I don’t recognize this guy anymore. He thinks people should refrain from searching for the truth because the search is not fair/random enough for him. Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately. Whether you personally dislike Gay or politically oppose Ackman or just want clicks, I am thankful for any skeleton you happen to find in their closets. Scott is willing to let lies fester until such a time when they can all be revealed impartially, or something.
Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately.
This Litany of Tarsky shit is probably the most edgy remnants of Yudkowskian writing - and it is of course highly unworkable as it can be subverted by almost childish level of effort besides numerous other flaws. As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny. In this case, we can investigate all Tarskyists and once we inevitably find them guilty of something, we can just hand them the rope so they can voluntary and eagerly hang each other in the name of the Truth. So the rest of us can actually "enjoy" normal society and actually do something about dishonest mercenary journalism without all the noise of litany chants from ratsphere in the background.
To me it seems that Scott is now becoming more mature and maybe he sees things more on the meta level. He realizes that some of rationalist rules can long-term lead to global Truth minimum by being attracted into local Truth maximum. We should be more careful and think about Truth in more abstract level, maybe saying that we just want to be meta-rule utilitarians can work - you can suspend some utilitarian rule in favor of other rule on some occasions like when dishonest journalists target people on our side. I for one am very happy, step-by-step at least Scott's part of the movement becomes a little bit more sane. Who knows, maybe one day he will also admit that people living in weird sex polycules may not be the most "rational" way of organizing the society. One can always dream.
But then maybe you are even more meta level as in this case I'd that it is a ultimately a very good thing that Gay is gone. Good riddance. So in a way Scott trying to indirectly garner sympathy for ghouls like Gay by making them comparable to his very own situation can be actually a proof for Scott still remaining hopeless. So maybe I should really just stay away and let orthodox rationalists duke it out with Scott in this round. Also I think attacking Ackman's wife is probably one of the more stupid moves to make, if anything I saw Ackman leaning even more strongly into his "conversion of Saul" position - not everybody can be as easily neutered as Scott back in the day when he disavowed The Motte as a result of the journalistic attack.
grognard
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georgioz 2mo ago
I’m forgetting the timeframe - was TheMotte.org operational when Scott was doxxed/had to disavow it?
As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny.
Isn’t the meta-rule for a more global truth more geared for this? The example you give to stay the light of truth is just more friend-enemy distinction.
It was obvious for a long time that Culture War was not healthy for Scott's professional career as he continuously withdrew from touching it by longer and longer pole. TheMotte started as a thread under Slatestarcodex subreddit before getting separated after it drew some heat into its own subreddit and eventually moved over here. The overall thread is that Scott became more mellow and kept himself at distance from CW stuff - and not without reason.
As for Litany of Tarsky it cannot be taken that seriously as object of destruction can be anything: human life, some other value or even Truth itself. I take it more as just a stronger way of saying "be intellectually honest". It works if it is more inward looking - don't be afraid to be wrong in your intellectual pursuit and destroy your previous belief. It does not mean you have to be Pavlik Morozov and destroy your own family by "telling truth" to police about their misdeeds because they should be destroyed by the Truth. I don't think it is supposed to be an argument in favor of always telling the truth to Kant's inquiring murderer in the skin of NYT journalist - although the edgy style of writing and general disposition of rationalist community may actually lead many to exactly that conclusion.
Scott was never doxxed because his identity was always a single google search away and he didn’t have a problem admitting it in real life. What he wanted to avoid was his patients and employers immediately seeing him as a public figure in a way that affected his day job, which is what the NYT article did.
Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Claudine Gay should've been fired. Fired for not being qualified, not for having done plagiarism. If Harvard scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find a black woman academic who hasn't committed plagiarism and elevates them to President, nothing's actually improved. The reason we have a plagiarism rule is because plagiarism is bad, not as a tool to use to take out opponents who've done other bad things, even when said opponents deserve it. It's a much more 'symmetric' weapon than the weapon one wants - 'she's not qualified, so she shouldn't have the job'.
Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Unironically Yes. The Truth will set us free.
In that case, something is deeply rotten in the kingdom, and the Truth has to start desinfecting somewhere. By comparison ,
the partisan point-scoring about who the truth harms first is of trivial importance.
Let me tell you a story about a helicopter pilot. He had noticed the fuel gauge was systematically under-estimating the fuel left. He learned to live with it, mentally adding dozens of liters to the reported volume every time. One day, he ran out of fuel and crashed. A mechanic had repaired the gauge. The pilot had accepted the lie, and so the lie killed him. And this was a man who had survived being shot down down over the USSR in a U-2 spy plane. Beware of normalizing lies and dysfunction.
