Thanks!! Receipt details (to your selected charity) in PM yesterday.
Or …
(Another part of the problem here might be that I think the privacy norms let me report on my psychological speculations about named individuals, but not all of the evidence that supports them, which might have come from private conversations.)
Okay, so Yudkowsky had prevaricated about his own philosophy of language
[shaky premise]
But it’s not a premise being introduced suddenly out of nowhere; it’s a conclusion argued for at length earlier in the piece. Prevaricate, meaning, “To shift or turn from direct speech or behaviour [...] to waffle or be (intentionally) ambiguous.” “His own philosophy of language”, meaning, that he wrote a 30,000 word Sequence elaborating on 37 ways in which words can be wrong, including #30, “Your definition draws a boundary around things that don’t really belong together.”
When an author who wrote 30,000 words in 2008 pounding home over and over and over again that “words can be wrong”, then turns around in 2018 and says that “maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way [...] [b]ut you’re not making a stand for Truth in doing so” 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”, about an issue where the opposing side’s view is precisely that the people bringing the word into question are using a definition that draws a boundary around things that don’t really belong together (because men aren’t women, and this continues to be the case even if you redefine some of the men as “trans women”), and the author doesn’t seem eager to clarify when someone calls him on the apparent reversal, I think it makes sense to describe that as the author being ambiguous, having shifted or turned from direct speech—in a word, prevaricating (although not “lying”).
I think I’ve made my case here. If you disagree with some part of the case, I’m eager to hear it! But I don’t think it’s fair for you to dimiss me for making a “shaky premise” when the premise is a conclusion that I argued for.
[unjustified assertion about someone else’s internal mental state that fails to consider alternate hypotheses]
On reflection, the word “transparently” definitely isn’t right here (thanks!), but I’m comfortable standing by “political reasons”. I think later events in the Whole Dumb Story bear me out.
you offered to pay me to respond, and I didn’t call it a “demand” or treat it that way, even though you exerted a bunch of social pressure
I think it would have been fine if you did call it a “demand”! Wiktionary’s first definition is “To request forcefully.” The grandparent is making a request, and the insults (“I don’t really expect you to have any good arguments”, &c.) make it “forceful”. Seems fine. Why did you expect me to object?
The last several paragraphs of the post are where these mistakes seem most egregious
Yeah, I definitely want to rewrite those to be clearer now (as alluded to in the last paragraph of the grandparent). Sorry.
“Obvious”, here and elsewhere seems trivially falsified by the amount of controversy and discussion that these posts have generated.
Sorry, let me clarify. “Obvious” is a 2 place word; there has to an implicit “to whom” even if not stated. I claim that the error in ”… Not Man for the Categories” is obvious to someone who understood the lessons in the “Human’s Guide to Words” Sequence, including the math. I agree that it’s not obvious to people in general, or self-identified “rationalists” in general.
I’m not disputing your account of your personal experience
Shouldn’t you, though? If my perception of “the community” was biased and crazy, it seems like you could totally embarrass me right now by pointing to evidence that my perceptions were biased and crazy.
For example, in part of the post (the paragraph starting with “Now, the memory of that social proof”), I link to comments from Yudkowsky, Alexander, Kelsey Piper, Ozy Brennan, and Rob Bensinger as evidence about the state of the “rationalist” zeitgiest. It seems like you could argue against this by saying something like, “Hey, what about authors X, Y, and Z, who are just as prominent in ‘the community’ as the people you named and are on the record saying that biological sex is immutable and supporting the integrity of female-only spaces?” Admittedly, this could get a little more complicated insofar as your claim is that I was overestimating the degree of consensus and centralization, because the less consensus and centralization there is, the less “What about this-and-such prominent ‘figure’” is a relevant consideration. I still feel like it should be possible to do better than my word against yours.
many of the claims and assumptions in this post seem to rest on an assumption that that experience and model is shared
What gave you that impression?! Would it help if I added the words “to me” or “I think” in key sentences? (An earlier draft said “I think” slightly more often, but my editor cut five instances of it.)
