Cornelius Dybdahl

Karma: 152

Cornelius Dybdahl 29 Mar 2024 3:19 UTC
3 points
−1
in reply to: Alex Vermillion’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
The issue at hand is not whether the “logic” was valid (incidentally, you are disputing the logical validity of an informal insinuation whose implication appears to be factually true, despite the hinted connection — that Scott’s views on HBD were influenced by Murray’s works — being merely probable)
The issues at hand are:
1. whether it is a justified “weapon” to use in a conflict of this sort
2. whether the deed is itself immoral beyond what is implied by “minor sin”

Cornelius Dybdahl 14 Mar 2024 1:07 UTC
3 points
−4
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: The Parable Of The Fallen Pendulum—Part 2
That is an unrealistic and thoroughly unworkable expectation.
World models are pre-conscious. We may be conscious of verbalised predictions that follow from our world models, and various cognitive processes that involve visualisation (in the form of imagery, inner monologue, etc.), since these give rise to qualia. We do not however possess direct awareness of the actual gear-level structures of our world models, but must get at these through (often difficult) inference.
When learning about any sufficiently complex phenomenon, such as pretty much any aspect of psychology or sociology, there are simply too many gears for it to be possible to identify all of them; a lot of them are bound to remain implicit and only be noticed when specifically brought into dispute. This is not to say that there can be no standard by which to expect “theory gurus” to prove themselves not to be frauds. For example, if they have unusual worldviews, they should be able to pinpoint examples (real or invented) that illustrate some causal mechanism that other worldviews give insufficient attention to. They should be able to broadly outline how this mechanism relates to their worldview, and how it cannot be adequately accounted for by competing worldviews. This is already quite sufficient, as it opens up the possibility for interlocutors to propose alternate views of the mechanism being discussed and show how they are, after all, able to be reconciled with other worldviews than the one proposed by the theorist.
Alternatively, they should be able to prove their merit in some other way, like showing their insight into political theory by successfully enacting political change, into crowd psychology by being successful propagandists, into psychology and/or anthropology by writing great novelists with a wide variety of realistic characters from various walks of life, etc.
But expecting them to be able to explicate to you the gears of their models is somewhat akin to expecting a generative image AI to explain its inner workings to you. It’s a fundamentally unreasonable request, all the more so because you have a tendency to dismiss people as bluffing whenever they can’t follow you into statistical territory so esoteric that there are probably less than a thousand people in the world who could.

Cornelius Dybdahl 12 Mar 2024 19:58 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: Steelmanning as an especially insidious form of strawmanning
Trouble is that even checking the steelman with the other person does not avoid the failure modes I am talking about. In fact, some moments ago, I made slight changes to the post to include a bit where the interlocutor presents a proposed steelman and you reject it. I included this because many redditors objected that this is by definition part of steelmanning (though none of the cited definitions actually included this criterion), and so I wanted to show that it makes no difference at all to my argument whether the interlocutor asks for confirmation of the steelman versus you becoming aware of it by some other mechanism. What’s relevant is only that you somehow learn of the steelman attempt, reject it as inadequate, and try to redirect your interlocutor back to the actual argument you made. The precise social forms by which this happens (the ideal being something like “would the following be an acceptable steelman [...]”) are only dressing, not substance.
I have in fact had a very long email conversation spanning several months with another LessWronger who kept constructing would-be steelmen of my argument that I kept having to correct.
As it was a private conversation, I cannot give too many details, but I can try to summarize the general gist
I and this user are part of a shared IRL social network, which I have been feeling increasingly alienated from, but which I cannot simply leave without severe consequences. Trouble is that this social network generally treats me with extreme condescension, disdain, patronisation, etc, and that I am constrained in my ability to fight back in my usual manner. I am not so concerned about the underlying contempt, except for its part in creating the objectionable behaviour. It seems to me that they must subconsciously have extreme contempt for me, but since I do not respect their judgement of me, my self-esteem is not harmed by this knowledge. The real problem is that situations where I am treated with contempt and cannot defend myself from it, but must remain polite and simply take it, provide a kind of evidence to my autonomous unconscious status tracking processes (what JBP claims to be the function of the serotoninergic system, though idk if this is true at all), and that this is not so easily overridden by my own contempt for their poor judgement as my conscious reasoning about their disdain for me is.
I repeatedly explained to this LessWrong user that the issue is that these situations provide evidence for contempt for me, and that since I am constrained in my ability to talk back, they also provide systematically false evidence about my level of self respect and about how I deserve to be treated. Speaking somewhat metaphorically, you could say that this social network is inadvertently using black magic against me and that I want them to stop. It might seem that this position could be easily explained, and indeed that was how it seemed to me too at the outset of the conversation, but it was complicated by the need to demonstrate that I was in fact being treated contemptuously, and that I was in fact being constrained in my ability to defend myself against it. It was not enough to give specific examples of the treatment, because that led my interlocutor to overly narrow abstractions, so I had to point out that the specific instances of contemptuous treatment demonstrated the existence of underlying contempt, and that this underlying contempt should a priori be expected to generate a large variety of contemptuous behaviour. This in turn led to a very tedious argument over whether that underlying contempt exists at all, where it would’ve come from, etc.
Anyway, I eventually approached another member of this social network and tried to explain my predicament. It was tricky, because I had to accuse him of an underlying contempt giving rise to a pattern of disrespectful behaviour, but also explain that it was the behaviour itself I was objecting to and not the underlying contempt, all without telling him explicitly that I do not respect his judgement. Astonishingly, I actually made a lot of progress anyway.
Well, that didn’t last long, because the LW user in question took it into his own hands to attempt to fix the schism, and told this man that if I am objecting to a pattern of disrespectful behaviour, then it is unreasonable to assume that I am objecting to the evidence of disrespect, rather than the underlying disrespect itself. You will notice that this is exactly the 180 degree opposite of my actual position. It also had the effect of cutting off my chance at making any further progress with the man in question, since it is now to my eyes impossible to explain what I actually object to without telling him outright that I have no respect for his judgement.
I am sure he thought he was being reasonable. After all, absent the context, it would seem like a perfectly reasonable observation. But as there were other problems with his behaviour that made it seem smug and self righteous to me, and as the whole conversation up to that point had already been so maddening and let to so much disaster (it seems in fact to have played a major part in causing extreme mental harm to someone who was quite close to me), I decided to cut my losses and not pursue it any further, except for scolding him for what seemed to me like the breach of an oath he had given earlier.
Anyway, the point is not to generalise too much from this example. What I described in the post was actually inspired by other scenarios. The point of telling you this story is simply that even if you are presented with the interlocutor’s proposed steelman and given a chance to reject it, this does not save you, and the conversation can still go on for literally months and not get out of the trap I described. I have had other examples of this trap being highly persistent, even with people who were more consistent in explicitly asking for confirmation of each proposed steelman, but what was special about this case was that it was the only one that lasted for literally months with hundreds of emails, that my interlocutor started out with a stated intent to see the conversation through to the end, and that my interlocutor was a fairly prolific LessWrong commenter and poster, whom I would rate as being at least in the top 5% and probably top 1% of smartest LessWrongers
I should mention for transparency that the LessWrong user in question did not state outright that he was steelmanning me, but having been around in this community for a long time, I think I am able to tell which behaviours are borne out of an attempt to steelman, or more broadly, which behaviours spring from the general culture of steelmanning and of being habituated to a steelman-esque mode of discourse. As my post indicated, I think steelmanning is a reasonable way to get to a more expedient resolution between people who broadly speaking “share base realities”, but as someone with views that are highly heterodox relative to the dominant worldviews on LessWrong, I can say that my own experience with steelmanning has been that it is one of the nastiest forms of argumentation I know of.
I focused on the practice of steelmanning as emblematic of a whole approach to thinking about good faith that I believe is wrongheaded more generally and not only pertaining to steelmanning. In hindsight, I should have stated this. I considered doing so, but decided to make it the subject of a subsequent post, and I didn’t notice that making a more in-depth post about the abstract pattern does not preclude me from making a brief mention in this post that steelmanning is only one instance of a more general pattern I am trying to critique.
The pattern is simply to focus excessively on behaviours and specific arguments as being in bad faith, and paying insufficient attention to the emotional drivers of being in bad faith, which also tend to make people go into denial about their bad faith.