The, imo correct, worry with that approach is that, so long as the stage is just Rufo and Gay and similar people dueling, that'll never happen - there'll be a hundred scandals every year, we'll perpetually be draining the swamp of the rot, and somehow it'll never go anywhere. It's not that Gay shouldn't be fired for plagiarism, it's that it just doesn't really matter, and that thinking it does is kinda a misdirection.
There are a lot more important lies than 'Gay didn't do plagiarism'! Not that one should object to her firing, but maybe not put your will behind the idea that the thing generating this is something that's useful in the long run.
Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
I think "only" is where this metaphor falls apart. Quite a lot of people get smacked for plagiarism, often less severe plagiarism than discovered here, both in Harvard and in the more general world. Perhaps those hits are only a small portion of all plagiarism that occurs, but it's clearly not something only partisans need fear.
This doesn't undermine Scott's broader point about journalist motivations, but that's separate from the question of Gay's 'destruction'.
I suspect that he's always been like this he just kept it on the DL. See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community. "Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
It may sound flippant, but I kind of blame the autism, in that I don't think he ever truly grokked that "the other-side can read your book" until the whole NYT fiasco, and by then he'd already said too much.
See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community.
I don't think Scott is endorsing obscuring the truth or lying in "The Categories Were Made for Man..." - just look at the Israel/Palestine example in the essay itself (which he even called attention to in his edit of the article.) Scott's threefold point in the article was that the way we choose to draw category boundaries is not some natural feature of reality, that there are multiple non-false ways to draw category boundaries, and we should be prepared to accept the implications of where we choose to draw those boundaries.
As far as sex-related terminology goes, I think the following are all valid ways we could draw the boundaries of the category "woman":
An adult human who produces ovum.
An adult human with XX chromosomes.
An adult human who lacks the SRY gene.
An adult human who has a vagina.
An adult human who doesn't have a penis.
An adult human capable of becoming pregnant.
An adult human whose adolescent development was dominated by estrogen.
An adult human whose adolescent development was naturally dominated by estrogen.
An adult human who was classified as female shortly after birth.
An adult human who passes enough tests in this list that the majority of people would call them a woman.
Etc., etc.
No matter where we draw the boundaries, there will always be ways to pick out the features you care about for instrumental rationality to get off the ground. For example, if I lived in a world where most of the speaking community I belonged to used the "produces ovum" definition of womanhood, but what I actually cared about was whether someone was "capable of becoming pregnant" (say because I was planning on starting a family with my own biological children), then I would still have ways to get at the information I cared about using other terminology. And if I lived in a world where Group A used the "lacks the SRY gene" definition, and Group B used the "has XX chromosomes" definition, I would have to determine if I was talking to someone from Group A or Group B to get an accurate picture of reality when talking about someone being a "woman."
Depending on how you draw the boundaries "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are not women" are both true statements, and unfortunately the moment a single person has a slightly different definition than everyone else, you can't actually count on the boundaries of the word being exactly the same for everyone.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant. Someone who's otherwise a woman but can't become pregnant would be described as "a woman who can't become pregnant", not as not literally being a woman. It doesn't work that way for transwomen either. Someone who doesn't want them in women's bathrooms but doesn't care too much about pronouns would never say "transwomen are women, but they are women who should be kept out of women's bathrooms". People don't make distinctions that way.
If you only like onions in soup, you aren't going to claim "I like all onions, but I define onions as a plant of genus Allium cepa that is located in a soup".
People do all sorts of weird things with words. To use two ancient examples: the Epicureans said that "pleasure" (hedone) was the highest good, and then said the height of pleasure was the absence of pain, and the Stoics said that the only truly good things were morally virtuous things and all other conventionally "good" things were really just "preferred indifferents."
The technical terminology of both of those philosophies differs quite a bit from standard usage in Greek, Latin and English. I think most people would say that "pleasure" and "absence of pain" are two different things entirely, and that having a wife and kids that you love isn't a "preferred indifferent" but a positive good in the life a person where it is desired. But I think in both cases, in redefining the terms (from a layman's perspective) the two philosophical schools are trying to make it psychologically easier to adopt each school's philosophical regimen.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant.
My point was not that any of those was an unambiguous "best" definition, just that they were all possible definitions. I agree that in our society, as far as standard English usage goes, some of those are less plausible than others, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from having the following categories of sex: man, eunuch, woman, barreness (sic.) Eunuchs and barrenesses could be regarded as infertile males and females, and almost (but not quite) men and women. I think given the right society, those categories could easily be pertinent enough that they could emerge as real and strong divisions in people's minds. (Say, for example, a society where eunuchs are in widespread usage as singers, babysitters, escorts and government functionaries, and in which a girl is not considered a "woman" until she had born at least one child.)
