From: Zack M. Davis Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2024 22:02:30 +0000 (-0800) Subject: make sure to include Twitter links in recap X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=0a9f55af6d37b6ff386c64071fe3e6446b46b882;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git make sure to include Twitter links in recap --- diff --git a/content/2024/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md b/content/2024/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md index 67f8c6f..228edf0 100644 --- a/content/2024/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md +++ b/content/2024/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md @@ -444,7 +444,7 @@ This seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in But this potential unification seemed dubious to me, especially given how the 2016 Facebook post posits that trans women are "at least 20% of the ones with penises" (!) in some population, while the 2004 mailing list post notes that "spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy". After it's been pointed out, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female but 'otherwise identical' copy of himself" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_. So in October 2016, [I wrote to Yudkowsky noting the apparent reversal and asking to talk about it](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price). Because of the privacy rules I'm adhering to in telling this Whole Dumb Story, I can't confirm or deny whether any such conversation occurred. -Then, in November 2018, while criticizing people who refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns, Yudkowsky proclaimed that "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying" and that "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning." But _that_ seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong). +Then, in November 2018, while criticizing people who refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns, Yudkowsky [proclaimed that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243) "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying" [and that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048) "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning." But _that_ seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong). (And this November 2018 reversal on the philosophy of language was much more inexplicable than the March 2016 reversal on the psychology of sex, because the latter is a complicated empirical question about which reasonable people might read new evidence differently and change their minds. In contrast, there's no plausible good reason for him to have reversed course on whether words can be wrong.)