If I were to transition today and didn’t pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn’t.
This is the same fuckin’ diseased mentality that gets cis women harassed in changing rooms for having jawlines that are slightly too heavy.
The math is also weird and unclear in that way which feels like a person reaching for grandiose Theories Of It All without any experience solving more mundane problems first.
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Ew. As a skinny chick I love seeing fat women in bikinis. My girlfriend in particular, but all of them because I want people wearing clothes they’re happy in.
Like it just pisses me off that there’s this deep idea that if you look fat or trans or disabled you’re inherently ugly. When like, nah, I’ve seen some drop dead gorgeous obese women, some stunningly beautiful trans women, and hot as fuck visibly disabled women. Maybe you’ll never find yourself attracted to someone with one of these body types, that’s fine, but quite a few of us will and it’s important to understand that that’s the case. And that’s not even touching on their idea that ugly people need to hide or something. No be ugly in public. Ugly people have just as much right as beautiful people to be out and about and dressed how they want
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Yeah it is. It’s one of the more radical ideas I got from feminist theory, but it’s also one of the ones that I think is most directly and easily actionable.
Most people want to be beautiful in some way. It’s understandable and I’ve got no issue with it. I exercise for that purpose and I choose to wear makeup sometimes as well in part for that reason. But I do it for me because I want to feel beautiful in the way that makes me happy and comfortable.
If someone genuinely doesn’t care that’s fine. And it’s also fine if nothing they can do will make them beautiful.There’s a lot of feminist discussion on a lot of the finer points I could make around that, but the blunt point is that the people of Walmart have the same right to be in public as the people of Hollywood. Andrea Dworkin (who was mocked on national television for her appearance) deserves for her face to be associated with her work just as much as Gloria Steinem (who was famously conventionally attractive). A kind man who dresses poorly and has a neckbeard and is badly balding is still worthy of being treated as just as much of a person as everyone else.
I also refuse to judge those who sound or smell somewhat unpleasantly. They’re people too. They have any number of reasons why they do as such. I find it strange that certain smells are treated as socially acceptable even if they absolutely reek in my experience, but others aren’t. Hell there are people who I’d much rather smell their bo than their lunch or their smoke. That’s not all something I expect of others, but it’s a related standard I try to hold myself to.
I had a friend for many years who would do this. To be clear, this person was otherwise a decent friend and I had good times with them. But they would constantly declare, loudly, to everyone, how fat they were. They would make constant comments on how fat, their relatives were. They’d insist that other people were making special arrangements for them because of their fatness.
No matter how many times people would assure this person that we largely did not care or consider their weight as any factor in hanging out with them or interacting with them, they would deny it. No matter how many times I or anyone else carefully suggested that there may be some value in speaking to a therapist about their anxiety around their weight, they would not listen.
This same person would also complain how much fat shame society as a whole inflicts. But they refused to acknowledge their own.
It is sad, and infuriating, and it eventually pushed me and many other people away.
Zack’s ability to externalise problems onto all others is stupendous even as a rationalist
🎶 I see the girls go by dressed in their summer clothes / Priors all updating until my darkness goes 🎶
Exactly. Yeah some trans women really don’t pass, some cis women don’t either. Nobody benefits from increased scrutiny on people’s gender except people selling fear of trans people or selling the tools to conform to gendered expectations.
But also if you’re unhappy with your meat sack change it because there’s no evidence you get another.
Three major thoughts here: 1) this is the epitome of toxic individualism, 2) holy hell this person really needs to leave rationalism for their own health and happiness, 3) I love the idea that anyone can insist on quoting Ray “doesn’t believe in bisexuality” Blanchard while calling themselves a person focused on truth
This person is clearly struggling with who they are and has decided they don’t get to be themselves and is working back from there
And I just want to clarify my beef with Blanchard. It’s not just that he’s wrong about me and people I care about in ways that are hurtful, prejudiced, and used to cause harm. It’s also the fact that he’s held up by a certain type of person because they can’t be bothered to understand us or science. Sometimes in science one lone person speaks truth to a field that irrationally digs in their heels and refuses to see reason. I understand that. But sometimes some jackass looks identical to that and just happens to be wrong and using terrible methodology and because people outside the field don’t understand shit they latch on because the field is saying things that go against their preconceived notions and that person sounds kinda right.
