SneerClub

Is Zack a big cheese in the community or just some random internet person who spams people with emails?

Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that taught me (amongst many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was. So it came as a huge surprise when, around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.

Goddamn, what an opening. I really hope this is an elaborate troll and not someone driven insane by internet transphobia and the Sequences.

Not gonna all read that, though.

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.

Another meandering manifesto from Zach hoping that trans women would stop existing ~~so that we stop tempting him with the prospect of actually maybe being happy for once~~.

To clear this up once and for all 'she' is a very solid category with a fixed and unchanging logical definition which can be derived via straightforward Bayesian reasoning and should only be used to refer to the following and anyone who disagrees HATES MATH:

1. Boats
2. Cars
3. A swedish chiptune artist (obligatory music link)
4. She-Slimes from the dragon quest series of videogames (fun fact: male She-slimes have the ability to undergo slimification and form a King she-slime when eight gather together!)
5. Ladies (a lady is of course a title that can be used by anyone who kneads bread, per etymology online)

Imagine if DeFi people got their wish and made a blockchain-enabled blogging platform where you have to mint crypto for every word. What a massive pile of cash you could make off of LessWrongers.