Cornelius Dybdahl 12 Mar 2024 18:39 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Steelmanning as an especially insidious form of strawmanning
Indeed, that was the purpose of steelmanning in its original form, as it was pioneered on Slate Star Codex.
Interestingly, when I posted it on r/slatestarcodex, a lot of people started basically screaming at me that I am strawmanning the concept of steelmanning, because a steelman by definition requires that the person you’re steelmanning accepts the proposed steelman as accurate. Hence, your comment provides me some fresh relief and assures me that there is still a vestige left of the rationalist community I used to know.
I wrote my article mostly concerning how I see the word colloquially used today. I intended it as one of several posts demonstrating a general pattern of bad faith argumentation that disguises itself as exceptionally good faith.
But setting all that aside, I think my critique still substantially applies to the concept in its original form. It is still the case, for example, that superficial mistakes will tend to be corrected automatically just from the general circulation of ideas within a community, and that the really persistent errors have to do with deeper distortions in the underlying worldview.
Worldviews are however basically analogous to scientific paradigms as described by Thomas Kuhn. People do not adopt a complicated worldview without it seeming vividly correct from at least some angle, however parochial that angle might be. Hence, the only correct way to resolve a deep conflict between worldviews is by the acquisition of a broader perspective that subsumes both. Of course, either worldview, or both, may be a mixture of real patterns coupled with a bunch of propaganda, but in such a case, the worldview that subsumes both should ideally be able to explain why that propaganda was created and why it seems vividly believable to its adherents.
At first glance, this might not seem to pose much of a problem for the practice of steelmanning in its original form, because in many cases it will seem like you can completely subsume the “grain of truth” from the other perspective into your own without any substantial conflict. But that would basically classify it as a “superficial improvement”, the kind that is bound to happen automatically just from the general circulation of ideas, and therefore less important than the less inevitable improvements. But if an improvement of this sort is not inevitable, it indicates that your current social network cannot generate the improvement on its own, but instead can only generate it through confrontations with conflicting worldviews from outside your main social network, and that means that your existing worldview cannot properly explain the grain of truth from the opposing view, since it could not predict it in advance, which means there is more to learn from this outside perspective than can be learned by straightforwardly integrating its apparent grain of truth.
This is basically the same pattern I am describing in the post, but just removed from the context of conversations between individuals, and instead applied to confrontations between different social networks with low-ish overlap. The argument is substantially the same, only less concrete.

Cornelius Dybdahl 11 Mar 2024 16:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Steelmanning as an especially insidious form of strawmanning
No, the reasoning generalises to those fields too. The problem with those areas driving their need to have measurement of cognitive abilities is excessive bureaucratisation and lack of a sensible top-down structure with responsibilities and duties in both directions. A wise and mature person can get a solid impression of an interviewee’s mental capacities from a short interview, and can even find out a lot of useful details that are not going to be covered by an IQ test. For example, mental health, maturity, and capacity to handle responsibility.
Or consider it from another angle: suppose I know someone to be brilliant and extremely capable, but when taking an IQ test, they only score 130 or so. What am I supposed to do with this information? Granted, it’s pretty rare — normally the IQ would reflect my estimation of their brilliance, but in such cases, it adds no new information. But if the score does not match the person’s actual capabilities as I have been able to infer them, I am simply left with the conclusion that IQ is not a particularly useful metric for my purposes. It may be highly accurate, but an experienced human judgement is considerably more accurate still.
Of course, individualised judgements of this sort are vulnerable to various failure modes, which is why large corporations and organizations like the military are interested in giving IQ tests instead. But this is often a result of regulatory barriers or other hindrances to simply requiring your job interviewers to avoid those failure modes and holding them accountable to it, with the risk of demotion or termination if their department becomes corrupt and/or grossly incompetent.
This issue is not particular to race politics. It is a much more general matter of fractal monarchy vs procedural bureaucracy.
Edit: or, if you want a more libertarian friendly version, it is a general matter of subsidiarity vs totalitarianism.

