The problem with this kind of exchange is not that anyone is being shouted down, nor that anyone is lying. The _problem_ is that people are motivatedly, ["algorithmically"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) "playing dumb." I wish we had better terminology for this phenomenon, which is ubiquitous in human life. By "playing dumb", I don't mean that to suggest that Kelsey was _consciously_ thinking, "I'm playing dumb in order gain an advantage in this argument". I don't doubt that, _subjectively_, mentioning that cis women also get cosmetic surgery sometimes _felt like_ a relevant reply. It's just that, in context, I was very obviously trying to talk about the "biological sex" thing, and Kelsey could have figured that out _if she had wanted to_.
-It's not that anyone explicitly said, "Biological sex isn't real" in those words. ([The elephant in the brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) knows it wouldn't be able to get away with _that_.) But if everyone correlatedly plays dumb whenever someone tries to _talk_ about sex in clear language in a context where that could conceivably hurt someone's feelings, I think what you have is a culture of _de facto_ biological sex denialism.
+It's not that anyone explicitly said, "Biological sex isn't real" in those words. ([The elephant in the brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) knows it wouldn't be able to get away with _that_.) But if everyone correlatedly plays dumb whenever someone tries to _talk_ about sex in clear language in a context where that could conceivably hurt some trans person's feelings, I think what you have is a culture of _de facto_ biological sex denialism.
Ben thought I was wrong to think of this kind of behavior as non-ostracisizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people are playing when they do that is to force me to choose between doing arbitarily large amounts of interpretive labor, or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
> Either the quoted excerpt is a blatant lie on Scott's part because there are rules of rationality governing conceptual boundaries and Scott absolutely knows it, or
> You have no grounds to criticize me for calling it a blatant lie, because there's no rule of rationality that says I shouldn't draw the category boundaries of "blatant lie" that way.
+
+there needs to be _some_ way for _someone_ to invest a _finite_ amount of effort to _correct the mistake_
+
]
[TODO section on factional conflict:
Fortunately, Yudkowsky graciously grants us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
-> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only [the present author —M.T.S.-W.] would have said anything where you could hear it.
+> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members [...]
>
> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
>
_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt.
-The author should have graciously accepted the compliment, and _done something to pass better next time_. The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—of noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's hostile stereotype of a narcissistic, gaslighting MtT and snapping out of it.
+The author should have graciously accepted the compliment, and _done something to pass better next time_. The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—of noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's hostile stereotype of a narcissistic, gaslighting trans-identified male and snapping out of it.
I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _[emotionally blackmailing](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) people out of their ability to report what they see_. I don't _want_ to reliniqush [my ability to notice what women's faces look like](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even if that means noticing that mine isn't; if I'm sad that it isn't, I can endure the sadness if the alternative is _forcing everyone in my life to doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
>
> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
-I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard (["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228)). I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard (["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word [...]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048)) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards, even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4.
+I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard (["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228)). I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard (["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word [...]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048)) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards (["you are being the bad guy if you try to shut down that conversation by saying that 'I can define the word "woman" any way I want'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4.
-But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard ("the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he" [...]'")
+But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard (["the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he" [...]'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228))
the turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio
Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.
-I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up a meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
+I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level _and_ the meta level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up to the meta-meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
(Of course, I realize that if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly miscalibratedly arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they _have a case_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
with internet available—
+_ Discord logs before Austin retreat
_ screenshot Rob's Facebook comment which I link
_ 13th century word meanings
_ compile Categories references from the Dolphin War Twitter thread
If you listen to the sorts of things the guy says lately, it looks like he's just completely given up on the idea that public speech could possibly be useful, or that anyone besides he and his flunkies is capable of thought. For example:
-> "too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me" I wish I had never written about LDT and just told people to vote for reasons they understand when they're older [TODO full direct quote]
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929
+
+> [Though yes, I do worry](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944234136129536) that other mortals would be more vulnerable to someone coming up and talking loudly about LDT. I attach my usual cautions about everything supposed to be just formalizing common sense and not depart from common sense except in the hands of a master, but...
+>
+> [...too many people think](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929) it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me, and they might fall for it. I'd wish that I'd never spoken on the topic, and just told them to vote in elections for reasons they'd understand when they're older. That said, enjoy your $1 in Ultimatum games.
Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theory—what a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I calim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.
-To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once [TODO: linky] wrote to Judea Pearl to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matter—it didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.
+To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, [the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once wrote to Judea Pearl](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKa9Lebyebf6a7P2o/the-rhythm-of-disagreement) to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matter—it didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.
[TODO But crucially, "Defer to subject-matter experts" seems like a _different_ moral than "Too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen Judea Pearl."]
[TODO: if he had never spoken of TDT, why _should_ they trust him about voting?!]
[TODO That trust is a _finite resource_. Zvi Mowshowitz claims the condescension is important information, which is why it's such a betrayal when he uses the condesension to score points
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq ]
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq
+
+> The condescension is _important information_ to help a reader figure out what is producing the outputs, and hiding it would make the task of 'extract the key insights' harder.
+
+]
------
> I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is the proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them—and if _not_, whether proscribing the use of a category in _public communication_ constitutes "proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
>
-> That's four possible (serial) cruxes I listed, one corresponding to each "whether". I could have included a fifth and final crux about whether, even _if_ The Thing In Question interfered with rational thinking, that might be worth it; but this I suspect you would not concede, and (being a rationalist) it's not something I'm willing to concede myself, so it's not a crux in a meaningful sense between us (or any two self-proclaimed "rationalists").
