Thanks for the reply! (Strong-upvoted.) I’ve been emotionally trashed today and didn’t get anything done at my dayjob, which arguably means I shouldn’t be paying attention to Less Wrong, but I feel the need to type this now in the hopes of getting it off my mind so that I can do my dayjob tomorrow.
Your definition draws a boundary around things that don’t really belong together. You can claim, if you like, that you are defining the word “fish” to refer to salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, and trout, but not jellyfish or algae. You can claim, if you like, that this is merely a list, and there is no way a list can be “wrong”. Or you can stop playing nitwit games and admit that you made a mistake and that dolphins don’t belong on the fish list. (Where to Draw the Boundary?)
That is, in 2008, as part of “A Human’s Guide to Words”, Eliezer Yudkowsky explicitly uses this specific example of whether dolphins are fish, and characterizes the position that dolphins are fish as “playing nitwit games” (!). This didn’t seem particularly controversial at the time?
Then, thirteen years later, in the current year, you declare that “The definitional gynmastics required to believe that dolphins aren’t fish are staggering” (staggering!), and Yudkowsky retweets you. (In general, retweets are not necessarily endorsements—sometimes people just want to draw attention to some content without further comment or implied approval—but I’m inclined to read this instance as implying approval, partially because this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing someone would retweet for attention-without-approval, and partially because of the working relationship between you and Yudkowsky.)
But this is pretty strange, right? It would seem that sometime between 2008 and the current year, the rationalist “party line” (as observed in the public statements of SingInst/MIRI leadership) on whether dolphins are fish shifted from (my paraphrases) “No; despite the surface similarities, that categorization doesn’t carve reality at the joints; stop playing nitwit games” to “Yes, because of the surface similarities; those who contend otherwise are the ones playing nitwit games.” A complete 180° reversal, on this specific example!Why?What changed? Surely if “cognitively useful categories should carve reality at the joints, and dolphins being fish doesn’t do that” was good philosophy in 2008, it should still be good philosophy in 2021?
It would make sense if people’s opinions changed due to new arguments—if people’s opinions changed because of reasons. Indeed, Yudkowsky’s original “stop playing nitwit games” dismissal was sloppy and flawed, and I ended up having the occasion to elaborate on the specific senses in which dolphins both do, and do not, cluster with fish in my 2019 “Where to Draw the Boundaries?”
(Get it? ”… Boundaries?”, plural, in contrast to ”… Boundary?”, singular, because I’m talking about how you can legitimately have multiple different category systems depending on which subspace of configuration space is decision-relevant in a particular context.)
But when I look at the thing you posted and Yudkowsky retweeted (even if it was a shitpost, your epistemic-status followup thread still contends “but also y’all know i’m right”), it doesn’t look like the party line about dolphins changed because of reasons. You didn’t even acknowledge the reversal, despite explicitly lamenting (in the followup thread) that people haven’t read “A Human’s Guide to Words”.
Am I the only one creeped out by this? To illustrate why I’m freaked out—why I’ve been freaked out to a greater or lesser degree almost constantly for the past five years—imagine that in a fictional 2008, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence were at war with Eastasia for harboring the terrorist unFriendly AI Emmanuel GoldstAIn. It would make sense if, on 21 November 2014, Luke Muehlhauser were to announce:
We’re making some changes! First, we’re now going to be the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI for short, instead of SingInst. And the reason for that is, the old name is no longer appropriate because we’re no longer unambiguously “for Artificial Intelligence” after we figured out that it’s probably going to destroy all value in our future lightcone. Second, a leaked pastebin revealed that Emmanuel GoldstAIn is actually being harbored by Eurasia, not Eastasia. Whoops! We’ll be winding down our war with Eastasia with the hope to be ready to declare war on Eurasia in time for our winter fundraiser. Third, we’re calling it “aligned” instead of “Friendly” AI now, and the reason for that is because Stuart Russell convinced us it’s a less goofy name.
That would make sense, because in this story, Luke is acknowledging the changes, and giving reasons for why it’s correct for the things to change. If Luke were to just say out of the blue on 21 November 2014 that the war with Eurasia is going well, without any indication that anything had changed for any reason, you would expect someone to notice.
Or, imagine if in 2014, Yudkowsky suddenly started saying the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, without acknowledging that anything had changed. That’s how weird this is. (Revised: Adele Lopez points out that this is wrong.)
And on this classification-of-dolphins issue (specifically, literally, dolphins in particular), it seems like something has changed, and everyone is pretending not to have noticed. Why? What changed? I have my theory, but I could be biased—I want to hear yours! I want to hear yours in public. Do you have a cheerful price for this? I could go up to $2000 for a public reply.
On the object level question? Like, what changed between younger Nate who read that sequence and didn’t object to that example, and older Nate who asserted (in a humorous context) that it takes staggering gymnastics to exclude dolphins from “fish”? Here’s what springs to mind:
I noticed that there is cluster-nature to the marine-environment adaptations
I noticed that humans used to have a word for that cluster
I noticed a sense of inconsistency between including whales in “even-toed ungulates” without also including them in “lobe-finned fish”.
I noticed that paraphyletic groupings seem to me to lack the courage of their convictions.
I learned that nature just keeps turning out crabs, which is a chink in the armor of phylogenetic classification schemes
I noticed my own discomfort as the lines around “fruit” and “berry” started wavering
I noticed specifically the distinction between “would be at home atop a fruit pizza” and “everything anatomically analogous to an apple”
I generalized, and noticed that I don’t actually believe phylogenetics is generally a good way to carve up the life forms around me
I took stock of my phylogenetic concepts, and asked myself which concepts were lost but plausibly still useful
I decided that the concept previously known as “fish” (the marine adaptation cluster) had some plausible use. (In particular, the specific use that sprang to mind when I checked this a while back was the ability of kids to point at arbitrary marine creatures and say “look a fish”, an influence that showed up in my thread.)
Scott’s post is I think the source of the first two in me, the rest is novel to me as far as I recall.
Attempting to force the change into a single sentence, I’d say that the main thing that changed is I noticed the subtle background forces that whisper (at least to blue tribe members in their youth) “phylogenetic classification is the one true way to organize life forms”, and rejected its claim.
For the record, I don’t see my current state as incongruous with Eliezer’s example. These days, if someone says that they have a definition of “fish” that includes salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, and trout but not jellyfish or algae, I might ask them how they classify camels before assuming they’ve made Eliezer’s mistake #30. But I continue to think #30 is a real mistake (I’d gloss it as “insisting that your concept denotes an awkward boundary even after the boundary has been revealed to be awkward”), and that Eliezer’s given example is still doing its job, despite the fact that I’d now say it gets a clarity boost from the subtle-implicit-insidious background cultural context on the ultimacy of phylogenetics, which it perhaps does not deserve.