Cornelius Dybdahl 11 Mar 2024 15:37 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Steelmanning as an especially insidious form of strawmanning
The measuring project is symptomatic of scientism and is part of what needs to be corrected.
That is what I meant when I said that the HBD crowd is reminiscent of utilitarian technocracy and progressive-era eugenics. The correct way of handling race politics is to take an inventory of the current situation by doing case studies and field research, and to develop a no-bullshit commonsense executive-minded attitude for how to go about improving the conditions of racial minorities from where they’re currently at.
Obviously, more policing is needed, so as to finally give black business-owners in black areas a break and let them develop without being pestered by shoplifters, riots, etc. Affirmative action is not working, and nor is the whole paradigm of equity politics. Antidiscrimination legislation was what crushed black business districts that had been flourishing prior to the sixties.
Whether the races are theoretically equal in their genetic potential or not is utterly irrelevant. The plain fact is that they are not equal at present, and that is not something you need statistics in order to notice. If you are a utopian, then your project is to make them achieve their full potential as constrained by genetics in some distant future, and if they are genetically equal, then that means you want equal outcomes at some point. But this is a ridiculous way of thinking, because it extrapolates your policy goals unreasonably far into the future, never mind that genetic inequalities do not constrain long-term outcomes in a world that is rapidly advancing in genetic engineering tech.
The scientistic, statistics-driven approach is clearly the wrong tool for the job, as we can see from just looking at what outcomes it has achieved. Instead it is necessary to have human minds thinking reasonably about the issue, instead of trying to replace human reason with statistics “carried on by steam” as Carlyle put it. These human minds thinking reasonably about the issue should not be evaluating policies by whether they can theoretically be extrapolated to some utopian outcome in the distant future, but simply about whether they actually improve things for racial minorities or not. This is one case where we could all learn something from Keynes’ famous remark that “in the long run, we are all dead”.
In short: scientism is the issue, and statistics by steam are part of it. Your insistence on the measurement project over discussing the real issues is why you do not have much success with these people. You are inadvertently perpetuating the very same stigma on informal reasoning about weighty matters that is the cause of the issue.

Cornelius Dybdahl 11 Mar 2024 14:59 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Steelmanning as an especially insidious form of strawmanning
They are not doing it in order to troll their political opponents. They are doing it out of scientism and loyalty to enlightenment aesthetics of reason and rationality, which just so happens to entail an extremely toxic stigma against informal reasoning about weighty matters.

Cornelius Dybdahl 11 Mar 2024 14:25 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Steelmanning as an especially insidious form of strawmanning
The second option, trying to uncover the real origin of the conclusion, being obviously the best of the three. It is also most in-line with canonical works like Is That Your True Rejection?
But it belongs to the older paradigm of rationalist thinking; the one that sought to examine motivated cognition and discover the underlying emotional drives (ideally with delicate sensitivty), whereas the new paradigm merely stigmatizes motivated cognition and inadvertently imposes a cultural standard of performativity, in which we are all supposed to pretend that our thinking is unmotivated. The problems with present rationalist culture would stand out like a glowing neon sign to old-school LessWrongers, but unfortunately there are not many of these left.

Cornelius Dybdahl 12 Jan 2024 0:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
And, again, it is not “false pretenses” to engage in a discussion with more than one goal in mind and not explicitly lay out all one’s goals in advance.
It saddens me that LessWrong has reached such a state that it is now a widespread behaviour to straw man the hell out of someone’s position and then double down when called on it.
What I think is both rude and counterproductive is focusing on what sort of person the other person is, as opposed to what they have done and are doing. In this particular thread the rot begins with “thus flattering your narcissism”
But the problem is at the level of his character, not any given behaviour. I have already explained this in one of my replies to tailcalled; if he simply learns to stay away from one type of narcissistic community, he will still be drawn in by communities where narcissism manifests in other ways than the one he is “immunized” to, so to speak. Likewise with the concrete behaviours: if he learns to avoid some toxic behaviours, the underlying toxicity will simply manifest in other toxic behaviours. I do not say there is therefore no point in calling out the toxic behaviours, but the only point in doing that is to use them as pointers to the underlying problem. If I just get him to recognise a particular pattern of behaviour, then I will have misidentified the pattern to him and might as well have done nothing. The issue is specifically that he is a horrible person and needs to realise it so he can begin practising virtue — this being of course a moral philosophy that LessWrongers are generally averse to, but you can see the result.
And then we get “you’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it” and “your few genuine displays of good faith” and “goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate” and “you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting” and so forth.
All of these are criticising behaviours rather than character and thus fit your pretended criterion. Thus, you made no specific complaint about them, because what you actually take issue with is simply my harshness and directness.
I think this sort of comment is basically never helpful
It is the only thing that is ever helpful when an improvement to the underlying character is what is called for.

Cornelius Dybdahl 9 Jan 2024 1:22 UTC
−5 points
−1
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Well, maybe I’m confused about what tailcalled’s “original comment” that you’re complaining about was, because looking at what I thought it was I can’t see anything in it that anyone could possibly expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are abusive. Nor much that anyone could expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are wrong, which makes me suspect even more that I’ve failed to identify what comment we’re talking about. But the only other plausible candidate I see for the “original comment” is this one, which has eve n less of that sort. Or maybe this one, which again doesn’t have anything like that. What comment do you think we are talking about here?
I also don’t see how it was supposed to do that, but I am commenting on his stated intentions. The fact that it is hard to spot those intentions in his first comments, even when actively looking for them, only further corroborates my point that his stated intentions were not obvious at all, and that it seemed to be a relatively innocuous reply that was made with only the discussion in mind. Yet, by his own statements, his point in responding was to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive. Thus, as I said, false pretenses.
I am fairly sure my opinions of tailcalled’s responses here is very similar to my opinion of his comments elsewhere which haven’t (so far as I’ve noticed) involved you at all, so I don’t find it very plausible that those opinions are greatly affected by the fact that on this occasion he is arguing with someone I’m finding disagreeable.
My claim was specifically that the halo effect is blinding you to an evasiveness that he does not typically display. Thus it is wholly consistent with you having a similar opinion of his comments here compared to your usual opinion of his comments.
“Pointing out character flaws”. “Insults”. Po-TAY-to. Po-TAH-to. My complaint isn’t that the way in which you are pointing out tailcalled’s alleged character flaws is needlessly unpleasant, it’s that you’re doing it at all.
I have already addressed that argument, and the whole point of my using the phrase “pointing out character flaws” was to stress the relevance of doing so to the argument I am making.
Ad hominem is not a fallacy if the topic of discussion is literally about the person’s character, and justice when commenting on feuds is after all a character trait. I cannot effectively criticise a community without criticising its members, and I cannot effectively criticise its members without pointing out character flaws, ie. without “insulting” them as you put it. If I had to adhere to your standards, my position would be ruled out before I even had a chance to make my case.

