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 victim’s vigilance, and your prescription still not only leaves the victim on the defensive, but also (at least in the example conversation you linked) puts the person using this defensive tactic in the position of having to make demands, which may well become repetitive if the attacker is being persistent, and which on that account opens further vulnerabilities.
Also, your example gives a grossly distorted picture because, 1., it is a case in which you are playing the role of a “helpful mediator”, or, more bluntly, that of an enabler, and 2., the tactic I am describing was not particularly central to the strategy of either person’s side in that particular case. It simply is not a relevant example to any appreciable degree.
I disagree, because Zack’s Ultimate Point is also somewhat unclear to me.
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.
That said, if he was purely making a philosophical point about locally valid types of reasoning for classification, then that would be OK. What I’m saying is that part of what shapes the conflict a lot is that people don’t really believe that he is purely making a philosophical point about classification.
Valid principles of classification are valid even if their proponents are advocating them with a view to some other, more specific point, and the fact that he has that point in mind when making posts about those principles of classification does not alter the fact that such posts are about principles of classification and not about the points he plans to make with them. This is not merely a high-decoupling vs low-decoupling thing; I am not suggesting that people should feign ignorance of his broader point, simply pointing out that the fact that he may advocate some principles of classification as part of a more specific line of argumentation about autogynephilia does not in fact create ambiguity surrounding the thesis/theses of a single given post. They can still straightforwardly be classified as making a point about autogynephilia, about the philosophy of classification, about the flaws of the rationalist community, or some combination of these. This post is clearly mainly a critique of the rationalist community, with the other two topics being secondary to that.
I do think there are gains to be made in increasing cooperativeness, but my experience is that there tends to be a need for greater order
I think there has been an excess of cooperativeness. Setting yourself up as a helpful mediator between Zack and his abusers is an injustice to Zack. The abusers need to be put it in their place, rather.
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 etiology anymore, it was philosophy of classification.
(This was in DMs, IIRC, so I don’t immediately have a link on hand.)
Valid principles of classification are valid even if their proponents are advocating them with a view to some other, more specific point, and the fact that he has that point in mind when making posts about those principles of classification does not alter the fact that such posts are about principles of classification and not about the points he plans to make with them. This is not merely a high-decoupling vs low-decoupling thing; I am not suggesting that people should feign ignorance of his broader point, simply pointing out that the fact that he may advocate some principles of classification as part of a more specific line of argumentation about autogynephilia does not in fact create ambiguity surrounding the thesis/theses of a single given post. They can still straightforwardly be classified as making a point about autogynephilia, about the philosophy of classification, about the flaws of the rationalist community, or some combination of these. This post is clearly mainly a critique of the rationalist community, with the other two topics being secondary to that.
The other two topics can’t be relegated to secondary relevance in this way. This post is a critique of the rationalist community, but it’s a critique with respect to the philosophy of classification (and autogynephilia?), and so understanding the point of the original conflict around philosophy of classification is a necessary condition for understanding the meaning of the critique of the rationalist community.
One option to bypass this problem would be to instead consider posts which are less directly dependent on history. Some examples which seem subtly relevant to the AGP debates without being directly dependent on its history (trying to be reasonably comprehensive):
Assume bad faith: While there was lots of opposition in the comments, it was opposition that made me think.
Challenges to Yudkowsky’s pronoun reform proposal: Comments are mostly supportive and reasonable. There are less-reasonable comments but they have fewer upvotes and their rebuttals have a lot of upvotes.
Blood is thicker than water 🐬: There’s a lot of pushback in the comments. This could fit under your model, but I’d also guess it’s partly an incompleteness of the post. One illustrative example was this, where I knew the way it was incomplete and could therefore add additional information. At the time it was posted, I didn’t know enough information to correct the other incompletenesses, but after spending a long time philosophizing about categorization, I think I know the answers to the other ones, so I’m inclined to say the pushback was appropriate for highlighting the problems with the post.
Reply to Nate Soares on dolphins: Most comments are fine. One point is, Nate Soares claims that he didn’t mean this in relationship to transgender topics. I’m not sure what you make of that but it seems believable to me.
Message length: Comments were positive, but actually it should have received more pushback if it was interpreted in the context of transgender debates, because a lot of the disagreements are causal, whereas this post is correlational.
Overall, I don’t think the pattern is as bad as you say.
I think there has been an excess of cooperativeness. Setting yourself up as a helpful mediator between Zack and his abusers is an injustice to Zack. The abusers need to be put it in their place, rather.
One of the abusers was sapphire, who I posted a pretty decisive rebuttal to. Is this not putting her in her place? There was a subtext of “you seem to be part of the forces that are trying to control Zack”, would it have been sufficient to surface this subtext?
Another person I responded to was Viliam, but at the time of responding, I believed Viliam to be genuinely confused about Zack’s ultimate point, because Viliam thought Zack’s ultimate point was about the etiology of transsexuality, and I had been privately corrected that he had changed is area of discourse. If I got it right, then it was an understandable/non-abusive confusion for Viliam to have, as can be observed from you having a similar confusion. Though the fact that Zack said elsewhere in this post that his part of his core position was the etiology of transness does support Viliam’s original position—but in that case there is actually a lot to be said in defense of rationalists, because a lot of the autogynephilia discourse is simply abysmal. (And the fact that the Ultimate Point is so inconsistent generates good reasons to be confused.)
Also the main abusers are presumably Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky (and maybe also Ozy or someone like that?) but I haven’t exactly recommended that Zack cooperates more with them. Instead in the case of e.g. Scott Alexander I have told Zack that Scott doesn’t pay enough attention to this subject for him to get through (and I don’t think I have gotten involved with Eliezer).
It is true that I have come up with opinions about how Zack should communicate his message, but I don’t really think it is accurate to characterize it as me setting myself up as a helpful mediator. A lot of it comes down to the fact that I have spent the past few years researching transgender topics for my own purposes, for a long period believing in autogynephilia theory, but then uncovering a wide array of flaws. Under such a circumstance, it seems relevant to inform Zack “hey the core of these arguments we’ve been making all this time have these gaping flaws, you should probably fix your strategy. here’s my understanding of how, given your goals”. Separately from this, I am also interested in correcting autogynephilia theory, or at least informing non-autogynephilia-theorists that autogynephilia theory is deeply flawed, so that at least my work can get some use and my frustrations over the last few years can be legible to someone.
In fact a substantial part of my opinions come from attempting to change autogynephilia theorists’ minds, failing, and trying to work out the patterns of why I failed—what their rhetorical motivations and inferential methods must be in order for them to end up stuck in precisely these errors.
The tactic will succeed if there’s even the slightest failure in the victim’s vigilance
I don’t think this is true because if it gets off track one can sort of take stock and “regroup”, getting rid of irrelevant side-threads and returning to the core of it.
and your prescription still not only leaves the victim on the defensive, but also (at least in the example conversation you linked) puts the person using this defensive tactic in the position of having to make demands, which may well become repetitive if the attacker is being persistent, and which on that account opens further vulnerabilities.
Not sure I understand this.
Also, your example gives a grossly distorted picture because, 1., it is a case in which you are playing the role of a “helpful mediator”, or, more bluntly, that of an enabler,
I’m not even sure who you say I am enabling in that link—Jiro or S. Verona Lišková? Both?
My view is that both of them were obscuring the positions they were taking (probably intentionally, because their positions were unpopular? with Jiro taking the position of “transness should not be normalized” and S. Verona Lišková taking positions such as “trans women do not have any male sports advantage”, “trans teens should be able to transition without their parents knowing about it, and this shouldn’t even be up for debate”, etc..
2., the tactic I am describing was not particularly central to the strategy of either person’s side in that particular case. It simply is not a relevant example to any appreciable degree.
I guess.
My take is that I am consistently able to navigate rationalist conversations about autogynephilia theory or sex differences without getting caught up in these sorts of issues. I don’t know if we could measure it somehow—e.g. having me write a post as a test or something. So I find it weird to see this as a “rationalist thing”, and when I look at what the various Blanchardians are doing, I can quite easily see lots of ways in which they set themselves up for this kind of trouble.
This admittedly wasn’t always so clear to me, but the way it became clear to me was that I studied the subject matter of autogynephilia, learned a lot of things, tried to talk with Blanchardians about them, and saw them resist in weird ways.
These also seem like ways in which I could’ve set myself up for the same sort of catch-22 in the conversation I linked, which is why I linked it.
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 appears to me that his focus has shifted all the way to calling out “the blight” or “epistemic rot”, ie. the apparent decline of a community he loves or loved. That, then, would be his present true point, though the ultimate point is nevertheless the one corresponding to his original tagline.
The other two topics can’t be relegated to secondary relevance in this way. This post is a critique of the rationalist community, but it’s a critique with respect to the philosophy of classification (and autogynephilia?), and so understanding the point of the original conflict around philosophy of classification is a necessary condition for understanding the meaning of the critique of the rationalist community.
That is what I meant by “secondary”, though, in analogy to how a necessary instrumental goal is sometimes described by non-LessWrongers as being secondary to their final purpose.
Overall, I don’t think the pattern is as bad as you say.
Most of those posts are from before the thing I call “constant abuse” began on LessWrong. It started when Zack began more directly calling out the rationalist community. The only post you gave as an example from this period was the Assume Bad Faith one, and that one wasn’t one in which he directly addressed any of the three topics enumerated (LOGD not being an intersex condition, philosophy of classification, critique of LW), so it is not actually a counterexample of the trend I am talking about. If you look at his recent posts on these topics, you will find that the pattern of abuse began at some point and was a constant occurrence since.
Of course, he was having some mental health issues before then, but as his chronicle shows, he was being met with a lot of abuse well before that abuse became a constant trend in his LessWrong comment sections in particular. The reason I attribute his present mental health issues to the present constant abuse, however, is that I don’t think of mental illness as a switch that’s turned on somehow and then remains turned on, caused by the initial trigger. I attribute his past mental illness to past abuse, and his present mental illness to the current stream of abuse, ie. the one I referred to as “constant abuse”. While I have no doubt that there are endogenous factors to his mental illness (eg. his decision to try to save this sinking ship that is LW rather than walking out on it), I don’t think those are the main factors that make him deviate from baseline mental health. That seems distinctly attributable to the mistreatment of him, rather.
One of the abusers was sapphire, who I posted a pretty decisive rebuttal to. Is this not putting her in her place? There was a subtext of “you seem to be part of the forces that are trying to control Zack”, would it have been sufficient to surface this subtext?
Potentially. The way your comment was written was decidedly insufficient, however. Wielding massive social and financial pressures against thoughtcriminals to silence them and champion a progressive cause — is so ubiquitous and widely accepted that a subtext is certainly not sufficient social punishment for someone who evidently takes such controlling behaviours (and her right to them) for granted, and indeed sapphire responded to your comment with more of the same abuse: “I don’t think we should help him convince other people of a position that seems to have driven him kinda insane.”
More importantly, when I called out the abuse more directly[1], you immediately made a comment that seemed to imply that the constant abuse could not be the reason for what sapphire calls his insanity, by arguing that the abuse was not constant. In this comment, you also described sapphire’s mistreatment of him as being merely “arguably” abusive, when it quite clearly had the form of a bully telling the victim that he shouldn’t have picked the losing side — a grossly and overtly abusive behaviour. You then characterised what seems to me like an abusive pattern of weaponised confusion and the catch 22 tactic I mentioned earlier as being merely “unstructured and unproductive” rather than abusive, and attributed to this to what you deem as flaws in Zack’s writings. That is you using the very same abusive tactic to downplay the abuse he is being met with.
Also, whatever flaws his writing may have, none of them come even close to justifying the way in which he is treated, and your initial comment in this thread obscured this important point by way of blaming the victim with a semi-plausible critique of his writing.
By being less abusive than sapphire and simultaneously two-siding it with “to be fair, they do have a point that Zack’s writing is unclear”, you are juxtaposing these two criticisms and making the case seem a lot more even than it is. One side is engaging in gross overt abuse against someone who has been gaslit by progressive ideology, the other side writes posts that are too long and meandering. Guess I’ll take the middle ground. Also worth noting that you wrote considerably more words to criticise Zack’s writing than to call out sapphire’s abusive behaviour. You effectively set yourself up to appear as a sensible middle-ground, creating a position of compromise between Zack and his abusers, which is frankly worse than anything sapphire did, but even setting that whole tactic aside, you were also being directly abusive to him yourself as I pointed out two paragraphs ago.
It is true that I have come up with opinions about how Zack should communicate his message, but I don’t really think it is accurate to characterize it as me setting myself up as a helpful mediator. A lot of it comes down to the fact that I have spent the past few years researching transgender topics for my own purposes, for a long period believing in autogynephilia theory, but then uncovering a wide array of flaws.
I am again in the position of having to remind you that being incorrect about factual issues is not a sufficient justification for others to engage in vicious abuse against you. Also, it was specifically your behaviour in this comment thread that I am characterising as setting yourself up as a helpful mediator. Your comment in this thread was not directed at Zack, pointing out flaws in his autogynephilia theory, but directed at me, undermining my attempt to call out sapphire’s blatantly and grossly abusive behaviour.
I don’t think this is true because if it gets off track one can sort of take stock and “regroup”, getting rid of irrelevant side-threads and returning to the core of it.
That approach does not diffuse the moral opprobrium levelled against a person for being long winded or making baseless assertions. These “regroupings” can equally well be engaged in by the person wielding the abusive tactic as by the person trying to defend himself against it, but it is typically the abuser and not the defender who has more experience controlling and weaponising the complexity of a discussion.
Not sure I understand this.
The defensive person is in the position of having to demand regroupings, or else of trying to simply impose them. Either one gives a weapon to the attacker if done repeatedly.
I’m not even sure who you say I am enabling in that link—Jiro or S. Verona Lišková? Both?
That’s beside the point. The point is that you are not the recipient of the abuse and so your situation is fundamentally different, and the only reason it even looks successful is because it manages to set you up as a reasonable mediator who is above it all, thus flattering your narcissism.
My take is that I am consistently able to navigate rationalist conversations about autogynephilia theory or sex differences without getting caught up in these sorts of issues.
My take is that that reflects negatively on your own communication tactics and merely indicates being skilful at manipulation, though in this case it is probably as simple as two-sides’ing everything. Your take reminds me of the “white allies” who say that Malcolm X was setting himself up for trouble by being too combative, or, on the other end of the political aisle, of William F. Buckley trying to clean up the mainstream right by silencing eg. libertarians, paleoconservatives, and populists. I believe your recent dabbles in critical theory have taught you something or other about this social dynamic, which is itself a part of the abuse I am accusing the LessWrong community of being guilty of.