None of this feels like a big reversal to me. I’d say that the hypothetical person in the example can be understood from context to be proposing a definition of “fish” useful for predicting features like breathing apparatus and bone structure (thanks to implicit, insidious, familiar, and universal background assumptions), and the “nitwit game” is to deny error and assert that the actual desideratum on the definition is that it be shaped in precisely thus-and-such an awkward way. I haven’t changed my stance on that point. I also don’t think it’s a “nitwit game” to say “oh, this concept is actually intended for predicting existence of vertibrae, sorry for the confusion”.
I think the place where I’ve made a decent-sized shift is that the idea of assigning a whole monosyllable to a notion that includes both the jawed and jawless fish, but excludes the shellfish, jellyfish, starfish, and the subset of jawed fish that routed through terrestrial forms, feels a lot more awkward to me than it used to. I don’t really see myself using that concept much in practice—and, like, if I’m watching a documentary on ocean creatures, I don’t think I’m being done any favors by having word-structures that group lungfish and lamprey while excluding sea turtles. This is the sense in which it seems to me to take some gymnastics to arrive at the modern word “fish” (as opposed to, say, shorter words for bony fish and jawless fish, plus a “fish” word that includes bears, plus a “fish” word that includes cuttlefish and crayfish), and, furthermore, some gymnastics to find a variant of “fish” that does not include dolphins.
I don’t stand by the claim that these gymnastics are “staggering”—at least, not in the sense that the gymnastics themselves are all that tricky. (Like, I can kinda see it, and it’s a fairly striaghtforward paraphyletic group as far as that goes, and there’s at least a bunch of “I know it when I see it” style visual clustering). The thing that I find staggering is how pervasive and unremarked the gymnastics are. (And this sort of sloppiness—being staggered by the size of the psyop, and tacking the adjective “staggering” onto the gymnastics—is the sort of thing that I endorse while in a shitposting context.)
That said, notably, everyone can already perform these gymnastics. We’re all taught to do these gymnastics implicitly, in youth, before we have the wherewithal to question them. Which means that relying on people to understand these (locally universal!) gymnastics when writing an example is perfectly reasonable.
In other words, I read Eliezer as saying something like “[assuming the standard gymnastics] failing to admit that the inclusion of dolphins was an error, and instead insisting that the concept boundary is supposed to contort, constitutes an additional error”, and me as drawing attention to the standard gymnastics.
even if it was a shitpost, your epistemic-status followup thread still contends “but also y’all know i’m right”
haha yeah
For the record, the poor capitalization and informal tone there (and in the preceding tweet) were intended to be tells that those tweets were still being written from the “shitposting” frame (as were all my threads since April). The follow-up starting with “By which I mean”, plus the remainder of the thread being well-punctuated, plus the final one ending by saying “And with that I’ll end this thread; any more and I might slip back into cogent model-building, and I’m not quite ready to end my shitposting streak yet.” were intended demarcate the switch from semitrolling to candor. Some of the things I value in shitposting are lost if I break the frame too readily in the threads themselves, so I’m rather loathe to give clearer signals in-context, but I’m generally happy to answer (publicly or privately) which tweets are spawned from which generators.
Apologies for the length. I’d make this shorter if I had more time.
I noticed the subtle background forces that whisper (at least to blue tribe members in their youth) “phylogenetic classification is the one true way to organize life forms”, and rejected its claim.
I still can’t guess why that bothers you :/ When I try to imagine the motivations of this shadowy conspiracy of elites who quietly manipulated the anglosphere into always maintaining separate concepts for fish and cetaceans, I just see a desire to teach us about how special and cool cetaceans are.
I can’t speak for So8res, but I’m bothered by something like… privileging one particular frame for reasons of fashion or class rather than efficiency? The sort of thing where you leave hazards around as tests, so that people can see who stumbles on them and who gracefully avoids them. I’m not opposed to tests in general, I just wish they’d be more efficient.
Like, the old meaning of fish was “fully aquatic animal”, which seems like the right sort of definition for a four-letter word (remember, words are supposed to encode information cheaply), and saying “actually we’ve reserved that four-letter word for this tiny slice of its former domain” seems like a weird choice (comparable to the ‘true bug’ definition).
For the record, the poor capitalization and informal tone there (and in the preceding tweet) were intended to be tells that those tweets were still being written from the “shitposting” frame
I just want to say that this “haha yeah” is really disrespectful. Straightening out the so-called “rationalist” community’s collective position on the cognitive function of categorization (culminating in January’s 10,000-word capstone post “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception”) has been the major project of my life for the past forty months, with dolphins in particular as my specific central example. You don’t know how many tears I’ve cried and how long I’ve suffered over this.
How would you feel if you sunk forty months of your life into deconfusing a philosophical issue that had huge, life-altering practical stakes for you, and the response to your careful arguments from community authorities was a dismissive “haha yeah”? Would you, perhaps, be somewhat upset?
I’ve barely been able to accomplish anything at my dayjob for the past ten days because I’ve been so furious about this. I think I want to develop my unpublished draft reply in progress into a followup post that will more carefully explain the case that paraphyletic categories are doing useful cognitive work, the fact that the colloquial and botanical senses of the word “berry” have coexisted for some time, and my socio-psychological theory of how we got in this absurd situation in the first place.
I don’t know how long this will take me to finish. It’s possible that I should take a break from this topic for week—or two—and finish the draft when I’m in a more stable state of mind. But when I do—and I will—if you have any scrap of human decency in your brain, you will not shitpost at me. You will reply with the seriousness implied by the fact that your fellow rationalists and any interested ancestor-simulators are watching you. If your time is sufficiently valuable to you that you have no further interest in this matter without additional incentives, the $2000 cheerful price offer mentioned above will remain open.
This isn’t a “pretend to agree with me to appease my untreated mental illness” move. I don’t want people to pretend to agree with me if I’m wrong! If I get things wrong and you or others point out the specific things that I’m actually wrong about, that’s great! That’s how we all become less wrong together. But the process of using the beautiful weapons of reasoned argument to become less wrong together, only works if both sides are being honest; the discourse algorithm doesn’t produce accurate maps if one side is allowed to shitpost.
How would you feel if you sunk forty months of your life into deconfusing a philosophical issue that had huge, life-altering practical stakes for you, and the response to your careful arguments from community authorities was a dismissive “haha yeah”? Would you, perhaps, be somewhat upset?