Cornelius Dybdahl 8 Jan 2024 12:50 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Lyrongolem’s comment on: Defense Against The Dark Arts: An Introduction
In much the same way, saying that ‘Ukraine would have quickly surrendered or suffered a quick defeat’ is only correct in counterfactual realities. You could of course argue that if the West did not help Ukraine structure it’s military prior to the invasion, no help of any kind was delivered (even from Eastern Europe) during the invasion, and magically granted Putin infinite domestic popularity, the war would’ve ended quickly. But at that point we are living in a different reality. A reality where Russia actually had the capability for a Desert Storm esque operation.
But point 3 was already a counterfactual by your own formulation of it. The claim that giving aid is prolonging the war is implicitly a comparison to the counterfactual in which aid isn’t given. I suppose that if you are convinced that Ukraine is going to win, then a marginal increase in aid is expected to shorten the war, but there is no reason to suspect that proponents of point 3 mean are referring to marginal adjustments in the amount of help, and I think there are limits to how uncharitably you can impute their views before you are the one engaging in dark arts.
Western aid did not intensify
From the standpoint of someone like Vivek — or for that matter from the standpoint of someone who understands how present resources can be converted into revenue streams and vice versa — additional donations to the war effort do constitute an intensification of aid, even if the rate of resource transfers remain the same.
I believe this to be a part of an information gap. Not understanding Russia and Ukraine’s true military capabilities. (understanding them is, of course, a key part of any geopolitical judgement, since otherwise you cannot tell whether a side is on the brink of defeat or victory). If Vivek was not aware of this gap, then he made an unqualified analysis, and if he was then his analysis is clearly wrong.
Supposing for the sake of argument that his analysis is conventionally unqualified, it does not imply that he has insufficient evidence to hold the position he does. A lot of evidence can be gleaned from which geopolitics experts said what, from which ones changed their mind, and the timing of when they did so, etc. In addition, this being a war of attrition as you pointed out, the key determination to make is who is better situated to win that war of attrition. How many able-bodied, working-age men does Ukraine have left, again?
But by the epistemic standards you have implied, he would need to be a domain expert to hold an opinion, which would leave him strikingly vulnerable to ultra-BS, and more importantly, would cede the whole playing field to technocracy from the get-go. Vivek is part of what could be called the “anti-expert faction”.

Cornelius Dybdahl 8 Jan 2024 12:18 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Saying something relevant to an ongoing discussion (which it seems clear to me tailcalled’s original comment was) while also hoping it will be persuasive to someone who has disagreed with you about something else is not “false pretenses”.
He specifically wanted to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive, which massively distorts his judgement with respect to commenting on the justice of Zack’s actions and LW’s reception of him. Tailcalled ought to at the very least have disclosed these ulterior motives from the beginning.
An additional point to note is that after more than a decade of efforts to mend the relationship, I gave up and cut off contact with tailcalled. I had however given him the opportunity to reach out to me with a view to make amends, or otherwise to convince me that I had been wrong to cut him off. He exploited this offer and chose not to do either, and for some reason I went along with it, causing the past several months to have been a lot more torturous than they needed to be, but it was somewhat bearable because it was confined to that one email conversation.
Then he interacts with me here, not only to address the topic of Zack’s post, but specifically to pursue his feud with me outside of emails.
It is certainly true that I am put off by your disagreeable manner. I do not think this is the halo effect.
That’s not what I said. It’s your being put off by my disagreeable manner that makes you subject to the halo effect when it comes to tailcalled’s responses.
as for any opinions I may form, that’s a matter of reasoning “if Cornelius had good arguments I would expect him to use them; since he evidently prefers to insult people, it is likely that he doesn’t have good arguments”
But the things you deemed insults were actually critiques of his character, not mere insults, and most of those critiques were aimed at showing that he is being unjust towards Zack, with the few exceptions pointing out character flaws that are characteristic of many LessWrongers and not just him. It is simply not possible to argue in favour of my position without raising points of personal criticism, because those points of criticism are absolutely central to my position, and it is only the horns effect that makes you perceive them as mere insults.
Of course you might just enjoy being unpleasant for its own sake
No, I do not. I actually have quite a distaste for it, but when faced with an immensely abusive community such as this one, my only other means of defence is to plead for mercy, which is errosive to self esteem.
But in this case, since I am dealing with tailcalled in particular, even that would not work. I have learned from about more than a decade of abuse from him that this is the only viable defence. Problem is, if he is in a crowd of enablers who don’t notice his bs because they are used to engaging in milder forms of the same abusive behaviour, then it will paint me as the abusive one.
It doesn’t look to me as if tailcalled is being evasive; if anything he[1] seems to me to be engaging with the issues rather more than you are.
No, this is simply him having evaded my arguments for so long that he has managed to distort your impression of what is actually being discussed. The main issue is a critique of the rationalist community. That then led to an issue of tailcalled’s injustice in judging the feud, and that in turn led to an issue of his evading my points.
If you trace back the lines of argumentation where I seem to be insulting him, you will find that what you deem insults are mostly accusations of injustice that were centrally relevant to the argument. Then, by endless nitpicking and evasiveness, and my insistence on maintaining the accusations of injustice through this obfuscation, they became increasingly separated from their original context, and you quite simply lost track of why I made them in the first place.
There are however also a few of them (edit: namely, the ones about self-serving bias) that only make sense in context of the private feud, and which are in response to remarks of his (eg. about the critical theory) that only look cruel if seen in context, which sorta illustrates what I mean about the false pretenses, because if he had disclosed them from the beginning, I would not have engaged at all.
Edit: I am also suspicious that he might have taken it here in part to present the feud in front of a crowd, with zero context, and specifically a crowd that is part of his culture and is likely to agree with him based on surface appearances, setting up false appearances of unanimity.
*edit: removed a fact that could be used to personally identify tailcalled

