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SneerClub @awful.systems
David Gerard @awful.systems

it's outrageous the NYT called Scoot a racist like Charles Murray! also, Scoot agrees with race science, precisely as Murray does. Also, the leaked 2014 email is only outrageous if you hadn't read SSC

content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack's unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by

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  • I love this unhinged Yudkowsky quote buried in here:

    This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.

    Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish[...]

    Zack is actually correct that this is a pretty wild thing to say... "Rest assured that I considered all possible counterarguments against my position which I was able to generate with my mega super brain. No, I haven't actually looked at the arguments against my position, but I'm confident in my ability to think of everything that people who disagree with me would say."

    It so happens that Yudkowsky is on the 'right side' politically in this particular case, but man, this is real sloppy for someone who claims to be on the side of capital-T truth.

    The problem is... well, Zack correctly recognizes Yudkowsky is maybe not as world-changingly smart as he presents himself, and may be engaging in motivated reasoning rather than disinterested truth-seeking, but then his solution (a) doesn't involve questioning his belief in the rest of the robot apocalypse mythos, and (b) does involve running crying directly into the arms of Moldbug and a bunch of TERFs, which like, dude. Maybe consider critically interrogating those people's arguments too??

  • So, I was morbidly curious about what Zack has to say about the Brennan emails (as I think they've been under-discussed, if not outright deliberately ignored, in lesswrong discussion), I found to my horror I actually agree with a side point of Zack's. From the footnotes:

    It seems notable (though I didn't note it at the time of my comment) that Brennan didn't break any promises. In Brennan's account, Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott unilaterally said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.

    To see why the lack of a promise is potentially significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or stealing billions of dollars of their customers' money) and unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance but added, "Never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge." In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the reporter.

    Of course, Zack's ultimate conclusion on this subject is the exact opposite of the correct one I think:

    I think that to people who have read and understood Alexander's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email.

    I think the main reason someone would consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn't read Slate Star Codex that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was "that guy who's so committed to charitable discourse

    Gee Zack, I wonder why so many people misread Scott? ...Its almost like he is intentionally misleading about his true views in order to subtly shift the Overton window of rationalist discourse and intentionally presents himself as simply committed to charitable discourse while actually having a hidden agenda! And the bloated length of Scott's writing doesn't help with clarity either. Of course Zack, who writes tens of thousands of words to indirectly complain about perceived hypocrisy of Eliezer's in order to indirectly push gender essentialist views, probably finds Scott's writings a perfectly reasonable length.

    Edit: oh and a added bonus on the Brennan Emails... Seeing them brought up again I connected some dots I had missed. I had seen (and sneered at) this Yud quote before:

    I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them, but in case it wasn't obvious consider the point made explicitly.

    But somehow I had missed or didn't realize the subtext was the emails that laid clear Scott's racism:

    (Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher's publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)

    Hmm... I'm not sure to update (usage of rationalist lingo is deliberate and ironic) in the direction of "Eliezer is stubbornly naive on Scott's racism" or "Eliezer is deliberately covering for Scott's racism". Since I'm not a rationalist my probabilities don't have to sum to 1, so I'm gonna go with both.

  • While the writer is wrong, the post itself is actually quite interesting and made me think more about epistemic luck. I think Zack does correctly point out cases where I would say rationalists got epistemically lucky, although his views on the matter seem entirely different. I think this quote is a good microcosm of this post:

    The Times's insinuation that Scott Alexander is a racist like Charles Murray seems like a "Gettier attack": the charge is essentially correct, even though the evidence used to prosecute the charge before a jury of distracted New York Times readers is completely bogus.

    A "Gettier attack" is a very interesting concept I will keep in my back pocket, but he clearly doesn't know what a Gettier problem is. With a Gettier case a belief is both true and justified, but still not knowledge because the usually solid justification fails unexpectedly. The classic example is looking at your watch and seeing it's 7:00, believing it's 7:00, and it actually is 7:00, but it isn't knowledge because the usually solid justification of "my watch tells the time" failed unexpectedly when your watch broke when it reached 7:00 the last time and has been stuck on 7:00 ever since. You got epistemically lucky.

    So while this isn't a "Gettier attack" Zack did get at least a partial dose of epistemic luck. He believes it isn't justified and therefore a Gettier attack, but in fact, you need justification for a Gettier attack, and it is justified, so he got some epistemic luck writing about epistemic luck. This is what a good chunk of this post feels like.

    • This “Gettier” attack seems to me to have no more interesting content than a “stopped clock”. To use an extremely similar, extremely common phrase, the New York Times would have been “right for the wrong reasons” to call Scott Alexander a racist. And this would be conceptually identical to pointing out that, I dunno, crazed conspiracy theorists suggested before he was caught that Jeffrey Epstein was part of an extensive paedophile network.

      But we see this happen all the time, in fact it’s such a key building block of our daily experience that we have at least two cliches devoted to capturing it.

      Perhaps it would be interesting if we were to pick out authentic Gettier cases which are also accusations of some kind, but it seems likely that in any case (i.e. all cases) where an accusation is levelled with complex evidence, the character of justification fails to be the very kind which would generate a Gettier case. Gettier cases cease to function like Gettier cases when there is a swathe of evidence to be assessed, because already our sense of justification is partial and difficult to target with the precision characteristic of unexpected failure - such cases turn out to be just “stopped clocks”. The sense of counter-intuitivity here seems mostly to be generated by the convoluted grammar of your summarising assessment, but this is just an example of bare recursivity, since you’re applying the language of the post to the post itself.

      • The sense of counter-intuitivity here seems mostly to be generated by the convoluted grammar of your summarising assessment, but this is just an example of bare recursivity, since you’re applying the language of the post to the post itself.

        I don't think it's counter-intuitive and the post itself never mentioned 'epistemic luck'.

        Perhaps it would be interesting if we were to pick out authentic Gettier cases which are also accusations of some kind

        This seems easy enough to contstruct, just base an accusation on a Gettier case. So in the case of the stopped clock, say we had an appointment at 6:00 and due to my broken watch I think it’s 7:00, as it so happens it actually is 7:00. When I accuse you of being an hour late it is a "Gettier attack", it's a true accusation, but it isn’t based on knowledge because it is based on a Gettier case.

69 comments