Perhaps! But also that doesn’t seem to me like what happened. The response to your careful arguments was the 1000ish words that engage with what seemed to me to be the heart of your questions, and that attempted to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding my communications. Also, the primary intent of the “haha yeah” was not dismissal, and the 100ish words following it were intended to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding the linked twitter thread. Your apparent reading of my “haha yeah” as dismissive of your careful arguments looks to me like yet another way you’re misunderstanding my communications.
(FWIW, as far as I can tell on very brief introspection, the main purpose of the ‘haha yeah’ was to hold open a space—however small—for online correspondence to be actually fun, with a comparatively minor side purpose of dismissing a very limited part of your argument. Furthermore, my conversational ethics do not permit such attempts at dismissal to be purely implicit, and the following paragraph attempts to render explicit the grounds on which I believe a specific narrow part of your argument deserved dismissal. There are forces in play whose names I don’t readily have on this brief introspection, and my account might change on a deeper introspection, but I feel like I know where the dismissal is in all this, and don’t expect I’d find that the main purpose was dismissal-based if I introspected further.)
My take on this conversation is that you’re dramatically mismodelling me, and then running really far—and getting quite distressed—based on bad models. For instance, it looks to me like you read my ‘haha yeah’ as “the response”, despite how it follows a thousand-odd words of engagement, and is sandwiched between a quote selecting a narrow portion of your argument and a paragraph explaining why I think that argument is off-kilter. I have a sense this sort of dramatic misread of my intentions has been happening repeatedly since the beginning, without engagement with my attempts at clarification, and I currently despair of communication.
I know you haven’t solicited advice, but for future reference, if you were taking smaller steps in your assumptions about my intentions, and asking more and earlier questions (example: “What’s the ‘haha yeah’ doing for you? (I’m reading it as broadly dismissive, and feel hurt by it).”), I both expect that you’d have a better chance of communicating with me, and that I’d be more enthusiastic about trying. (I acknowledge that this style of communication requires a high degree of trust, and that you might not have that trust with me.)
As things stand, I have the sense that you’re lashing out wildly at shadow-versions of me you’ve constructed, and I’m not enthusiastic about engaging further on the object level (and my cheerful price is quite high, alas).
But when I do—and I will—if you have any scrap of human decency in your brain, you will not shitpost at me.
I’ve heard (perhaps incorrectly) that this is very emotionally salient to you, that you take it seriously, and that you care deeply about how I react. I feel an abstract compassion for you in this; your quest sounds like a thankless job and plausibly a virtuous one. Only abstract compassion, though, because my current emotional response is one that emits sentences like “well fuck you too; call me back when you can model me farther than you can throw me”. It is from that state that I dispute your factual claim quoted above. My model of human mindspace contains variants of me who could retain some decency while shitposting in ways you perceive as being “at you”. (Example: the thing I’m perceiving as you mismodelling-and-lashing-out hurts to be on the receiving end of, and I claim that humans can retain their decency while lashing out in response to being hurt. Also, I think the shitposting has purposes you’re not modelling, and there are ways your response could be shaped such that shitposting in reply seems reasonable on its face.)
(ETA: the primary connotation of the above is something like “you seem to be attempting to apply pressure to me in a manner I consider invalid; it holds no sway over me” / “I have perceived this as a desperate simultaneous plea for both compassion and deference, and while I have the compassion, I lack the deference”. Neither of those are quite right etc. I add this parenthetical out of an anticipation that, without it, you’ll wildly misinterpret me here. I feel bitterness about how regularly and wildly you seem to misinterpret me, without apparent awareness or acknowledgement, and the bitterness tempts me to sharper phrasings.)
All that said, I’ve heard you as making a request that I avoid a certain type of glibness in my replies to you, on the grounds that it causes you great distress. Insofar as this doesn’t cause me to stop interacting with you wholesale (eg, for fear that I’ll cause you undue great distress given your apparent propensity to misread me), and insofar as I don’t, like, forget when I’m banging out a very quick response, I predict I’ll honor that request. And for the record, I do not intend to cause you distress, and I continue to respect your what-seems-to-me-like conviction in the pursuit of truth.
While it seems to me like you’re trying to protect an important pole of coherency and consistency here, I think this comment as well as some features of the OP (to a lesser extent) overstep some important bounds and make it quite tricky to have a productive conversation, in a way that I would like to both discourage and advise against. I worry that you’re imputing positions stronger than people are holding, and thus creating more disagreement than exists, and raising the emotional stakes of that disagreement more than seems necessary to continue the conversation.
I would rather not perpetuate an escalatory dynamic where you think you need to make a bigger and bigger fuss in order to get responses, in a way that can be reminiscent of ‘trapped priors’; it seems to me like the conversation in this thread could have been basically as effective at challenging So8res’s position and provoking elaboration with much less strain on your part, and yet when I imagine being in your shoes this encounter probably feels like an example of the success of this approach.
Concretely, in this case, I think you’re exasperated about humor and shitposting in a way that isn’t justified and is failing to credit the ways in which people are responding to your bids for increased seriousness and abstraction. The standard you seem to be imposing is not “please respond to seriousness with seriousness” but the much stronger “please never joke in public about something I take very seriously”, which seems like a pretty drastic standard, and one I would mildly warn against trying to enforce on LW.
(On the object level, I agree with Ben Pace that you are right that the about-face on this example deserves explanation, but my sense is that the explanation is satisfactory; the take that I’d summarize as ‘there’s a paraphyletic grouping that pretends to obviousness that it does not possess on closer examination’ seems sensible enough, tho I am interested in disagreements you have with that take.)
I applaud your earlier decision to have a friend review a draft before posting it, since I think this is the sort of behavior that leads to more intellectual progress and less mutual misunderstanding. In that spirit, I’d be happy to review any further comments you want to make in this conversation, in the hopes of having it go a bit better.
“please don’t shitpost and when you engage with me please avoid all attempts at humor because these pattern-match to ways I am abused and if you do those things even if in good faith it will only hurt our communication, perhaps disastrously, never help” would, I think, cover basically everything you want to cover without also signaling that it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you.
OTOH if it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you then you have successfully signaled that.
Possibly this isn’t fair but I’m pretty sure it’s an accurate reading.
I would note the similarity between “haha yeah” and the stated lack of punctuation and capitalization in “shitposts”, which are supposed to be light jokes.
Also, you say
If I get things wrong and you or others point out the specific things that I’m actually wrong about, that’s great! That’s how we all become less wrong together. But the process of using the beautiful weapons of reasoned argument to become less wrong together, only works if both sides are being honest; the discourse algorithm doesn’t produce accurate maps if one side is allowed to shitpost.