Ray Blanchard is the Andrew Wakefield of sexology and a certain type of people insist he’s Galileo in that story that’s usually oversimplified because it makes for a better story than telling it truthfully.
Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who’s on the record as believing more than one gets burned as a witch.
Two heresies leave Chicago traveling at 90 km/h and 100 km/h
Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to also to acknowledge, e.g., racial IQ differences?
uh
I agreed that that would be better, but realistically, I didn’t see why Yudkowsky should want to poke that hornet’s nest.
uhhhhhhhhh
a perfectly spherical heresy in a vacuum at absolute zero, and also it’s racist
LWers will literally
Instead of going to therapy
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My dayjob performance had been suffering for months. The psychology of the workplace is … subtle. There’s a phenomenon where some people are vastly more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one is cruel enough to make it common knowledge. This is awkward for people who simultaneously benefit from the culture of common-knowledge-prevention allowing them to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/year software engineer without actually performing at that level, who also read enough Ayn Rand as a teenager to be ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation. I didn’t think the company would fire me, but I was worried that they should.
My goodness is there anything about this person’s outlook that isn’t profoundly sad.
They’re up to their armpits in a pit of self-loathing of their own making & unable to take any of the proffered help because their self-imposed ethical system doesn’t permit it.
Profoundly sad is exactly what it is.
Crucially, a misanthropic and underbaked ethical system based on principles that are either completely removed from reality or demonstrably wrong. And which in the end really amounts to a great deal of … rationalisation :o
104 minutes! Not today satan.
A ctrl+f on ‘sneer’ shows me a lot of talking about sneerclub, but guess he didn’t actually check reddit and notice that it is no longer there.
And of course the guy is some weird anti pronouns person. (‘But somebody might look how you not expect them to look!’)
The hilarious part to me is that they imagine Eliezer moderates himself or self-censors particularly in response to sneerclub. Like of all the possible reasons why Eliezer may not want to endorse transphobic rhetoric about pronouns (concern about general PR besides sneerclub, a more complex nuanced understanding of language, or even genuine compassion for trans people), sneerclubs disapproval is the one that sticks out to the author. I guess good job on us? Keep it up!
I’m amazed that the random shitposting of a bunch of nerds who band together purely to dunk on terrible rationalist takes weighs so heavily on their minds. Aren’t they supposed to be above that kind of thing?
They are not really talking about us, they are talking about an imagined group of badguys, for all their talks about intellectual turing tests they fail the most basic ones at their own detractors. This does however worry my paranoid mind, as this does mean that the more deranged parts of Rationalism might try and take action against people from sneerclub. I have no desire to be doxed and then have weird LW/EA kids from local universities visit my home. (or make working in tech harder for me).
Every sneer is one transphobic act suppressed in fear.
When I first started reading Sneerclub I was amazed at how different Sneerclub was vs how the Rationalists described it. Also amazing how much better your mh gets after you stop reading SSC subreddit (this was before they created themotte).
not going to waste my time on a random terf, but i’m happy to see said terf to waste ten times more to write and meticulously cross-reference all that crap.
Not so much a random terf as someone who appears to have been trying to use lesswrong struggle sessions in place of trans conversion therapy for a while now.
Or at least that’s my diagonal impression, and I’m also not going over that entire maelstrom just to make sure if they are a rotten egg or not.
Zack seems to want to transition, has detailed logic as to why not to, and is determined to make it everyone else’s problem
Demanding that EY et al define “woman” for them so that they can know whether or not they can transition is simultaneously hilarious and deeply sad.
Yeah i didn’t read much, but at one point in my life i was attempting to do something like that and I see all the telltale signs. The difference is that as a teenager I grew up and developed the emotional maturity to understand that no amount of wanting to not be trans would make me cis, just trans and miserable.
Also I grew up and learned how absolutely bonkers rationalism is as a philosophy.
They seem so deep in that the idea of “what would make me happy” has left the equation long ago
That kind of stuff does make me feel sad, like all the trans people who start out hating on trans people on 4chan. (Don’t get me wrong they still suck and they should stop, but I can feel multiple emotions and also feel a bit sad about them)
Rationalist Civil War was my least favorite Marvel movie.
^F David Gerard
Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, “Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!” And you replied: “No, I’m not! That’s a lie.” And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive…
I‘m impressed at the way you still manage to live rent free in these chud’s heads. The bogeyman is real if you’re a rationalist apparently & his name is D.Gerard.