Cornelius Dybdahl 8 Jan 2024 4:32 UTC
0 points
−1
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
By sacrificing that status, I lost the ability to continue engaging in those things. For instance by criticizing Bailey on his core misbehavior, he did his best to get rid of me, which lost me the ability to continue criticizing him, thus closing off that angle of behavior.
Your self-serving bias is a bias and not a rational stance of calculated actions. It sways your reasoning and the beliefs you arrive at, not your direct behaviour towards Michael Bailey.
Is that getting your position right?
No. I am not making any point about what discourse selects for. I could make such points, but they would look quite different from what you have imputed. My point was about your behaviour and the psychology implied by it.
I then learned that they weren’t interested in new information, especially not if it was disadvantageous to their political interests. It seems valid for me to share this to warn others who were in a similar position to me. If Blanchardians don’t like this, they shouldn’t have promoted me as their intellectual/researcher/teacher without warning me ahead of time.
Does this lead to Blanchardians getting held to higher standards than anti-Blanchardians? I suppose it does, because anti-Blanchardians openly announce their political biases, and so I wouldn’t have felt betrayed in the same way by them.
I swear you are inventing more and more elaborate ways to miss the point. The issue is that you portray yourself as a reasonable mediator while having these asymmetric standards. I do not object to you holding Blanchardianism to higher standards when acting in your capacity as an expert critic of Blanchardianism, but here you were commenting on a feud between Zack and LessWrong, and my point was specifically that LessWrong’s treatment towards Zack has been abusive, not that they have made more factual errors or that they were more ideologically motivated than him. Your position as an expert critic of Blanchardianism does not in the slightest justify an enormous bias in standards of behaviour when mediating a feud. It is irrelevant.
I suppose you might argue that you were not intending to act as a mediator, but that is precisely why it is objectionable that your behaviour is strongly goal-oriented to portraying yourself as a reasonable mediator willing to call out both sides when they are wrong.
False. It is not simply a way of “positioning myself above it all”. It is also factually true; I spent the last few years, including much of the time I should have spent on e.g. education on it, so “so tired of it all” is a factual description of me, and similarly by any reasonable means of counting, I’m cut away from the discourse on this topic, so I am also defeated.
Again you nitpick a single word (in this case the word “simply”) as a way of avoiding the issue. The point is that you described yourself as “so tired of and defeated by it all” as an argument that you are not positioning yourself above it all, as if the two were in conflict (hence your usage of the word “instead”), when in fact they are strikingly congruent.
I know more about the Blanchardian and Blanchardian-adj side than I know about the anti-Blanchardian side. More qualifiers are justified due to greater uncertainty.
I call bullshit again. There was no need for that qualifier. Sapphire’s argument could have been used with minimal alteration to tell people off for being dissidents in nazi germany. It was overtly abusive and the qualifier was not necessary in the slightest.
But, if Blanchardians are insisting that they are focusing on etiology, then onlookers will concentrate on looking for whether Blanchardians have good etiological insights, and when they see there are none, it’s not so surprising if they abandon it.
They really don’t. They first see the sociological implications, not even of the position, but of the delivery, of the other stances held by the proponents, etc. You know this. Not only is this addressed extensively in the Sequences (eg. in politics is the mindkiller) but it is also something you yourself have frequently called out in the past, specifically pertaining to the reaction of the LessWrong community toward Blanchardianism. So I simply do not buy the argument that the proponents of Blanchardianism view it through a more sociological lens than the critics do. I do not even buy that you believe otherwise.
When I talk about disruptive transsexuality, this is not the factor I am talking about, and in fact anecdotally HSTSs tend to be elevated on the general factor of disruptiveness. I think this is what you might be getting at when you are talking about disruptive HSTSs?
No, I simply clicked your link and read what you wrote about the disruptive/pragmatic typology.
Maybe one could design a study that measures this factor, then show that there’s a huge sexual orientation difference in it, and then switch to calling the factor “androphilic/nonandrophilic” or something, idk.
Androphilia is not however limited to HSTS’s, as in the case of meta-attraction or whatever is the current explanation for why some trans women who psychologically resemble exclusively gynephilic trans women are also attracted to men. This latter case is also prone to being viciously oppressive to gay men.
Are there any publicly accessible healthy communities that you’d recommend I peek at as a starting point?
Not in the sense you probably mean by “publicly accessible”. These days, public accessibility is almost impossible to reconcile with being a healthy community. The only way to maintain a healthy community at this point is to exclude the people who would destroy it.
But to give you an idea: a typical boxing gym, a traditional martial arts class, a group of fishermen, a scouting organization, or for that matter Bohemian smalltown is a very healthy community. I can also think of some healthy internet communities, but they are not publicly accessible.
I’ve recently taken a liking to htmx—see their discord here and twitter here. Is that some strain of narcissism too? (Cringemaxxing narcissism maybe?)
Yes. It is less unhealthy than the communities you are used to, which is probably why you like it, but it is still unhealthy. Cringemaxxing stems from profound insecurity and low self-esteem. People cringemaxx to preempt criticism, or to find cathartic release from their habitual vigilance against being cringy, or some other variety of either guardedness or catharsis. Cringemaxxers are, in fact, neurotics.

Cornelius Dybdahl 8 Jan 2024 3:32 UTC
0 points
−1
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
but I don’t see anything manipulative or under-false-pretenses about what you’re complaining about here.
He responded to me in a manner that seemed to only suggest an intention of addressing the subject matter of discussion in this post, not an intention of swaying my stance towards him in our private feud, but then in the text I quoted, he explicitly states that his purpose was to sway my stance in that private feud. That’s practically the definition of false pretenses.
You’re falling prey to the halo effect. You are put off by my more disagreeable manner, and so you impute other negative characteristics to me and become blinded to even very blatant abuses from tailcalled towards me. For my part, I am compelled to be very forcefully assertive by tailcalled’s extreme evasiveness.
(And, for what it’s worth, reading this thread I get a much stronger impression of “importing grudges from elsewhere” from you than from tailcalled.)
That’s because you’ve fallen for his manipulation tactics. He literally admitted the false pretenses, stopping only short of actually using that label. His original reply to me was, by his own admission, motivated by the private feud, which means he was the one who imported a grudge from elsewhere, regardless of what vibe you are getting.
And the sole reason I am coming across as more begrudging than he is because he keeps evading the points so I have to keep directing him back towards them, making me appear forceful, which you may remember was precisely what I said would happen if I follow his prescription for defusing these manipulation tactics.
All of that is him manipulating you, and you have fallen for it.