That argument is also a valid argument against making emotional appeals about your past mental state and how it has been affected by this argument. There are rumors about mathematicians being driven mad by the concept of infinity. This doesn’t make them very good at teaching Calculus in college, but rather the opposite.
Crying over the amount of spilt ink doesn’t have that much epistemic relevance. That your particle accelerator cost X million dollars doesn’t make it produce better data. Truth can be frustrating and unfair in that sense.
If a single naive person can say “The emperor has no clothes” and all the epistemics come falling down, maybe they should come falling down. With solid deconfusion even if a single authority figure says “I am not convinced” the solace from the work itself should be plenty.
This plea that the issue should be handled in the tone of seriousness seems like a bad application of social pressure. We shouldn’t need swearing on bibles. Using the role of constituting community beliefs as social-versus game value chips seems bad.
Or, imagine if in 2014, Yudkowsky suddenly started saying the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, without acknowledging that anything had changed. That’s how weird this is.
This is a strong overstatement. Eliezer clearly has invested orders of magnitude more effort in defense of his MWI stance than he did in defense of his original dolphins-aren’t-fish “stance”.
So, I’m not a biologist. I don’t think Eliezer is much of a biologist either. A thing that I learned in the last ten years, which maybe Nate and Eliezer learned in the same time, idk, is that different aquatic animals are more distantly related than one might have thought. For example, let’s take the list from 2008. When I go on Wikipedia and try to find an appropriate scientific name for each and stick it into timetree.org to try to figure out when their most recent common ancestor was, I get the following estimates:
Salmon and Guppies: 206 MYA Trout and Guppies: 206 MYA Dolphins and Guppies: 435 MYA Sharks and Guppies: 473 MYA Jellyfish and Guppies: 824 MYA Algae and Guppies: 1496 MYA
That is, if you’re going to start removing things from the list because of how distantly related they are, sharks go first; Chondrichthyes is just as weird a member of Chordata as Mammalia is, from the perspective of Actinopterygii.
The trouble with defending the 2008 classification is not that it’s phylogenetics, it’s that, as far as I can tell, it’s bad phylogenetics. And so you end up requiring mental gymnastics in order to exclude dolphins because their most recent common ancestor is too far back while including sharks whose most recent common ancestor is even further back. The pedant’s position (“I know that dolphins are mammals instead of fish!”) doesn’t hold up under either the useful definition (“dolphins are aquatic animals tho”) or the phylogenist’s definition (“mammals are chordata tho, which is what you should mean when you say ‘fish’.”).
Usually I don’t think short comments of agreement really contribute to conversations, but this is actually critical and in the interest of trying to get a public preference cascade going: No. You are not the only one creeped out by this. The parts of The Sequences which have held up the best over the last decade are the refinements on General Semantics, and I too am dismayed at the abandonment of carve-reality-at-its-joints.
I’m surprised you think this is “absolutely critical”. Do you think I’m making a grave error in my newfound distaste for paraphyletic groupings? (My ability to notice their awkwardness felt internally like evidence that my joint-carving skills have improved over the years, ftr.) Is there some other joint-carving skill you believe I am lacking, or have lost? Or perhaps you’re decrying a decay in general community epistemics, for which my thread is simply a poster-child? Or perhaps you’re lamenting some general community or global decline of candor? I’m uncertain what precisely you’re dismayed about, and solicit specific criticisms of my actions.
The example of dolphins didn’t seem central to the general dynamics what the claim was about. “nitwit games” is a description of a logic you can’t follow that you want to mock. The tree article made sense to me how a dolphin-fish carving would work. One of the virtues is to say “oops” and go on, this does make the mistakes more “stealthy”.
I don’t like the bashing of ways of thinking so spewing hatred that way or this way is pretty passee anyway. One can be consistent in being against random fences and being for principled fences and call for a fencde to be taken down. But later learn that there was actually a principle and functioning of laying it down. Then it becomes an issue whether the original principles were better or worse than the new proposed principles. How long must one search before it starts to bereaosnable to treat the fence as purposeless?
I think I would welcome reflection on how being mocky by surface examination is/was a bit misleading. There surely are a lot of biases and illusions but human brains try so assuming basic competence would give a somewhat favorable prior that a lot of words have some sensible structure in them. That some of them are pretty transparent and some are pretty obscure but that doesn’t make it constructive to judge all obscure things by their apperance.
What changed? Surely if “cognitively useful categories should carve reality at the joints, and dolphins being fish doesn’t do that” was good philosophy in 2008, it should still be good philosophy in 2021?
Scott Alexander’s essay uses the example of fish versus whales to argue that transgender people should be classified by whatever sex they claim to be rather than classified by biological sex. This essay came out after 2008 and before 2021. And Scott Alexander is about as influential here as Yudkowsky.
In other words, what changed is that asserting that it makes sense to classify dolphins as fish is now something you need to assert for political purposes.
Edit: I missed the reference to gender issues. But I think it may explain why Yudkowsky and rationalists in general have changed their mind, regardless of why anyone in particular here has.
Your comment seems to me to assume that Scott thinks there would be nothing very wrong with a definition of “fish” that included whales only because that’s something he has to think in order to remain consistent while classifying transgender people the way they feel they should be classified.
I don’t think it’s at all obvious that that’s so.
(Similarly, one could postulate that Zack thinks there would be something very wrong with such a definition of “fish” only because that’s something he has to think in order to remain consistent while insisting that transgender people should be classified according to attributes like anatomy, chromosomes, etc.
I don’t think that’s obviously so, either.)
Either of those things could be true. Both of them could be true, for that matter. Or neither. But I think that in order for “rationalists as a group have changed their minds on this for political reasons” to be a better analysis than “rationalists as a group have changed their minds on this because they found Scott’s arguments about King Solomon and the like convincing”, there needs to be some good reason to think that Scott’s arguments are bad enough that rationalists couldn’t be convinced by them without political motivation, or that Scott’s arguments were clearly made in bad faith, or something of the kind.
(Note: my description of Scott’s and Zack’s positions is brief and necessarily sketchy. E.g., Scott is writing about whether it’s OK to define a word that groups what-we-call-fish together with whales and dolphins; Zack is more interested in whether it would be OK to use the specific word “fish” that way, given how it is already used; it’s not clear which question Soares is really debating, given that the whole thing is shitposting anyway. Some of the gender-political issues for which this serves as an analogy match up pretty well with one of those, some not so much. Anyway, please do not take any of the above as a serious attempt to describe either Scott’s or Zack’s exact position.)
Your comment seems to me to assume that Scott thinks there would be nothing very wrong with a definition of “fish” that included whales only because that’s something he has to think in order to remain consistent while classifying transgender people the way they feel they should be classified.