/r/SneerClub
these people are so terrified of Satan Church that they haven’t read the change of address we stabbed into the front door with a ceremonial dagger like 5 months ago
Imagine one day Dan Gackle of Hacker News fame banned the Linus Tech Tips guy for sockpuppeting but actually you were the sockpuppet. Also suppose Terry A. Davis were still alive so you went to ask him how to sockpuppet like a veteran, but instead you run into Timnit Gebru, who is also a terrorist. She calls you pronouns and slurs like TESCREAL and your pants drop to your ankles and everyone is laughing at you and also Terry calls you the N word because you don’t know how to write a compiler. Then you turn around and see Scott Siskind and Joanne Rowling and they’re also laughing at you and you start to cry.
Anyway you’d be really upset.
Picture a scene: the New York Times is releasing an article on Effective Altruism (EA) with an express goal to dig up every piece of negative information they can find. They contact Émile Torres, David Gerard, and Timnit Gebru, collect evidence about Sam Bankman-Fried, the OpenAI board blowup, and Pasek’s Doom, start calling Astral Codex Ten (ACX) readers to ask them about rumors they’d heard about affinity between Effective Altruists, neoreactionaries, and something called TESCREAL. They spend hundreds of hours over six months on interviews and evidence collection, paying Émile and Timnit for their time and effort. The phrase “HBD” is muttered, but it’s nobody’s birthday.
From here. (Author’s not a lesswronger themselves, I think.)
I follow drama and blow-ups in a lot of different subcultures. It’s my job.
Wait, you can get paid for this???
A thing that is sort of amazing about that article (by Woodgrains, who is supposed to be part of the leftwing people of themotte) is that their complaints about journalism being unfair to them is said by everybody all the time in every subculture when there is a non 100% puff piece on their subculture.
The problem with journalists is that they tend to shine a light on the parts of your subculture that you pretend isn’t there, but a part that you should really check out and do something about (a bit like that mole, ow god I’m projecting and need to call my doctor). How can you be a grown person and not have seen this happen to several groups over and over again already? How sheltered and only inside LW spheres are these people? (Rhetorical)
(I know Woodgrains is praising the ability of LW to criticize themselves, but crucially he doesn’t really seem to notice that nothing changes, the various racists/sexists etc are still there and talking about happy birthdays (urgh). But hey at least it got Gwern mad)
leftwing people of themotte
lol the empty fucking set
Yeah remember how themotte had a “quality contributions of last month” post every month? The schism (for people not in the know: the less ‘far right culture war, more good faith discussions’ spinoff of themotte (how many layers deep are we now? Damn you Hanson!), what a failed project from the start, the culture war anger is the point and the draw of themotte) has a ‘Quality Contributions for the first half of 2023’ post. Guess there were no quality contributions the 6 months after that.
The EA/LW community loves to think from first principles, and that is usually one of its finest traits. I notice and respect the times their first-principles thinking leads them to be correct about things broader society is incorrect about—a regular occurrence.
[citation fucking needed]
the fuck. apparently I secretly do run rationality.
scratching his itch to be productive by traveling the world and doing charity via talking with cool, smart people about meaningful ideas.
i’d want some pretty convincing evidence that the bit after “and” goes with the word “productive”.
@Geoffrey Miller, with his own long history of serious, sincere engagement within the rationalist community,
uh yeah lol ok
God it feels so fucking good not knowing who any of these idiots are, time to ruin that feeling forever
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Well he’s a rationalist. It’s not like he’s going to get to the right answer empirically
Newspeak
It should be noted here that he is using Newspeak wrong. Newspeak was a simplified language in which everything was reduced to simple dichotomies. The whole pronouns thing (and the whole hidden iceberg of NB/transphobia/etc related to that) is something which newspeak would to enforce. The inability to differentiate between sex/gender/gender assigned at birth/seeing gender as a spectrum and reducing it all to man vs female is newspeak.
He didn’t understand the book, read the additional material about newspeak, or even glance at the wikipedia page about newspeak.
Wonder if anybody on LW even noticed. (Yes, im implicitly calling them bad nerds here). (A ctrl-f later, doesn’t seem anybody noticed. Seems nobody also noticed that we have moved to awful.systems).
Using Nineteen Eighty-Four references incorrectly is a right-wing trope.
