From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2022 04:16:34 +0000 (-0700) Subject: memoir poke and fold X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=0760a518f0b5cee2ec77ff1d6e2d681065a4190b;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git memoir poke and fold After some progress from 11–1530, I degenerated into continuing my re-read of Second Foundation. (It'd been years!) Is today over? No—an experiment in bribes: I told myself I could check the net on my laptop and watch a show from 2300 to midnight if I squeeze in four (amend that, I actually wrote "3" in my planner?) blocks before 2300. I'm sure it's that easy: as long as my butt is in the desk chair and I'm engaged with the ms. in some form, then I'm moving forward, and any form of violence, deceit, or corruption that increases chair time is in the service of the God–Empress. --- diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md index 7d8e5f2..130db9c 100644 --- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -199,7 +199,11 @@ Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading t Anna didn't reply, but I apparently did interest Michael, who chimed in on the email thread to Yudkowsky. We had a long phone conversation the next day lamenting how the "rationalists" were dead as an intellectual community. -As for the attempt to intervene on Yudkowsky—here I need to make a digression about the constraints I'm facing in telling this Whole Dumb Story. _I_ would prefer to just tell the Whole Dumb Story as I would to my long-neglected Diary—trying my best at the difficult task of explaining _what actually happened_ in a very important part of my life, without thought of concealing anything. But a lot of _other people_ seem to have strong intuitions about "privacy", which bizarrely impose constraints on what _I'm_ allowed to say about my own life: in particular, it's considered unacceptable to publicly quote or summarize someone's emails from a conversation that they had reason to expect to be private. I feel obligated to comply with these widely-held privacy norms, even if _I_ think they're paranoid and [anti-social](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blackmailers-are-privateers-in-the-war-on-hypocrisy/). +As for the attempt to intervene on Yudkowsky—here I need to make a digression about the constraints I'm facing in telling this Whole Dumb Story. _I_ would prefer to just tell the Whole Dumb Story as I would to my long-neglected Diary—trying my best at the difficult task of explaining _what actually happened_ in a very important part of my life, without thought of concealing anything. + +(If you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_.) + +Unfortunately, a lot of _other people_ seem to have strong intuitions about "privacy", which bizarrely impose constraints on what _I'm_ allowed to say about my own life: in particular, it's considered unacceptable to publicly quote or summarize someone's emails from a conversation that they had reason to expect to be private. I feel obligated to comply with these widely-held privacy norms, even if _I_ think they're paranoid and [anti-social](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blackmailers-are-privateers-in-the-war-on-hypocrisy/). So I would _think_ that the commonsense privacy-norm-compliance rule I should hold myself to while telling this Whole Dumb Story is that I obviously have an inalienable right to blog about _my own_ actions, but that I'm not allowed to refer to private conversations in cases where I don't think I'd be able to get the consent of the other party. (I don't think I'm required to go through the ritual of asking for consent in cases where the revealed information couldn't reasonably be considered "sensitive", or if I know the person doesn't have hangups about this weird "privacy" thing.) In this case, I'm allowed to talk about _me_ emailing Yudkowsky (because that was _my_ action), but I'm not allowed to talk about anything he might have said in reply, or whether he replied. @@ -383,7 +387,7 @@ Without disclosing any specific content from private conversations that may or m Michael said that it seemed important that, if we thought Yudkowsky wasn't interested, we should have common knowledge among ourselves that we consider him to be choosing to be a cult leader. -I settled on Sara Barellies's ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) as my breakup song with Yudkowsky and the rationalists, often listening to [a cover of it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) on loop to numb the pain. ("And I tell myself to let the story end"—the story of the rationalists as a world-changing intellectual movement—"And my heart will rest in someone else's hand"—Michael Vassar's.)[^breakup] +I settled on Sara Barellies's ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) as my breakup song with Yudkowsky and the rationalists, often listening to [a cover of it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) on loop to numb the pain. ("And I tell myself to let the story end"—the story of the rationalists as a world-changing intellectual movement. "And my heart will rest in someone else's hand"—Michael Vassar's.)[^breakup] [^breakup]: In general, I'm proud of my careful choices of breakup songs. For example, my breakup song with institutionalized schooling was Taylor Swift's ["We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64), a bitter renunciation of an on-again-off-again relationship ("I remember when we broke up / The first time") with a ex who was distant and condescending ("And you, would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that's much cooler than mine"), thematically reminiscent of my ultimately degree-less string of [bad](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [relationships](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) [UC Santa Cruz](https://www.ucsc.edu/) (2006–2007), [Heald College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) (2008), [Diablo Valley College](https://www.dvc.edu/) (2010–2012), and [San Francisco State University](https://www.sfsu.edu/) (2012–2013). diff --git a/notes/memoir-sections.md b/notes/memoir-sections.md index eccac28..f137eb1 100644 --- a/notes/memoir-sections.md +++ b/notes/memoir-sections.md @@ -15,7 +15,6 @@ _ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip _ Sasha disaster - With internet available— _ university library _ Aaron Terrell and Corina Cohn @@ -42,6 +41,7 @@ _ more examples of Yudkowsky's arrogance far editing tier— +_ "I Wish You Well" as breakup song _ the function of privacy norms is to protect you from people who want to selectively reveal information to hurt you, so it makes sense that I'm particularly careful about Yudkowsky's privacy and not Scott's, because I totally am trying to hurt Yudkowsky (this also protects me from the charge that by