content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack’s unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by
“It was bad that the New York Times called Scott a racist, because he’s a racist but in a way that makes it correct to be racist.”
oh holy shit I was only a handful of paragraphs in but he literally says that!!!
So The New York Times implicitly accuses us of being racists, like Charles Murray, and instead of pointing out that being a racist like Charles Murray is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach in the course of being sensible, we disingenuously deny everything.
one point for (pseudo)intellectual honesty i guess!
I nominate this accidental called shot for Sneer Of The Week
I wanted to see what kind of person would defend Scott, but disparage Murray so…
ctrl-f “Murray” read quote related ctrl-w
I almost don’t want to know what motte the author has set up to make Murray’s hereditarianism seem “obviously correct” and “sensible”. Are we supposed to ignore the cross burning and constant race science posting on twitter?
IMO, we don’t want to poke the hornet’s nest of Davis defending Murray, lest we get another 20k word sequence that we have to slog through to sneer at.
(10,959 words… I don’t think I hate myself enough to read this one all the way through.)
The second part of this blog post is irrelevant.
Question is, where does the second part begin…
This circuitous, n-tuple negative tenor pervades the whole piece. It’s first and foremost frustrating, but after that just sad.
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Everything about Zack is sad.
I have to say, if you look past the, well, you know, stuff, he’s actually pretty decent at injecting pathos into the posts about his personal life. His writing does a good job bringing you into his extremely depressing/self-loathing inner world – you really feel for the guy, or at least I do. That said, it’s this exact effect which makes me think he is probably not perceiving things as lucidly as he thinks he is. Depression can feel like clarity, but that’s no way to live.
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Y’all have nailed how I felt reading this. You have this fellow who has constructed a cognitive process to self-harm at every juncture. Whenever there is an opportunity to believe in something that could bring them joy or closure etc., they head in the opposite direction because of some tenet they think is “correct” or “obvious” even though said tenet usually has a paper-thin justification. Davis is haunted by an Imp of the perverse; that imp is named Yudkowsky.
* anyone who disagrees with it is a malicious and evil lying liar
Congrats at succeeding at an intellectual Turing test. And they say we strawman them.
I love this unhinged Yudkowsky quote buried in here:
This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
Personally, I’m used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[…]
Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say… “Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven’t actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I’m confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say.”
It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the ‘right side’ politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.
The problem is… well, Zack correctly recognizes Yudkowsky is maybe not as world-changingly smart as he presents himself, and may be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than disinterested truth-seeking, but then his solution (a) doesn’t involve questioning his belief in the rest of the robot apocalypse mythos, and (b) does involve running crying directly into the arms of Moldbug and a bunch of TERFs, which like, dude. Maybe consider critically interrogating those people’s arguments too??
At this point I think there’s a pathological lack of insight going on with Zack.
Epistemic status: I have made it through this swamp. I did not read the footnotes. I glossed over the comments. Also as far as I can tell I am a cishet male, which is probably relevant to mention in reviewing this.
So here is where I am at. This post fractal sucks. Davis clearly doesn’t identify with the gender essentialist notion of male, but they also want to hold onto the idea of a biological sex binary. It sucks. I don’t think this is a unique situation- there are plenty of stories about trans kids in conservative/religious households. This particular conservative religion is the robot cult. The oppressive parents are the ghost of 2007!Yud and Scoot.
A standout, self-contained example of the general badness of this post is this anecdote (CW: transphobia/misgendering):
A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like some male celebrity. “I’m so mad,” she fumed. “I look like this right now”—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—“how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?” It is genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn’t get perceived in the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult (on Earth, and not just dath ilan) should understand— It was a compliment! That receptionist was almost certainly thinking of someone like David Bowie or Eddie Izzard, rather than being hateful. The author should have graciously accepted the compliment and done something to pass better next time.[15] The horror of trans culture is that it’s impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—noticing that they’re behaving like a TERF’s hostile stereotype of a narcissistic, gaslighting trans-identified man and snapping out of it.
It is baffling that they choose to speculate about/rationalise the offending comment to cast aspersions on the protagonist and “trans culture” as a whole.