Believing things for multiple reasons is a thing (despite the LW idea of a true rejection, as if people only have one reason for everything). Moreover, people aren’t perfectly rational machines, and motivated reasoning is a thing. I certainly think that needing to believe it for the sake of transgendered people is a large component of why he believes it, and that he probably wouldn’t otherwise believe it, even if it’s not the only reason why.
I agree: one can have multiple reasons for having (or professing) a belief. For that reason, to me saying “X believes Y because Z” (where Z is a disreputable reason and one would otherwise assume something less disreputable) is rather uninteresting if not accompanied by actual evidence that the other less-disreputable reasons aren’t sufficient explanation for X to believe Y.
In the present case, Scott is known to be a good thinker, and has given (not particularly disreputable) reasons for believing Y; rationalists on the whole are also pretty good thinkers (Nate and Eliezer included); if you think their opinions on this point are mostly the result of political prejudice, you’re entitled to think that but I don’t see any good reason to agree.
Thanks for the reply! (Strong-upvoted.) I’ve been emotionally trashed today and didn’t get anything done at my dayjob, which arguably means I shouldn’t be paying attention to Less Wrong, but I feel the need to type this now in the hopes of getting it off my mind so that I can do my dayjob tomorrow.
In your epistemic-status thread, you express sadness at “the fact that nobody’s read A Human’s Guide to Words or w/e”. But, with respect, you … don’t seem to be behaving as if you’ve read it? Specifically, entry #30 on the list of “37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong” is—I’ll quote it in full—
That is, in 2008, as part of “A Human’s Guide to Words”, Eliezer Yudkowsky explicitly uses this specific example of whether dolphins are fish, and characterizes the position that dolphins are fish as “playing nitwit games” (!). This didn’t seem particularly controversial at the time?
Then, thirteen years later, in the current year, you declare that “The definitional gynmastics required to believe that dolphins aren’t fish are staggering” (staggering!), and Yudkowsky retweets you. (In general, retweets are not necessarily endorsements—sometimes people just want to draw attention to some content without further comment or implied approval—but I’m inclined to read this instance as implying approval, partially because this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing someone would retweet for attention-without-approval, and partially because of the working relationship between you and Yudkowsky.)
But this is pretty strange, right? It would seem that sometime between 2008 and the current year, the rationalist “party line” (as observed in the public statements of SingInst/MIRI leadership) on whether dolphins are fish shifted from (my paraphrases) “No; despite the surface similarities, that categorization doesn’t carve reality at the joints; stop playing nitwit games” to “Yes, because of the surface similarities; those who contend otherwise are the ones playing nitwit games.” A complete 180° reversal, on this specific example! Why? What changed? Surely if “cognitively useful categories should carve reality at the joints, and dolphins being fish doesn’t do that” was good philosophy in 2008, it should still be good philosophy in 2021?
It would make sense if people’s opinions changed due to new arguments—if people’s opinions changed because of reasons. Indeed, Yudkowsky’s original “stop playing nitwit games” dismissal was sloppy and flawed, and I ended up having the occasion to elaborate on the specific senses in which dolphins both do, and do not, cluster with fish in my 2019 “Where to Draw the Boundaries?”
(Get it? ”… Boundaries?”, plural, in contrast to ”… Boundary?”, singular, because I’m talking about how you can legitimately have multiple different category systems depending on which subspace of configuration space is decision-relevant in a particular context.)
But when I look at the thing you posted and Yudkowsky retweeted (even if it was a shitpost, your epistemic-status followup thread still contends “but also y’all know i’m right”), it doesn’t look like the party line about dolphins changed because of reasons. You didn’t even acknowledge the reversal, despite explicitly lamenting (in the followup thread) that people haven’t read “A Human’s Guide to Words”.
Am I the only one creeped out by this? To illustrate why I’m freaked out—why I’ve been freaked out to a greater or lesser degree almost constantly for the past five years—imagine that in a fictional 2008, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence were at war with Eastasia for harboring the terrorist unFriendly AI Emmanuel GoldstAIn. It would make sense if, on 21 November 2014, Luke Muehlhauser were to announce:
That would make sense, because in this story, Luke is acknowledging the changes, and giving reasons for why it’s correct for the things to change. If Luke were to just say out of the blue on 21 November 2014 that the war with Eurasia is going well, without any indication that anything had changed for any reason, you would expect someone to notice.
Or, imagine if in 2014, Yudkowsky suddenly started saying the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, without acknowledging that anything had changed. That’s how weird this is.(Revised: Adele Lopez points out that this is wrong.)And on this classification-of-dolphins issue (specifically, literally, dolphins in particular), it seems like something has changed, and everyone is pretending not to have noticed. Why? What changed? I have my theory, but I could be biased—I want to hear yours! I want to hear yours in public. Do you have a cheerful price for this? I could go up to $2000 for a public reply.
On the object level question? Like, what changed between younger Nate who read that sequence and didn’t object to that example, and older Nate who asserted (in a humorous context) that it takes staggering gymnastics to exclude dolphins from “fish”? Here’s what springs to mind:
I noticed that there is cluster-nature to the marine-environment adaptations
I noticed that humans used to have a word for that cluster
I noticed a sense of inconsistency between including whales in “even-toed ungulates” without also including them in “lobe-finned fish”.
I noticed that paraphyletic groupings seem to me to lack the courage of their convictions.
I learned that nature just keeps turning out crabs, which is a chink in the armor of phylogenetic classification schemes
I noticed my own discomfort as the lines around “fruit” and “berry” started wavering
I noticed specifically the distinction between “would be at home atop a fruit pizza” and “everything anatomically analogous to an apple”
I generalized, and noticed that I don’t actually believe phylogenetics is generally a good way to carve up the life forms around me
I took stock of my phylogenetic concepts, and asked myself which concepts were lost but plausibly still useful
I decided that the concept previously known as “fish” (the marine adaptation cluster) had some plausible use. (In particular, the specific use that sprang to mind when I checked this a while back was the ability of kids to point at arbitrary marine creatures and say “look a fish”, an influence that showed up in my thread.)
Scott’s post is I think the source of the first two in me, the rest is novel to me as far as I recall.
Attempting to force the change into a single sentence, I’d say that the main thing that changed is I noticed the subtle background forces that whisper (at least to blue tribe members in their youth) “phylogenetic classification is the one true way to organize life forms”, and rejected its claim.
For the record, I don’t see my current state as incongruous with Eliezer’s example. These days, if someone says that they have a definition of “fish” that includes salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, and trout but not jellyfish or algae, I might ask them how they classify camels before assuming they’ve made Eliezer’s mistake #30. But I continue to think #30 is a real mistake (I’d gloss it as “insisting that your concept denotes an awkward boundary even after the boundary has been revealed to be awkward”), and that Eliezer’s given example is still doing its job, despite the fact that I’d now say it gets a clarity boost from the subtle-implicit-insidious background cultural context on the ultimacy of phylogenetics, which it perhaps does not deserve.