Incidentally I was sorely tempted to invoke Godwin’s law and point out that she could’ve wielded the same tactic against frustrated, embittered dissidents living under nazism, and with only very slight variations she could’ve used it to condemn the Edelweiss pirates, the swings, etc., eg. “I don’t think we should help him convince other people of a position that seems to have gotten him ostracised and driven him into trouble with the SS”. Granted, it was “mere” psychiatrists that Zack had gotten in trouble with.
Your take reminds me of the “white allies” who say that Malcolm X was setting himself up for trouble by being too combative, or, on the other end of the political aisle, of William F. Buckley trying to clean up the mainstream right by silencing eg. libertarians, paleoconservatives, and populists. I believe your recent dabbles in critical theory have taught you something or other about this social dynamic, which is itself a part of the abuse I am accusing the LessWrong community of being guilty of.
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.
Most of those posts are from before the thing I call “constant abuse” began on LessWrong. It started when Zack began more directly calling out the rationalist community.
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 inoffensive.
2021-now—Zack starts posting his memoir, which among other things reveals more direct issues with rationalist leaders.
Now all but one of the links I gave were post 2021, so clearly this breakdown doesn’t capture your objection. Zooming in on the last bit, my reading is:
I guess on reflection Zack was really uneven in his publication of his memoir?? He posted part 1 in 2021, but then waited until 2023 with his second part, and now posted this third part just before 2024. Which I guess makes the bulk of the LW conflict much later than I’d intuitively think of it.
Zack did criticize rationalist leaders during this time, though, including the 2021 stuff on dolphins and the 2022 stuff on pronouns.
So I suppose you could validly raise the hypothesis of “the abuse only arose when Zack escalated”. I don’t really buy into this, partly for reasons I’ll get into later, but at least the history I cited before doesn’t disprove it.
(How about the comments to his previous post in this series, Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer? I take from “If you look at his recent posts on these topics, you will find that the pattern of abuse began at some point and was a constant occurrence since” that you are asserting it showed up here too? Most of the comments on it are fine though, and the bad comments seem well within the tolerance zone where it would be incredibly fragile not to tolerate them. Maybe you’re referring to Alyssa’s twitter stunt? Idk? I’m confused.)
Of course, he was having some mental health issues before then, but as his chronicle shows, he was being met with a lot of abuse well before that abuse became a constant trend in his LessWrong comment sections in particular. The reason I attribute his present mental health issues to the present constant abuse, however, is that I don’t think of mental illness as a switch that’s turned on somehow and then remains turned on, caused by the initial trigger. I attribute his past mental illness to past abuse, and his present mental illness to the current stream of abuse, ie. the one I referred to as “constant abuse”. While I have no doubt that there are endogenous factors to his mental illness (eg. his decision to try to save this sinking ship that is LW rather than walking out on it), I don’t think those are the main factors that make him deviate from baseline mental health. That seems distinctly attributable to the mistreatment of him, rather.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Zack is Simply Crazy And That’s Why He’s Doing This. I agree that Scott’s weird stonewalling of him makes it worse.
Potentially. The way your comment was written was decidedly insufficient, however. Wielding massive social and financial pressures against thoughtcriminals, to silence them and champion a progressive cause is so ubiquitous and widely accepted that a subtext is certainly not sufficient social punishment for someone who evidently takes such controlling behaviours (and her right to them) for granted, and indeed sapphire responded to your comment with more of the same abuse: “I don’t think we should help him convince other people of a position that seems to have driven him kinda insane.”
More importantly, when I called out the abuse more directly[1], you immediately made a comment that seemed to imply that the constant abuse could not be the reason for what sapphire calls his insanity, by arguing that the abuse was not constant. In this comment, you also described sapphire’s mistreatment of him as being merely “arguably” abusive, when it quite clearly had the form of a bully telling the victim that he shouldn’t have picked the losing side — a grossly and overtly abusive behaviour. You then characterised what seems to me like an abusive pattern of weaponised confusion and the catch 22 tactic I mentioned earlier as being merely “unstructured and unproductive” rather than abusive, and attributed to this to what you deem as flaws in Zack’s writings. That is you using the very same abusive tactic to downplay the abuse he is being met with.
I’m… somewhat ambivalent about describing sapphire as “Wielding massive social and financial pressures against thoughtcriminals, to silence them and champion a progressive cause”? On the one hand, a point in favor is when she threatened A Certain Person with a ban in the Slate Star Codex discord server for saying that rationalism is the most extreme malebrained area available. But idk, this isn’t that abusive, considering the ban didn’t happen and that the person was being kind of childish about it (in the typical annoying Blanchardian way of making vague yet extreme claims—really needed to be put in his place). On the other hand, she did let autogynephilia discourse flourish for quite a while, quite strongly, on the very same server, even including around that very same person. And if I understand correctly, her weakness in moderating eventually lead to its culture war channel becoming a cesspool and her stepping down? Idk, I wasn’t around at that time.
It doesn’t seem to me that sapphire has been consistent enough towards this topic to be described as “constantly” anything, and it doesn’t seem to me that saphhire and Zack have had enough interactions to describe their relationship with any sort of constancy either.
Of course her not being constantly abusive does not mean she is not sometimes abusive. My above writing is not a claim that she was not acting abusively. I do lean towards saying that she treated Zack abusively. The “unstructured and unproductive” comment also wasn’t meant to apply to someone like sapphire, but instead to various other figures. I’m tempted to admit that I was wrong to use the term “arguably abusive”, however I do think that because the original conflict is so messy, it’s not so straightforward. (And usually “arguably X” is used to refer to a case where you lean in favor of X, or at least want to forward something like X?)
Also, whatever flaws his writing may have, none of them come even close to justifying the way in which he is treated, and your initial comment in this thread obscured this important point by way of blaming the victim with a semi-plausible critique of his writing.
By being less abusive than sapphire and simultaneously two-siding it with “to be fair, they do have a point that Zack’s writing is unclear”, you are juxtaposing these two criticisms and making the case seem a lot more even than it is. One side is engaging in gross overt abuse against someone who has been gaslit by progressive ideology, the other side writes posts that are too long and meandering. Guess I’ll take the middle ground. Also worth noting that you wrote considerably more words to criticise Zack’s writing than to call out sapphire’s abusive behaviour. You effectively set yourself up to appear as a sensible middle-ground, creating a position of compromise between Zack and his abusers, which is frankly worse than anything sapphire did, but even setting that whole tactic aside, you were also being directly abusive to him yourself as I pointed out two paragraphs ago.
I feel like excessive use of the term “abuse” makes this less clear.
If we interpret sapphire as making a forceful threat, then Zack’s poor writing doesn’t justify the forceful threat. (On the other hand, if Zack was e.g. a university professor or a clinical researcher, then poor argument for his theories would justify a threat of firing—it’d literally be his job to do proper research.) This wasn’t really how I interpreted it, and last I heard from Zack, it’s not really something he has feared. But I guess I can see how one could interpret it that way.
But… again if we take someone like Viliam, I think calling his comment “abuse” is just wrong? If Zack’s original arguments against rationalists were bad, then rationalists shouldn’t be convinced by them, and it’s not that outrageous that that they sort of make a half-assed counter and then ignore the topic, and it’s a relevant point to ask “but wait, what were your original arguments? doesn’t this seem overly convoluted?”.
I am again in the position of having to remind you that being incorrect about factual issues is not a sufficient justification for others to engage in vicious abuse against you. Also, it was specifically your behaviour in this comment thread that I am characterising as setting yourself up as a helpful mediator. Your comment in this thread was not directed at Zack, pointing out flaws in his autogynephilia theory, but directed at me, undermining my attempt to call out sapphire’s blatantly and grossly abusive behaviour.
My actual motivation with my original comment was to try to point you at some of the areas in which Blanchardians are wrong or even abusive, since (in our other Discussion, in the emails) you were skeptical that my views are all that much driven by my experiences with Blanchardianism.
A case study would presumably be Reply to Ozymandias on Two-Type MtF Taxonomy. A lot of Ozy’s arguments were really bad, and then Zack responded by correcting Ozy’s bad arguments, but also by throwing a whole bunch of other bad arguments in there too. This was arguably the debate that original convinced me of Blanchardianism, and yet in retrospect the thing that convinced me (the ETLE stuff) shouldn’t have been convincing! Of particular note is Zack’s statement “But you agree that erotic female embodiment fantasies are very common in pre-trans women; you seem to think this can be a mere manifestation of gender dysphoria.”, which borders on abusive considering how it equivocates between Ozy’s moderate “well let’s listen to what trans women have to say about their experiences” and Blanchardian’s radical “let’s assume that 80% of gynephilic trans women are severely lying about this subject, and therefore disqualify their testimony/exaggerated their claimed experiences and declare this the Official Scientific Truth and call everyone who is objecting deniers”. This rhetorical trick works by using the vagueness of informal language instead of doing more crisp and precise psychometric characterizations. Or there’s also the post before that, Reply to Ozymandias on Autogynephilia, where by my count 5 out of 6 of the replies were Bad Takes.
My dabbles in critical theory arose from and is almost entirely limited to my contact with Zack’s associates, and from critical theorists seeming to describe pathologies that I have frequently faced from Blanchardians. As such, Blanchardianism basically screens off (in a probabilistic DAG sense) other critical theory topics for me. If critical theory says that my behavior in these topics is that of Bad Centrists, then I say “hmm then maybe those Bad Centrists were actually onto something, idk”. I don’t know anything about how combative Malcolm X was, nor do I know anything about William F. Buckley, I just know that Blanchardianism sucks, and if critical theorists don’t know that then they lack basic information for commenting on this subject matter.
So the whole critical theory thing really was just self-serving, then. Funny, the critical theorists wrote about that, too.
I guess “Zack only recently began more directly calling out the rationalist community” is maybe a natural way for an outsider/newcomer to parse this conflict, idk. I don’t find this parsing super intuitive because I immediately think of posts from 2018-2020 like this and this and this and this. But I was following his blog during this time, and these haven’t really been discussed on LessWrong due to the “no politics!” restriction.
Look, I am really becoming quite impatient with this whole tangent of nitpicking one single adjective that was never particularly essential to my argument. There are older cases of him calling out the LessWrong community, some of them even before 2018, and there are also older cases of him being abused in various ways. His more recent interactions are met with an abusive reception more consistently than his older interactions. I am not going to bother continuing to defend my choice to use the phrase “constant abuse”. My point stands without it, and as far as I can tell, there is no point to this endless nitpicking other than simply evading the actual argument.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Zack is Simply Crazy And That’s Why He’s Doing This. I agree that Scott’s weird stonewalling of him makes it worse.
Great, you’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it. Now if you could see how your own behaviour makes it worse, we might actually get somewhere.
I’m… somewhat ambivalent about describing sapphire as “Wielding massive social and financial pressures against thoughtcriminals, to silence them and champion a progressive cause”?
She didn’t create the pressure, but she invoked it when talking about how he has gone insane and is losing friends, etc., and she certainly wielded it against him. But actually my point was simply that even the creation of such pressures is so widely accepted that your callout of sapphire’s comparatively milder abuse would fly beneath the radar of most people, and thus not work effectively as a callout.
It doesn’t seem to me that sapphire has been consistent enough towards this topic to be described as “constantly” anything
Hold on; I talked about the abuse he’s been receiving as an explanation for his insanity, not as part of an accusation that sapphire was constantly abusing him. I was in fact in the process of collecting examples of abusive behaviour and other bad faith engagement, to use for a post about the existence of unintentional manipulation and other forms of bad faith that the perpetrator may not be aware of engaging in, because there is in the LessWrong community a completely erroneous implicit assumption that people are always aware when they’re being manipulative. I wanted to make a post correcting this error, explaining some things about the boundaries of consciousness, about what it means for intents to be conscious, etc., and I wanted to illustrate it with examples of people unknowingly engaging in bad faith.
If we interpret sapphire as making a forceful threat, then Zack’s poor writing doesn’t justify the forceful threat. (On the other hand, if Zack was e.g. a university professor or a clinical researcher, then poor argument for his theories would justify a threat of firing—it’d literally be his job to do proper research.) This wasn’t really how I interpreted it, and last I heard from Zack, it’s not really something he has feared. But I guess I can see how one could interpret it that way.
I did not interpret it as a forceful threat either.
But… again if we take someone like Viliam, I think calling his comment “abuse” is just wrong? If Zack’s original arguments against rationalists were bad, then rationalists shouldn’t be convinced by them, and it’s not that outrageous that that they sort of make a half-assed counter and then ignore the topic, and it’s a relevant point to ask “but wait, what were your original arguments? doesn’t this seem overly convoluted?”.
The only way you’re getting this analysis to sound reasonable at all is by omitting a lot of crucial points. For example, the cultishness of trans theory in assuming that gender dysphoria in an AMAB implies female brainsex, the fact that his arguments, though erroneous in some of the particulars, did point to a very real and very central point, which I will here just indicate as the point that not all MtFs are HSTS, whatever the explanation for the others, the disinterest in seriously investigating these issues at all, despite how massively they impact so many members of this community, etc. There was plenty of very real bad faith in the LW community’s reception of Zack’s points, well beyond what can be explained by factual errors, especially when they were the sort that took even you a considerable amount of time to discover.
My actual motivation with my original comment was to try to point you at some of the areas in which Blanchardians are wrong or even abusive
Most Blanchardians I have interacted with were TERFs, whom I consider to be some of the most dishonest, abusive people I have ever encountered. Even with our current falling out, I am still utterly enraged at how Rod Fleming treats you. He is probably in my top ten of least likeable people I have ever encountered. I am very annoyed at Michael Bailey’s behaviour towards you, because I would very much have liked to see debates between you and him.
I am not sure why you think you need to convince me that Blanchardians are wrong and most of them abusive. I think it is worth pointing out that you are just now making the case that a community you interact with a lot, and which you were a part of for a long time, is wrong and abusive. You have made the same observation about a lot of other such communities. I don’t remember the exact list, but I seem to recall that it included liberals (and perhaps antifeminists? idk).
Here’s the kicker: I agree.
I also happen to think it might be fruitful for you to wonder if you might be drawn to these abusive communities, and whether the abusiveness might have been something of a constant throughout your changing affiliations, and whether it might not have persisted through your most recent such changes.
since (in our other Discussion, in the emails) you were skeptical that my views are all that much driven by my experiences with Blanchardianism.