There are possible constructions of those terms that would be bizarre to modern English speakers. For example, under Galen's single sex model almost 2000 years ago, women were "defective men with inverted sex organs", but no one in today's society would think that.
I think the shape of society often defines the limits of "plausible" word boundaries. Some Asian languages have single words for "older brother" and "younger brother" and "paternal uncle" and "maternal uncle" because the hierarchies of birth order and paternal vs maternal relatives is always important and pertinent information (at least historically.) It's not that English has no way of referring to those same distinctions, but for various historical and cultural reasons our language doesn't package those concepts as single words.
The whole point of using the word "women" for trans people is that using the word is supposed to go with treating them like regular women in all possible ways. That's the exact opposite of your examples. Trans supporters want to blur the distinction, using the term "woman" broadly. Using "woman" to mean only someone who's fertile, or borne a child, or married, etc. is the opposite of that; it narrows the category of "woman".
I feel like you're missing the point, the bigger and much scarier claim from a trans perspective is the acknowledgment that that identity is a tool for the identifier more than it is a property of the identified, thus exposing all the "sex assigned at birth" nonsense as the lie that it is.
"Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
I suspected this was an inaccurate summary so I reread Bounded Distrust and he doesn't mention Fauci once. Also he doesn't defend anyone else either (besides defending conspiracy theorists as being understandably suspicious of mainstream sources), it's about extracting information from misleading/untrustworthy sources, not saying it is good for them to be misleading. It's so far from your description that I am wondering if this a distorted description of some other post but then you also remembered the wrong title.
He talks about Fauci here. Hlynka may have been getting these posts up, given that this post largely reads as apologia for Fauci being less-than-maximally honest.
I agree with Hlynka’s interpretation. Scott might as well have called it ‘In defense of liars’ – letting lies fester is his thing now.
In Bounded Distrust, he wants us to consider information in a vaccuum, possessing a certain deracinated signal-to-noise ratio. He wants us to ignore the liar status of the speaker, softly whispering that it's not that bad if he is. But there is a bright line here, between the speaker (journalist, sociologist, authority figure) who inadvertently tells a falsehood, and the one who knowingly does so.
The only reason why the latter still sometimes tells the truth, is because he doesn’t think he can get away with bigger lies. Morally, as far as I’m concerned, he’s done. As a source of information, we’re always better off asking another man, since the liar’s statements, at best, merely reflect what others can prove.
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Notes -
I don’t recognize this guy anymore. He thinks people should refrain from searching for the truth because the search is not fair/random enough for him. Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately. Whether you personally dislike Gay or politically oppose Ackman or just want clicks, I am thankful for any skeleton you happen to find in their closets. Scott is willing to let lies fester until such a time when they can all be revealed impartially, or something.
This Litany of Tarsky shit is probably the most edgy remnants of Yudkowskian writing - and it is of course highly unworkable as it can be subverted by almost childish level of effort besides numerous other flaws. As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny. In this case, we can investigate all Tarskyists and once we inevitably find them guilty of something, we can just hand them the rope so they can voluntary and eagerly hang each other in the name of the Truth. So the rest of us can actually "enjoy" normal society and actually do something about dishonest mercenary journalism without all the noise of litany chants from ratsphere in the background.
To me it seems that Scott is now becoming more mature and maybe he sees things more on the meta level. He realizes that some of rationalist rules can long-term lead to global Truth minimum by being attracted into local Truth maximum. We should be more careful and think about Truth in more abstract level, maybe saying that we just want to be meta-rule utilitarians can work - you can suspend some utilitarian rule in favor of other rule on some occasions like when dishonest journalists target people on our side. I for one am very happy, step-by-step at least Scott's part of the movement becomes a little bit more sane. Who knows, maybe one day he will also admit that people living in weird sex polycules may not be the most "rational" way of organizing the society. One can always dream.
But then maybe you are even more meta level as in this case I'd that it is a ultimately a very good thing that Gay is gone. Good riddance. So in a way Scott trying to indirectly garner sympathy for ghouls like Gay by making them comparable to his very own situation can be actually a proof for Scott still remaining hopeless. So maybe I should really just stay away and let orthodox rationalists duke it out with Scott in this round. Also I think attacking Ackman's wife is probably one of the more stupid moves to make, if anything I saw Ackman leaning even more strongly into his "conversion of Saul" position - not everybody can be as easily neutered as Scott back in the day when he disavowed The Motte as a result of the journalistic attack.
I’m forgetting the timeframe - was TheMotte.org operational when Scott was doxxed/had to disavow it?