In general, I think a lot of the value proposition of my political writing is that I’m wreckless enough to write clearly about things that most people prefer not to be clear about—models that should be “obvious” but are not shared. I’m definitely not assuming my model is shared. If it were shared, I wouldn’t need to write so many words explaining it!
Thanks!! Receipt details (to your selected charity) in PM yesterday.
(Another part of the problem here might be that I think the privacy norms let me report on my psychological speculations about named individuals, but not all of the evidence that supports them, which might have come from private conversations.)
But it’s not a premise being introduced suddenly out of nowhere; it’s a conclusion argued for at length earlier in the piece. Prevaricate, meaning, “To shift or turn from direct speech or behaviour [...] to waffle or be (intentionally) ambiguous.” “His own philosophy of language”, meaning, that he wrote a 30,000 word Sequence elaborating on 37 ways in which words can be wrong, including #30, “Your definition draws a boundary around things that don’t really belong together.”
When an author who wrote 30,000 words in 2008 pounding home over and over and over again that “words can be wrong”, then turns around in 2018 and says that “maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way [...] [b]ut you’re not making a stand for Truth in doing so” 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”, about an issue where the opposing side’s view is precisely that the people bringing the word into question are using a definition that draws a boundary around things that don’t really belong together (because men aren’t women, and this continues to be the case even if you redefine some of the men as “trans women”), and the author doesn’t seem eager to clarify when someone calls him on the apparent reversal, I think it makes sense to describe that as the author being ambiguous, having shifted or turned from direct speech—in a word, prevaricating (although not “lying”).
I think I’ve made my case here. If you disagree with some part of the case, I’m eager to hear it! But I don’t think it’s fair for you to dimiss me for making a “shaky premise” when the premise is a conclusion that I argued for.
On reflection, the word “transparently” definitely isn’t right here (thanks!), but I’m comfortable standing by “political reasons”. I think later events in the Whole Dumb Story bear me out.
I think it would have been fine if you did call it a “demand”! Wiktionary’s first definition is “To request forcefully.” The grandparent is making a request, and the insults (“I don’t really expect you to have any good arguments”, &c.) make it “forceful”. Seems fine. Why did you expect me to object?
Yeah, I definitely want to rewrite those to be clearer now (as alluded to in the last paragraph of the grandparent). Sorry.
Sorry, let me clarify. “Obvious” is a 2 place word; there has to an implicit “to whom” even if not stated. I claim that the error in ”… Not Man for the Categories” is obvious to someone who understood the lessons in the “Human’s Guide to Words” Sequence, including the math. I agree that it’s not obvious to people in general, or self-identified “rationalists” in general.
Shouldn’t you, though? If my perception of “the community” was biased and crazy, it seems like you could totally embarrass me right now by pointing to evidence that my perceptions were biased and crazy.
For example, in part of the post (the paragraph starting with “Now, the memory of that social proof”), I link to comments from Yudkowsky, Alexander, Kelsey Piper, Ozy Brennan, and Rob Bensinger as evidence about the state of the “rationalist” zeitgiest. It seems like you could argue against this by saying something like, “Hey, what about authors X, Y, and Z, who are just as prominent in ‘the community’ as the people you named and are on the record saying that biological sex is immutable and supporting the integrity of female-only spaces?” Admittedly, this could get a little more complicated insofar as your claim is that I was overestimating the degree of consensus and centralization, because the less consensus and centralization there is, the less “What about this-and-such prominent ‘figure’” is a relevant consideration. I still feel like it should be possible to do better than my word against yours.
What gave you that impression?! Would it help if I added the words “to me” or “I think” in key sentences? (An earlier draft said “I think” slightly more often, but my editor cut five instances of it.)
In general, I think a lot of the value proposition of my political writing is that I’m wreckless enough to write clearly about things that most people prefer not to be clear about—models that should be “obvious” but are not shared. I’m definitely not assuming my model is shared. If it were shared, I wouldn’t need to write so many words explaining it!