Because, regarding your dabbles in critical theory, I was paying attention to the bright little spark of genuine contrition and good faith, not to the apparently much larger component that was merely self-serving. Perhaps I was being overly Christian.
So the whole critical theory thing really was just self-serving, then. Funny, the critical theorists wrote about that, too.
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.
Look, I am really becoming quite impatient with this whole tangent of nitpicking one single adjective that was never particularly essential to my argument. … My point stands without it, and as far as I can tell, there is no point to this endless nitpicking other than simply evading the actual argument.
Sure. Zack faces a bunch of abuse from his posts. Whether it’s exactly constant isn’t so important.
Great, you’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it. Now if you could see how your own behaviour makes it worse, we might actually get somewhere.
I’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate myself on it? How?
The only way you’re getting this analysis to sound reasonable at all is by omitting a lot of crucial points. For example, the cultishness of trans theory in assuming that gender dysphoria in an AMAB implies female brainsex, the fact that his arguments, though erroneous in some of the particulars, did point to a very real and very central point, which I will here just indicate as the point that not all MtFs are HSTS, whatever the explanation for the others, the disinterest in seriously investigating these issues at all, despite how massively they impact so many members of this community, etc. There was plenty of very real bad faith in the LW community’s reception of Zack’s points, well beyond what can be explained by factual errors, especially when they were the sort that took even you a considerable amount of time to discover.
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?”.
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 investigated! But nobody listens to me about this...)
Most Blanchardians I have interacted with were TERFs, whom I consider to be some of the most dishonest, abusive people I have ever encountered. Even with our current falling out, I am still utterly enraged at how Rod Fleming treats you. He is probably in my top ten of least likeable people I have ever encountered. I am very annoyed at Michael Bailey’s behaviour towards you, because I would very much have liked to see debates between you and him.
I am not sure why you think you need to convince me that Blanchardians are wrong and most of them abusive.
Well, for one, because you don’t seem to agree with me in the case of Zack.
Also I’m not super convinced by your opposition to Michael Bailey as you probably don’t know the specifics of that conflict. For all I know, you might support Bailey if you knew more. And considering that Michael Bailey did offer something like a debate, it seems like you need to be more specific about which subject you’d like to see me debate with him, in order for you to truly illustrate that you are not simply on his side.
I think it is worth pointing out that you are just now making the case that a community you interact with a lot, and which you were a part of for a long time, is wrong and abusive. You have made the same observation about a lot of other such communities. I don’t remember the exact list, but I seem to recall that it included liberals (and perhaps antifeminists? idk).
Here’s the kicker: I agree.
I also happen to think it might be fruitful for you to wonder if you might be drawn to these abusive communities, and whether the abusiveness might have been something of a constant throughout your changing affiliations, and whether it might not have persisted through your most recent such changes.
Given that they were all abusive in like 2 very specific ways, yes, but also this makes me able to identify them in the future.
The apparently-not-critical-theory-but-instead-something-else impression I got still made me question a bunch of my past behavior.
Indeed, and some of those lines of questioning yourself did indeed lead to regrets — for a time. Until you walked back your few genuine displays of good faith (edit: excepting the one with the discord server, though you did weaponise my emphasis on that one against me, which is arguably similar to walking it back). That sort of thing gives me an impression that even the process of questioning your past behaviour is basically just a self-serving preemptive defence against criticisms such as this one.
If critical theorists have come up with some relevant theory, then feel encouraged to post it. I’m not going to be convinced by vague allusions to figures I don’t know anything about.
Iirc it is mostly in its applied forms, as in critical race theory. Robin DiAngelo for example frequently argues that white progressives are just appropriating the language of the civil rights movement and of subsequent theories (CRT being one) in a way that doesn’t properly engage with the issues and is really just a self-serving tactic to preserve their privileged position and their white saviour complex. I believe Herbert Marcuse also argued something similar in One-Dimensional Man, albeit obviously without the focus on race.
I’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate myself on it? How?
Because, whether by calculation or (as I think) by political instinct, all your critiques of Zack’s critics are goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate as contrasted with the extremists on both sides, even though in point of fact I have had to practically drag you to make even this admission. At first you were describing sapphire as only arguably abusive, and even your previous comment you were still creating an outrageously one-sided portrayal of Zack’s interactions with the community that simply portrayed his arguments as bad while glossing over the fact that he was pointing to a lot of real substance. Even after your break with Blanchardianism, you are after all still using most of the terminology that you were introduced to through Blanchardianism. There is real substance there, even if most (all?) of it predates Blanchard’s own work, and the idea that the rationalist community dismissed it all simply because of flaws in Zack’s arguments does not even come remotely close to being a reasonable characterisation. I think you know this on some level.
In short, your behaviour is goal oriented towards keeping up appearances of being a sensible moderate, charitable to both sides, while in actual fact having an absolutely immense bias.
Zack… doesn’t seem to have discussed brainsex much?
Not by that term, but that is what is implied when discussing whether LOGD is an intersex condition. It’s not like he was referring to XXY chromosomes or some such.
I am not convinced you are correctly interpreting that market.
Approximately nobody in these rationalist debates are claiming that all MtFs are HSTS
Of course not. Almost none of them would’ve even encountered the term if not for Blanchardianism, which is the point I’m getting at. Previously they would have simply recognised HSTS’s as “straight transwomen” and left it at that.
It’s not clear how you’re asking it to be investigated, and Zack hasn’t written much about this either. (I have extensive opinions about how it should be investigated! But nobody listens to me about this...)
It’s not like I am criticising them for failing to spend lots of effort pursuing some particular line of investigation, just pointing out that their rejection of Zack simply cannot be explained by some flaws in Blanchardianism that took even you quite a while to uncover.
Look, I am going to be blunt and say that you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting and you really need to learn to get it under control.
Well, for one, because you don’t seem to agree with me in the case of Zack.
Zack is being complicit in his own abuse in much the same way you are complicit in it, albeit to a lesser extent.
Also I’m not super convinced by your opposition to Michael Bailey as you probably don’t know the specifics of that conflict. For all I know, you might support Bailey if you knew more. And considering that Michael Bailey did offer something like a debate, it seems like you need to be more specific about which subject you’d like to see me debate with him, in order for you to truly illustrate that you are not simply on his side.
I indeed don’t know the specifics of that conflict; certainly not enough to be “simply on his side”. I have however read your explanation of how he came to block you, and am willing to take your word for it, since it seems consistent with the vibe I get from him. He actually kinda reminds me of a very particular kind of annoying Catholic father figure[1]. So although I do not know the specifics of that conflict, I do know enough to have a negative overall impression of him, just going by vibes.
My bad impression of him has been sufficient to deter me from looking closer into him without a clear reason, though such a reason was to some extent granted by his view of femininity as you related them to me (something to the effect that straight men will never be truly feminine). There, I am probably mostly on his side, though I suspect he has less understanding of the more aristocratic kind of femininity that I consider more central to the concept.
Given that they were all abusive in like 2 very specific ways, yes, but also this makes me able to identify them in the future.
Yes, you will be able to identify these particular manifestations of narcissism, and thus find communities in which it manifests differently, in ways you are less aware of, and hence will have even less self-awareness of perpetrating. If there is an improvement implied here, I fail to see it.
and I say this as someone who both prefers Catholicism to Protestantism and patriarchy to feminism. There are nevertheless some very annoying, very prejudiced Catholic patriarchs in Texas, and he reminds me of them. I don’t mean to imply that he actually is Catholic, of course.
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.)
The issue at hand is a critique of the rationalist community. A community is the product of its members.
Although, in this particular case, part of the issue is that tailcalled is having a private feud with me on the side, which he decided to bring into this comment section under false pretenses, cf. his own words:
My actual motivation with my original comment was to try to point you at some of the areas in which Blanchardians are wrong or even abusive, since (in our other Discussion, in the emails) you were skeptical that my views are all that much driven by my experiences with Blanchardianism.
There is no excuse for this kind of manipulative behaviour, but it is par for the course when it comes to the LessWrong community and thus eminently relevant to critiquing that same community.
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.)
but I don’t see anything manipulative or under-false-pretenses about what you’re complaining about here.
He responded to me in a manner that seemed to only suggest an intention of addressing the subject matter of discussion in this post, not an intention of swaying my stance towards him in our private feud, but then in the text I quoted, he explicitly states that his purpose was to sway my stance in that private feud. That’s practically the definition of false pretenses.
You’re falling prey to the halo effect. You are put off by my more disagreeable manner, and so you impute other negative characteristics to me and become blinded to even very blatant abuses from tailcalled towards me. For my part, I am compelled to be very forcefully assertive by tailcalled’s extreme evasiveness.
(And, for what it’s worth, reading this thread I get a much stronger impression of “importing grudges from elsewhere” from you than from tailcalled.)
That’s because you’ve fallen for his manipulation tactics. He literally admitted the false pretenses, stopping only short of actually using that label. His original reply to me was, by his own admission, motivated by the private feud, which means he was the one who imported a grudge from elsewhere, regardless of what vibe you are getting.
And the sole reason I am coming across as more begrudging than he is because he keeps evading the points so I have to keep directing him back towards them, making me appear forceful, which you may remember was precisely what I said would happen if I follow his prescription for defusing these manipulation tactics.
All of that is him manipulating you, and you have fallen for it.
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 avoiding talking about. (I’m not sure what it is that you think he is avoiding talking about. Maybe it’s How Terrible Tailcalled Is, but in that case I don’t think you get to say “I’m only being insulting to tailcalled because he keeps trying to make the conversation be about something other than how awful he is”.)
Saying something relevant to an ongoing discussion (which it seems clear to me tailcalled’s original comment was) while also hoping it will be persuasive to someone who has disagreed with you about something else is not “false pretenses”.
He specifically wanted to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive, which massively distorts his judgement with respect to commenting on the justice of Zack’s actions and LW’s reception of him. Tailcalled ought to at the very least have disclosed these ulterior motives from the beginning.
An additional point to note is that after more than a decade of efforts to mend the relationship, I gave up and cut off contact with tailcalled. I had however given him the opportunity to reach out to me with a view to make amends, or otherwise to convince me that I had been wrong to cut him off. He exploited this offer and chose not to do either, and for some reason I went along with it, causing the past several months to have been a lot more torturous than they needed to be, but it was somewhat bearable because it was confined to that one email conversation.
Then he interacts with me here, not only to address the topic of Zack’s post, but specifically to pursue his feud with me outside of emails.
It is certainly true that I am put off by your disagreeable manner. I do not think this is the halo effect.
That’s not what I said. It’s your being put off by my disagreeable manner that makes you subject to the halo effect when it comes to tailcalled’s responses.
as for any opinions I may form, that’s a matter of reasoning “if Cornelius had good arguments I would expect him to use them; since he evidently prefers to insult people, it is likely that he doesn’t have good arguments”
But the things you deemed insults were actually critiques of his character, not mere insults, and most of those critiques were aimed at showing that he is being unjust towards Zack, with the few exceptions pointing out character flaws that are characteristic of many LessWrongers and not just him. It is simply not possible to argue in favour of my position without raising points of personal criticism, because those points of criticism are absolutely central to my position, and it is only the horns effect that makes you perceive them as mere insults.
Of course you might just enjoy being unpleasant for its own sake
No, I do not. I actually have quite a distaste for it, but when faced with an immensely abusive community such as this one, my only other means of defence is to plead for mercy, which is errosive to self esteem.
But in this case, since I am dealing with tailcalled in particular, even that would not work. I have learned from about more than a decade of abuse from him that this is the only viable defence. Problem is, if he is in a crowd of enablers who don’t notice his bs because they are used to engaging in milder forms of the same abusive behaviour, then it will paint me as the abusive one.
It doesn’t look to me as if tailcalled is being evasive; if anything he[1] seems to me to be engaging with the issues rather more than you are.
No, this is simply him having evaded my arguments for so long that he has managed to distort your impression of what is actually being discussed. The main issue is a critique of the rationalist community. That then led to an issue of tailcalled’s injustice in judging the feud, and that in turn led to an issue of his evading my points.
If you trace back the lines of argumentation where I seem to be insulting him, you will find that what you deem insults are mostly accusations of injustice that were centrally relevant to the argument. Then, by endless nitpicking and evasiveness, and my insistence on maintaining the accusations of injustice through this obfuscation, they became increasingly separated from their original context, and you quite simply lost track of why I made them in the first place.
There are however also a few of them (edit: namely, the ones about self-serving bias) that only make sense in context of the private feud, and which are in response to remarks of his (eg. about the critical theory) that only look cruel if seen in context, which sorta illustrates what I mean about the false pretenses, because if he had disclosed them from the beginning, I would not have engaged at all.
Edit: I am also suspicious that he might have taken it here in part to present the feud in front of a crowd, with zero context, and specifically a crowd that is part of his culture and is likely to agree with him based on surface appearances, setting up false appearances of unanimity.
*edit: removed a fact that could be used to personally identify tailcalled
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 this one, which again doesn’t have anything like that. What comment do you think we are talking about here?
I am fairly sure my opinions of tailcalled’s responses here is very similar to my opinion of his comments elsewhere which haven’t (so far as I’ve noticed) involved you at all, so I don’t find it very plausible that those opinions are greatly affected by the fact that on this occasion he is arguing with someone I’m finding disagreeable.
“Pointing out character flaws”. “Insults”. Po-TAY-to. Po-TAH-to. My complaint isn’t that the way in which you are pointing out tailcalled’s alleged character flaws is needlessly unpleasant, it’s that you’re doing it at all. (And I would say the same if tailcalled were spending all his time pointing out your alleged character flaws, whatever those might be, but he isn’t.) As far as I am concerned, when an LW discussion becomes mostly about the character of one of its participants, it is very unlikely that it is doing any good to anyone. And if what you mostly want to do here is point out people’s character flaws, then even if those character flaws are real I think it’s probably not very helpful.
It doesn’t look to me as if LW is the hotbed of “constant abuse” you are trying to portray it as (and no, I’m not trying to insist that “constant” has to mean “literally nonstop” or anything). It looks to me—and here I’m going off my own impression, not e.g. anything tailcalled may have said about the situation—as if Zack gets plenty of disagreement on LW but very little abuse. So to whatever extent your “accusations of injustice” are of the form “tailcalled denies that Zack is constantly being abused, but he is”, I find myself agreeing with tailcalled more than with you. Again, this was already my impression, so it can’t be a halo/horns thing from this conversation.
(Of course, you may have me pigeonholed as one of the “crowd of enablers”. Maybe you’re right, though from my perspective I’m pretty sure I’m not abusing anyone and have no intention or awareness of engaging in the specific catch-22 you describe. I have disagreed with Zack from time to time, though.)
Well, maybe I’m confused about what tailcalled’s “original comment” that you’re complaining about was, because looking at what I thought it was I can’t see anything in it that anyone could possibly expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are abusive. Nor much that anyone could expect to convince anyone that Blanchardians are wrong, which makes me suspect even more that I’ve failed to identify what comment we’re talking about. But the only other plausible candidate I see for the “original comment” is this one, which has eve n less of that sort. Or maybe this one, which again doesn’t have anything like that. What comment do you think we are talking about here?
I also don’t see how it was supposed to do that, but I am commenting on his stated intentions. The fact that it is hard to spot those intentions in his first comments, even when actively looking for them, only further corroborates my point that his stated intentions were not obvious at all, and that it seemed to be a relatively innocuous reply that was made with only the discussion in mind. Yet, by his own statements, his point in responding was to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive. Thus, as I said, false pretenses.
I am fairly sure my opinions of tailcalled’s responses here is very similar to my opinion of his comments elsewhere which haven’t (so far as I’ve noticed) involved you at all, so I don’t find it very plausible that those opinions are greatly affected by the fact that on this occasion he is arguing with someone I’m finding disagreeable.
My claim was specifically that the halo effect is blinding you to an evasiveness that he does not typically display. Thus it is wholly consistent with you having a similar opinion of his comments here compared to your usual opinion of his comments.
“Pointing out character flaws”. “Insults”. Po-TAY-to. Po-TAH-to. My complaint isn’t that the way in which you are pointing out tailcalled’s alleged character flaws is needlessly unpleasant, it’s that you’re doing it at all.
I have already addressed that argument, and the whole point of my using the phrase “pointing out character flaws” was to stress the relevance of doing so to the argument I am making.
Ad hominem is not a fallacy if the topic of discussion is literally about the person’s character, and justice when commenting on feuds is after all a character trait. I cannot effectively criticise a community without criticising its members, and I cannot effectively criticise its members without pointing out character flaws, ie. without “insulting” them as you put it. If I had to adhere to your standards, my position would be ruled out before I even had a chance to make my case.
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.
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.
an evasiveness that he does not typically display
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.
I cannot effectively criticise a community without criticising its members
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 displays of good faith” and “goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate” and “you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting” and so forth.
I think this sort of comment is basically never helpful. If what you are trying to do here is something that can’t be done without this sort of comment, then I think it would be better not to do it . (More precisely: if you think that what you are trying to do here is something that can’t be done without such comments, then I think you are probably wrong unless what you are trying to do is mostly “make tailcalled feel bad” or something.)
I did in fact do X in order to do Y. The proof, which only @Cornelius Dybdahl can see, is that “which in turn makes it challenging to make sensible descriptions like “biological sex is binary because chromosomes are binary, XX vs XY”″ is a reference to something he said in the emails.
The issue is that he is misrepresenting what Y is. Y is not proving that Blanchardians are abusive. Y is highlighting a problem with Blanchardian rhetoric, which Zack arguably does more than the run-of-the-mill TERF that Cornelius said he already knew was abusive.
And, again, it is not “false pretenses” to engage in a discussion with more than one goal in mind and not explicitly lay out all one’s goals in advance.
It saddens me that LessWrong has reached such a state that it is now a widespread behaviour to straw man the hell out of someone’s position and then double down when called on it.
What I think is both rude and counterproductive is focusing on what sort of person the other person is, as opposed to what they have done and are doing. In this particular thread the rot begins with “thus flattering your narcissism”
But the problem is at the level of his character, not any given behaviour. I have already explained this in one of my replies to tailcalled; if he simply learns to stay away from one type of narcissistic community, he will still be drawn in by communities where narcissism manifests in other ways than the one he is “immunized” to, so to speak. Likewise with the concrete behaviours: if he learns to avoid some toxic behaviours, the underlying toxicity will simply manifest in other toxic behaviours. I do not say there is therefore no point in calling out the toxic behaviours, but the only point in doing that is to use them as pointers to the underlying problem. If I just get him to recognise a particular pattern of behaviour, then I will have misidentified the pattern to him and might as well have done nothing. The issue is specifically that he is a horrible person and needs to realise it so he can begin practising virtue — this being of course a moral philosophy that LessWrongers are generally averse to, but you can see the result.
And then we get “you’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it” and “your few genuine displays of good faith” and “goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate” and “you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting” and so forth.
All of these are criticising behaviours rather than character and thus fit your pretended criterion. Thus, you made no specific complaint about them, because what you actually take issue with is simply my harshness and directness.
I think this sort of comment is basically never helpful
It is the only thing that is ever helpful when an improvement to the underlying character is what is called for.
(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.)
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.
Indeed, and some of those lines of questioning yourself did indeed lead to regrets — for a time. Until you walked back your few genuine displays of good faith (edit: excepting the one with the discord server, though you did weaponise my emphasis on that one against me, which is arguably similar to walking it back). That sort of thing gives me an impression that even the process of questioning your past behaviour is basically just a self-serving preemptive defence against criticisms such as this one.
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..
Iirc it is mostly in its applied forms, as in critical race theory. Robin DiAngelo for example frequently argues that white progressives are just appropriating the language of the civil rights movement and of subsequent theories (CRT being one) in a way that doesn’t properly engage with the issues and is really just a self-serving tactic to preserve their privileged position and their white saviour complex. I believe Herbert Marcuse also argued something similar in One-Dimensional Man, albeit obviously without the focus on race.
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).
Because, whether by calculation or (as I think) by political instinct, all your critiques of Zack’s critics are goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate as contrasted with the extremists on both sides, even though in point of fact I have had to practically drag you to make even this admission.
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 Blanchardian camp, again without systematically studying or thinking about the subject, and therefore also ends up constantly spamming all sorts of false or nonsensical ideas, and that I’ve spent the past few years systematically studying and thinking about the subject and therefore have detailed opinions about how either camp is wrong. But that doesn’t mean I’m “above it all”, instead I’m way deep into it all and I’m so tired of and defeated by it all.
Zack has gotten to the point where he pretty much admits he is mainly driven by priors! It’s just not wrong to see things this way. If we want, we could quantify it with a survey, listing a bunch of Blanchardian and anti-Blanchardian beliefs, and then scoring people. Yes, I’d probably score in the middle whereas the Blanchardians would score to one side and the anti-Blanchardians would score to another side.
At first you were describing sapphire as only arguably abusive
even your previous comment you were still creating an outrageously one-sided portrayal of Zack’s interactions with the community that simply portrayed his arguments as bad while glossing over the fact that he was pointing to a lot of real substance
Not by that term, but that is what is implied when discussing whether LOGD is an intersex condition. It’s not like he was referring to XXY chromosomes or some such.
And here we’re getting to the real meat of the issue.
First, a communication issue. Zack has plausibly intended to talk about brainsex or something, but his interlocutors have openly been thinking about other things, and the semantics of “an intersex condition” is not simply defined to be brainsex. (As a sidenote, XXY is not an intersex condition, but AFAIK most intersex conditions do have a fairly bounded scope, like MRKH and such.)
People have frequently been discussing things like body-map theory, which does not require that the entire brain has its sex swapped, only that some basic perception things are swapped. Body map theory is pretty stupid, but Zack hasn’t really done much to address it (and I think for a while he might even have been sympathetic to it applying to HSTSs? Idk, I may be wrong).
My bad impression of him has been sufficient to deter me from looking closer into him without a clear reason, though such a reason was to some extent granted by his view of femininity as you related them to me (something to the effect that straight men will never be truly feminine). There, I am probably mostly on his side, though I suspect he has less understanding of the more aristocratic kind of femininity that I consider more central to the concept.
And again this gets to the meat of the issue.
Nobody gets to pick the definition of “masculinity/femininity” used for these topics. If one is studying the sociological effects of transness, one has to focus on the sociologically relevant aspects of femininity, which I think is heavily intertwined with the sexual market.
But, Blanchardianism is not claiming to be a theory of sociology. Blanchardianism is claiming to be a theory of transgender etiology, and therefore one shouldn’t simply be picking the definition of “masculinity/femininity” to optimize sociological relevance.
There’s a case to be made that one should avoid talking about “masculinity/femininity” at all, since it can be confusing due to its sociological meaning. But it doesn’t change the fact that one needs to consider the distinction between macho vs sensitive men, and that one might want to entertain the relevance of neuroticism or feminine aesthetic interests or so on. If one just rejects these questions as “not real femininity” without providing any explanation, or by (as Zack tends to do) providing nonsense explanations (e.g. multivariate group differences), then one is doing something very wrong.
… if one is trying to study etiology. Of course, maybe Blanchardianism is not about etiology?? Could that be true?? Wouldn’t that be wild?? Then everyone would have to change their entire discourse because all the preexisting discourse was using etiology-related words.
It’s not like I am criticising them for failing to spend lots of effort pursuing some particular line of investigation, just pointing out that their rejection of Zack simply cannot be explained by some flaws in Blanchardianism that took even you quite a while to uncover.
First, Ozy were making some nonsense arguments against ETLE. The fact that they were nonsense, and that the ETLE correlations actually seemed to hold, made me think the Blanchardians were onto something. In retrospect, in order to determine the direction of the causal arrow between “sexually attracted to being X” and “want to be X”, I was using “sexually attracted to X” as an instrumental variable. But in retrospect this seems stupid because whichever confounders could generate an attraction to X as partners could plausibly also generate a desire to be X, so the IV assumptions don’t hold.
Another argument was Ozy’s point that there is a distinction between “true autogynephiles” and trans women, which I took as making predictions about discontinuities in the distribution that turned out to (sort of) not be there. But that is focusing overly much on random predictions made by a random person who has not been thinking very much about it. What I’ve instead learned is that I should ignore almost everything that people have previously said on these sorts of topics because it is very poorly informed, and instead collect a wealth of information myself.
Of course, these lines of thought would be insane if Blanchardianism was a sociological theory. A sane line of thought if Blanchardianism was a sociological theory would be something like the disruptive/pragmatic typology, though of course since Blanchardianism is claiming to be an etiological theory, it is instead absolutely insane to take the evidence for the disruptive/pragmatic typology as being some huge validation of Blanchardianism.
Yes, you will be able to identify these particular manifestations of narcissism, and thus find communities in which it manifests differently, in ways you are less aware of, and hence will have even less self-awareness of perpetrating. If there is an improvement implied here, I fail to see it.
I mean it would be insane for me to just simply avoid those 2 pathologies. Instead I should ask more generally what the community is trying to achieve, whether it is good at achieving that, whether I want to achieve that and whether it would be helpful for me to be in it, whether it is responsive to critique and accountable, etc..
But the thing is, Robin DiAngelo and other CRT people are constantly bluffing. They keep citing evidence for their beliefs that doesn’t actually precisely pin down their position, but instead can accommodate a wide variety of positions. In such a case, it’s not unreasonable or unexpected that people would pick and choose what ideas they find most plausible.
Good thing then that I’m calling you out on self-serving bias rather than special pleading, then.
I don’t know to what extent this is just poor communication (maybe she does have the relevant evidence but doesn’t cite it) or a grift (considering she axiomatically rejects innate racial differences, and falsely presents innate racial differences as the reigning ideological explanation for racial inequality, there’s probably at least a nonzero element of grift).
It’s a gift. She is doing precisely the same thing she is calling out other white progressives on, but when you think about it, that only corroborates her point that race grifting is something white progressives are liable to do.
The case with Scott Alexander seems like an exception to this, though? If Scott is someone who is extremely prone to not paying attention to this subject matter, then I am clearly not simultaneously contrasting myself with people who are extremely prone to paying attention to this subject matter. Instead I am making comments all over the place.
The two major factions in a controversy are rarely perfectly orthogonal. I am not suggesting that you are contrasting yourself with people who are extremely prone to paying attention to the subject matter, merely that you are setting yourself up as the moderate who fairly critiques both factions, despite actually having an absolutely immense bias in what standards you hold each side to.
But that doesn’t mean I’m “above it all”, instead I’m way deep into it all and I’m so tired of and defeated by it all.
Describing yourself as “so tired of and defeated by it all” is simply another way of positioning yourself above it all, differing only in that it insinuates a kind of martyrdom at the same time. Your behaviour is almost comically narcissistic.
Missing the point again — the point is simply that you use a lot more qualifiers when critiquing one side than the other, even if the former is actually behaving a lot worse. ESL or not, I am pretty sure you are able to tell that “sapphire is abusive” is a much more assertive formulation than “sapphire is arguably abusive”, therefore I am inclined to call bullshit on your ESL excuse.
Body map theory is pretty stupid, but Zack hasn’t really done much to address it (and I think for a while he might even have been sympathetic to it applying to HSTSs? Idk, I may be wrong).
Again missing the point, which is simply that Zack’s discussion of these concepts actually did provide a lot of genuine value and insights, even if there were also many points where he was flatly wrong, and the total dismissiveness of the community, again, simply cannot be explained by flaws that were subtle enough for even you to take a while to discover them.
And again this gets to the meat of the issue.
No, this was simply me describing my impression of Michael Bailey. I am well aware that Blanchardianism is not a theory of sociology, and is not about masculinity and femininity.
Of course, these lines of thought would be insane if Blanchardianism was a sociological theory. A sane line of thought if Blanchardianism was a sociological theory would be something like the disruptive/pragmatic typology, though of course since Blanchardianism is claiming to be an etiological theory, it is instead absolutely insane to take the evidence for the disruptive/pragmatic typology as being some huge validation of Blanchardianism.
Disruptive HSTS’s are however disruptive in very different ways than other disruptive trans women. In particular, HSTS’s, disruptive or not, are much less likely to be extremely oppressive to gay men.
I mean it would be insane for me to just simply avoid those 2 pathologies. Instead I should ask more generally what the community is trying to achieve, whether it is good at achieving that, whether I want to achieve that and whether it would be helpful for me to be in it, whether it is responsive to critique and accountable, etc..
No, going with an immunity analogy, that will still only give you immunity to specific strains of narcissism as you learn to recognise them. What you ought to do instead is to find healthy communities so that you can train your system 1 to immediately recognise the difference between a healthy community and an unhealthy one. The approach you are using is much too vulnerable to self-deception.
But that’s just the community side of things. You are still leaving unexamined the question of why those pathological communities appealed to you in the first place.
Good thing then that I’m calling you out on self-serving bias rather than special pleading, then.
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...)
The two major factions in a controversy are rarely perfectly orthogonal. I am not suggesting that you are contrasting yourself with people who are extremely prone to paying attention to the subject matter, merely that you are setting yourself up as the moderate who fairly critiques both factions, despite actually having an absolutely immense bias in what standards you hold each side to.
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 anti-Blanchardians openly announce their political biases, and so I wouldn’t have felt betrayed in the same way by them.
The point of criticism is to inform people. A bit of that information can be used to choose what side to support, but since there’s only enough space and people for a small number of sides, you don’t get need much information to choose a side. Instead, a better use of information is to integrate it into a side to improve it, i.e. for an ideology to get rid of its bad memes and replace them with good ones. Blanchardians don’t do this.
Describing yourself as “so tired of and defeated by it all” is simply another way of positioning yourself above it all, differing only in that it insinuates a kind of martyrdom at the same time. Your behaviour is almost comically narcissistic.
False. It is not simply a way of “positioning myself above it all”. It is also factually true; I spent the last few years, including much of the time I should have spent on e.g. education on it, so “so tired of it all” is a factual description of me, and similarly by any reasonable means of counting, I’m cut away from the discourse on this topic, so I am also defeated.
There may in addition to this factual matter be some sort of strategic consequences of my framing, but you can’t just say that this statement is simply those strategic consequences, and it would be helpful if you did say what those strategic consequences were in more detail.
Missing the point again — the point is simply that you use a lot more qualifiers when critiquing one side than the other, even if the former is actually behaving a lot worse. ESL or not, I am pretty sure you are able to tell that “sapphire is abusive” is a much more assertive formulation than “sapphire is arguably abusive”, therefore I am inclined to call bullshit on your ESL excuse.
I know more about the Blanchardian and Blanchardian-adj side than I know about the anti-Blanchardian side. More qualifiers are justified due to greater uncertainty.
Again missing the point, which is simply that Zack’s discussion of these concepts actually did provide a lot of genuine value and insights, even if there were also many points where he was flatly wrong, and the total dismissiveness of the community, again, simply cannot be explained by flaws that were subtle enough for even you to take a while to discover them.
No, this was simply me describing my impression of Michael Bailey. I am well aware that Blanchardianism is not a theory of sociology, and is not about masculinity and femininity.
And again this gets to the meat of the issue:
Blanchardianism should be a theory of sociology. Or like, maybe we should also keep the etiology-focused version of Blanchardianism around, though as it stands now, approximately all people talking about Blanchardianism lack a real interest in etiology, so if Blanchardianism is supposed to be community-driven, something about the interests needs to change for an etiology-focused version to work.
But again let’s take Zack’s valuable and insightful discussion. How many of these contributions are about etiology? Few, maybe even none. How many are about sociology and politics? Lots! And this is despite the fact that he explicitly considers politics off-limits, and considers activism wrong, and so on.
How did this happen? It happened because sociology is a field that is more accessible to informal observation and theorizing, compared to etiology. So since sociology is a more fruitful field, Blanchardians should simply explicitly focus on it instead of insisting that they are focusing on etiology.
But, if Blanchardians are insisting that they are focusing on etiology, then onlookers will concentrate on looking for whether Blanchardians have good etiological insights, and when they see there are none, it’s not so surprising if they abandon it.
I don’t think the “flaws that were subtle enough for even you to take a while to discover them” holds here.
Disruptive HSTS’s are however disruptive in very different ways than other disruptive trans women. In particular, HSTS’s, disruptive or not, are much less likely to be extremely oppressive to gay men.
The exists a General Factor of Disruptiveness, which in psychometrics is often called Externalizing and which correlates with traits like disagreeableness, unconscientiousness and extraversion. Like the “rebel factor”.
When I talk about disruptive transsexuality, this is not the factor I am talking about, and in fact anecdotally HSTSs tend to be elevated on the general factor of disruptiveness. I think this is what you might be getting at when you are talking about disruptive HSTSs?
There are definitely forms of disruptiveness that are equally common among trans women regardless of sexual orientation, or even that are more common among HSTSs than AGPTSs. Possibly this makes the disruptive/pragmatic labels problematic, and one could replace them with other labels. For psychometrics I care less about the labels than about their derivation and their indicators.
What I am proposing is a dimension reduction based on the primary 1 or few transgender-related characteristics that are relevant to the interests of or salient to different outsider parties. The justification for this is that by picking variables that are relevant to parties’ interests, one automatically ends up with a variable that is important, and by doing a dimension reduction over multiple outsider parties, it in particular focuses on a variable whose relevance exists across many contexts, thereby making it not so context-dependent.
I hypothesize that such a dimension reduction will mostly pick up on sexual orientation, for reasons I argued in my link. This presumably also applies to your “be extremely oppressive to gay men” point. Maybe one could design a study that measures this factor, then show that there’s a huge sexual orientation difference in it, and then switch to calling the factor “androphilic/nonandrophilic” or something, idk.
I think this would bring the debate far closer to people’s crux, that this would make the academic studies on it far more applicable in practice, and that this would make it easier to reason about and to discuss. I also propose that this has kind of already informally happened, in the sense that because people have to stitch together their information based on bits of personal experience and pieces that others find important to share, they basically struggle to maintain high dimensionality of models, and they basically build their models out of similar pieces to this. So I think this constitutes realigning the formal theory with what people want to do anyway.
No, going with an immunity analogy, that will still only give you immunity to specific strains of narcissism as you learn to recognise them. What you ought to do instead is to find healthy communities so that you can train your system 1 to immediately recognise the difference between a healthy community and an unhealthy one. The approach you are using is much too vulnerable to self-deception.
Are there any publicly accessible healthy communities that you’d recommend I peek at as a starting point?
I’ve recently taken a liking to htmx—see their discord here and twitter here. Is that some strain of narcissism too? (Cringemaxxing narcissism maybe?)
By sacrificing that status, I lost the ability to continue engaging in those things. For instance by criticizing Bailey on his core misbehavior, he did his best to get rid of me, which lost me the ability to continue criticizing him, thus closing off that angle of behavior.
Your self-serving bias is a bias and not a rational stance of calculated actions. It sways your reasoning and the beliefs you arrive at, not your direct behaviour towards Michael Bailey.
Is that getting your position right?
No. I am not making any point about what discourse selects for. I could make such points, but they would look quite different from what you have imputed. My point was about your behaviour and the psychology implied by it.
I then learned that they weren’t interested in new information, especially not if it was disadvantageous to their political interests. It seems valid for me to share this to warn others who were in a similar position to me. If Blanchardians don’t like this, they shouldn’t have promoted me as their intellectual/researcher/teacher without warning me ahead of time.
Does this lead to Blanchardians getting held to higher standards than anti-Blanchardians? I suppose it does, because anti-Blanchardians openly announce their political biases, and so I wouldn’t have felt betrayed in the same way by them.
I swear you are inventing more and more elaborate ways to miss the point. The issue is that you portray yourself as a reasonable mediator while having these asymmetric standards. I do not object to you holding Blanchardianism to higher standards when acting in your capacity as an expert critic of Blanchardianism, but here you were commenting on a feud between Zack and LessWrong, and my point was specifically that LessWrong’s treatment towards Zack has been abusive, not that they have made more factual errors or that they were more ideologically motivated than him. Your position as an expert critic of Blanchardianism does not in the slightest justify an enormous bias in standards of behaviour when mediating a feud. It is irrelevant.
I suppose you might argue that you were not intending to act as a mediator, but that is precisely why it is objectionable that your behaviour is strongly goal-oriented to portraying yourself as a reasonable mediator willing to call out both sides when they are wrong.
False. It is not simply a way of “positioning myself above it all”. It is also factually true; I spent the last few years, including much of the time I should have spent on e.g. education on it, so “so tired of it all” is a factual description of me, and similarly by any reasonable means of counting, I’m cut away from the discourse on this topic, so I am also defeated.
Again you nitpick a single word (in this case the word “simply”) as a way of avoiding the issue. The point is that you described yourself as “so tired of and defeated by it all” as an argument that you are not positioning yourself above it all, as if the two were in conflict (hence your usage of the word “instead”), when in fact they are strikingly congruent.
I know more about the Blanchardian and Blanchardian-adj side than I know about the anti-Blanchardian side. More qualifiers are justified due to greater uncertainty.
I call bullshit again. There was no need for that qualifier. Sapphire’s argument could have been used with minimal alteration to tell people off for being dissidents in nazi germany. It was overtly abusive and the qualifier was not necessary in the slightest.
But, if Blanchardians are insisting that they are focusing on etiology, then onlookers will concentrate on looking for whether Blanchardians have good etiological insights, and when they see there are none, it’s not so surprising if they abandon it.
They really don’t. They first see the sociological implications, not even of the position, but of the delivery, of the other stances held by the proponents, etc. You know this. Not only is this addressed extensively in the Sequences (eg. in politics is the mindkiller) but it is also something you yourself have frequently called out in the past, specifically pertaining to the reaction of the LessWrong community toward Blanchardianism. So I simply do not buy the argument that the proponents of Blanchardianism view it through a more sociological lens than the critics do. I do not even buy that you believe otherwise.
When I talk about disruptive transsexuality, this is not the factor I am talking about, and in fact anecdotally HSTSs tend to be elevated on the general factor of disruptiveness. I think this is what you might be getting at when you are talking about disruptive HSTSs?
No, I simply clicked your link and read what you wrote about the disruptive/pragmatic typology.
Maybe one could design a study that measures this factor, then show that there’s a huge sexual orientation difference in it, and then switch to calling the factor “androphilic/nonandrophilic” or something, idk.
Androphilia is not however limited to HSTS’s, as in the case of meta-attraction or whatever is the current explanation for why some trans women who psychologically resemble exclusively gynephilic trans women are also attracted to men. This latter case is also prone to being viciously oppressive to gay men.
Are there any publicly accessible healthy communities that you’d recommend I peek at as a starting point?
Not in the sense you probably mean by “publicly accessible”. These days, public accessibility is almost impossible to reconcile with being a healthy community. The only way to maintain a healthy community at this point is to exclude the people who would destroy it.
But to give you an idea: a typical boxing gym, a traditional martial arts class, a group of fishermen, a scouting organization, or for that matter Bohemian smalltown is a very healthy community. I can also think of some healthy internet communities, but they are not publicly accessible.
I’ve recently taken a liking to htmx—see their discord here and twitter here. Is that some strain of narcissism too? (Cringemaxxing narcissism maybe?)
Yes. It is less unhealthy than the communities you are used to, which is probably why you like it, but it is still unhealthy. Cringemaxxing stems from profound insecurity and low self-esteem. People cringemaxx to preempt criticism, or to find cathartic release from their habitual vigilance against being cringy, or some other variety of either guardedness or catharsis. Cringemaxxers are, in fact, neurotics.
Most of those posts are from before the thing I call “constant abuse” began on LessWrong.
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.
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.
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 victim’s vigilance, and your prescription still not only leaves the victim on the defensive, but also (at least in the example conversation you linked) puts the person using this defensive tactic in the position of having to make demands, which may well become repetitive if the attacker is being persistent, and which on that account opens further vulnerabilities.
Also, your example gives a grossly distorted picture because, 1., it is a case in which you are playing the role of a “helpful mediator”, or, more bluntly, that of an enabler, and 2., the tactic I am describing was not particularly central to the strategy of either person’s side in that particular case. It simply is not a relevant example to any appreciable degree.
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.
Valid principles of classification are valid even if their proponents are advocating them with a view to some other, more specific point, and the fact that he has that point in mind when making posts about those principles of classification does not alter the fact that such posts are about principles of classification and not about the points he plans to make with them. This is not merely a high-decoupling vs low-decoupling thing; I am not suggesting that people should feign ignorance of his broader point, simply pointing out that the fact that he may advocate some principles of classification as part of a more specific line of argumentation about autogynephilia does not in fact create ambiguity surrounding the thesis/theses of a single given post. They can still straightforwardly be classified as making a point about autogynephilia, about the philosophy of classification, about the flaws of the rationalist community, or some combination of these. This post is clearly mainly a critique of the rationalist community, with the other two topics being secondary to that.
I think there has been an excess of cooperativeness. Setting yourself up as a helpful mediator between Zack and his abusers is an injustice to Zack. The abusers need to be put it in their place, rather.
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.
(This was in DMs, IIRC, so I don’t immediately have a link on hand.)
The other two topics can’t be relegated to secondary relevance in this way. This post is a critique of the rationalist community, but it’s a critique with respect to the philosophy of classification (and autogynephilia?), and so understanding the point of the original conflict around philosophy of classification is a necessary condition for understanding the meaning of the critique of the rationalist community.
One option to bypass this problem would be to instead consider posts which are less directly dependent on history. Some examples which seem subtly relevant to the AGP debates without being directly dependent on its history (trying to be reasonably comprehensive):
Assume bad faith: While there was lots of opposition in the comments, it was opposition that made me think.
Challenges to Yudkowsky’s pronoun reform proposal: Comments are mostly supportive and reasonable. There are less-reasonable comments but they have fewer upvotes and their rebuttals have a lot of upvotes.
Blood is thicker than water 🐬: There’s a lot of pushback in the comments. This could fit under your model, but I’d also guess it’s partly an incompleteness of the post. One illustrative example was this, where I knew the way it was incomplete and could therefore add additional information. At the time it was posted, I didn’t know enough information to correct the other incompletenesses, but after spending a long time philosophizing about categorization, I think I know the answers to the other ones, so I’m inclined to say the pushback was appropriate for highlighting the problems with the post.
Reply to Nate Soares on dolphins: Most comments are fine. One point is, Nate Soares claims that he didn’t mean this in relationship to transgender topics. I’m not sure what you make of that but it seems believable to me.
Communication requires common interests or differential signal costs: Not sure how relevant it is intended to be to the topic, but it seems relevant. Comments seem fine.
Unnatural categories are optimized for deception: Clearly a spicy take when understood in the context of trans issues, but the comments there seem perfectly fine.
Message length: Comments were positive, but actually it should have received more pushback if it was interpreted in the context of transgender debates, because a lot of the disagreements are causal, whereas this post is correlational.
Overall, I don’t think the pattern is as bad as you say.
One of the abusers was sapphire, who I posted a pretty decisive rebuttal to. Is this not putting her in her place? There was a subtext of “you seem to be part of the forces that are trying to control Zack”, would it have been sufficient to surface this subtext?