Isn’t the meta-rule for a more global truth more geared for this? The example you give to stay the light of truth is just more friend-enemy distinction.
It was obvious for a long time that Culture War was not healthy for Scott's professional career as he continuously withdrew from touching it by longer and longer pole. TheMotte started as a thread under Slatestarcodex subreddit before getting separated after it drew some heat into its own subreddit and eventually moved over here. The overall thread is that Scott became more mellow and kept himself at distance from CW stuff - and not without reason.
As for Litany of Tarsky it cannot be taken that seriously as object of destruction can be anything: human life, some other value or even Truth itself. I take it more as just a stronger way of saying "be intellectually honest". It works if it is more inward looking - don't be afraid to be wrong in your intellectual pursuit and destroy your previous belief. It does not mean you have to be Pavlik Morozov and destroy your own family by "telling truth" to police about their misdeeds because they should be destroyed by the Truth. I don't think it is supposed to be an argument in favor of always telling the truth to Kant's inquiring murderer in the skin of NYT journalist - although the edgy style of writing and general disposition of rationalist community may actually lead many to exactly that conclusion.
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Scott was never doxxed because his identity was always a single google search away and he didn’t have a problem admitting it in real life. What he wanted to avoid was his patients and employers immediately seeing him as a public figure in a way that affected his day job, which is what the NYT article did.
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The problem is when the Overton window shifts. So what is safe today in a decade will be uncovered as a skeleton.
I mean, plagiarism was also considered a pretty big deal for an academic ten years ago.
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Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Claudine Gay should've been fired. Fired for not being qualified, not for having done plagiarism. If Harvard scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find a black woman academic who hasn't committed plagiarism and elevates them to President, nothing's actually improved. The reason we have a plagiarism rule is because plagiarism is bad, not as a tool to use to take out opponents who've done other bad things, even when said opponents deserve it. It's a much more 'symmetric' weapon than the weapon one wants - 'she's not qualified, so she shouldn't have the job'.
Unironically Yes. The Truth will set us free.
In that case, something is deeply rotten in the kingdom, and the Truth has to start desinfecting somewhere. By comparison , the partisan point-scoring about who the truth harms first is of trivial importance.
Let me tell you a story about a helicopter pilot. He had noticed the fuel gauge was systematically under-estimating the fuel left. He learned to live with it, mentally adding dozens of liters to the reported volume every time. One day, he ran out of fuel and crashed. A mechanic had repaired the gauge. The pilot had accepted the lie, and so the lie killed him. And this was a man who had survived being shot down down over the USSR in a U-2 spy plane. Beware of normalizing lies and dysfunction.
The, imo correct, worry with that approach is that, so long as the stage is just Rufo and Gay and similar people dueling, that'll never happen - there'll be a hundred scandals every year, we'll perpetually be draining the swamp of the rot, and somehow it'll never go anywhere. It's not that Gay shouldn't be fired for plagiarism, it's that it just doesn't really matter, and that thinking it does is kinda a misdirection.
There are a lot more important lies than 'Gay didn't do plagiarism'! Not that one should object to her firing, but maybe not put your will behind the idea that the thing generating this is something that's useful in the long run.
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I think "only" is where this metaphor falls apart. Quite a lot of people get smacked for plagiarism, often less severe plagiarism than discovered here, both in Harvard and in the more general world. Perhaps those hits are only a small portion of all plagiarism that occurs, but it's clearly not something only partisans need fear.
This doesn't undermine Scott's broader point about journalist motivations, but that's separate from the question of Gay's 'destruction'.
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I suspect that he's always been like this he just kept it on the DL. See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community. "Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
It may sound flippant, but I kind of blame the autism, in that I don't think he ever truly grokked that "the other-side can read your book" until the whole NYT fiasco, and by then he'd already said too much.
I don't think Scott is endorsing obscuring the truth or lying in "The Categories Were Made for Man..." - just look at the Israel/Palestine example in the essay itself (which he even called attention to in his edit of the article.) Scott's threefold point in the article was that the way we choose to draw category boundaries is not some natural feature of reality, that there are multiple non-false ways to draw category boundaries, and we should be prepared to accept the implications of where we choose to draw those boundaries.
As far as sex-related terminology goes, I think the following are all valid ways we could draw the boundaries of the category "woman":
No matter where we draw the boundaries, there will always be ways to pick out the features you care about for instrumental rationality to get off the ground. For example, if I lived in a world where most of the speaking community I belonged to used the "produces ovum" definition of womanhood, but what I actually cared about was whether someone was "capable of becoming pregnant" (say because I was planning on starting a family with my own biological children), then I would still have ways to get at the information I cared about using other terminology. And if I lived in a world where Group A used the "lacks the SRY gene" definition, and Group B used the "has XX chromosomes" definition, I would have to determine if I was talking to someone from Group A or Group B to get an accurate picture of reality when talking about someone being a "woman."