“eyy the lady shoulda taken it as a compliment!” is so classically misogynist that this is wrapping back around to gender affirmation
it’s stupid and i wouldn’t have brought it up if zack wasn’t such a fucking dick, but that’s fucking rich coming from someone who’s so high on their own completely misguided biological essentialism, at the exclusion of any social reality, that they think an apt and plausible way to pass as a woman in public is to use a full head silicone mask
alas, too much of a transphobe to know better
Until I came across a comics table hawking TransCat, the “first” (self-aware scare quotes included) transgender superhero. I had to stop and look: just the catchphrase promised an exemplar of everything I’m fighting—not out of hatred, but out of a shared love that I think I have the more faithful interpretation of. I opened the cover of one of the displayed issues to peek inside. The art quality was … not good. “There’s so much I could say that doesn’t fit in this context,” I said to the table’s proprietor, whose appearance I will not describe.
a vile thing to write at any time, but to do so within this post in particular is just incredible
??? Zack is a “I think you should leave” character
jesus fucking christ
This is wild, there’s like multiple essays worth of text and subtext in there. It almost makes me sad for Zack and his severe brain worms
what in the world
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Reminds me of Rod Dreher in ways.
ghost of 2007!Yud
This part gets me the most. The current day Yud isn’t transphobic (enough? idk) so Zack has to piece together his older writings on semantics and epistemology to get a more transphobic gender essentialist version of past Yud.
This particular conservative religion is the robot cult.
and remember that the robot cult is considerably less transphobic than Zack, and that’s half the problem Zack has.
Another meandering manifesto from Zach hoping that trans women would stop existing
so that we stop tempting him with the prospect of actually maybe being happy for once.To clear this up once and for all ‘she’ is a very solid category with a fixed and unchanging logical definition which can be derived via straightforward Bayesian reasoning and should only be used to refer to the following and anyone who disagrees HATES MATH:
- Boats
- Cars
- A swedish chiptune artist (obligatory music link)
- She-Slimes from the dragon quest series of videogames (fun fact: male She-slimes have the ability to undergo slimification and form a King she-slime when eight gather together!)
- Ladies (a lady is of course a title that can be used by anyone who kneads bread, per etymology online)
anyone who kneads bread
I got that reference
I would like an explanation, please!
There was a twitter or bsky post talking about how lords comes from ‘person who guards the bread’ and ladies from ‘person who kneads the bread’. let me see if I can find it.
Ahh, gotcha. This is what I get for not being active on the birdsite.
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steemit
As someone who made decent money off that site back in the day, fuck Steemit. Realizing that my earnings came from Korean folks losing their life savings turned me against crypto for life.
post begins with Atlas Shrugged excerpt
ah fuck guess I’m reading this one.
69 minute read
at least there’s that.
AH FUCK it’s this person again. I choose not to remember rat names if I can help it but guess I gotta commit this one to memory.
i did warn you!
Begins with atlas shrug quotes, is rambling insanity that runs far too long.
Yeah, that tracks.
So, I was morbidly curious about what Zack has to say about the Brennan emails (as I think they’ve been under-discussed, if not outright deliberately ignored, in lesswrong discussion), I found to my horror I actually agree with a side point of Zack’s. From the footnotes:
It seems notable (though I didn’t note it at the time of my comment) that Brennan didn’t break any promises. In Brennan’s account, Alexander “did not first say ‘can I tell you something in confidence?’ or anything like that.” Scott unilaterally said in the email, “I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by ‘appreciate’, I mean that if you ever do, I’ll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge”, but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.
To see why the lack of a promise is potentially significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or stealing billions of dollars of their customers’ money) and unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance but added, “Never tell anyone I said this, or I’ll seek some sort of horrible revenge.” In that case, I think more people’s moral intuitions would side with the reporter.
Of course, Zack’s ultimate conclusion on this subject is the exact opposite of the correct one I think:
I think that to people who have read and understood Alexander’s work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email.
I think the main reason someone would consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn’t read Slate Star Codex that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was "that guy who’s so committed to charitable discourse
Gee Zack, I wonder why so many people misread Scott? …Its almost like he is intentionally misleading about his true views in order to subtly shift the Overton window of rationalist discourse and intentionally presents himself as simply committed to charitable discourse while actually having a hidden agenda! And the bloated length of Scott’s writing doesn’t help with clarity either. Of course Zack, who writes tens of thousands of words to indirectly complain about perceived hypocrisy of Eliezer’s in order to indirectly push gender essentialist views, probably finds Scott’s writings a perfectly reasonable length.
Edit: oh and a added bonus on the Brennan Emails… Seeing them brought up again I connected some dots I had missed. I had seen (and sneered at) this Yud quote before:
I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them, but in case it wasn’t obvious consider the point made explicitly.
