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Yudkowsky tweets Quilette interview with TERF (https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512?s=19)
37

Somebody should just tweet ‘I dont know much about AGI, but I don’t think it will be a big problem’ at him in a few months, see how he reacts.

Edit: before he manages to morph into a huge sealion btw.

To be clear, I don’t know much about gender dysphoria

or physics

or AI

or anything they teach in highschool really

but by all means go on?

go off, even

To be clear, I don’t know much about gender dysphoria.

Have you ever considered, I don’t know, TALKING TO SOMEONE WHO DOES?

Oh I know, he could talk to Scott. The two of them together could definitely reason out everything they need to know.
...from first principles
if only there were huge numbers of transgender people in the Bay Area transhumanist subculture he knew personally

“Everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties”

Jesus fuck he’s so fucking bad at philosophy and physics that he has no business trying to bootstrap intuition from those into subjects he’s even more embarrassingly inept at.

To be clear, I don’t know much about gender dysphoria.

We know, Eliezer, we know.

Don't know much about history Don't know much biology Thanks for this quote, now I can't get the song out of my head
I'm hijacking the first comment, to point out that in subsequent replies people have called this BS, and he gladly accepted the explanation.

To be clear, I don’t know much about gender dysphoria

Thank you for this necessary clarification

Everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties.

That’s an interesting definition of ‘not all gender dysphoria is real’.

>> Everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender ~~dysphoria~~ involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties. > Let me guess how many of these pricks want to hear *that*, though..
I mean. Yudkowsky has also said that (paraphrased) “it’s not a lie to call a trans woman “she””, so I don’t think he’d actually complain if you said that there were more than two genders. I’d be surprised if he went beyond “tweeting TERFs and making inane statements about categories being things that exist”.
> Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties. Hydrogen has isotopes, but I'm pretty sure the hypothetical isotope with, say, 10 or 100 neutrons doesn't have any real-world applications. Similarly, ROGD is a variety of dysphoria that you can conceptualize, but is it useful to apply it to people? (No.)

To be clear, I don’t know much about gender dysphoria

I know two others have noted this in particular, but goddamit Eliezer

To be fair, it takes a very high IQ to understand gender dysphoria from the lens of rationalism.

I'm too tired to continue this pasta 🍝

Isn’t this an argument for believing literally anything ever? “Unicorns are real.” “Well, animals do come in varieties, so ok”

“Unicorns are not real.” “Well, not-animals only come in one variety: 'not', so I don't believe you”. Bootstrapping is fun.
> Not-animals are more complex than protons, ergo this cannot be true
But are not-not-not animals as complex as positrons?
They're not *not* as complex 🤷‍♀️

To be clear, I don’t know much about gender dysphoria.

The whole thread should just be us quoting this.

> To be clear, I don't know much about gender dysphoria. Just doing my part.

Yudkowsky tweets Quillette…

Already noped out.

”Gender dysphoria is like hydrogen, it comes in many varieties”

“Excellent analogy! I couldn’t have said it better myself”

”Gender is like hydrogen, it comes in many varieties”

“NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. THERE ARE EXACTLY TWO GENDERS AND SCIENCE WILL NEVER SAY OTHERWISE”

What sucks is that Yudkowsky actually seemed pretty good on trans issues. Awhile back he posted on Twitter about what a dumb hill "biological pronouns" was to die on.
If you go further down the tweets you find him responding positively to criticism of the article and the nonsense "rapid onset" condition
He then asks for more pro rapid onset articles. So he is still just sitting on the fence.
He has to see both sides!
Right, which is why this was disappointing to see. I thought Yudkowsky was better than this. But it shows the danger of buying into this heterodox branding. Sometimes someone's ideas are rejected because they are bad or harmful. So we shouldn't reflexively go to bat for 'censored' scholars. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, as a wise man [once said](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence).
Yeah, this seems like a case of contrarian brain poisoning. Anyone that claims to be persecuted by the left gets a half-assed boost based on ad-hoc reasoning..

i don’t know anything about lisa littman - can someone explain what the deal with her paper is?

Zinnia Jones has written some good stuff about Littman's paper and ROGD more generally. [Here](https://medium.com/@zinniajones/my-letter-to-the-brown-daily-herald-on-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-and-lisa-littmans-response-9a5c5a0d9b61) is a good start.
She published a rather flawed paper on "rapid onset gender dysphoria". It's back in the news because PLOS ONE published a set of corrections and clarifications of its flaws (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214157&type=printable). And quillette of course had to quillette about it.
Quilletting is the new kibbitzing.

god, I hate his moldy face