+> That's four possible (serial) cruxes I listed, one corresponding to each "whether".
+
+On the first and second cruxes, concerning whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit on the whole and whether they should be avoided when possible, I ask: harm _to whom?_ Not all agents have the same utility function! If some people are harmed by other people making certain probabilistic inferences, then it would seem that there's a _conflict_ between the people harmed (who prefer that such inferences be avoided if possible), and people who want to make and share probabilistic inferences about reality (who think that that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be).
+
+On the third crux, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is to proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them: well, it's hard to be sure whether it's the _best_ way: no doubt a more powerful intelligence could search over a larger space of possible strategies than me. But yeah, if your goal is to _prevent people from noticing facts about reality_, then preventing them from using words that refer those facts seems like a pretty effective way to do it!
+
+On the fourth crux, whether proscribing the use of a category in public communication constitutes "proscribing" in a way that interferes with one's ability to think in the privacy of one's own mind: I think this is true (for humans). We're social animals. To the extent that we can do higher-grade cognition at all, we do it (even when alone) using our language faculties that are designed for communicating with others. How are you supposed to think about things that you don't have words for?
+
+Xu continues:
+
+> I could have included a fifth and final crux about whether, even _if_ The Thing In Question interfered with rational thinking, that might be worth it; but this I suspect you would not concede, and (being a rationalist) it's not something I'm willing to concede myself, so it's not a crux in a meaningful sense between us (or any two self-proclaimed "rationalists").
>
> My sense is that you have (thus far, in the parts of the public discussion I've had the opportunity to witness) been behaving as though the _one and only crux in play_—that is, the True Source of Disagreement—has been the fifth crux, the thing I refused to include with the others of its kind. Your accusations against the caliphate _only make sense_ if you believe the dividing line between your behavior and theirs is caused by a disagreement as to whether "rational" thinking is "worth it"; as opposed to, say, what kind of prescriptions "rational" thinking entails, and which (if any) of those prescriptions are violated by using a notion of gender (in public, where you do not know in advance who will receive your communications) that does not cause massive psychological damage to some subset of people.
>
I reply: I'd like to [taboo](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words) the word "rational"; I think I can do a much better job of explaining what's going on without appealing to what is or is not "rational." (As it is written of a virtue which is nameless, if you speak overmuch of the Way, you will not attain it.)
-On the first and second cruxes, concerning whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit on the whole and whether they should be avoided when possible, I ask: harm _to whom?_ Not all agents have the same utility function! If some people are harmed by other people making certain probabilistic inferences, then it would seem that there's a _conflict_ between the people harmed (who prefer that such inferences be avoided if possible), and people who want to make and share probabilistic inferences about reality (who think that that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be).
-
-On the third crux, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is to proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them: well, it's hard to be sure whether it's the _best_ way: no doubt a more powerful intelligence could search over a larger space of possible strategies than me. But yeah, if your goal is to _prevent people from noticing facts about reality_, then preventing them from using words that refer those facts seems like a pretty effective way to do it!
-
-On the fourth crux, whether proscribing the use of a category in public communication constitutes "proscribing" in a way that interferes with one's ability to think in the privacy of one's own mind: I think this is true (for humans). We're social animals. To the extent that we can do higher-grade cognition at all, we do it (even when alone) using our language faculties that are designed for communicating with others. How are you supposed to think about things that you don't have words for?
-
Thus, bearing in mind that we don't all need to count harms and benefits the same way, and that it is futile to contest what kind of prescriptions "rational" thinking entails, on the question of whether the dividing line between my behavior and the Caliphate's is caused by a disagreement as to whether "rational" thinking is "worth it", I'm inclined to say—
It's not a "disagreement" at all. It's a _conflict_.
-
Telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
> I sometimes wish that certain men would appreciate that not all men are like them—or at least, that not all men _want_ to be like them—that the fact of masculinity is not necessarily something to integrate.
> Duly appreciated.
+
+
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY#comments 110 karma
+support from Oli—
+> I think there is a question of whether current LessWrong is the right place for this discussion (there are topics that will attract unwanted attention, and when faced with substantial adversarial forces, I think it is OK for LessWrong to decide to avoid those topics as long as they don't seem of crucial importance for the future of humanity, or have those discussions in more obscure ways, or to limit visibility to just some subset of logged-in users, etc). But leaving that discussion aside, basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
+>
+> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
+>
+> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=cPunK8nFKuQRorcNG#comments
+iceman—
+> I kinda disagree that this is a mere issue of Straussian reading: I suspect that in this (and other cases), you are seeing the raw output of Elizer's rationalizations and not some sort of instrumental coalition politics dark arts. If I was going for some sort of Straussian play, I wouldn't bring it up unprompted or make long public declarations like this.
+>
+> Zack is hypersensitive to this one issue because it interacts with his Something to Protect. But what I wonder about is where else Eliezer is trying to get away with things like this.
+
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1853001#reply-1853001
+> Another reason people go to Hell? Malediction! An Asmodean priest was using that spell on children too! Pharasma apparently doesn't give a shit! At best, it might be a negative weight in Her utility function that She traded to the ancient gods of Evil for something else that She wanted. A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her _really giving a shit_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff