All of Cornelius Dybdahl's Comments + Replies

I have long held the view that good deeds are as relevant to justice as bad deeds, and that the failure to reward good deeds is if anything a worse injustice than the failure to punish bad deeds. I grant that this is a slight asymmetry in the opposite direction, but I don't think this is a problem, because this kind of asymmetry discourages inaction, and I think inaction is a net negative.

But there is another way in which my conception of justice differs from your conception of symmetric justice, namely: I would never allow bad points and good points to ca... (read more)

I'm two years late to the discussion, but I think I can clear this up. The idea is that a person without qualia might still have sensory processing that leads to the construction of percepts which can inform our actions, but without any consciousness of sensation. There is also a distinction between sensory data and sensation. Consider this scenario:

I am looking at a red square on a white wall. The light from some light source reflects off the wall and enters my eye, where it activates cone and rod cells. This is sensory data, but it is not sensation, in t... (read more)

A messy onset featuring transient beating caused by a piano key being out of tune with itself is usually insignificant, but it is not necessarily insignificant if it occurs during a mellow, legato passage, where that particular note plays an especially central role. It can ruin the phrase completely. Still only in the ears of skilled musicians, but if you say this is unimportant because skilled musicians are vastly outnumbered by the general population, then you wind up creating a strong disincentive from advancing in skill beyond a certain point, and you ... (read more)

It is part Ayn Rand, part Curtis Yarvin. Ultimately it all comes from Thomas Carlyle anyway.

And there is no need to limit yourself to potential obligations. Unless you have an exceedingly blessed life, then there should be no shortage of friends and loved ones in need of help.

2CronoDAS
These days, "a shortage of friends and loved ones" in general is not as uncommon as one might hope. :/

That does not even come close to cancelling out the reduced ability to get a detailed view of the impact, let alone the much less honest motivations behind such giving. 

And lives are not of equal value. Even if you think they have equal innate value, surely you can recognise that a comparatively shorter third-world life with worse prospects for intellectual and artistic development and greater likelihood of abject poverty is much less valuable (even if only due to circumstances) than the lives of people you are surrounded with, and surely you will als... (read more)

2CronoDAS
This sounds a lot like Ayn Randian selfishness but applied to the level of a friend group rather than an individual. "Potential obligations to friends and one's self are more important than the present suffering of strangers" is a consistent point of view that I rarely see eloquent arguments for, but it's certainly not one I agree with.

Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement, whose early influences came from socialist intellectual communities such as the Fabian Society, as opposed to the rationalist diaspora.

That's a lot closer to the truth than you might think. There are plenty of lines going from the Fabian society (and from Trotsky, for that matter) into the rationalist diaspora. On the other hand, there is very little influence from eg. Henry Regnery or Oswald Spengler.

“A real charter city hasn’t been tried!” I reply.

Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore is close enou... (read more)

1CronoDAS
I disagree that it's easier and/or more effective to try to improve local conditions; diminishing marginal utility is a real thing.

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"

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 o... (read more)

4tailcalled
It can be hard to predict the gears ahead of time, but it's not that hard to lay out a bunch of gears when queried. One can then maintain and refine a library of gears with explanations as part of the discourse.

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 th... (read more)

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 concernin... (read more)

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 conside... (read more)

2tailcalled
I'm not convinced about this, both from an efficiency perspective and an accuracy perspective. Take military service as an example. The way I remember it, we had like 60 people all take an IQ test in parallel, which seems more efficient than having 60 different interviews. (Somewhere between 2x more efficient and 60x more efficient, depending on how highly one weights the testers and testee's time.) Or in the case of genomics, you are often dealing with big databases of people who signed up a long time ago for medical research; it's not so practical to interview them extensively, and existing studies deal with brief tests that were given with minimal supervision. From an accuracy perspective, my understanding is that the usual finding is that psychometric tests and structured interviews provide relatively independent information, such that the best accuracy is obtained by combining both. This does definitely imply that there would be value in integrating more structured interviews into genomics (if anyone can afford it...), and more generally integrating information from more different angles into single datasets, but it doesn't invalidate those tests in the first place. I mean there's a few different obvious angles to this. IQ tests measure g. If you've realized someone has some non-g factor that is very important for your purposes, then by all means conclude that the IQ test missed that. If you've concluded that the IQ test underestimated their g, that's a different issue. You're phrasing things like your own assessment correlates at like 0.9 with g and that the residual is non-normally distributed, which I sort of doubt is true (should be easy enough to test... though maybe you already have experiences you can reference to illustrate it?)

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 fin... (read more)

2tailcalled
This is correct as an analysis of racial politics, but you end up with latent variable measurement projects for multiple reasons. In the particular case of cognitive abilities, there's also cognitive disability, military service, hiring, giftedness, cognitive decline, genomics and epidemiology, all of which have interest in the measurement of cognitive abilities. Furthermore, the theory and tools for cognitive abilities can be informed by and is informative for the measurement of other latent variables, so you also end up with interest from people who study e.g. personality. People should do serious research to inform their policy, and they should do serious research on latent variables, but they should avoid using disingenuous arguments where they talk like they've done serious research when really they're trying to troll.

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.

2tailcalled
Sort of true, but it seems polycausal; the drive to troll their political opponents makes them willing to push misleading and bad-faith arguments, whereas the scientism makes them disguise those bad arguments in scientific-sounding terms. Both causes seem toxic to good-faith attempts at building good measurement though. Like you're correct that the scientism has to be corrected too, but that can be handled much more straightforwardly if they're mostly interested in the measurement project than if they are interested in political discourse.

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 t... (read more)

2tailcalled
I think it also depends. If you are engaging in purely political discourse, then sure, this is correct. But e.g. if you're doing a good-faith project to measure latent variables, such that the latent variables are of primary interest and the political disputes are of secondary interest, then having people around who are postulating elaborate latent variable models in order to troll their political opponents are distracting. At best, they could indicate that there is a general interest in measuring the sort of latent variables they talk about, and so they could be used as inspiration for what to develop measures on, but at worst they could interfere with the research project by propagating myths.

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

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2gjm
I am not (deliberately or knowingly) strawmanning anything, and what you call "doubling down" I call "not having been convinced by your arguments". If you think tailcalled was doing something more heinous than (1) having purposes other than advancing the discussion here and (2) not going out of his way to say so, then maybe you should actually indicate what that was; your accounts of his alleged dishonesty, so far, look to me like (1) + (2) + your disapproval, rather than (1) + (2) + something actually worse than 1+2. If "the problem is at the level of his character" then I do not think there is any realistic chance that complaining about his character will do anything to solve the problem. Have you ever seen any case where a substantial improvement to someone's character came about as a result of someone telling them on an internet forum what a bad person they were? I don't think I have. At this point I shall take habryka's advice and drop this discussion. (Not only because of habryka's advice but because I agree with him that this conversation seems unlikely to be very productive, and because the LW user interface -- deliberately -- makes it painful to take part in discussions downthread of highly-downvoted comments.) I will not be offended if you choose to get in the last word.
8habryka
(LessWrong mod here. I am very far from having read remotely all discussion on this post, and am unlikely to because this is a truly giant pile of text. FWIW, this comment seems quite aggressive to me standing on its own, and my best guess, using really just surface-level heuristics and not having engaged in much depth, is that this conversation seems not particularly productive and if I was a participant I would probably do something else.  Also, please don't generalize LW norms from a comment thread as niche and deep as this one. I highly doubt any of the mods have followed this discussion all the way to the end, and I doubt the voting here corresponds to anything but the strong feelings of a relatively small number of discussion participants.  All this is just speaking as someone who has skimmed this thread. I might totally be misreading things. I don't think I am going to stop anyone from commenting here unless someone wants me to call for more official moderator action.)
2tailcalled
My stated intention wasn't to convince you that Blanchardians are abusive. My stated intention was to "point you at some of the areas in which Blanchardians are wrong or even abusive". The information in my comment is supposed to lie in the exact areas I point to, not in Blanchardians being bad. You've decided that I am actually terribly misjudging these areas due to bias and so my opinions on them are derailing the conversation. You're entitled to have that opinion, but I disagree, and therefore endlessly insulting my intellect while not engaging with my core point is not going to be convincing to me. I don't know how to inform you about these points other than to just keep hold of it while you try to turn LessWrong against me. Of course this sort of mirrors the situation in the emails where you acted like I had converted to some insane blank-slatism even though I told you that wasn't the case and my crux was more closely related to Blanchardianism.
2gjm
I am deeply unconvinced by the argument "Some time after writing X, tailcalled said he said it partly to do Y; it's very unclear how X could possibly do Y; therefore when tailcalled wrote X he did it under false pretenses". It certainly does seem to follow from those premises that tailcalled's account of why he did X isn't quite right. But that doesn't mean that when he wrote X there was anything dishonest going on. I actually think the most likely thing is that he didn't in fact write X in order to do Y, he just had a vague notion in his mind that maybe the discussion would have effect Y, and forgot that he hadn't so far got round to saying anything that was likely to do it. Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence. (Not very much incompetence. This sort of discussion is easy to lose track of.) 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. Oh. I'd thought you were mostly alleging persistent character flaws rather than one-off things. Anyway: I won't say it's impossible that what you say is true, but I am so far unconvinced. Perhaps I have been unclear about what it is I think you have been doing in this thread that it would be better not to do. I am not objecting to criticizing people's behaviour. (I think I disagree with many of your criticisms, but that's a separate matter.) 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" -- I don't agree with all your previous criticism of tailcalled but it all has the form "you did X, which was bad because Y", which I think is fine; but at this point you switch to "and you are a bad person". And then we get "you've added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it" and "your few genuine

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

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-2Lyrongolem
Well, no, it's not. Because I am speaking about future events (ie: should we give aid or not), not past events.  I'm not. Current battlefield conditions suggest that the war will be a protracted stalemate favoring Russia absent strategically meaningful aid. And by strategically meaningful I mean either providing capabilities that allow retaking of territory or negating a long term weakness (say, shell or manpower shortages). But I digress. In any case, I'm arguing from the perspective of military capability, not as an expert, but as someone who is familiar with expert arguments (I could cite, for instance, oryx, the Insititute for the study of war, Perun, etc). Basic understanding of battlefield dynamics and conditions at a strategic level. And here again... this doesn't really address my point, mainly that statements 2 and 3 are essentially statements about relative strategic capability between two state actors, and this is neither domain level expert knowledge nor exceedingly complicated. You cannot argue, for instance, that the US does not have transatlantic power projection (aircraft carriers say hello). In the same way, you cannot argue Russia has a capability to win a quick and decisive war over Ukraine without western aid, because we saw them fail. Empirically speaking they lack a capability, and everyone who follows the conflict is aware of this.   I feel like we're going in circles now. It could be that I failed to make my points clearly, or you failed to understand them. But in any case my position is that matters of historical military capability (note historical: as in past tense, already occurred) is not up for debate. 2) and 3) fly in the face of it.  In any case I think this is a good place to discontinue, I don't think we're getting any benefit from further discussion. 

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 th... (read more)

gjm*122

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 even less of that sort. Or maybe... (read more)

2tailcalled
We can take the discussion to emails to avoid crowd pressure.

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 ... (read more)

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, ... (read more)

6gjm
I am not persuaded by any part of your analysis of the situation. 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". It is certainly true that I am put off by your disagreeable manner. I do not think this is the halo effect. Finding unpleasantness unpleasant isn't the halo/horns effect, it's just what unpleasantness is; 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". Of course you might just enjoy being unpleasant for its own sake, in which case indeed I might underestimate the quality of the arguments or evidence you have at your disposal; if you want me (or others who think as I do) not to do that, I suggest that you try actually presenting said arguments and evidence rather than throwing insults around. 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. (Maybe he's being evasive in whatever other venues your Drama is spilling over from; I have no way of knowing about that.) In any case, evasiveness doesn't compel insults. There is no valid inference from "tailcalled is being evasive" to "I must insult devote a large fraction of what I say to tailcalled to insulting him". [1] I actually have no idea of tailcalled's gender; I'm going along with your choice of pronoun. In the unlikely (but maybe less unlikely in this particular sort of context) event that this is leading my astray, my apologies to tailcalled. It does not look to me as if your repeated insultingness towards tailcalled is a necessary consequence (or in fact any sort of consequence) of having to keep pulling the conversation back to something he is av
5tailcalled
I was about to list some of the cases where I had sacrificed huge amounts of status on the basis of principles I believed in, as a counterexample to self-serving bias. Maybe you also believe those cases are self-serving somehow, but I guess maybe more likely the appropriate continuation lies along the following lines: 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. Thus, in the long run, discourse is going to select for me engaging in the places that are appealing to the prejudices of the onlookers or the moderators. So for example, rationalists might like some reason why they weren't wrong to reject Zack, so if I have some belief about that, then they are going to promote me as the answer for that, yet that doesn't mean they are actually learning from me. Is that getting your position right? Or? (If it is, I would still be inclined to say your position is wrong, maybe arguably inverted compared to the truth. Or I guess one could argue the truth is just an even more epic garbage fire. More on that later...) I am, or at least used to be, a Blanchardian intellectual/researcher/teacher. This makes it my job to continually raise the standards for Blanchardians, by providing new information at the edge of their knowledge, and pointing out errors in existing positions. 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 a

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 dr

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4gjm
I haven't followed whatever Drama may be going on between you and tailcalled elsewhere, but I don't see anything manipulative or under-false-pretenses about what you're complaining about here. (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.)
-3tailcalled
I think we should take our personal dispute in emails once we've talked about the case of Blanchardianism, since talking through Blanchardianism may at least inform you where my priors come from etc.. 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. (A concrete example I have in mind: to disprove color blindness, Robin DiAngelo cites field studies showing that black people are still discriminated against when it comes to callbacks for resumes, but her argument requires this discrimination is independent of color-blind ideology, which she doesn't give evidence for.) 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). 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. Your accusation only seems true in the weakest possible sense. Like it's just factually true that there is a Blanchardian camp that spends a lot of time arguing about this subject without systematically studying or thinking about the subject and therefore ends up constantly spamming all sorts false or nonsensical ideas, and an anti-Blanchardian camp that spends a lot of time arguing against the B
3gjm
I would find this discussion more enlightening and more pleasant to read if you would focus on the issues rather than devoting so much of what you write to saying what a bad person you think tailcalled is. Of course there's no particular reason why you should care what I find enlightening or pleasant, so let me add that one strong effect of the large proportion of insults in what you write is that it makes me think it more likely that you're wrong. (Cf. this old lawyers' saying.)

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 c

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0Lyrongolem
Ok. Let me address this then.  I'll contend this is either part of an information gap or a very strange interpretation of events.  Consider the following series of statements: As the Russian army has more mass and equipment than the Baltic states, the Russians can take the Baltics whenever they please. Therefore, it's inevitable that Russia will emerge victorious, and defending the Baltics is pointless. On paper, this would seem to be roughly accurate, except of course it completely ignores the NATO intervention which will likely happen, NATO troops forward positioned in the Baltics, as well as Russia's existing commitments in Ukraine.  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.  This is, to the best of my knowledge, not even something the realists argued after the initial invasion failed. While prior to the invasion this was the narrative, afterwards this was clearly shown to be false.  Western aid did not intensify to a meaningfully significant degree prior to the battle of Kyiv, which was Russia's only hope of a 'quick victory'. While stingers, NLAWs, and other anti tank equipment was useful, the West primarily aimed to supply Ukraine for the purposes of a protracted insurgency, not a conventional war. We did not see deliveries of heavy equipment, and even now we're still waiting on F-16s.  The results of Western aid have also been mixed. While humanitarian and financial support has allowed the Ukranian state and economy to continue on

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 i... (read more)

1Lyrongolem
Ah, ok. Allow me a clarification then.  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.  So, in the interest of clarity. Consider again the points Vivek made:  1. Aid doesn't serve American interests 2. The war effort is doomed 3. Aid prolongs the war (a peace deal is better) My assessment of 1) is still the same, although you're right. It's possible Vivek has different politics. So I'm comfortable believing this is merely erroneous rather than bullshit. The same cannot be said for 2) and 3), however.  To say that aid doesn't serve American interests legitimately is a qualified assessment. You must have an understanding of American interests, and the specific geopolitical situation at hand. That by proxy means an understanding of Ukraine, it's geopolitical significance, it's battlefield dynamics and how an outcome of the war may effect the U.S. If you do not understand geopolitics, and simply cherrypick arguments, I'd contend that you're still using ultra-BS, because even though yourover all point is legitimate the process you used to defend it is not.  With knowledge about the specific situation in Ukraine, you cannot reasonably believe 2) and 3). In effect, it ignores defense economics, long run battlefield outcomes, historical precedent, and a variety of other things which is a prerequisite for making a prope

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 d

... (read more)
3tailcalled
I don't know what the critical theorists wrote about this, but I don't think it was just self-serving. I naturally learn the most about subjects that intersect with my activities, but that doesn't mean I can't change my opinions about other subjects on the basis of what I learn. The apparently-not-critical-theory-but-instead-something-else impression I got still made me question a bunch of my past behavior. 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. Sure. Zack faces a bunch of abuse from his posts. Whether it's exactly constant isn't so important. I've added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate myself on it? How? Some issues with this: * Zack... doesn't seem to have discussed brainsex much? * Zack's dodge of cultish brainsex theories seems to be stupid reasons. He seems to agree with the prior that brainsex theories are likely, as evidenced by his treatment of gender diagnosticity as reflecting brainsex, his sympathy towards the extreme male brain theory of autism, and his unqualified endorsement of Phil's book, which e.g. asserts that autogynephilia is linked with extreme male-brainedness. In such a case it seems reasonable for people to be confused and think "but if brainsex is so relevant in all these other cases, I suppose it's also relevant for transness?". * Feminine essence theory isn't really the leading alternative to Blanchardianism. * Approximately nobody in these rationalist debates are claiming that all MtFs are HSTS. I guess "which I will here just indicate" is supposed to code that I'm not supposed to take this literally, maybe you're talking about the disruptive/pragmatic typology, but you've gotta explain it for it to make sense. * 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 inve

Thanks for confirming my suspicions, since the precise wording must have been very embarrassing to intentionally delete without a trace, I won't pry, and I'll let bygones be bygones.

I already told you what the comment said. I deleted it not because I thought it was embarrassing, but because I thought it was irrelevant.

Is there some way for moderators or admins to identify the content of a deleted comment? If so, I give my permission for them to do so and state publicly what it contained.

I understand it can be a bit scary and frustrating when someone much m

... (read more)
-1M. Y. Zuo
So we agree to disagree. EDIT: I wanted to say it was an interesting discussion to be polite, but the juvenile insults and mud slinging tactics are obvious enough that probably zero passing readers would believe it.

Yes, there was abuse before then, but it wasn't constant. It has since then become constant abuse. Do we really need to endlessly nitpick my usage of the phrase "constant abuse"? 

I still think the word "constant" is sufficiently apt, but more importantly, my argument does not depend in the slightest on the aptness of that one particular word, yet here we are, idk how many comments in, still discussing it. That strikes me as merely a way to evade the point by endless nitpicknig.

The tactic consists of two prongs, both of which I have seen used in isolation in other places than LessWrong. I have not however seen both together with this switching tactic elsewhere. Non-rationalists may also dismiss arguments addressing the big picture by calling them baseless assertions or manipulative or conspiracy theories or whatever, but they will not be in the habit of prompting people to revisit underlying assumptions, and if the proponent does this of his own initiative, they might accuse him of spin and of making elaborate excuses to hold on ... (read more)

This is spot on, as is your subsequent point that the real defense is to simply be right and not let counterarguments change your mind. The fact that you are getting downvoted is a rather sad commentary on the state LessWrong has reached. What you are preaching is the twelfth rationalist virtue, which is really the culmination of all the others.

As I said, I don't know how one can consistently recognize traps like this. It seems exceedingly difficult to me, but that's what an actual defense would look like.

It is exceedingly difficult, but it can be learned. Unfortunately libertarianism (I get anarcho-capitalist vibes from you but I could be wrong) is itself captured by one of these traps, being basically a way of subverting leftism and turning it against itself. If you're curious, the Austrian school was "pure" in a sense up to and including Mises, but then Ayn Rand was heavily inspired by Mises a... (read more)

Have you given even a moment's thought to what Vivek might say in response to your objections? I get the impression that you haven't, and that you know essentially nothing about the views of the opposing side on this issue.

The three bullet points in your summary of his argument are not an example of dark arts just on account of seeming unconvincing to you. They are actual arguments that you may disagree with, and which you consider obviously stupid simply because you have no clue what response he would give to your objections, and so you blithely assume th... (read more)

-2Lyrongolem
Well... yes. It's essentially covered by what I went over. In my view at least, me and Vivek have a narrative disagreement, as opposed to a dispute over a single set or series of facts. In any case, I imagine the points of contest would be 1. The benefit of Ukraine aid for US foreign policy 2. The costs imposed on the US  3. Moral concerns with more vague ideas like 'supporting democracy' There's many rebuttals I could foresee him giving, such as poor battlefield outcomes in Ukraine, relatively more pressing domestic concerns at home, or some variation of realist foreign policy values. In any case I find those arguments unconvincing, which I've tried to articulate.  I could respond to your arguments, but then I doubt it's much use to explain my position on books I haven't read and thinkers I'm not familiar with. I'm still not entirely sure what exactly you're arguing for, only that you believe my argument is wrong. Can you present a coherent narrative independently rather than simply citing people?  In the interests of moving forward the discussion, let me try to summarize what I feel you've attempted to communicate.  1. Continued efforts by the Ukranian military and state are likely doomed to fail 2. Aiding Ukraine does not meaningfully diminish the threat to eastern europe or europe in general 3. Finland's Accession to NATO was not a meaningful security dilemma for Russia, but Ukraine is  4. Historically speaking, it would have been better for Great Britain to make peace with Hitler. Appeasement is a viable strategy.  Is this correct? I am comfortable having a longer discussion if you like, but then it's not a focus of this post, only a subpoint. If you'd like to have a debate in private messages I'm open, but otherwise I think I've answered your main question. Yes, I did consider counterarguments and competing narratives. I commonly do so in regular debate. I did not find them convincing. 

See the thing is for a long time I used to think Zack's ultimate point was his original tagline, but as I kept pushing him more and more to focus on empirical research in the area instead of on arguing with rationalists, eventually he stopped me and corrected me that his true point wasn't really trans etiology anymore, it was philosophy of classification.

True point =/= ultimate point. The ultimate point is where your line of argumentation terminates, whereas the true point is simply the point you care most about in the given moment. At this point it appear... (read more)

4tailcalled
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. 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. If I were to do a timeline, the most intuitive version for me would be: * 2016-2017 - Zack and rationalists were debating autogynephilia, but mostly in-person or in obscure Facebook threads, so it is hard exactly to know who did well, though given Zack's current arguments, and the usual arguments forwarded by Blanchardians, and the fact that Zack has talked about pushing MTIMB on people, it seems like a good bet that Zack's core arguments were abysmal.[1] * 2018 - Zack posts his response to Scott, finds it didn't work, gives up on the rationalist community. He posts mourning statements on his blog, and continues to critique them on and off. * 2019-2020 - Zack starts posting transgender-related critiques to LessWrong, using metaphors, nonspecificity, and such things to make them relatively
2Vaniver
I think I remember this timeline differently, or would like you to be a bit more clear on what you mean. I thought of this as an entrenched conflict back in 2019, which was before all the posts used as examples.

Do you realize I can see when you've posted replies and then 'deleted them without trace' immediately afterwards? The mods can too. 

For any others wondering, the deleted comment simply said "... That's what I get for engaging with a blatant troll", or something to that effect. It was because M. Y. Zuo's manipulative bs had made me forget my actual reasons for engaging, and I deleted the comment when I remembered what they were.

But it seems superfluous at this point, since any reasonable person can tell that M. Y. Zuo's behaviour is absolutely reprehen... (read more)

-17M. Y. Zuo

I can't possibly hope to convince you when you are engaging in abysmally bad faith. My purpose is to call you out, because you should not be getting away with this shit.

On another note, I did in fact "list out actual arguments", exactly as you said. I can only surmise that they didn't satisfy the "criteria of the counter-party", and for some unguessable (/s) reason, you once again will not give even the slightest indication of what you deem to be insufficient about them.

How exactly am I supposed to convince an interlocutor who will not even explain why he is unmoved by the arguments provided? Again, this is insane.

-8M. Y. Zuo

Since you seem to have completely lost track of what actually happened, I will remind you:

  • Zack made this post and was met with a barrage of abuse
  • Some of the abusers were blaming Zack for making a post that random passersby might not care about
  • I pointed out that the people making this critique had in fact interacted much more with the post than somebody who genuinely wouldn't care
  • You pointed out that these people had interacted with the post in ways beside the one I just mentioned
  • I pointed out that this obviously corroborates my point rather than detracting
... (read more)
-4M. Y. Zuo
This is in itself another opinion... Did you genuinely not read my previous comment to the end? i.e. You need to convince me, not yourself. And the previous opinions are just not convincing, to me, as coherent 'arguments'. Period.  No amount of futile replies can alter the past, unless you edit the comments, which  would create its own credibility problems. We can agree to disagree and move on.

The thing is this tactic needs the cooperation of both participants to work. If the participant getting attacked with the catch 22 just makes a clear description of the central point, and then writes quick clear answer to each sidetracking about how they are sidetracking, it's easy to resist.

No it doesn't, it just requires that the person engaging in the tactic is sufficiently persistent to resume immediately after the victim of the tactic has defused it using the defence you recommend. The tactic will succeed if there's even the slightest failure in the v... (read more)

Because you like other LessWrongers are in the habit of being fooled by your own manipulations, such as the aforementioned weaponised confusion, and even then you have correctly identified Zack's ultimate point in your reference to this original tagline.

See the thing is for a long time I used to think Zack's ultimate point was his original tagline, but as I kept pushing him more and more to focus on empirical research in the area instead of on arguing with rationalists, eventually he stopped me and corrected me that his true point wasn't really trans etiol... (read more)

Like I said, one person's opinions regarding the supposed characteristics of another's comments simply cannot outweigh the opinions of anyone else. 

Utterly irrelevant since I never asked anybody to take my opinions as outweighing their own.

But if you genuinely want to productively engage, I'll give one final chance:

Can you offer some actual proof or substantive backing, not in edited comments, for at least half of all the stuff written so far?

Again, I have already presented arguments for my case. If you do not consider them sufficiently substantive, t... (read more)

-2M. Y. Zuo
  This is your own opinion that's being made to sound as if they are incontestable facts... every comment sounds like this. My opinion is the opposite and at least equally valid.  So anyone can endlessly negate just by expressing the opposite opinion, hence it's unproductive. You need to list out actual arguments, proofs, analysis, or any falsifiable claims, etc... that satisfy the criteria of the counter-party.  Whether or not they satisfy your own criteria is irrelevant to this point, and just saying it's the truth won't convince the counter-party. And if you still can't accept this, then do not engage, I won't be offended.

"Constant" implies some notion of uniformity, though, doesn't it? Not necessarily across critics as it could also be e.g. across time, but it seems like we should have constancy across some axis in order for it to be constant.

Yes, pretty much every time he makes a post on this topic, he is met with a barrage of abuse.

I'm not completely sure what you mean by "weaponization" of confusion.

There is this particular tactic I have seen from LessWrongers[1] and nowhere else. It consists of a catch 22:

  • if you make a simple informal point, eg. calling attention
... (read more)
3Shankar Sivarajan
It looks like a cousin of "sealioning", certainly not unique to LessWrong. If you squint a bit, you might see Socrates as having pioneered it (see Killing Socrates).

There is this particular tactic I have seen from LessWrongers[1] and nowhere else. It consists of a catch 22:

  • if you make a simple informal point, eg. calling attention to something absurd and pointing out its absurdity, your argument will be criticised for being manipulative or consisting of baseless assertions, or perhaps your interlocutor will simply deny that you made an argument at all, and you will be called upon to formalise it more or in some other way make the argument more rigorous.
  • if you make a detailed point covering enough ground to addres
... (read more)

I acknowledge my own comments may seem to be low quality or 'bad' in your eyes, but to post even lower quality replies is self-defeating.

I didn't. Mine at least contained actual arguments.

Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. 

The text you quoted makes a specific argument that you once again chose to simply insult instead of addressing it. Again, your behaviour speaks for itself.

At this point it has become abundantly clear that you are simply a troll, so I will not bother to engage with you henceforth.

-6M. Y. Zuo

There hasn't been a coherent argument presented yet, hence why I directly pointed out the incoherency... 

No, you did not, you added a fact that further corroborated the argument, as my reply showed.

Since this is the second deflection in a row, I'll give one more chance to answer the previous direct questions:

I have already directly answered the first question: no, I am not confused about the terminology. I have also answered the assumptions implicit in the question and shown why the question was irrelevant. Of course, both that one and the subsequent ... (read more)

-2M. Y. Zuo
I'm getting tired of this back and forth.  Your opinions regarding all these supposed negative characteristics do not outweigh anyone else's, nor my own, so it seems unproductive.  I acknowledge my own comments may seem to be low quality or 'bad' in your eyes, but to post even lower quality replies is self-defeating. i.e. My manners in comment writing, even though they may be low quality or detestable in your opinion, are still higher quality than what has been demonstrated so far here: Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.  Can you offer some actual proof or substantive backing, not in edited comments, for at least half of all the stuff written so far?

I'm not sure "constant abuse" is accurate. Zack's interlocutors seem to vary from genuinely abusive (arguably applicable to sapphire's comment) to locally supportive to locally wrong to locally corrective, but most significantly his interlocutors seem unstructured and unproductive for the conversation.

I did not say that his critics are uniformly abusive, merely that he is being met with constant abuse. This can still be the case even if only some of his interlocutors are abusive. I think "constant abuse" is a fitting description of the experiences recounte... (read more)

6tailcalled
"Constant" implies some notion of uniformity, though, doesn't it? Not necessarily across critics as it could also be e.g. across time, but it seems like we should have constancy across some axis in order for it to be constant. I'm not completely sure what you mean by "weaponization" of confusion. What I mean is that Zack's Ultimate Point is unclear. I think Ozy best communicated the feeling people who are confused about it have: But I think this sort of echoes throughout a bunch of his writing. His standard response is to talk about multivariate group-discriminating axes (e.g Mahalanobis D), but those axes just don't work the way he'd intuitively like them to work. The correct approach would IMO be to more clearly list what he is getting at, but for some reason he doesn't do this. Zack's interests in traits seems to start and end with a desire to Prove That Demographics Really Exist, which is kind of a weird way to treat something that is so central to this discussion. LessWrongers may not behave this way with non-political topics, but do they behave this way with well-communicated political topics? It's definitely justified to hold politically sensitive discussion to higher standards than non-political discussion, so I don't think you can unambiguously attribute it solely to distortions due to the politics without also comparing to well-communicated political topics.

You are not even pretending to address the argument at this point, you are merely insulting it and me. I think your latest reply here speaks for itself.

-3M. Y. Zuo
  There hasn't been a coherent argument presented yet, hence why I directly pointed out the incoherency...  Since this is the second deflection in a row, I'll give one more chance to answer the previous direct questions: And if you don't want to answer the second two questions, which is totally your prerogative, then at least answer the first direct question? Otherwise of course I'm not going to be 'pretending to address' any subsequent deflections... there's no reason for me to deviate from sticking to the chronological ordering of comments.

That incoherence you speak of is precisely what my previous comment pointed out, and it pertains to your argument rather than mine. As my previous comment explained, engaging with a post even just to call it uninteresting undermines any proclamation that you do not care about the post. If your engagement is more substantive than this, then that only further calls into question the need to shame the author for making posts that random passing readers might not care about.

Edited to add:

The 'random passing reader' refers to all readers within a few standard d

... (read more)
-8M. Y. Zuo

I guess it's just not very clear to me why Michael Vassar doesn't consider them to be highly blameworthy.

It is the bad faith engagement which I deem abusive, especially given the context, not the disagreement.

Even if Zack happens to be right, the fact that people do not update about something they don't care about and which cannot be sufficiently simply explained, is not evidence of them being "fake", "corrupt", "epistemically rotten", "enemy combatants", or any other hysterical hyperbole.

The complexity you complain about is not Zack's fault. His detractors engage in endless evasiveness including God-of-the-gaps style arguments as ChristianKI pointed out, and walking back an entire LW sequence that was previously non-controversial, simply because it has become ... (read more)

I think it's also worth emphasizing that the use of the phrase "enemy combatants" was in an account of something Michael Vassar said in informal correspondence, rather than being a description I necessarily expect readers of the account to agree with (because I didn't agree with it at the time). Michael meant something very specific by the metaphor, which I explain in the next paragraph. In case my paraphrased explanation wasn't sufficient, his exact words were:

The latter frame ["enemy combatants"] is more accurate both because criminals have rights and

... (read more)

See, this is an example of the bad faith engagement that lies close to the core of this controversy.

People who do not care about a post click away from it. They do not make picket signs about how much they don't care and socially shame the poster for making posts that aren't aimed at random passing readers. Whether a post is aimed at random passing readers is an abysmally poor criterion for evaluating the merits of posts in a forum that is already highly technical and full of posts for specialist audiences, and in point of fact several readers did care enough to spend hours of their time on it.

-3M. Y. Zuo
This seems incoherent considering I already addressed Zack's point, in a direct reply, 3d ago, just one comment chain down, along with several other folks weighing in. So I'll assume you haven't read them. Here's my other comment reposted here: The 'random passing reader' refers to all readers within a few standard deviations of the average, but not to literally every single reader.  i.e. Those who have no strong views regarding Zack either way. Hence it's unsurprising, and implied, that there are outliers.  Are you confused about this terminology?

The insanity is more reasonably attributed to being met with constant abuse (which your comment is ostensibly an example of) than to his positions on epistemology or the ontology of gender. Also, Zack has already explained that he has something to protect, which is existentially threatened by his detractors. The implication of your sentiment seems to be that he should simply give up on what is precious to him and pick the winning side. This is not the standard you would be applying if you were engaging in good faith.

7tailcalled
I'm not sure "constant abuse" is accurate. Zack's interlocutors seem to vary from genuinely abusive (arguably applicable to sapphire's comment) to locally supportive to locally wrong to locally corrective, but most significantly his interlocutors seem unstructured and unproductive for the conversation. I'd guess that the unstructuredness and unproductiveness is partly because they're not really paying attention to the subject, but also to a significant extent because there are some genuinely confusing aspects to Zack's position, due to a combination of bad communication and Extremely Bad Takes that haven't been corrected yet. It's not abusive to be genuinely confused. (To an extent, these Extremely Bad Takes actually overlap with his position on epistemology/ontology. He tends to take categories as formative, based on models like PCA, which in turn makes it challenging to make sensible descriptions like "biological sex is binary because chromosomes are binary, XX vs XY". This is tricky to fix partly because the sequences also take a position like this, so correcting it would require walking back on significant parts of the sequences and rationalist epistemology.) That said, I don't know whether fixing Zack's bad communication/Bad Takes would fix the conflict. I guess it could make it worse, by making it easier for aggressive activists to know what to attack. But it seems to me like even that could generate less mental illness, as it could be less ambiguous that what is left is simple conflict rather than Zack genuinely being importantly mistaken.
6sapphire
People disagreeing with you, on public sites and especially on their own blogs, is not abuse! 

Hmmm... what if I require intent but the intent needs not be conscious? What makes intent specifically conscious is simply that you model yourself as having the intent; a kind of map-territory correspondence between your intent (territory) and your self-model of your intent (map). We can be conscious of our intentions, but it is not the intentions themselves that are conscious.

In fact, I consider it more dishonest for people to have dishonest intentions they are unaware of than for them to knowingly lie. Insofar as the liar is not making excuses even in hi... (read more)

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