None of this feels like a big reversal to me. I’d say that the hypothetical person in the example can be understood from context to be proposing a definition of “fish” useful for predicting features like breathing apparatus and bone structure (thanks to implicit, insidious, familiar, and universal background assumptions), and the “nitwit game” is to deny error and assert that the actual desideratum on the definition is that it be shaped in precisely thus-and-such an awkward way. I haven’t changed my stance on that point. I also don’t think it’s a “nitwit game” to say “oh, this concept is actually intended for predicting existence of vertibrae, sorry for the confusion”.
I think the place where I’ve made a decent-sized shift is that the idea of assigning a whole monosyllable to a notion that includes both the jawed and jawless fish, but excludes the shellfish, jellyfish, starfish, and the subset of jawed fish that routed through terrestrial forms, feels a lot more awkward to me than it used to. I don’t really see myself using that concept much in practice—and, like, if I’m watching a documentary on ocean creatures, I don’t think I’m being done any favors by having word-structures that group lungfish and lamprey while excluding sea turtles. This is the sense in which it seems to me to take some gymnastics to arrive at the modern word “fish” (as opposed to, say, shorter words for bony fish and jawless fish, plus a “fish” word that includes bears, plus a “fish” word that includes cuttlefish and crayfish), and, furthermore, some gymnastics to find a variant of “fish” that does not include dolphins.
I don’t stand by the claim that these gymnastics are “staggering”—at least, not in the sense that the gymnastics themselves are all that tricky. (Like, I can kinda see it, and it’s a fairly striaghtforward paraphyletic group as far as that goes, and there’s at least a bunch of “I know it when I see it” style visual clustering). The thing that I find staggering is how pervasive and unremarked the gymnastics are. (And this sort of sloppiness—being staggered by the size of the psyop, and tacking the adjective “staggering” onto the gymnastics—is the sort of thing that I endorse while in a shitposting context.)
That said, notably, everyone can already perform these gymnastics. We’re all taught to do these gymnastics implicitly, in youth, before we have the wherewithal to question them. Which means that relying on people to understand these (locally universal!) gymnastics when writing an example is perfectly reasonable.
In other words, I read Eliezer as saying something like “[assuming the standard gymnastics] failing to admit that the inclusion of dolphins was an error, and instead insisting that the concept boundary is supposed to contort, constitutes an additional error”, and me as drawing attention to the standard gymnastics.
haha yeah
For the record, the poor capitalization and informal tone there (and in the preceding tweet) were intended to be tells that those tweets were still being written from the “shitposting” frame (as were all my threads since April). The follow-up starting with “By which I mean”, plus the remainder of the thread being well-punctuated, plus the final one ending by saying “And with that I’ll end this thread; any more and I might slip back into cogent model-building, and I’m not quite ready to end my shitposting streak yet.” were intended demarcate the switch from semitrolling to candor. Some of the things I value in shitposting are lost if I break the frame too readily in the threads themselves, so I’m rather loathe to give clearer signals in-context, but I’m generally happy to answer (publicly or privately) which tweets are spawned from which generators.
Apologies for the length. I’d make this shorter if I had more time.
I still can’t guess why that bothers you :/ When I try to imagine the motivations of this shadowy conspiracy of elites who quietly manipulated the anglosphere into always maintaining separate concepts for fish and cetaceans, I just see a desire to teach us about how special and cool cetaceans are.
I can’t speak for So8res, but I’m bothered by something like… privileging one particular frame for reasons of fashion or class rather than efficiency? The sort of thing where you leave hazards around as tests, so that people can see who stumbles on them and who gracefully avoids them. I’m not opposed to tests in general, I just wish they’d be more efficient.
Like, the old meaning of fish was “fully aquatic animal”, which seems like the right sort of definition for a four-letter word (remember, words are supposed to encode information cheaply), and saying “actually we’ve reserved that four-letter word for this tiny slice of its former domain” seems like a weird choice (comparable to the ‘true bug’ definition).
(Circling back to the object level after a three-and-a-half-month cooldown period.)
In a new post, I explain why paraphyletic categories are actually fine.
(I’ve drafted a 3000 word reply to this, but I’m waiting on feedback from a friend before posting it.)
I just want to say that this “haha yeah” is really disrespectful. Straightening out the so-called “rationalist” community’s collective position on the cognitive function of categorization (culminating in January’s 10,000-word capstone post “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception”) has been the major project of my life for the past forty months, with dolphins in particular as my specific central example. You don’t know how many tears I’ve cried and how long I’ve suffered over this.
How would you feel if you sunk forty months of your life into deconfusing a philosophical issue that had huge, life-altering practical stakes for you, and the response to your careful arguments from community authorities was a dismissive “haha yeah”? Would you, perhaps, be somewhat upset?
I’ve barely been able to accomplish anything at my dayjob for the past ten days because I’ve been so furious about this. I think I want to develop my unpublished draft reply in progress into a followup post that will more carefully explain the case that paraphyletic categories are doing useful cognitive work, the fact that the colloquial and botanical senses of the word “berry” have coexisted for some time, and my socio-psychological theory of how we got in this absurd situation in the first place.
I don’t know how long this will take me to finish. It’s possible that I should take a break from this topic for week—or two—and finish the draft when I’m in a more stable state of mind. But when I do—and I will—if you have any scrap of human decency in your brain, you will not shitpost at me. You will reply with the seriousness implied by the fact that your fellow rationalists and any interested ancestor-simulators are watching you. If your time is sufficiently valuable to you that you have no further interest in this matter without additional incentives, the $2000 cheerful price offer mentioned above will remain open.
This isn’t a “pretend to agree with me to appease my untreated mental illness” move. I don’t want people to pretend to agree with me if I’m wrong! If I get things wrong and you or others point out the specific things that I’m actually wrong about, that’s great! That’s how we all become less wrong together. But the process of using the beautiful weapons of reasoned argument to become less wrong together, only works if both sides are being honest; the discourse algorithm doesn’t produce accurate maps if one side is allowed to shitpost.
I have the honor to be your obedient servant.
Perhaps! But also that doesn’t seem to me like what happened. The response to your careful arguments was the 1000ish words that engage with what seemed to me to be the heart of your questions, and that attempted to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding my communications. Also, the primary intent of the “haha yeah” was not dismissal, and the 100ish words following it were intended to convey some ways it seemed you were misunderstanding the linked twitter thread. Your apparent reading of my “haha yeah” as dismissive of your careful arguments looks to me like yet another way you’re misunderstanding my communications.