Cornelius Dybdahl 7 Jan 2024 17:32 UTC
−6 points
−5
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
But the thing is, Robin DiAngelo and other CRT people are constantly bluffing. They keep citing evidence for their beliefs that doesn’t actually precisely pin down their position, but instead can accommodate a wide variety of positions. In such a case, it’s not unreasonable or unexpected that people would pick and choose what ideas they find most plausible.
Good thing then that I’m calling you out on self-serving bias rather than special pleading, then.
I don’t know to what extent this is just poor communication (maybe she does have the relevant evidence but doesn’t cite it) or a grift (considering she axiomatically rejects innate racial differences, and falsely presents innate racial differences as the reigning ideological explanation for racial inequality, there’s probably at least a nonzero element of grift).
It’s a gift. She is doing precisely the same thing she is calling out other white progressives on, but when you think about it, that only corroborates her point that race grifting is something white progressives are liable to do.
The case with Scott Alexander seems like an exception to this, though? If Scott is someone who is extremely prone to not paying attention to this subject matter, then I am clearly not simultaneously contrasting myself with people who are extremely prone to paying attention to this subject matter. Instead I am making comments all over the place.
The two major factions in a controversy are rarely perfectly orthogonal. I am not suggesting that you are contrasting yourself with people who are extremely prone to paying attention to the subject matter, merely that you are setting yourself up as the moderate who fairly critiques both factions, despite actually having an absolutely immense bias in what standards you hold each side to.
But that doesn’t mean I’m “above it all”, instead I’m way deep into it all and I’m so tired of and defeated by it all.
Describing yourself as “so tired of and defeated by it all” is simply another way of positioning yourself above it all, differing only in that it insinuates a kind of martyrdom at the same time. Your behaviour is almost comically narcissistic.
Possibly I have a habit of using the word “arguably” wrong, idk, I plead ESL. Plus dictionaries agree with my usage.
Missing the point again — the point is simply that you use a lot more qualifiers when critiquing one side than the other, even if the former is actually behaving a lot worse. ESL or not, I am pretty sure you are able to tell that “sapphire is abusive” is a much more assertive formulation than “sapphire is arguably abusive”, therefore I am inclined to call bullshit on your ESL excuse.
Body map theory is pretty stupid, but Zack hasn’t really done much to address it (and I think for a while he might even have been sympathetic to it applying to HSTSs? Idk, I may be wrong).
Again missing the point, which is simply that Zack’s discussion of these concepts actually did provide a lot of genuine value and insights, even if there were also many points where he was flatly wrong, and the total dismissiveness of the community, again, simply cannot be explained by flaws that were subtle enough for even you to take a while to discover them.
And again this gets to the meat of the issue.
No, this was simply me describing my impression of Michael Bailey. I am well aware that Blanchardianism is not a theory of sociology, and is not about masculinity and femininity.
Of course, these lines of thought would be insane if Blanchardianism was a sociological theory. A sane line of thought if Blanchardianism was a sociological theory would be something like the disruptive/pragmatic typology, though of course since Blanchardianism is claiming to be an etiological theory, it is instead absolutely insane to take the evidence for the disruptive/pragmatic typology as being some huge validation of Blanchardianism.
Disruptive HSTS’s are however disruptive in very different ways than other disruptive trans women. In particular, HSTS’s, disruptive or not, are much less likely to be extremely oppressive to gay men.
I mean it would be insane for me to just simply avoid those 2 pathologies. Instead I should ask more generally what the community is trying to achieve, whether it is good at achieving that, whether I want to achieve that and whether it would be helpful for me to be in it, whether it is responsive to critique and accountable, etc..
No, going with an immunity analogy, that will still only give you immunity to specific strains of narcissism as you learn to recognise them. What you ought to do instead is to find healthy communities so that you can train your system 1 to immediately recognise the difference between a healthy community and an unhealthy one. The approach you are using is much too vulnerable to self-deception.
But that’s just the community side of things. You are still leaving unexamined the question of why those pathological communities appealed to you in the first place.

Cornelius Dybdahl 7 Jan 2024 14:54 UTC
−1 points
−1
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
The issue at hand is a critique of the rationalist community. A community is the product of its members.
Although, in this particular case, part of the issue is that tailcalled is having a private feud with me on the side, which he decided to bring into this comment section under false pretenses, cf. his own words:
My actual motivation with my original comment was to try to point you at some of the areas in which Blanchardians are wrong or even abusive, since (in our other Discussion, in the emails) you were skeptical that my views are all that much driven by my experiences with Blanchardianism.
There is no excuse for this kind of manipulative behaviour, but it is par for the course when it comes to the LessWrong community and thus eminently relevant to critiquing that same community.