granting more privacy to Yudkowsky than Scott, I'm implying that Yudkowsky said something more incriminating; the difference in treatment is about _me_ and my expectations, rather than what they may or may not have said when I tried emailing them); I want it to be clear that I'm attacking him but not betraying him _ pull "agreeing with Stalin" quote earlier in ms. to argue that Yudkowsky apparently doesn't disagree with my "deliberately ambiguous" _ is the title of pt. 4 OK? (agreeing with Stalin _is_ correct when Stalin is right; the problem is that Stalin isn't right about gender) @@ -92,6 +92,7 @@ _ explain why I'm not being charitable in 2018 thread analysis, that at the time _ better summary of Littman _ explain Rob _ edit the child transition section in a way that Kay Brown would be OK with, have a few sentences about Clever Hans before the wrap-up +_ ask Jessica where Scott clarified his position on antipsychotics? terms to explain on first mention— @@ -1359,6 +1360,8 @@ commenting policy— > The censorship policy of the Reign of Terror is not part of the content of the post itself and may not be debated on the post. If you think Censorship!! is a terrible idea and invalidates discussion, feel free not to read the comments section. > The Internet is full of things to read that will not make you angry. If it seems like you choose to spend a lot of time reading things that will give you a chance to be angry and push down others so you can be above them, you're not an interesting plant to have in my garden and you will be weeded. I don't consider it fun to get angry at such people, and I will choose to read something else instead. +I tried arguing against ideas _first!_ + I do wonder how much of his verbal report is shaped by pedagogy (& not having high-quality critics). People are very bad at imagining how alien aliens would be! "Don't try to hallucinate value there; just, don't" is simpler than working out exactly how far to push cosmopolitanism @@ -1510,17 +1513,12 @@ Alicorn writes (re Kelsey's anorexia): "man it must be so weird to have a delusi what's really weird is having a delusion, knowing it's a delusion, and _everyone else_ insists your delusion is true ... and I'm not allowed to say that without drawing on my diplomacy budget, which puts a permanent distance between me and the group -(If you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_.) - 4 levels of intellectual conversation https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/ If we _actually had_ magical sex change technology of the kind described in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), no one would even consider clever philosophy arguments about how to redefine words: people who wanted to change sex would just do it, and everyone else would use the corresponding language, not as a favor, but because it straightforwardly described reality. - Scott said it sounded like I wasn't a 100% category absolutist, and that I would be willing to let a few tiny things through, and that our real difference is that he thought this gender thing was tiny enough to ignore, and I didn't. I thought his self-report of "tiny enough to ignore" was blatantly false: I predicted that his brain notices when trans women don't pass, and that this affected his probabilistic anticipations about them, decisions towards them, _&c._, and that when he finds out that a passing trans women is trans, then also affects his probabilistic anticipations, _&c._ This could be consistent with "tiny enough to ignore" if you draw the category boundaries of "tiny" and "ignore" the right way in order to force the sentence to come out "true" ... but you see the problem. If I took what Scott said in "... Not Man for the Categories" literally, I could make _any_ sentence true by driving a truck through the noncentral fallacy. -https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608 -> Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll. Steve Sailer retweeted me today criticizing Lee Jussim https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1160662220511932416 @@ -1548,24 +1546,6 @@ As I was wrapping up the call, I mentioned that the reason it was a bad week was Thanks, Mom. I'm so lucky to have a mother that's _less retarded than the leadership of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute_. ------- - -[TODO: Yudkowsky wireheading his fiction subreddit - -https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/ -https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/ -13 November 2019 - -The recent thing that was most helpful in making my memoir seem like just a challenging writing project, rather than treason/heresy, was actually Eliezer - -doing more destroying-language-for-the-sake-of-politeness but in a non-Culture-War context: - -comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/ -> On discussion threads for a work's particular chapter, people may debate the well-executedness of some particular feature of that work's particular chapter. Comments saying that nobody should enjoy this whole work are still verboten. Replies here should still follow the etiquette of saying "Mileage varied: I thought character X seemed stupid to me" rather than saying "No, character X was actually quite stupid." - - -] - ---- 2019 comments to "Wilhelm"— @@ -1602,7 +1582,7 @@ Greg Egan's "Closer" (1992) predicted language models, and seemed wild at the ti The text of _Inadequate Equilibria_ is more modest than his rhetorical marketing blunder -and the BOTZ ETF I bought in 2020 has a -27.57% unrealized loss! awesome!! +and the BOTZ ETF I bought in 2020 has a −27.57% unrealized loss! awesome!! Katie also asked "MTF?" when I told her about the Sasha disaster!! @@ -1614,6 +1594,17 @@ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/egoism-as-defense-against-a-life-of-unending- I assume starting a detransition market would be not-OK +https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608 +> Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll. + Oh, this was also on 18 February 2021 (same day as my comment about SneerClub); maybe the conjunction of the two made me more salient https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1362555980232282113 > Oh, maybe it's relevant to note that those posts were specifically part of my 21-month rage–grief campaign of being furious at Eliezer all day every day for lying-by-implicature about the philosophy of language? But, I don't want to seem petty by pointing that out! I'm over it! + +And I think I _would_ have been over it, except— + +----- + +I'm available if you want to contest anything you think is unfair or challenge my interpretation of the "can't directly refer to private conversations" privacy norm, but I doubt it's a good use of your time. + +(_I've_ given up on you; my intent is to explain to _everyone else_ why you're not worth it.)