Depending on how you draw the boundaries "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are not women" are both true statements, and unfortunately the moment a single person has a slightly different definition than everyone else, you can't actually count on the boundaries of the word being exactly the same for everyone.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant. Someone who's otherwise a woman but can't become pregnant would be described as "a woman who can't become pregnant", not as not literally being a woman. It doesn't work that way for transwomen either. Someone who doesn't want them in women's bathrooms but doesn't care too much about pronouns would never say "transwomen are women, but they are women who should be kept out of women's bathrooms". People don't make distinctions that way.
If you only like onions in soup, you aren't going to claim "I like all onions, but I define onions as a plant of genus Allium cepa that is located in a soup".
People do all sorts of weird things with words. To use two ancient examples: the Epicureans said that "pleasure" (hedone) was the highest good, and then said the height of pleasure was the absence of pain, and the Stoics said that the only truly good things were morally virtuous things and all other conventionally "good" things were really just "preferred indifferents."
The technical terminology of both of those philosophies differs quite a bit from standard usage in Greek, Latin and English. I think most people would say that "pleasure" and "absence of pain" are two different things entirely, and that having a wife and kids that you love isn't a "preferred indifferent" but a positive good in the life a person where it is desired. But I think in both cases, in redefining the terms (from a layman's perspective) the two philosophical schools are trying to make it psychologically easier to adopt each school's philosophical regimen.
My point was not that any of those was an unambiguous "best" definition, just that they were all possible definitions. I agree that in our society, as far as standard English usage goes, some of those are less plausible than others, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from having the following categories of sex: man, eunuch, woman, barreness (sic.) Eunuchs and barrenesses could be regarded as infertile males and females, and almost (but not quite) men and women. I think given the right society, those categories could easily be pertinent enough that they could emerge as real and strong divisions in people's minds. (Say, for example, a society where eunuchs are in widespread usage as singers, babysitters, escorts and government functionaries, and in which a girl is not considered a "woman" until she had born at least one child.)
There are possible constructions of those terms that would be bizarre to modern English speakers. For example, under Galen's single sex model almost 2000 years ago, women were "defective men with inverted sex organs", but no one in today's society would think that.
I think the shape of society often defines the limits of "plausible" word boundaries. Some Asian languages have single words for "older brother" and "younger brother" and "paternal uncle" and "maternal uncle" because the hierarchies of birth order and paternal vs maternal relatives is always important and pertinent information (at least historically.) It's not that English has no way of referring to those same distinctions, but for various historical and cultural reasons our language doesn't package those concepts as single words.
The whole point of using the word "women" for trans people is that using the word is supposed to go with treating them like regular women in all possible ways. That's the exact opposite of your examples. Trans supporters want to blur the distinction, using the term "woman" broadly. Using "woman" to mean only someone who's fertile, or borne a child, or married, etc. is the opposite of that; it narrows the category of "woman".
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I feel like you're missing the point, the bigger and much scarier claim from a trans perspective is the acknowledgment that that identity is a tool for the identifier more than it is a property of the identified, thus exposing all the "sex assigned at birth" nonsense as the lie that it is.
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I suspected this was an inaccurate summary so I reread Bounded Distrust and he doesn't mention Fauci once. Also he doesn't defend anyone else either (besides defending conspiracy theorists as being understandably suspicious of mainstream sources), it's about extracting information from misleading/untrustworthy sources, not saying it is good for them to be misleading. It's so far from your description that I am wondering if this a distorted description of some other post but then you also remembered the wrong title.
He talks about Fauci here. Hlynka may have been getting these posts up, given that this post largely reads as apologia for Fauci being less-than-maximally honest.
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I agree with Hlynka’s interpretation. Scott might as well have called it ‘In defense of liars’ – letting lies fester is his thing now.
In Bounded Distrust, he wants us to consider information in a vaccuum, possessing a certain deracinated signal-to-noise ratio. He wants us to ignore the liar status of the speaker, softly whispering that it's not that bad if he is. But there is a bright line here, between the speaker (journalist, sociologist, authority figure) who inadvertently tells a falsehood, and the one who knowingly does so.
The only reason why the latter still sometimes tells the truth, is because he doesn’t think he can get away with bigger lies. Morally, as far as I’m concerned, he’s done. As a source of information, we’re always better off asking another man, since the liar’s statements, at best, merely reflect what others can prove.
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