Another person I responded to was Viliam, but at the time of responding, I believed Viliam to be genuinely confused about Zack’s ultimate point, because Viliam thought Zack’s ultimate point was about the etiology of transsexuality, and I had been privately corrected that he had changed is area of discourse. If I got it right, then it was an understandable/non-abusive confusion for Viliam to have, as can be observed from you having a similar confusion. Though the fact that Zack said elsewhere in this post that his part of his core position was the etiology of transness does support Viliam’s original position—but in that case there is actually a lot to be said in defense of rationalists, because a lot of the autogynephilia discourse is simply abysmal. (And the fact that the Ultimate Point is so inconsistent generates good reasons to be confused.)
Also the main abusers are presumably Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky (and maybe also Ozy or someone like that?) but I haven’t exactly recommended that Zack cooperates more with them. Instead in the case of e.g. Scott Alexander I have told Zack that Scott doesn’t pay enough attention to this subject for him to get through (and I don’t think I have gotten involved with Eliezer).
It is true that I have come up with opinions about how Zack should communicate his message, but I don’t really think it is accurate to characterize it as me setting myself up as a helpful mediator. A lot of it comes down to the fact that I have spent the past few years researching transgender topics for my own purposes, for a long period believing in autogynephilia theory, but then uncovering a wide array of flaws. Under such a circumstance, it seems relevant to inform Zack “hey the core of these arguments we’ve been making all this time have these gaping flaws, you should probably fix your strategy. here’s my understanding of how, given your goals”. Separately from this, I am also interested in correcting autogynephilia theory, or at least informing non-autogynephilia-theorists that autogynephilia theory is deeply flawed, so that at least my work can get some use and my frustrations over the last few years can be legible to someone.
In fact a substantial part of my opinions come from attempting to change autogynephilia theorists’ minds, failing, and trying to work out the patterns of why I failed—what their rhetorical motivations and inferential methods must be in order for them to end up stuck in precisely these errors.
I don’t think this is true because if it gets off track one can sort of take stock and “regroup”, getting rid of irrelevant side-threads and returning to the core of it.
Not sure I understand this.
I’m not even sure who you say I am enabling in that link—Jiro or S. Verona Lišková? Both?
My view is that both of them were obscuring the positions they were taking (probably intentionally, because their positions were unpopular? with Jiro taking the position of “transness should not be normalized” and S. Verona Lišková taking positions such as “trans women do not have any male sports advantage”, “trans teens should be able to transition without their parents knowing about it, and this shouldn’t even be up for debate”, etc..
I guess.
My take is that I am consistently able to navigate rationalist conversations about autogynephilia theory or sex differences without getting caught up in these sorts of issues. I don’t know if we could measure it somehow—e.g. having me write a post as a test or something. So I find it weird to see this as a “rationalist thing”, and when I look at what the various Blanchardians are doing, I can quite easily see lots of ways in which they set themselves up for this kind of trouble.
This admittedly wasn’t always so clear to me, but the way it became clear to me was that I studied the subject matter of autogynephilia, learned a lot of things, tried to talk with Blanchardians about them, and saw them resist in weird ways.
These also seem like ways in which I could’ve set myself up for the same sort of catch-22 in the conversation I linked, which is why I linked it.
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 appears to me that his focus has shifted all the way to calling out “the blight” or “epistemic rot”, ie. the apparent decline of a community he loves or loved. That, then, would be his present true point, though the ultimate point is nevertheless the one corresponding to his original tagline.
That is what I meant by “secondary”, though, in analogy to how a necessary instrumental goal is sometimes described by non-LessWrongers as being secondary to their final purpose.
Most of those posts are from before the thing I call “constant abuse” began on LessWrong. It started when Zack began more directly calling out the rationalist community. The only post you gave as an example from this period was the Assume Bad Faith one, and that one wasn’t one in which he directly addressed any of the three topics enumerated (LOGD not being an intersex condition, philosophy of classification, critique of LW), so it is not actually a counterexample of the trend I am talking about. If you look at his recent posts on these topics, you will find that the pattern of abuse began at some point and was a constant occurrence since.
Of course, he was having some mental health issues before then, but as his chronicle shows, he was being met with a lot of abuse well before that abuse became a constant trend in his LessWrong comment sections in particular. The reason I attribute his present mental health issues to the present constant abuse, however, is that I don’t think of mental illness as a switch that’s turned on somehow and then remains turned on, caused by the initial trigger. I attribute his past mental illness to past abuse, and his present mental illness to the current stream of abuse, ie. the one I referred to as “constant abuse”. While I have no doubt that there are endogenous factors to his mental illness (eg. his decision to try to save this sinking ship that is LW rather than walking out on it), I don’t think those are the main factors that make him deviate from baseline mental health. That seems distinctly attributable to the mistreatment of him, rather.
Potentially. The way your comment was written was decidedly insufficient, however. Wielding massive social and financial pressures against thoughtcriminals to silence them and champion a progressive cause — is so ubiquitous and widely accepted that a subtext is certainly not sufficient social punishment for someone who evidently takes such controlling behaviours (and her right to them) for granted, and indeed sapphire responded to your comment with more of the same abuse: “I don’t think we should help him convince other people of a position that seems to have driven him kinda insane.”
More importantly, when I called out the abuse more directly[1], you immediately made a comment that seemed to imply that the constant abuse could not be the reason for what sapphire calls his insanity, by arguing that the abuse was not constant. In this comment, you also described sapphire’s mistreatment of him as being merely “arguably” abusive, when it quite clearly had the form of a bully telling the victim that he shouldn’t have picked the losing side — a grossly and overtly abusive behaviour. You then characterised what seems to me like an abusive pattern of weaponised confusion and the catch 22 tactic I mentioned earlier as being merely “unstructured and unproductive” rather than abusive, and attributed to this to what you deem as flaws in Zack’s writings. That is you using the very same abusive tactic to downplay the abuse he is being met with.
Also, whatever flaws his writing may have, none of them come even close to justifying the way in which he is treated, and your initial comment in this thread obscured this important point by way of blaming the victim with a semi-plausible critique of his writing.
By being less abusive than sapphire and simultaneously two-siding it with “to be fair, they do have a point that Zack’s writing is unclear”, you are juxtaposing these two criticisms and making the case seem a lot more even than it is. One side is engaging in gross overt abuse against someone who has been gaslit by progressive ideology, the other side writes posts that are too long and meandering. Guess I’ll take the middle ground. Also worth noting that you wrote considerably more words to criticise Zack’s writing than to call out sapphire’s abusive behaviour. You effectively set yourself up to appear as a sensible middle-ground, creating a position of compromise between Zack and his abusers, which is frankly worse than anything sapphire did, but even setting that whole tactic aside, you were also being directly abusive to him yourself as I pointed out two paragraphs ago.
I am again in the position of having to remind you that being incorrect about factual issues is not a sufficient justification for others to engage in vicious abuse against you. Also, it was specifically your behaviour in this comment thread that I am characterising as setting yourself up as a helpful mediator. Your comment in this thread was not directed at Zack, pointing out flaws in his autogynephilia theory, but directed at me, undermining my attempt to call out sapphire’s blatantly and grossly abusive behaviour.
That approach does not diffuse the moral opprobrium levelled against a person for being long winded or making baseless assertions. These “regroupings” can equally well be engaged in by the person wielding the abusive tactic as by the person trying to defend himself against it, but it is typically the abuser and not the defender who has more experience controlling and weaponising the complexity of a discussion.
The defensive person is in the position of having to demand regroupings, or else of trying to simply impose them. Either one gives a weapon to the attacker if done repeatedly.
That’s beside the point. The point is that you are not the recipient of the abuse and so your situation is fundamentally different, and the only reason it even looks successful is because it manages to set you up as a reasonable mediator who is above it all, thus flattering your narcissism.
My take is that that reflects negatively on your own communication tactics and merely indicates being skilful at manipulation, though in this case it is probably as simple as two-sides’ing everything. Your take reminds me of the “white allies” who say that Malcolm X was setting himself up for trouble by being too combative, or, on the other end of the political aisle, of William F. Buckley trying to clean up the mainstream right by silencing eg. libertarians, paleoconservatives, and populists. I believe your recent dabbles in critical theory have taught you something or other about this social dynamic, which is itself a part of the abuse I am accusing the LessWrong community of being guilty of.
Incidentally I was sorely tempted to invoke Godwin’s law and point out that she could’ve wielded the same tactic against frustrated, embittered dissidents living under nazism, and with only very slight variations she could’ve used it to condemn the Edelweiss pirates, the swings, etc., eg. “I don’t think we should help him convince other people of a position that seems to have gotten him ostracised and driven him into trouble with the SS”. Granted, it was “mere” psychiatrists that Zack had gotten in trouble with.
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 inoffensive.
2021-now—Zack starts posting his memoir, which among other things reveals more direct issues with rationalist leaders.
Now all but one of the links I gave were post 2021, so clearly this breakdown doesn’t capture your objection. Zooming in on the last bit, my reading is:
I guess on reflection Zack was really uneven in his publication of his memoir?? He posted part 1 in 2021, but then waited until 2023 with his second part, and now posted this third part just before 2024. Which I guess makes the bulk of the LW conflict much later than I’d intuitively think of it.
Zack did criticize rationalist leaders during this time, though, including the 2021 stuff on dolphins and the 2022 stuff on pronouns.
So I suppose you could validly raise the hypothesis of “the abuse only arose when Zack escalated”. I don’t really buy into this, partly for reasons I’ll get into later, but at least the history I cited before doesn’t disprove it.
(How about the comments to his previous post in this series, Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer? I take from “If you look at his recent posts on these topics, you will find that the pattern of abuse began at some point and was a constant occurrence since” that you are asserting it showed up here too? Most of the comments on it are fine though, and the bad comments seem well within the tolerance zone where it would be incredibly fragile not to tolerate them. Maybe you’re referring to Alyssa’s twitter stunt? Idk? I’m confused.)
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Zack is Simply Crazy And That’s Why He’s Doing This. I agree that Scott’s weird stonewalling of him makes it worse.
I’m… somewhat ambivalent about describing sapphire as “Wielding massive social and financial pressures against thoughtcriminals, to silence them and champion a progressive cause”? On the one hand, a point in favor is when she threatened A Certain Person with a ban in the Slate Star Codex discord server for saying that rationalism is the most extreme malebrained area available. But idk, this isn’t that abusive, considering the ban didn’t happen and that the person was being kind of childish about it (in the typical annoying Blanchardian way of making vague yet extreme claims—really needed to be put in his place). On the other hand, she did let autogynephilia discourse flourish for quite a while, quite strongly, on the very same server, even including around that very same person. And if I understand correctly, her weakness in moderating eventually lead to its culture war channel becoming a cesspool and her stepping down? Idk, I wasn’t around at that time.
It doesn’t seem to me that sapphire has been consistent enough towards this topic to be described as “constantly” anything, and it doesn’t seem to me that saphhire and Zack have had enough interactions to describe their relationship with any sort of constancy either.
Of course her not being constantly abusive does not mean she is not sometimes abusive. My above writing is not a claim that she was not acting abusively. I do lean towards saying that she treated Zack abusively. The “unstructured and unproductive” comment also wasn’t meant to apply to someone like sapphire, but instead to various other figures. I’m tempted to admit that I was wrong to use the term “arguably abusive”, however I do think that because the original conflict is so messy, it’s not so straightforward. (And usually “arguably X” is used to refer to a case where you lean in favor of X, or at least want to forward something like X?)
I feel like excessive use of the term “abuse” makes this less clear.
If we interpret sapphire as making a forceful threat, then Zack’s poor writing doesn’t justify the forceful threat. (On the other hand, if Zack was e.g. a university professor or a clinical researcher, then poor argument for his theories would justify a threat of firing—it’d literally be his job to do proper research.) This wasn’t really how I interpreted it, and last I heard from Zack, it’s not really something he has feared. But I guess I can see how one could interpret it that way.
But… again if we take someone like Viliam, I think calling his comment “abuse” is just wrong? If Zack’s original arguments against rationalists were bad, then rationalists shouldn’t be convinced by them, and it’s not that outrageous that that they sort of make a half-assed counter and then ignore the topic, and it’s a relevant point to ask “but wait, what were your original arguments? doesn’t this seem overly convoluted?”.
My actual motivation with my original comment was to try to point you at some of the areas in which Blanchardians are wrong or even abusive, since (in our other Discussion, in the emails) you were skeptical that my views are all that much driven by my experiences with Blanchardianism.
A case study would presumably be Reply to Ozymandias on Two-Type MtF Taxonomy. A lot of Ozy’s arguments were really bad, and then Zack responded by correcting Ozy’s bad arguments, but also by throwing a whole bunch of other bad arguments in there too. This was arguably the debate that original convinced me of Blanchardianism, and yet in retrospect the thing that convinced me (the ETLE stuff) shouldn’t have been convincing! Of particular note is Zack’s statement “But you agree that erotic female embodiment fantasies are very common in pre-trans women; you seem to think this can be a mere manifestation of gender dysphoria.”, which borders on abusive considering how it equivocates between Ozy’s moderate “well let’s listen to what trans women have to say about their experiences” and Blanchardian’s radical “let’s assume that 80% of gynephilic trans women are severely lying about this subject, and therefore disqualify their testimony/exaggerated their claimed experiences and declare this the Official Scientific Truth and call everyone who is objecting deniers”. This rhetorical trick works by using the vagueness of informal language instead of doing more crisp and precise psychometric characterizations. Or there’s also the post before that, Reply to Ozymandias on Autogynephilia, where by my count 5 out of 6 of the replies were Bad Takes.
So the whole critical theory thing really was just self-serving, then. Funny, the critical theorists wrote about that, too.
Look, I am really becoming quite impatient with this whole tangent of nitpicking one single adjective that was never particularly essential to my argument. There are older cases of him calling out the LessWrong community, some of them even before 2018, and there are also older cases of him being abused in various ways. His more recent interactions are met with an abusive reception more consistently than his older interactions. I am not going to bother continuing to defend my choice to use the phrase “constant abuse”. My point stands without it, and as far as I can tell, there is no point to this endless nitpicking other than simply evading the actual argument.
Great, you’ve added one more way to feel above it all and congratulate yourself on it. Now if you could see how your own behaviour makes it worse, we might actually get somewhere.
She didn’t create the pressure, but she invoked it when talking about how he has gone insane and is losing friends, etc., and she certainly wielded it against him. But actually my point was simply that even the creation of such pressures is so widely accepted that your callout of sapphire’s comparatively milder abuse would fly beneath the radar of most people, and thus not work effectively as a callout.