(FWIW, as far as I can tell on very brief introspection, the main purpose of the ‘haha yeah’ was to hold open a space—however small—for online correspondence to be actually fun, with a comparatively minor side purpose of dismissing a very limited part of your argument. Furthermore, my conversational ethics do not permit such attempts at dismissal to be purely implicit, and the following paragraph attempts to render explicit the grounds on which I believe a specific narrow part of your argument deserved dismissal. There are forces in play whose names I don’t readily have on this brief introspection, and my account might change on a deeper introspection, but I feel like I know where the dismissal is in all this, and don’t expect I’d find that the main purpose was dismissal-based if I introspected further.)
My take on this conversation is that you’re dramatically mismodelling me, and then running really far—and getting quite distressed—based on bad models. For instance, it looks to me like you read my ‘haha yeah’ as “the response”, despite how it follows a thousand-odd words of engagement, and is sandwiched between a quote selecting a narrow portion of your argument and a paragraph explaining why I think that argument is off-kilter. I have a sense this sort of dramatic misread of my intentions has been happening repeatedly since the beginning, without engagement with my attempts at clarification, and I currently despair of communication.
I know you haven’t solicited advice, but for future reference, if you were taking smaller steps in your assumptions about my intentions, and asking more and earlier questions (example: “What’s the ‘haha yeah’ doing for you? (I’m reading it as broadly dismissive, and feel hurt by it).”), I both expect that you’d have a better chance of communicating with me, and that I’d be more enthusiastic about trying. (I acknowledge that this style of communication requires a high degree of trust, and that you might not have that trust with me.)
As things stand, I have the sense that you’re lashing out wildly at shadow-versions of me you’ve constructed, and I’m not enthusiastic about engaging further on the object level (and my cheerful price is quite high, alas).
I’ve heard (perhaps incorrectly) that this is very emotionally salient to you, that you take it seriously, and that you care deeply about how I react. I feel an abstract compassion for you in this; your quest sounds like a thankless job and plausibly a virtuous one. Only abstract compassion, though, because my current emotional response is one that emits sentences like “well fuck you too; call me back when you can model me farther than you can throw me”. It is from that state that I dispute your factual claim quoted above. My model of human mindspace contains variants of me who could retain some decency while shitposting in ways you perceive as being “at you”. (Example: the thing I’m perceiving as you mismodelling-and-lashing-out hurts to be on the receiving end of, and I claim that humans can retain their decency while lashing out in response to being hurt. Also, I think the shitposting has purposes you’re not modelling, and there are ways your response could be shaped such that shitposting in reply seems reasonable on its face.)
(ETA: the primary connotation of the above is something like “you seem to be attempting to apply pressure to me in a manner I consider invalid; it holds no sway over me” / “I have perceived this as a desperate simultaneous plea for both compassion and deference, and while I have the compassion, I lack the deference”. Neither of those are quite right etc. I add this parenthetical out of an anticipation that, without it, you’ll wildly misinterpret me here. I feel bitterness about how regularly and wildly you seem to misinterpret me, without apparent awareness or acknowledgement, and the bitterness tempts me to sharper phrasings.)
All that said, I’ve heard you as making a request that I avoid a certain type of glibness in my replies to you, on the grounds that it causes you great distress. Insofar as this doesn’t cause me to stop interacting with you wholesale (eg, for fear that I’ll cause you undue great distress given your apparent propensity to misread me), and insofar as I don’t, like, forget when I’m banging out a very quick response, I predict I’ll honor that request. And for the record, I do not intend to cause you distress, and I continue to respect your what-seems-to-me-like conviction in the pursuit of truth.
Thanks. I regret letting my emotions get the better of me. I apologize.
Some notes with my mod hat on:
While it seems to me like you’re trying to protect an important pole of coherency and consistency here, I think this comment as well as some features of the OP (to a lesser extent) overstep some important bounds and make it quite tricky to have a productive conversation, in a way that I would like to both discourage and advise against. I worry that you’re imputing positions stronger than people are holding, and thus creating more disagreement than exists, and raising the emotional stakes of that disagreement more than seems necessary to continue the conversation.
I would rather not perpetuate an escalatory dynamic where you think you need to make a bigger and bigger fuss in order to get responses, in a way that can be reminiscent of ‘trapped priors’; it seems to me like the conversation in this thread could have been basically as effective at challenging So8res’s position and provoking elaboration with much less strain on your part, and yet when I imagine being in your shoes this encounter probably feels like an example of the success of this approach.
Concretely, in this case, I think you’re exasperated about humor and shitposting in a way that isn’t justified and is failing to credit the ways in which people are responding to your bids for increased seriousness and abstraction. The standard you seem to be imposing is not “please respond to seriousness with seriousness” but the much stronger “please never joke in public about something I take very seriously”, which seems like a pretty drastic standard, and one I would mildly warn against trying to enforce on LW.
(On the object level, I agree with Ben Pace that you are right that the about-face on this example deserves explanation, but my sense is that the explanation is satisfactory; the take that I’d summarize as ‘there’s a paraphyletic grouping that pretends to obviousness that it does not possess on closer examination’ seems sensible enough, tho I am interested in disagreements you have with that take.)
I applaud your earlier decision to have a friend review a draft before posting it, since I think this is the sort of behavior that leads to more intellectual progress and less mutual misunderstanding. In that spirit, I’d be happy to review any further comments you want to make in this conversation, in the hopes of having it go a bit better.
Feedback:
“please don’t shitpost and when you engage with me please avoid all attempts at humor because these pattern-match to ways I am abused and if you do those things even if in good faith it will only hurt our communication, perhaps disastrously, never help” would, I think, cover basically everything you want to cover without also signaling that it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you.
OTOH if it will be extremely emotionally draining to engage with you then you have successfully signaled that.
Possibly this isn’t fair but I’m pretty sure it’s an accurate reading.
I would note the similarity between “haha yeah” and the stated lack of punctuation and capitalization in “shitposts”, which are supposed to be light jokes.
Also, you say
That argument is also a valid argument against making emotional appeals about your past mental state and how it has been affected by this argument. There are rumors about mathematicians being driven mad by the concept of infinity. This doesn’t make them very good at teaching Calculus in college, but rather the opposite.
Crying over the amount of spilt ink doesn’t have that much epistemic relevance. That your particle accelerator cost X million dollars doesn’t make it produce better data. Truth can be frustrating and unfair in that sense.
If a single naive person can say “The emperor has no clothes” and all the epistemics come falling down, maybe they should come falling down. With solid deconfusion even if a single authority figure says “I am not convinced” the solace from the work itself should be plenty.