@gerikson Not just right wing. Orwell abuse is pretty much universal - I have a rule of thumb that anyone who describes something as “Orwellian” has either never read any Orwell or read 1984 once many years ago and remembers that it had cameras in it or something. It’s popular because it’s seen as an argument-stopping intervention - a more intellectual version of making Hitler comparisons. Reductio ad Orwellium?
puts on vr headset to play ‘a plagues tale’ this is so Orwellian.
obviously the correct term is “Blairite”
@dgerard Eric the Arthur B.?
@Soyweiser Must be the earlier discarded version of Newspeak where instead of compressing the vocabulary to make nuance impossible to convey they did the opposite. It worked okay until a Party member was heard by a 10 year old Junior Spy describing Big Brother as “a doubleshit maxipompous arsetalker” and was last seen being beaten senseless by the Thought Police.
so Zack got to the right answer completely by accident?
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what Eliezer means is that you should treat Eliezer’s concepts as carving reality at the joints and also any other concepts you want to bias-launder
Someone asked in the comments that Zack clarify wtf the claim is, and Zack posted this abstract:
Does this help? (159 words and one hyperlink to a 16-page paper)
Empirical Claim: late-onset gender dysphoria in males is not an intersex condition.
Summary of Evidence for the Empirical Claim: see “Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies” by Anne Lawrence, published in European Psychologist. (Not by me!)
Philosophical Claim: categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”; in particular, whether a categorization makes someone happy or sad is not relevant.
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Caveat to the Sociological Claim: the Sociological Claim about a prominence-weighted sample of an amorphous collective doesn’t reflect poorly on individual readers of lesswrong.com who weren’t involved in the discussions in question and don’t even live in America, let alone Berkeley.
so this is a two-hour post about Zack’s arguments with unnamed Bay Area rationalists. Today, in posts that should have been a Discord chat.
(the paper he names is a Blancharding ramble)
And the arguments seem to boil down to them saying “if you wanna transition, just do it”, and Zack is all like “nooooooo you must convince me not to via Rationality!!!”
(sorry if I’m being flippant, this person seems to be in a lot of mental distress, but they’re also kinda big deal in the community? Like fucking gwern weighed in a bit sarcastically?)
yeah i noticed yesterday there’s a link to (one of) Zack’s blog(s) in SSC’s sidebar.
so what precisely is Zack supposed to be good at in Rationality other than Blancharding?
Word count.
when you need to add an exponential notation option to wc
wc --tldrhttps://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/wc.c#n507
The word count variable is an
intmax_t, so assuming ISO C (it’s GNU so probably not but whatever) it has to be at least C99 and thus support at least 64 bitlong long.Looking forward to the nine quintillion word LW posts. Wonder if I should submit a patch to make
wc(1)use GMP for future proofing purposes…
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Who knows? They seem to know all these people personally, so I guess they attend rationalist cuddle puddles in SV or something.
I ran into them online a year ago when a Twitter follow shared their last essay with some acerbic comments about the lengths (both in the mental & absurd word count senses) they were going to do deny their desire to transition & they appeared in the comments after I made a snarky remark along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much”. Still quite proud of that one.
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I hesitate to ask, but information hazards be damned.
In that worldview, what are cis gay persons? Also intersex or something else?
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I feel it’s appropriate at this point to mention that Blanchard’s theory mostly hinges on putting little rings around queer people’s penises, a method invented by his mentor Kurt Freund.
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There’s also this handy introduction (cw: sad)
Yeah it’s sad gosh. Looks like a lot of relatable fears taken to the extreme instead of dealt with properly.
Aside: Zach keeps saying trans people impose on others so I want to shout this into the void at no one in particular: dear cis people all you have to do is mind your own business!
But also holy smokes that “anon” comment is wild.
HSTS with enough IQ points
Enough IQ points? HTTP Strict Transport Security? … enough IQ points?!
Our values are different. I dislike females, where I see female I see potential for competition, mutual poisoning and anxiety-driven treason, and I see zero value, sexual or otherwise.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah ironically that comment is even more poisoned by 4chan blanchardian culture than Zack is poisoned by rationalism.
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my god, it’s Zack explaining precisely how fucked up one would have to be to write that blog, in under four hundred words. Amazing.