Hold on; I talked about the abuse he’s been receiving as an explanation for his insanity, not as part of an accusation that sapphire was constantly abusing him. I was in fact in the process of collecting examples of abusive behaviour and other bad faith engagement, to use for a post about the existence of unintentional manipulation and other forms of bad faith that the perpetrator may not be aware of engaging in, because there is in the LessWrong community a completely erroneous implicit assumption that people are always aware when they’re being manipulative. I wanted to make a post correcting this error, explaining some things about the boundaries of consciousness, about what it means for intents to be conscious, etc., and I wanted to illustrate it with examples of people unknowingly engaging in bad faith.
I did not interpret it as a forceful threat either.
The only way you’re getting this analysis to sound reasonable at all is by omitting a lot of crucial points. For example, the cultishness of trans theory in assuming that gender dysphoria in an AMAB implies female brainsex, the fact that his arguments, though erroneous in some of the particulars, did point to a very real and very central point, which I will here just indicate as the point that not all MtFs are HSTS, whatever the explanation for the others, the disinterest in seriously investigating these issues at all, despite how massively they impact so many members of this community, etc. There was plenty of very real bad faith in the LW community’s reception of Zack’s points, well beyond what can be explained by factual errors, especially when they were the sort that took even you a considerable amount of time to discover.
Most Blanchardians I have interacted with were TERFs, whom I consider to be some of the most dishonest, abusive people I have ever encountered. Even with our current falling out, I am still utterly enraged at how Rod Fleming treats you. He is probably in my top ten of least likeable people I have ever encountered. I am very annoyed at Michael Bailey’s behaviour towards you, because I would very much have liked to see debates between you and him.
I am not sure why you think you need to convince me that Blanchardians are wrong and most of them abusive. I think it is worth pointing out that you are just now making the case that a community you interact with a lot, and which you were a part of for a long time, is wrong and abusive. You have made the same observation about a lot of other such communities. I don’t remember the exact list, but I seem to recall that it included liberals (and perhaps antifeminists? idk).
Here’s the kicker: I agree.
I also happen to think it might be fruitful for you to wonder if you might be drawn to these abusive communities, and whether the abusiveness might have been something of a constant throughout your changing affiliations, and whether it might not have persisted through your most recent such changes.
Because, regarding your dabbles in critical theory, I was paying attention to the bright little spark of genuine contrition and good faith, not to the apparently much larger component that was merely self-serving. Perhaps I was being overly Christian.
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 investigated! But nobody listens to me about this...)
Well, for one, because you don’t seem to agree with me in the case of Zack.
Also I’m not super convinced by your opposition to Michael Bailey as you probably don’t know the specifics of that conflict. For all I know, you might support Bailey if you knew more. And considering that Michael Bailey did offer something like a debate, it seems like you need to be more specific about which subject you’d like to see me debate with him, in order for you to truly illustrate that you are not simply on his side.
Given that they were all abusive in like 2 very specific ways, yes, but also this makes me able to identify them in the future.
Indeed, and some of those lines of questioning yourself did indeed lead to regrets — for a time. Until you walked back your few genuine displays of good faith (edit: excepting the one with the discord server, though you did weaponise my emphasis on that one against me, which is arguably similar to walking it back). That sort of thing gives me an impression that even the process of questioning your past behaviour is basically just a self-serving preemptive defence against criticisms such as this one.
Iirc it is mostly in its applied forms, as in critical race theory. Robin DiAngelo for example frequently argues that white progressives are just appropriating the language of the civil rights movement and of subsequent theories (CRT being one) in a way that doesn’t properly engage with the issues and is really just a self-serving tactic to preserve their privileged position and their white saviour complex. I believe Herbert Marcuse also argued something similar in One-Dimensional Man, albeit obviously without the focus on race.
Because, whether by calculation or (as I think) by political instinct, all your critiques of Zack’s critics are goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate as contrasted with the extremists on both sides, even though in point of fact I have had to practically drag you to make even this admission. At first you were describing sapphire as only arguably abusive, and even your previous comment you were still creating an outrageously one-sided portrayal of Zack’s interactions with the community that simply portrayed his arguments as bad while glossing over the fact that he was pointing to a lot of real substance. Even after your break with Blanchardianism, you are after all still using most of the terminology that you were introduced to through Blanchardianism. There is real substance there, even if most (all?) of it predates Blanchard’s own work, and the idea that the rationalist community dismissed it all simply because of flaws in Zack’s arguments does not even come remotely close to being a reasonable characterisation. I think you know this on some level.
In short, your behaviour is goal oriented towards keeping up appearances of being a sensible moderate, charitable to both sides, while in actual fact having an absolutely immense bias.
Not by that term, but that is what is implied when discussing whether LOGD is an intersex condition. It’s not like he was referring to XXY chromosomes or some such.
I am not convinced you are correctly interpreting that market.
Of course not. Almost none of them would’ve even encountered the term if not for Blanchardianism, which is the point I’m getting at. Previously they would have simply recognised HSTS’s as “straight transwomen” and left it at that.
It’s not like I am criticising them for failing to spend lots of effort pursuing some particular line of investigation, just pointing out that their rejection of Zack simply cannot be explained by some flaws in Blanchardianism that took even you quite a while to uncover.
Look, I am going to be blunt and say that you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting and you really need to learn to get it under control.
Zack is being complicit in his own abuse in much the same way you are complicit in it, albeit to a lesser extent.
I indeed don’t know the specifics of that conflict; certainly not enough to be “simply on his side”. I have however read your explanation of how he came to block you, and am willing to take your word for it, since it seems consistent with the vibe I get from him. He actually kinda reminds me of a very particular kind of annoying Catholic father figure[1]. So although I do not know the specifics of that conflict, I do know enough to have a negative overall impression of him, just going by vibes.
My bad impression of him has been sufficient to deter me from looking closer into him without a clear reason, though such a reason was to some extent granted by his view of femininity as you related them to me (something to the effect that straight men will never be truly feminine). There, I am probably mostly on his side, though I suspect he has less understanding of the more aristocratic kind of femininity that I consider more central to the concept.
Yes, you will be able to identify these particular manifestations of narcissism, and thus find communities in which it manifests differently, in ways you are less aware of, and hence will have even less self-awareness of perpetrating. If there is an improvement implied here, I fail to see it.
and I say this as someone who both prefers Catholicism to Protestantism and patriarchy to feminism. There are nevertheless some very annoying, very prejudiced Catholic patriarchs in Texas, and he reminds me of them. I don’t mean to imply that he actually is Catholic, of course.
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.)
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:
There is no excuse for this kind of manipulative behaviour, but it is par for the course when it comes to the LessWrong community and thus eminently relevant to critiquing that same community.
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.)
He responded to me in a manner that seemed to only suggest an intention of addressing the subject matter of discussion in this post, not an intention of swaying my stance towards him in our private feud, but then in the text I quoted, he explicitly states that his purpose was to sway my stance in that private feud. That’s practically the definition of false pretenses.
You’re falling prey to the halo effect. You are put off by my more disagreeable manner, and so you impute other negative characteristics to me and become blinded to even very blatant abuses from tailcalled towards me. For my part, I am compelled to be very forcefully assertive by tailcalled’s extreme evasiveness.
That’s because you’ve fallen for his manipulation tactics. He literally admitted the false pretenses, stopping only short of actually using that label. His original reply to me was, by his own admission, motivated by the private feud, which means he was the one who imported a grudge from elsewhere, regardless of what vibe you are getting.
And the sole reason I am coming across as more begrudging than he is because he keeps evading the points so I have to keep directing him back towards them, making me appear forceful, which you may remember was precisely what I said would happen if I follow his prescription for defusing these manipulation tactics.
All of that is him manipulating you, and you have fallen for it.
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 avoiding talking about. (I’m not sure what it is that you think he is avoiding talking about. Maybe it’s How Terrible Tailcalled Is, but in that case I don’t think you get to say “I’m only being insulting to tailcalled because he keeps trying to make the conversation be about something other than how awful he is”.)
He specifically wanted to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive, which massively distorts his judgement with respect to commenting on the justice of Zack’s actions and LW’s reception of him. Tailcalled ought to at the very least have disclosed these ulterior motives from the beginning.
An additional point to note is that after more than a decade of efforts to mend the relationship, I gave up and cut off contact with tailcalled. I had however given him the opportunity to reach out to me with a view to make amends, or otherwise to convince me that I had been wrong to cut him off. He exploited this offer and chose not to do either, and for some reason I went along with it, causing the past several months to have been a lot more torturous than they needed to be, but it was somewhat bearable because it was confined to that one email conversation.
Then he interacts with me here, not only to address the topic of Zack’s post, but specifically to pursue his feud with me outside of emails.
That’s not what I said. It’s your being put off by my disagreeable manner that makes you subject to the halo effect when it comes to tailcalled’s responses.
But the things you deemed insults were actually critiques of his character, not mere insults, and most of those critiques were aimed at showing that he is being unjust towards Zack, with the few exceptions pointing out character flaws that are characteristic of many LessWrongers and not just him. It is simply not possible to argue in favour of my position without raising points of personal criticism, because those points of criticism are absolutely central to my position, and it is only the horns effect that makes you perceive them as mere insults.
No, I do not. I actually have quite a distaste for it, but when faced with an immensely abusive community such as this one, my only other means of defence is to plead for mercy, which is errosive to self esteem.
But in this case, since I am dealing with tailcalled in particular, even that would not work. I have learned from about more than a decade of abuse from him that this is the only viable defence. Problem is, if he is in a crowd of enablers who don’t notice his bs because they are used to engaging in milder forms of the same abusive behaviour, then it will paint me as the abusive one.
No, this is simply him having evaded my arguments for so long that he has managed to distort your impression of what is actually being discussed. The main issue is a critique of the rationalist community. That then led to an issue of tailcalled’s injustice in judging the feud, and that in turn led to an issue of his evading my points.
If you trace back the lines of argumentation where I seem to be insulting him, you will find that what you deem insults are mostly accusations of injustice that were centrally relevant to the argument. Then, by endless nitpicking and evasiveness, and my insistence on maintaining the accusations of injustice through this obfuscation, they became increasingly separated from their original context, and you quite simply lost track of why I made them in the first place.
There are however also a few of them (edit: namely, the ones about self-serving bias) that only make sense in context of the private feud, and which are in response to remarks of his (eg. about the critical theory) that only look cruel if seen in context, which sorta illustrates what I mean about the false pretenses, because if he had disclosed them from the beginning, I would not have engaged at all.
Edit: I am also suspicious that he might have taken it here in part to present the feud in front of a crowd, with zero context, and specifically a crowd that is part of his culture and is likely to agree with him based on surface appearances, setting up false appearances of unanimity.
*edit: removed a fact that could be used to personally identify tailcalled
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 this one, which again doesn’t have anything like that. What comment do you think we are talking about here?
I am fairly sure my opinions of tailcalled’s responses here is very similar to my opinion of his comments elsewhere which haven’t (so far as I’ve noticed) involved you at all, so I don’t find it very plausible that those opinions are greatly affected by the fact that on this occasion he is arguing with someone I’m finding disagreeable.
“Pointing out character flaws”. “Insults”. Po-TAY-to. Po-TAH-to. My complaint isn’t that the way in which you are pointing out tailcalled’s alleged character flaws is needlessly unpleasant, it’s that you’re doing it at all. (And I would say the same if tailcalled were spending all his time pointing out your alleged character flaws, whatever those might be, but he isn’t.) As far as I am concerned, when an LW discussion becomes mostly about the character of one of its participants, it is very unlikely that it is doing any good to anyone. And if what you mostly want to do here is point out people’s character flaws, then even if those character flaws are real I think it’s probably not very helpful.
It doesn’t look to me as if LW is the hotbed of “constant abuse” you are trying to portray it as (and no, I’m not trying to insist that “constant” has to mean “literally nonstop” or anything). It looks to me—and here I’m going off my own impression, not e.g. anything tailcalled may have said about the situation—as if Zack gets plenty of disagreement on LW but very little abuse. So to whatever extent your “accusations of injustice” are of the form “tailcalled denies that Zack is constantly being abused, but he is”, I find myself agreeing with tailcalled more than with you. Again, this was already my impression, so it can’t be a halo/horns thing from this conversation.
(Of course, you may have me pigeonholed as one of the “crowd of enablers”. Maybe you’re right, though from my perspective I’m pretty sure I’m not abusing anyone and have no intention or awareness of engaging in the specific catch-22 you describe. I have disagreed with Zack from time to time, though.)
I also don’t see how it was supposed to do that, but I am commenting on his stated intentions. The fact that it is hard to spot those intentions in his first comments, even when actively looking for them, only further corroborates my point that his stated intentions were not obvious at all, and that it seemed to be a relatively innocuous reply that was made with only the discussion in mind. Yet, by his own statements, his point in responding was to convince me that Blanchardians are abusive. Thus, as I said, false pretenses.
My claim was specifically that the halo effect is blinding you to an evasiveness that he does not typically display. Thus it is wholly consistent with you having a similar opinion of his comments here compared to your usual opinion of his comments.
I have already addressed that argument, and the whole point of my using the phrase “pointing out character flaws” was to stress the relevance of doing so to the argument I am making.
Ad hominem is not a fallacy if the topic of discussion is literally about the person’s character, and justice when commenting on feuds is after all a character trait. I cannot effectively criticise a community without criticising its members, and I cannot effectively criticise its members without pointing out character flaws, ie. without “insulting” them as you put it. If I had to adhere to your standards, my position would be ruled out before I even had a chance to make my case.
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.
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 displays of good faith” and “goal-oriented towards making you appear as the sensible moderate” and “you have a profound proclivity for bullshitting” and so forth.
I think this sort of comment is basically never helpful. If what you are trying to do here is something that can’t be done without this sort of comment, then I think it would be better not to do it . (More precisely: if you think that what you are trying to do here is something that can’t be done without such comments, then I think you are probably wrong unless what you are trying to do is mostly “make tailcalled feel bad” or something.)
I did in fact do X in order to do Y. The proof, which only @Cornelius Dybdahl can see, is that “which in turn makes it challenging to make sensible descriptions like “biological sex is binary because chromosomes are binary, XX vs XY”″ is a reference to something he said in the emails.