Cornelius Dybdahl 7 Jan 2024 1:40 UTC
−5 points
−5
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
The apparently-not-critical-theory-but-instead-something-else impression I got still made me question a bunch of my past behavior.
Indeed, and some of those lines of questioning yourself did indeed lead to regrets — for a time. Until you walked back your few genuine displays of good faith (edit: excepting the one with the discord server, though you did weaponise my emphasis on that one against me, which is arguably similar to walking it back). That sort of thing gives me an impression that even the process of questioning your past behaviour is basically just a self-serving preemptive defence against criticisms such as this one.
If critical theorists have come up with some relevant theory, then feel encouraged to post it. I’m not going to be convinced by vague allusions to figures I don’t know anything about.
Iirc it is mostly in its applied forms, as in critical race theory. Robin DiAngelo for example frequently argues that white progressives are just appropriating the language of the civil rights movement and of subsequent theories (CRT being one) in a way that doesn’t properly engage with the issues and is really just a self-serving tactic to preserve their privileged position and their white saviour complex. I believe Herbert Marcuse also argued something similar in One-Dimensional Man, albeit obviously without the focus on race.
I’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate myself on it? How?
Because, whether by calculation or (as I think) by political instinct, all your critiques of Zack’s critics are goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate as contrasted with the extremists on both sides, even though in point of fact I have had to practically drag you to make even this admission. At first you were describing sapphire as only arguably abusive, and even your previous comment you were still creating an outrageously one-sided portrayal of Zack’s interactions with the community that simply portrayed his arguments as bad while glossing over the fact that he was pointing to a lot of real substance. Even after your break with Blanchardianism, you are after all still using most of the terminology that you were introduced to through Blanchardianism. There is real substance there, even if most (all?) of it predates Blanchard’s own work, and the idea that the rationalist community dismissed it all simply because of flaws in Zack’s arguments does not even come remotely close to being a reasonable characterisation. I think you know this on some level.
In short, your behaviour is goal oriented towards keeping up appearances of being a sensible moderate, charitable to both sides, while in actual fact having an absolutely immense bias.
- Zack… doesn’t seem to have discussed brainsex much?
Not by that term, but that is what is implied when discussing whether LOGD is an intersex condition. It’s not like he was referring to XXY chromosomes or some such.
- Feminine essence theory isn’t really the leading alternative to Blanchardianism.
I am not convinced you are correctly interpreting that market.
Approximately nobody in these rationalist debates are claiming that all MtFs are HSTS
Of course not. Almost none of them would’ve even encountered the term if not for Blanchardianism, which is the point I’m getting at. Previously they would have simply recognised HSTS’s as “straight transwomen” and left it at that.
- It’s not clear how you’re asking it to be investigated, and Zack hasn’t written much about this either. (I have extensive opinions about how it should be investigated! But nobody listens to me about this...)
It’s not like I am criticising them for failing to spend lots of effort pursuing some particular line of investigation, just pointing out that their rejection of Zack simply cannot be explained by some flaws in Blanchardianism that took even you quite a while to uncover.
Look, I am going to be blunt and say that you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting and you really need to learn to get it under control.
Well, for one, because you don’t seem to agree with me in the case of Zack.
Zack is being complicit in his own abuse in much the same way you are complicit in it, albeit to a lesser extent.
Also I’m not super convinced by your opposition to Michael Bailey as you probably don’t know the specifics of that conflict. For all I know, you might support Bailey if you knew more. And considering that Michael Bailey did offer something like a debate, it seems like you need to be more specific about which subject you’d like to see me debate with him, in order for you to truly illustrate that you are not simply on his side.
I indeed don’t know the specifics of that conflict; certainly not enough to be “simply on his side”. I have however read your explanation of how he came to block you, and am willing to take your word for it, since it seems consistent with the vibe I get from him. He actually kinda reminds me of a very particular kind of annoying Catholic father figure^[1]. So although I do not know the specifics of that conflict, I do know enough to have a negative overall impression of him, just going by vibes.
My bad impression of him has been sufficient to deter me from looking closer into him without a clear reason, though such a reason was to some extent granted by his view of femininity as you related them to me (something to the effect that straight men will never be truly feminine). There, I am probably mostly on his side, though I suspect he has less understanding of the more aristocratic kind of femininity that I consider more central to the concept.
Given that they were all abusive in like 2 very specific ways, yes, but also this makes me able to identify them in the future.
Yes, you will be able to identify these particular manifestations of narcissism, and thus find communities in which it manifests differently, in ways you are less aware of, and hence will have even less self-awareness of perpetrating. If there is an improvement implied here, I fail to see it.
1. ^
  and I say this as someone who both prefers Catholicism to Protestantism and patriarchy to feminism. There are nevertheless some very annoying, very prejudiced Catholic patriarchs in Texas, and he reminds me of them. I don’t mean to imply that he actually is Catholic, of course.

Cornelius Dybdahl 7 Jan 2024 0:57 UTC
7 points
3
in reply to: Lyrongolem’s comment on: Defense Against The Dark Arts: An Introduction
In typical terms, ultra-BS is lying. (as in, you know you are wrong and speak as if you’re right anyways). In my view, however, there’s also an extension to that. If you are aware that you don’t have knowledge on a topic and make wild assertions anyhow to support a narrative (say, if I declared that Kremlin whisperers are considering a coup against Putin) I would also be ‘BS-ing’. I’m not lying in the traditional sense, as it’s certainly possible I’m correct (however unlikely). But if I clearly don’t have information then I can’t act as if I do. Thus I’d consider some ‘erroneous’ arguments by Vivek to be bullshit, because it displays an information gap I have trouble believing he wasn’t aware of.
I understand how you use the terms, but my point is that Vivek does not in fact demonstrate the information gap you impute to him. I am confident he would be easily able to address your objections.
The same cannot be said for 2) and 3), however.
The fact that the war has persisted for so long seems sufficient proof that, in the absence of the aid, Ukraine would have quickly surrendered or at worst suffered a quick defeat. In either case, the war would have been shorter. Point 3 is unambiguously correct, and even most people on your side of the issue would agree with that (ie. they believe that a large part of the reason Ukraine has been able to fight so long has been the aid)
With knowledge about the specific situation in Ukraine, you cannot reasonably believe 2) and 3).
There are lots of people of the realist school of geopolitics who know a lot about the specific situation in Ukraine and who nevertheless at least claim to believe 2. Are they all liars? I don’t think so. I guess you could argue that they are all unreasonable and thus capable of believing it despite contrary evidence, but such a stance is again merely arguing that point 2 is erroneous, not that it is dark arts.
Is my position more clear now?
No. Your position was already quite clear from the original post. It’s just incorrect, not unclear.