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it’s clear we’d be beating our heads with hammers anyway, the internet points are a small consolation prize
One day, when Zack is a little older, I hope he learns it’s okay to sometimes talk -to someone- instead of airing one’s identity confusion like an arxiv prepublish paper.
Like, it’s okay to be confused in a weird world, or even have controversial opinions. Make some friends you can actually trust, aren’t demanding bayesian defenses of feelings, and chat this shit out buddy.
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Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Zack my guy you are so fucking close. Also just fucking leave.
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I’ve just dipped in and out of it all day - I can’t look away! It’s better than a car crash: you can slow down multiple times
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The only thing any of us can do is choose how we are going to get dumber every day
I read a bit, and I’m very sorry it happened (the text being written)
104 minute read at LWer speed (uncritical, taking everything at face value, and you already understand their dialect of english)
Actual read time: depends on how often you snark tbh.
Could use GDQ any%/all% categories
The thing that gets me the most about this is they can’t imagine that Eliezer might genuinely be in favor of inclusive language, and thus his use of people’s preferred pronouns must be a deliberate calculated political correctness move and thus in violation of the norms espoused by the sequences (which the author takes as a given the Eliezer has never broken before, and thus violating his own sequences is some sort of massive and unique problem).
To save you all having to read the rant…
—which would have been the end of the story, except that, as I explained in a subsequent–subsequent post, “A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning”, in late 2018, Eliezer Yudkowsky prevaricated about his own philosophy of language in a way that suggested that people were philosophically confused if they disputed that men could be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.
Caliphate officials (Eliezer, Scott, Anna) and loyalists (Steven) were patronizingly consoling me
One of the top replies does call this like it is…
A meaningful meta-level reply, such as “dude, relax, and get some psychological help” will probably get me classified as an enemy, and will be interpreted as further evidence about how sick and corrupt is the mainstream-rationalist society.
Also, bonus sneer points, developing weird terminology for everything, referring to Eliezer and Scott as the Caliphs of rationality.
ahaha, this was a joke inside the subculture, which Scott A even posted about - because Scott was posting a lot on Slate Star Codex and Eliezer wasn’t really posting much at that time.
Right, its a joke, in the sense that the phrase “Caliph” started its usage in a non-serious fashion that got a chuckle, but the way Zack uses it, it really doesn’t feel like a joke. It feels like the author genuinely wants Eliezer to act as the central source of authority and truth among the rationalists and thus Eliezer must not endorse the heresy of inclusive language or else it will mean their holy prophet has contradicted the holy scripture causing a paradox.
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My “I am not a prophet, do not follow me, this is not a religion” shirt sure does get a lot of questions.
I am late to sneer culture. I read HPMOR back in the day and even visited LW and then forgot about it. EA (mosquito) was on my radar but since philanthropy is anyway a bandaid on societal problems I hadn’t bothered. Until FTX crashed. I already knew crypto was a scam, but a scam that wraps itself in bad philosophy is more interesting.
After a lot of old Twitter threads and Tumblr posts it finally clicked: They made the Harry Potter fanfic guy their prophet!
Which is so stupid that it fits perfectly into our timeline.
“Kidding on the square” as they used to say.
a phrase for jokes that only work insofar as they’re true?
oh absolutely
The false dichotomy between “material/biology/physics-based” and “metaphysical i.e. fake” is everywhere in everything lesswrong outputs yet it never fails to annoy me. Sometimes I wish I could take these people aside and bully some sense into them, but due to their nazi leanings maybe being selfdestructively wrong and stupid is a fitting punishment.
you would almost think these people were doing philosophy while deliberately learning fuck all about it
ties big yud and scott up in her basement, forces them to go through the critique of pure reason giving them a werther’s every time they manage to genuinely engage with the ideas
scott’s undergrad degree, he FUCKING MAJORED IN PHILOSOPHY
D:
They skim read some utilitarianism, which is a limited school of thought (if it has any value at all), and jumped straight to “fuck yes! This is everything!”
This is very undergraduate.
“at last! I can do some really telling thought experiments!”
Is this stuff deliberately written to be word salad?
all the evidence is that Zack cannot not write like this
As somebody who has read terf shit to self harm in the past I want to thank this poor soul for writing something too impenetrable to even be readable let alone effective
(Follows link to authors blog, reads blogroll)
JFC. Kathleen Stock. They have the entire universe of gender studies to choose from & Kathleen Stock is their philosopher of choice.