The issue is that he is misrepresenting what Y is. Y is not proving that Blanchardians are abusive. Y is highlighting a problem with Blanchardian rhetoric, which Zack arguably does more than the run-of-the-mill TERF that Cornelius said he already knew was abusive.
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.
But the problem is at the level of his character, not any given behaviour. I have already explained this in one of my replies to tailcalled; if he simply learns to stay away from one type of narcissistic community, he will still be drawn in by communities where narcissism manifests in other ways than the one he is “immunized” to, so to speak. Likewise with the concrete behaviours: if he learns to avoid some toxic behaviours, the underlying toxicity will simply manifest in other toxic behaviours. I do not say there is therefore no point in calling out the toxic behaviours, but the only point in doing that is to use them as pointers to the underlying problem. If I just get him to recognise a particular pattern of behaviour, then I will have misidentified the pattern to him and might as well have done nothing. The issue is specifically that he is a horrible person and needs to realise it so he can begin practising virtue — this being of course a moral philosophy that LessWrongers are generally averse to, but you can see the result.
All of these are criticising behaviours rather than character and thus fit your pretended criterion. Thus, you made no specific complaint about them, because what you actually take issue with is simply my harshness and directness.
It is the only thing that is ever helpful when an improvement to the underlying character is what is called for.
(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.)
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.
We can take the discussion to emails to avoid crowd pressure.
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 Blanchardian camp, again without systematically studying or thinking about the subject, and therefore also ends up constantly spamming all sorts of false or nonsensical ideas, and that I’ve spent the past few years systematically studying and thinking about the subject and therefore have detailed opinions about how either camp is wrong. But that doesn’t mean I’m “above it all”, instead I’m way deep into it all and I’m so tired of and defeated by it all.
Zack has gotten to the point where he pretty much admits he is mainly driven by priors! It’s just not wrong to see things this way. If we want, we could quantify it with a survey, listing a bunch of Blanchardian and anti-Blanchardian beliefs, and then scoring people. Yes, I’d probably score in the middle whereas the Blanchardians would score to one side and the anti-Blanchardians would score to another side.
Possibly I have a habit of using the word “arguably” wrong, idk, I plead ESL. Plus dictionaries agree with my usage.
And here we’re getting to the real meat of the issue.
First, a communication issue. Zack has plausibly intended to talk about brainsex or something, but his interlocutors have openly been thinking about other things, and the semantics of “an intersex condition” is not simply defined to be brainsex. (As a sidenote, XXY is not an intersex condition, but AFAIK most intersex conditions do have a fairly bounded scope, like MRKH and such.)
People have frequently been discussing things like body-map theory, which does not require that the entire brain has its sex swapped, only that some basic perception things are swapped. Body map theory is pretty stupid, but Zack hasn’t really done much to address it (and I think for a while he might even have been sympathetic to it applying to HSTSs? Idk, I may be wrong).
And again this gets to the meat of the issue.
Nobody gets to pick the definition of “masculinity/femininity” used for these topics. If one is studying the sociological effects of transness, one has to focus on the sociologically relevant aspects of femininity, which I think is heavily intertwined with the sexual market.
But, Blanchardianism is not claiming to be a theory of sociology. Blanchardianism is claiming to be a theory of transgender etiology, and therefore one shouldn’t simply be picking the definition of “masculinity/femininity” to optimize sociological relevance.
There’s a case to be made that one should avoid talking about “masculinity/femininity” at all, since it can be confusing due to its sociological meaning. But it doesn’t change the fact that one needs to consider the distinction between macho vs sensitive men, and that one might want to entertain the relevance of neuroticism or feminine aesthetic interests or so on. If one just rejects these questions as “not real femininity” without providing any explanation, or by (as Zack tends to do) providing nonsense explanations (e.g. multivariate group differences), then one is doing something very wrong.
… if one is trying to study etiology. Of course, maybe Blanchardianism is not about etiology?? Could that be true?? Wouldn’t that be wild?? Then everyone would have to change their entire discourse because all the preexisting discourse was using etiology-related words.
I only got into Blanchardianism due to 2 extreme coincidences though, which are most clearly illustrated by Ozy’s Thoughts on The Blanchard/Bailey Distinction and On Autogynephilia.
First, Ozy were making some nonsense arguments against ETLE. The fact that they were nonsense, and that the ETLE correlations actually seemed to hold, made me think the Blanchardians were onto something. In retrospect, in order to determine the direction of the causal arrow between “sexually attracted to being X” and “want to be X”, I was using “sexually attracted to X” as an instrumental variable. But in retrospect this seems stupid because whichever confounders could generate an attraction to X as partners could plausibly also generate a desire to be X, so the IV assumptions don’t hold.
Another argument was Ozy’s point that there is a distinction between “true autogynephiles” and trans women, which I took as making predictions about discontinuities in the distribution that turned out to (sort of) not be there. But that is focusing overly much on random predictions made by a random person who has not been thinking very much about it. What I’ve instead learned is that I should ignore almost everything that people have previously said on these sorts of topics because it is very poorly informed, and instead collect a wealth of information myself.
Of course, these lines of thought would be insane if Blanchardianism was a sociological theory. A sane line of thought if Blanchardianism was a sociological theory would be something like the disruptive/pragmatic typology, though of course since Blanchardianism is claiming to be an etiological theory, it is instead absolutely insane to take the evidence for the disruptive/pragmatic typology as being some huge validation of Blanchardianism.
I mean it would be insane for me to just simply avoid those 2 pathologies. Instead I should ask more generally what the community is trying to achieve, whether it is good at achieving that, whether I want to achieve that and whether it would be helpful for me to be in it, whether it is responsive to critique and accountable, etc..
Good thing then that I’m calling you out on self-serving bias rather than special pleading, then.
It’s a gift. She is doing precisely the same thing she is calling out other white progressives on, but when you think about it, that only corroborates her point that race grifting is something white progressives are liable to do.
The two major factions in a controversy are rarely perfectly orthogonal. I am not suggesting that you are contrasting yourself with people who are extremely prone to paying attention to the subject matter, merely that you are setting yourself up as the moderate who fairly critiques both factions, despite actually having an absolutely immense bias in what standards you hold each side to.
Describing yourself as “so tired of and defeated by it all” is simply another way of positioning yourself above it all, differing only in that it insinuates a kind of martyrdom at the same time. Your behaviour is almost comically narcissistic.
Missing the point again — the point is simply that you use a lot more qualifiers when critiquing one side than the other, even if the former is actually behaving a lot worse. ESL or not, I am pretty sure you are able to tell that “sapphire is abusive” is a much more assertive formulation than “sapphire is arguably abusive”, therefore I am inclined to call bullshit on your ESL excuse.
Again missing the point, which is simply that Zack’s discussion of these concepts actually did provide a lot of genuine value and insights, even if there were also many points where he was flatly wrong, and the total dismissiveness of the community, again, simply cannot be explained by flaws that were subtle enough for even you to take a while to discover them.
No, this was simply me describing my impression of Michael Bailey. I am well aware that Blanchardianism is not a theory of sociology, and is not about masculinity and femininity.
Disruptive HSTS’s are however disruptive in very different ways than other disruptive trans women. In particular, HSTS’s, disruptive or not, are much less likely to be extremely oppressive to gay men.
No, going with an immunity analogy, that will still only give you immunity to specific strains of narcissism as you learn to recognise them. What you ought to do instead is to find healthy communities so that you can train your system 1 to immediately recognise the difference between a healthy community and an unhealthy one. The approach you are using is much too vulnerable to self-deception.
But that’s just the community side of things. You are still leaving unexamined the question of why those pathological communities appealed to you in the first place.
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 anti-Blanchardians openly announce their political biases, and so I wouldn’t have felt betrayed in the same way by them.
The point of criticism is to inform people. A bit of that information can be used to choose what side to support, but since there’s only enough space and people for a small number of sides, you don’t get need much information to choose a side. Instead, a better use of information is to integrate it into a side to improve it, i.e. for an ideology to get rid of its bad memes and replace them with good ones. Blanchardians don’t do this.
False. It is not simply a way of “positioning myself above it all”. It is also factually true; I spent the last few years, including much of the time I should have spent on e.g. education on it, so “so tired of it all” is a factual description of me, and similarly by any reasonable means of counting, I’m cut away from the discourse on this topic, so I am also defeated.
There may in addition to this factual matter be some sort of strategic consequences of my framing, but you can’t just say that this statement is simply those strategic consequences, and it would be helpful if you did say what those strategic consequences were in more detail.
I know more about the Blanchardian and Blanchardian-adj side than I know about the anti-Blanchardian side. More qualifiers are justified due to greater uncertainty.
And again this gets to the meat of the issue:
Blanchardianism should be a theory of sociology. Or like, maybe we should also keep the etiology-focused version of Blanchardianism around, though as it stands now, approximately all people talking about Blanchardianism lack a real interest in etiology, so if Blanchardianism is supposed to be community-driven, something about the interests needs to change for an etiology-focused version to work.
But again let’s take Zack’s valuable and insightful discussion. How many of these contributions are about etiology? Few, maybe even none. How many are about sociology and politics? Lots! And this is despite the fact that he explicitly considers politics off-limits, and considers activism wrong, and so on.
How did this happen? It happened because sociology is a field that is more accessible to informal observation and theorizing, compared to etiology. So since sociology is a more fruitful field, Blanchardians should simply explicitly focus on it instead of insisting that they are focusing on etiology.
But, if Blanchardians are insisting that they are focusing on etiology, then onlookers will concentrate on looking for whether Blanchardians have good etiological insights, and when they see there are none, it’s not so surprising if they abandon it.
I don’t think the “flaws that were subtle enough for even you to take a while to discover them” holds here.
The exists a General Factor of Disruptiveness, which in psychometrics is often called Externalizing and which correlates with traits like disagreeableness, unconscientiousness and extraversion. Like the “rebel factor”.
When I talk about disruptive transsexuality, this is not the factor I am talking about, and in fact anecdotally HSTSs tend to be elevated on the general factor of disruptiveness. I think this is what you might be getting at when you are talking about disruptive HSTSs?
There are definitely forms of disruptiveness that are equally common among trans women regardless of sexual orientation, or even that are more common among HSTSs than AGPTSs. Possibly this makes the disruptive/pragmatic labels problematic, and one could replace them with other labels. For psychometrics I care less about the labels than about their derivation and their indicators.
What I am proposing is a dimension reduction based on the primary 1 or few transgender-related characteristics that are relevant to the interests of or salient to different outsider parties. The justification for this is that by picking variables that are relevant to parties’ interests, one automatically ends up with a variable that is important, and by doing a dimension reduction over multiple outsider parties, it in particular focuses on a variable whose relevance exists across many contexts, thereby making it not so context-dependent.
I hypothesize that such a dimension reduction will mostly pick up on sexual orientation, for reasons I argued in my link. This presumably also applies to your “be extremely oppressive to gay men” point. Maybe one could design a study that measures this factor, then show that there’s a huge sexual orientation difference in it, and then switch to calling the factor “androphilic/nonandrophilic” or something, idk.
I think this would bring the debate far closer to people’s crux, that this would make the academic studies on it far more applicable in practice, and that this would make it easier to reason about and to discuss. I also propose that this has kind of already informally happened, in the sense that because people have to stitch together their information based on bits of personal experience and pieces that others find important to share, they basically struggle to maintain high dimensionality of models, and they basically build their models out of similar pieces to this. So I think this constitutes realigning the formal theory with what people want to do anyway.
Are there any publicly accessible healthy communities that you’d recommend I peek at as a starting point?
I’ve recently taken a liking to htmx—see their discord here and twitter here. Is that some strain of narcissism too? (Cringemaxxing narcissism maybe?)
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.
No. I am not making any point about what discourse selects for. I could make such points, but they would look quite different from what you have imputed. My point was about your behaviour and the psychology implied by it.
I swear you are inventing more and more elaborate ways to miss the point. The issue is that you portray yourself as a reasonable mediator while having these asymmetric standards. I do not object to you holding Blanchardianism to higher standards when acting in your capacity as an expert critic of Blanchardianism, but here you were commenting on a feud between Zack and LessWrong, and my point was specifically that LessWrong’s treatment towards Zack has been abusive, not that they have made more factual errors or that they were more ideologically motivated than him. Your position as an expert critic of Blanchardianism does not in the slightest justify an enormous bias in standards of behaviour when mediating a feud. It is irrelevant.
I suppose you might argue that you were not intending to act as a mediator, but that is precisely why it is objectionable that your behaviour is strongly goal-oriented to portraying yourself as a reasonable mediator willing to call out both sides when they are wrong.
Again you nitpick a single word (in this case the word “simply”) as a way of avoiding the issue. The point is that you described yourself as “so tired of and defeated by it all” as an argument that you are not positioning yourself above it all, as if the two were in conflict (hence your usage of the word “instead”), when in fact they are strikingly congruent.
I call bullshit again. There was no need for that qualifier. Sapphire’s argument could have been used with minimal alteration to tell people off for being dissidents in nazi germany. It was overtly abusive and the qualifier was not necessary in the slightest.
They really don’t. They first see the sociological implications, not even of the position, but of the delivery, of the other stances held by the proponents, etc. You know this. Not only is this addressed extensively in the Sequences (eg. in politics is the mindkiller) but it is also something you yourself have frequently called out in the past, specifically pertaining to the reaction of the LessWrong community toward Blanchardianism. So I simply do not buy the argument that the proponents of Blanchardianism view it through a more sociological lens than the critics do. I do not even buy that you believe otherwise.
No, I simply clicked your link and read what you wrote about the disruptive/pragmatic typology.
Androphilia is not however limited to HSTS’s, as in the case of meta-attraction or whatever is the current explanation for why some trans women who psychologically resemble exclusively gynephilic trans women are also attracted to men. This latter case is also prone to being viciously oppressive to gay men.
Not in the sense you probably mean by “publicly accessible”. These days, public accessibility is almost impossible to reconcile with being a healthy community. The only way to maintain a healthy community at this point is to exclude the people who would destroy it.
But to give you an idea: a typical boxing gym, a traditional martial arts class, a group of fishermen, a scouting organization, or for that matter Bohemian smalltown is a very healthy community. I can also think of some healthy internet communities, but they are not publicly accessible.
Yes. It is less unhealthy than the communities you are used to, which is probably why you like it, but it is still unhealthy. Cringemaxxing stems from profound insecurity and low self-esteem. People cringemaxx to preempt criticism, or to find cathartic release from their habitual vigilance against being cringy, or some other variety of either guardedness or catharsis. Cringemaxxers are, in fact, neurotics.
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.
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.