But somehow I had missed or didn’t realize the subtext was the emails that laid clear Scott’s racism:
(Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher’s publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)
Hmm… I’m not sure to update (usage of rationalist lingo is deliberate and ironic) in the direction of “Eliezer is stubbornly naive on Scott’s racism” or “Eliezer is deliberately covering for Scott’s racism”. Since I’m not a rationalist my probabilities don’t have to sum to 1, so I’m gonna go with both.
I don’t believe this is a correct use of a diaeresis: “preöccupied” (and not just because it looks ridiculous if you know Swedish)
Eschewing the mainstream use of language and formatting is a sign of genius.
Bring back röckdöts!
(Funniest example of that is the band Tröjan, which literally means “the sweater” in Swedish)
Whomst’ve even come up with such a preposterous usage
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The diaeresis does have an actual grammatical purpose: to break up digraphs into their separate sounds, indicating, for example, that the “oo” in “cooperate” isn’t a single vowel like the one in “loop”. Though given that English doesn’t have an “eo” digraph that produces one vowel sound, “preöccupied” is just ignorant peacockery.
The Heavy Metal Umlaut, meanwhile, stands outside of grammar and doesn’t care for it. To challenge it because “Moteurhead” sounds like a silly name for a metal band is to miss the point.
Cooperate as in turn someone into a barrel maker.
If you thought English was French it would phonetically read something like “pruhccupied” without it, or even more phonetically “prëccupied” (using, funnily enough, the same dots but as in Albanian orthography, which happen to capture the sound quite well). Does this only raise further questions? Well yes.
69 minute read.
That is not nice.
Reminds me of the poetic reaction to the epic poem (1400+ lines) about May by Herman Gorter. In reaction to this Hendrik de Vries wrote: (Loosely translated, with the ABBBA rhyme scheme destroyed, im sorry)
"Gorter, Gorter!
I wanted to read your Maycanto
But soon I was afraid
That I, before I died, would not be able to finish it.
Shorter! Shorter! Shorter!"
OG in Dutch: "Gorter, Gorter!
'k Heb uw Meizang willen lezen
Maar begon al gauw te vrezen
Dat het, voor mijn dood, niet uit zou wezen.
Korter! Korter! Korter!"
Not that relevant, but I always thought it was a fun story, and it is a nice piece of poetic shade thrown.
Edit: formatting eurgh.
I don’t recognise this ABBA song, must be a deep cut (jk)
b-side of “Gimme Gimme Gimme 17,000 Words After Midnight”
You May never heard of it.
(I think this is the best and most important post in the sequence; I suspect that many readers who didn’t and shouldn’t bother with the previous three posts, may benefit from this one.)
that’s … wonderful, Zack
also, I think this is the first mention of the Brennan email on LW?
I think this is the first mention of the Brennan email on LW?
That is actually kind of weird… Did the lesswrong mods deliberately censor all discussion of the emails? (Out of a misplaced sense of respect for what gets the privilege of privacy? Or deliberately covering up the racism? Or the later disguised as the former?) They seem foundational to understanding Scott’s true motives, it seem like the emails should have at least warranted a tangential mention. Trying to clear this up… but searching for Brennan doesn’t help as an original fiction character has that name and searching for emails doesn’t help as it gets the Bostrom emails.
so Scott has never addressed the email. Basically cos he can’t without hanging his ass out in public. The wider rationalist-sphere seems to have just chosen not to mention it in public. But well, there’s Zack for ya!
piling on.
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ZACK: well, let me explain clearly and concisely: [25,000 words of incoherent Blanchardian rambling elided] and that’s why Eliezer’s lax pronoun usage is an existential risk
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While the writer is wrong, the post itself is actually quite interesting and made me think more about epistemic luck. I think Zack does correctly point out cases where I would say rationalists got epistemically lucky, although his views on the matter seem entirely different. I think this quote is a good microcosm of this post:
The Times’s insinuation that Scott Alexander is a racist like Charles Murray seems like a “Gettier attack”: the charge is essentially correct, even though the evidence used to prosecute the charge before a jury of distracted New York Times readers is completely bogus.