This plea that the issue should be handled in the tone of seriousness seems like a bad application of social pressure. We shouldn’t need swearing on bibles. Using the role of constituting community beliefs as social-versus game value chips seems bad.
This is a strong overstatement. Eliezer clearly has invested orders of magnitude more effort in defense of his MWI stance than he did in defense of his original dolphins-aren’t-fish “stance”.
Thanks, you are right and the thing I originally typed is wrong. I edited the comment.
So, I’m not a biologist. I don’t think Eliezer is much of a biologist either. A thing that I learned in the last ten years, which maybe Nate and Eliezer learned in the same time, idk, is that different aquatic animals are more distantly related than one might have thought. For example, let’s take the list from 2008. When I go on Wikipedia and try to find an appropriate scientific name for each and stick it into timetree.org to try to figure out when their most recent common ancestor was, I get the following estimates:
That is, if you’re going to start removing things from the list because of how distantly related they are, sharks go first; Chondrichthyes is just as weird a member of Chordata as Mammalia is, from the perspective of Actinopterygii.
The trouble with defending the 2008 classification is not that it’s phylogenetics, it’s that, as far as I can tell, it’s bad phylogenetics. And so you end up requiring mental gymnastics in order to exclude dolphins because their most recent common ancestor is too far back while including sharks whose most recent common ancestor is even further back. The pedant’s position (“I know that dolphins are mammals instead of fish!”) doesn’t hold up under either the useful definition (“dolphins are aquatic animals tho”) or the phylogenist’s definition (“mammals are chordata tho, which is what you should mean when you say ‘fish’.”).
Usually I don’t think short comments of agreement really contribute to conversations, but this is actually critical and in the interest of trying to get a public preference cascade going: No. You are not the only one creeped out by this. The parts of The Sequences which have held up the best over the last decade are the refinements on General Semantics, and I too am dismayed at the abandonment of carve-reality-at-its-joints.
I’m surprised you think this is “absolutely critical”. Do you think I’m making a grave error in my newfound distaste for paraphyletic groupings? (My ability to notice their awkwardness felt internally like evidence that my joint-carving skills have improved over the years, ftr.) Is there some other joint-carving skill you believe I am lacking, or have lost? Or perhaps you’re decrying a decay in general community epistemics, for which my thread is simply a poster-child? Or perhaps you’re lamenting some general community or global decline of candor? I’m uncertain what precisely you’re dismayed about, and solicit specific criticisms of my actions.
I am not super creeped out by this.
The example of dolphins didn’t seem central to the general dynamics what the claim was about. “nitwit games” is a description of a logic you can’t follow that you want to mock. The tree article made sense to me how a dolphin-fish carving would work. One of the virtues is to say “oops” and go on, this does make the mistakes more “stealthy”.
I don’t like the bashing of ways of thinking so spewing hatred that way or this way is pretty passee anyway. One can be consistent in being against random fences and being for principled fences and call for a fencde to be taken down. But later learn that there was actually a principle and functioning of laying it down. Then it becomes an issue whether the original principles were better or worse than the new proposed principles. How long must one search before it starts to bereaosnable to treat the fence as purposeless?
I think I would welcome reflection on how being mocky by surface examination is/was a bit misleading. There surely are a lot of biases and illusions but human brains try so assuming basic competence would give a somewhat favorable prior that a lot of words have some sensible structure in them. That some of them are pretty transparent and some are pretty obscure but that doesn’t make it constructive to judge all obscure things by their apperance.
Wow, am surprised that the dolphins example has 180′d in Nate’s recent thread.
I do endorse shitposting as a form of posting, it’s great and I’d like Nate to do more.
Scott Alexander’s essay uses the example of fish versus whales to argue that transgender people should be classified by whatever sex they claim to be rather than classified by biological sex. This essay came out after 2008 and before 2021. And Scott Alexander is about as influential here as Yudkowsky.
In other words, what changed is that asserting that it makes sense to classify dolphins as fish is now something you need to assert for political purposes.
Edit: I missed the reference to gender issues. But I think it may explain why Yudkowsky and rationalists in general have changed their mind, regardless of why anyone in particular here has.
Your comment seems to me to assume that Scott thinks there would be nothing very wrong with a definition of “fish” that included whales only because that’s something he has to think in order to remain consistent while classifying transgender people the way they feel they should be classified.
I don’t think it’s at all obvious that that’s so.
(Similarly, one could postulate that Zack thinks there would be something very wrong with such a definition of “fish” only because that’s something he has to think in order to remain consistent while insisting that transgender people should be classified according to attributes like anatomy, chromosomes, etc.
I don’t think that’s obviously so, either.)
Either of those things could be true. Both of them could be true, for that matter. Or neither. But I think that in order for “rationalists as a group have changed their minds on this for political reasons” to be a better analysis than “rationalists as a group have changed their minds on this because they found Scott’s arguments about King Solomon and the like convincing”, there needs to be some good reason to think that Scott’s arguments are bad enough that rationalists couldn’t be convinced by them without political motivation, or that Scott’s arguments were clearly made in bad faith, or something of the kind.
(Note: my description of Scott’s and Zack’s positions is brief and necessarily sketchy. E.g., Scott is writing about whether it’s OK to define a word that groups what-we-call-fish together with whales and dolphins; Zack is more interested in whether it would be OK to use the specific word “fish” that way, given how it is already used; it’s not clear which question Soares is really debating, given that the whole thing is shitposting anyway. Some of the gender-political issues for which this serves as an analogy match up pretty well with one of those, some not so much. Anyway, please do not take any of the above as a serious attempt to describe either Scott’s or Zack’s exact position.)
Believing things for multiple reasons is a thing (despite the LW idea of a true rejection, as if people only have one reason for everything). Moreover, people aren’t perfectly rational machines, and motivated reasoning is a thing. I certainly think that needing to believe it for the sake of transgendered people is a large component of why he believes it, and that he probably wouldn’t otherwise believe it, even if it’s not the only reason why.
I agree: one can have multiple reasons for having (or professing) a belief. For that reason, to me saying “X believes Y because Z” (where Z is a disreputable reason and one would otherwise assume something less disreputable) is rather uninteresting if not accompanied by actual evidence that the other less-disreputable reasons aren’t sufficient explanation for X to believe Y.
In the present case, Scott is known to be a good thinker, and has given (not particularly disreputable) reasons for believing Y; rationalists on the whole are also pretty good thinkers (Nate and Eliezer included); if you think their opinions on this point are mostly the result of political prejudice, you’re entitled to think that but I don’t see any good reason to agree.