Cornelius Dybdahl 6 Jan 2024 2:06 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Lyrongolem’s comment on: Defense Against The Dark Arts: An Introduction
Is this correct?
Sort of, but you’re missing my main point, which is simply that what Vivek did is not actually dark arts, and that what you are doing is.
His arguments, as you summarised them into bullet points, are topical and in good faith. They are at worst erroneous and not an example of bullshitting. You have convinced yourself that if he were to contend with your objections, he’d resort to surface level arguments about battlefield outcomes, pressing domestic concerns, etc., which actually would fall under your category of ultra-bullshit. Ie. you did in fact assume that he does not have substantive arguments in favour of, say, paleoconservative geopolitical principles, and you accuse him of practising dark arts simply on account of the response you assume he would come up with.

Cornelius Dybdahl 6 Jan 2024 0:51 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
My dabbles in critical theory arose from and is almost entirely limited to my contact with Zack’s associates, and from critical theorists seeming to describe pathologies that I have frequently faced from Blanchardians. As such, Blanchardianism basically screens off (in a probabilistic DAG sense) other critical theory topics for me. If critical theory says that my behavior in these topics is that of Bad Centrists, then I say “hmm then maybe those Bad Centrists were actually onto something, idk”. I don’t know anything about how combative Malcolm X was, nor do I know anything about William F. Buckley, I just know that Blanchardianism sucks, and if critical theorists don’t know that then they lack basic information for commenting on this subject matter.
So the whole critical theory thing really was just self-serving, then. Funny, the critical theorists wrote about that, too.
I guess “Zack only recently began more directly calling out the rationalist community” is maybe a natural way for an outsider/newcomer to parse this conflict, idk. I don’t find this parsing super intuitive because I immediately think of posts from 2018-2020 like this and this and this and this. But I was following his blog during this time, and these haven’t really been discussed on LessWrong due to the “no politics!” restriction.
Look, I am really becoming quite impatient with this whole tangent of nitpicking one single adjective that was never particularly essential to my argument. There are older cases of him calling out the LessWrong community, some of them even before 2018, and there are also older cases of him being abused in various ways. His more recent interactions are met with an abusive reception more consistently than his older interactions. I am not going to bother continuing to defend my choice to use the phrase “constant abuse”. My point stands without it, and as far as I can tell, there is no point to this endless nitpicking other than simply evading the actual argument.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Zack is Simply Crazy And That’s Why He’s Doing This. I agree that Scott’s weird stonewalling of him makes it worse.
Great, you’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it. Now if you could see how your own behaviour makes it worse, we might actually get somewhere.
I’m… somewhat ambivalent about describing sapphire as “Wielding massive social and financial pressures against thoughtcriminals, to silence them and champion a progressive cause”?
She didn’t create the pressure, but she invoked it when talking about how he has gone insane and is losing friends, etc., and she certainly wielded it against him. But actually my point was simply that even the creation of such pressures is so widely accepted that your callout of sapphire’s comparatively milder abuse would fly beneath the radar of most people, and thus not work effectively as a callout.
It doesn’t seem to me that sapphire has been consistent enough towards this topic to be described as “constantly” anything
Hold on; I talked about the abuse he’s been receiving as an explanation for his insanity, not as part of an accusation that sapphire was constantly abusing him. I was in fact in the process of collecting examples of abusive behaviour and other bad faith engagement, to use for a post about the existence of unintentional manipulation and other forms of bad faith that the perpetrator may not be aware of engaging in, because there is in the LessWrong community a completely erroneous implicit assumption that people are always aware when they’re being manipulative. I wanted to make a post correcting this error, explaining some things about the boundaries of consciousness, about what it means for intents to be conscious, etc., and I wanted to illustrate it with examples of people unknowingly engaging in bad faith.
If we interpret sapphire as making a forceful threat, then Zack’s poor writing doesn’t justify the forceful threat. (On the other hand, if Zack was e.g. a university professor or a clinical researcher, then poor argument for his theories would justify a threat of firing—it’d literally be his job to do proper research.) This wasn’t really how I interpreted it, and last I heard from Zack, it’s not really something he has feared. But I guess I can see how one could interpret it that way.
I did not interpret it as a forceful threat either.
But… again if we take someone like Viliam, I think calling his comment “abuse” is just wrong? If Zack’s original arguments against rationalists were bad, then rationalists shouldn’t be convinced by them, and it’s not that outrageous that that they sort of make a half-assed counter and then ignore the topic, and it’s a relevant point to ask “but wait, what were your original arguments? doesn’t this seem overly convoluted?”.
The only way you’re getting this analysis to sound reasonable at all is by omitting a lot of crucial points. For example, the cultishness of trans theory in assuming that gender dysphoria in an AMAB implies female brainsex, the fact that his arguments, though erroneous in some of the particulars, did point to a very real and very central point, which I will here just indicate as the point that not all MtFs are HSTS, whatever the explanation for the others, the disinterest in seriously investigating these issues at all, despite how massively they impact so many members of this community, etc. There was plenty of very real bad faith in the LW community’s reception of Zack’s points, well beyond what can be explained by factual errors, especially when they were the sort that took even you a considerable amount of time to discover.
My actual motivation with my original comment was to try to point you at some of the areas in which Blanchardians are wrong or even abusive
Most Blanchardians I have interacted with were TERFs, whom I consider to be some of the most dishonest, abusive people I have ever encountered. Even with our current falling out, I am still utterly enraged at how Rod Fleming treats you. He is probably in my top ten of least likeable people I have ever encountered. I am very annoyed at Michael Bailey’s behaviour towards you, because I would very much have liked to see debates between you and him.
I am not sure why you think you need to convince me that Blanchardians are wrong and most of them abusive. I think it is worth pointing out that you are just now making the case that a community you interact with a lot, and which you were a part of for a long time, is wrong and abusive. You have made the same observation about a lot of other such communities. I don’t remember the exact list, but I seem to recall that it included liberals (and perhaps antifeminists? idk).
Here’s the kicker: I agree.
I also happen to think it might be fruitful for you to wonder if you might be drawn to these abusive communities, and whether the abusiveness might have been something of a constant throughout your changing affiliations, and whether it might not have persisted through your most recent such changes.
since (in our other Discussion, in the emails) you were skeptical that my views are all that much driven by my experiences with Blanchardianism.
Because, regarding your dabbles in critical theory, I was paying attention to the bright little spark of genuine contrition and good faith, not to the apparently much larger component that was merely self-serving. Perhaps I was being overly Christian.