A “Gettier attack” is a very interesting concept I will keep in my back pocket, but he clearly doesn’t know what a Gettier problem is. With a Gettier case a belief is both true and justified, but still not knowledge because the usually solid justification fails unexpectedly. The classic example is looking at your watch and seeing it’s 7:00, believing it’s 7:00, and it actually is 7:00, but it isn’t knowledge because the usually solid justification of “my watch tells the time” failed unexpectedly when your watch broke when it reached 7:00 the last time and has been stuck on 7:00 ever since. You got epistemically lucky.
So while this isn’t a “Gettier attack” Zack did get at least a partial dose of epistemic luck. He believes it isn’t justified and therefore a Gettier attack, but in fact, you need justification for a Gettier attack, and it is justified, so he got some epistemic luck writing about epistemic luck. This is what a good chunk of this post feels like.
This “Gettier” attack seems to me to have no more interesting content than a “stopped clock”. To use an extremely similar, extremely common phrase, the New York Times would have been “right for the wrong reasons” to call Scott Alexander a racist. And this would be conceptually identical to pointing out that, I dunno, crazed conspiracy theorists suggested before he was caught that Jeffrey Epstein was part of an extensive paedophile network.
But we see this happen all the time, in fact it’s such a key building block of our daily experience that we have at least two cliches devoted to capturing it.
Perhaps it would be interesting if we were to pick out authentic Gettier cases which are also accusations of some kind, but it seems likely that in any case (i.e. all cases) where an accusation is levelled with complex evidence, the character of justification fails to be the very kind which would generate a Gettier case. Gettier cases cease to function like Gettier cases when there is a swathe of evidence to be assessed, because already our sense of justification is partial and difficult to target with the precision characteristic of unexpected failure - such cases turn out to be just “stopped clocks”. The sense of counter-intuitivity here seems mostly to be generated by the convoluted grammar of your summarising assessment, but this is just an example of bare recursivity, since you’re applying the language of the post to the post itself.
The sense of counter-intuitivity here seems mostly to be generated by the convoluted grammar of your summarising assessment, but this is just an example of bare recursivity, since you’re applying the language of the post to the post itself.
I don’t think it’s counter-intuitive and the post itself never mentioned ‘epistemic luck’.
Perhaps it would be interesting if we were to pick out authentic Gettier cases which are also accusations of some kind
This seems easy enough to contstruct, just base an accusation on a Gettier case. So in the case of the stopped clock, say we had an appointment at 6:00 and due to my broken watch I think it’s 7:00, as it so happens it actually is 7:00. When I accuse you of being an hour late it is a “Gettier attack”, it’s a true accusation, but it isn’t based on knowledge because it is based on a Gettier case.
I suppose I must be confused, your saying that the piece was interesting was just because it made you think about the phrase “Gettier attack”?
It made me think of epistemic luck in the rat-sphere in general, him inventing then immediately fumbling ‘gettier attack’ is just such a perfect example, but there are other examples in there such as Yud saying:
Personally, I’m used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[…]
Which @200fifty points out:
Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say… “Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven’t actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I’m confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say.” It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the ‘right side’ politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.
I suppose I get it, although I’m still a bit unsure how these examples count as “epistemic luck”
Zack thought the Times had all the justification they needed (for a Gettier case) since he thought they 1) didn’t have a good justification but 2) also didn’t need a good justification. He was wrong about his second assumption (they did need a good justification), but also wrong about the first assumption (they did have a good justification), so they cancelled each other out, and his conclusion ‘they have all the justification they need’ is correct through epistemic luck.
The strongest possible argument supports the right conclusion. Yud thought he could just dream up the strongest arguments and didn’t need to consult the literature to reach the right conclusion. Dreaming up arguments is not going to give you the strongest arguments, while consulting the literature will. However, one of the weaker arguments he dreamt up just so happened to also support the right conclusion, so he got the right answer through epistemic luck.
Ooooh I get it for Yudkowsky now, I thought you were targeting something else in his comment, on Davis I remain a bit confused, because previously you seemed to be saying that his epistemic luck was in having come up with the term - but this cannot be an example of epistemic luck because there is nothing (relevantly) epistemic in coming up with a term
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Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: ever since puberty, I’ve had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that taught me (amongst many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was. So it came as a huge surprise when, around 2016, the “rationalist” community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
Goddamn, what an opening. I really hope this is an elaborate troll and not someone driven insane by internet transphobia and the Sequences.
Not gonna all read that, though.
I really hope this is an elaborate troll
i am sorry to tell you
Is Zack a big cheese in the community or just some random internet person who spams people with emails?
he’s one of the rationalists, firmly in the subculture, not a driveby
