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In "Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles" (Less Wrong mirrorpost), the fourth installment of my memoir telling the Whole Dumb Story of how I wasted the last eight years of my life trying to convince the so-called "rationalist" community that you can't redefine concepts in order to make people happy, I explain how Eliezer Yudkowsky has not been consistently candid in his communications with his followers, hindering their ability to exercise their responsibilities.
Previously: pt. 1 (Less Wrong mirrorpost), pt. 2 (Less Wrong mirrorpost, The Motte discussion), pt. 3 (Less Wrong mirrorpost)
I'm sympathetic to Yud here, tbh, despite my object-level beliefs. AI risk is a thousand times more important than trans stuff under any reasonable values (including
the correct onesmine which find it to be generally bad). It probably isn't worth blowing up the influence you have. That doesn't justify the technically-not-lying. But, if I were Yud, I'd plausibly just practice the "virtue" of silence. Which is just as bad. Are you, in both, abandoning your friends to the memetic wolves? Yes. There are ... a lot of wolves, though, and I can't, in fact, stop them all, and I should probably look at my options and pick the one that stops the worst of it. The main sin of Yud's approach isn't that his concept-language is slightly broken, it's that he's - knowingly or not - cheering his close friends and followers along a bad path. Being silent is barely better. And it's better still to be loud than to barely speak up (eg me commenting here).I'm pretty sure Yud genuinely believes that the "meat" of his support for trans people, including the 20% of rats with penises, is correct. Plausibly you know differently in the dms, but he appears to think that - maybe they're still psychologically male in significant senses, maybe everyone's being a little bit systematically misled but they're better off and happier 'as women'. The latter is really the important thing to address - all the theory and math is interesting, but it's only relevant because the community isn't directly debating the object-level issues. Not even the ones about pronouns. 'what parts of what we call 'women' really apply to them, where do the desires come from, and what should we do about that'. I genuinely wonder if that will happen, or what'll come of it if it does. Will your posts be read by everyone, considered 'interesting', even 'thought provoking' and then just forgotten? The material points discussed, minds changed, but only in private (and thus only a small number of people)? You could imagine LessWrong dialogues on 'should the median rat trans woman have transitioned', but I (from the outside) don't think it'll happen, even though (ignoring the meta concerns above) it should.
Another reason Yud and rationalists generally might be averse to discussing the issue: Many trans people, IME, find critical philosophical exploration of the experience of being trans to be very psychologically painful, as much or more than misgendering. If you think 'saying he hurts someone -> I should say she', and it hurts more to really deeply question the thing than it does to say the wrong pronoun ... And when you're surrounded by people who are deeply invested in it all, potentially losing them or causing a huge split might be a much bigger barrier than pissing off progressives.
Or not, maybe most trans-rats are perfectly fine discussing the philosophy of 'is trans real', idk. Your posts don't seem to have gotten much pushback of that kind.
I think Zack agrees with you about it maybe being worth it for Yudkowsky to lie about trans issues for the cause. But I'm on Zack's side pretty much entirely, because the entire schtick of the rationalists, the only reason they have contributed anything at all and have any (minor clout) is because of all the times they pissed off everyone and were willing to hurt feelings in a single-minded pursuit of the truth.
It's the same reason why our scientific institutions (used to) have clout - precisely because they were visibly willing to cross boundaries and violate taboos is why they gained power (which then led to their politicization and hollowing out).
Perhaps it's just a predictable cycle of creative destruction. But I still think Zack is fighting the good fight.
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