DE-RATTING 2: CLARIFICATIONS ON FRIVOLOUS SHIT

Preliminary: the original accusation and my responses https://app.simplenote.com/p/wKW9DP
1. The main letter: https://app.simplenote.com/p/02HJS2
1.a. Memory / awareness as it relates to disregarding archival: https://app.simplenote.com/p/P5Jn9Y
2. Clarifications on frivolous shit, which this is: https://app.simplenote.com/p/8gcsJY
3. My concerns going forward: https://app.simplenote.com/p/lmlrpv

This part is where I elaborate on gossip that I think is too frivolous and dumb to warrant inclusion in the main document.

****** 1. THE NATURE OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE ******

Some of you are confused about the nature of public discourse and public replies. I originally wrote "seem confused" but, no, this really is pants-on-head backward.

If I'm writing a paper, and I say that an author is wrong about something, I am doing this for the record.

It's assumed that, provided they even care, the author will do the due diligence of finding my criticism.

If my criticism is publicly available, which it almost always is, that's *your fault* for not following me or for not bothering to find the criticism. I'm not going to inform everybody. I don't care if you aren't following me, nor do I want your responses on my page because you aren't the point. Integrate the response to your error into your work or don't; I have done you a favor by even bothering to publicly make it available.

The careless thing is to let you stay wrong -- and if that's actually what you prefer, I would prefer to not know you.

Not only is there no obligation to inform you that there is a critical response to something you've said, it's not even a *good idea* to enact this as practice even in just a courtesy sense because that is just impractical for every criticism I make and because discourse is not a 1-to-1 exchange and because the point isn't to be friends or to negotiate your social status, the point is to correct information and make the quality of information people read better.

****** 2. THE AELLA THING ******

I'm going to cover an -- not the -- elephant in the room. I figured I would get banned if I said this or if I was open about this, but now that I am banned I can't get double-banned, so:

1. Aella says a lot of insightful things. I agree with probably 95% of them. She is clearly smart.

2. There is no person correct enough or smart enough to not be worth criticizing. No one is above criticism. This is true for Yudkowsky, Scott, and everyone here.

3. Criticizing someone is problematic when a bias exists such that they will be disproportionaly defended whenever you do.

4. Some of you are shamelessly horny and want to fuck Aella a lot. It's palpable. We know who does and who doesn't.

5. If I were to publicly criticize her in the chat I will be accused of creating undue discord or whatever.

6. If I do it privately, then I'm talking behind her back, which is very obviously how some of you feel.

7. If I do it publicly in a post, that's apparently bad if I'm not friends with her, because she's not following me.

8. She isn't able to respond because ******I don't want to be Facebook friends with her.****** I've not wanted to for well over a year, since December 2020 when Arpan asked me, several separate times, to invite her to my groupchats.

This expectation is not so much asking but demanding that I be her facebook friend and not only am I not doing that, it's obvious that this is an irrational position if you even bother to think about how this norm would play out at scale. It's a public post. You can publicly repond. You just don't want to; that's a you-problem if not a you-irrationality.

****** 3. LOW ON INFORMATION-VALUING / LOW FYG THRESHOLD******

My group chats and circles in general are centered around information and discussion quality. Discussion quality is not determined by cordiality or how good people feel, it's determined epistemically and by the quality of information and dialogue. I don't care if you're important. I have removed "important people." I don't care whether you're well known either, or whether you're a good father, or whatever. You can be a celebrity and a good father and a horrible contributor and I'm still going to remove you if your output is annoying and a blight on everyone's cognitive real estate.

Inevitably some people struggle to understand this, so I've made a thought experiment that makes this clearer. This is called the fuck-you genie. The genie gives you very good information that you either can't get anywhere else or would have a tremendously difficult time getting anywhere else. When he does this he's verbally an asshole, but not in a way that is psychologically injurious. He just calls you a cunt or retard or whatever. The genie's remarks aren't traumatizing. The idea here is that there's a fuck-you-genie threshold people have where they would tolerate some degree of interpersonal discord for information.

More elaboration is here: http://facebook.com/1441668545/posts/10226164823334012 (the comments serve as nested footnotes here, such as explaining how Nassim Taleb is a FYG.)

A lot of people, I've realized -- not because of this group, just in general -- have an extremely low fuck-you-genie threshold. In the most extreme example, you'd forego a PhD or something because an instructor made you mildly uncomfortable or called you a couple of names or whatever. This group in particular however seems to have a much lower threshold than I first thought. This drastically lowers my want to invest myself further.

****** 4. SCARY MESSAGES ABOUT ME FROM, WITH NEAR-CERTAINTY, THE POSTRATIONALIST TWITTER CIRCLE ******

There was a person who was going around and anonymously messaging people bizarre rumors about me, such as that I am manipulative or worse.

NOTE: This is a personal dispute, at its core, and to refute it I'm going to need to bring up awkward personal details about people. If you believe the "manipulative" (etc) accusation, this is pertinent. If you don't believe it, you can skip past this section. If you're a Michael-Jackson-eating-popcorn gif, you already know what you're going to do.

To begin, the accusation originates from some person connected to Colin Popell / "orthonormalist" and Samuel Henley / "eigenrobot", both of whom are influential on what might be called postrationalist twitter; including Samuel's wife their combined follower count is over 40,000 although I would imagine there is heavy overlap.

The reasoning is detailed below:

1. Some of the messages you received reference my reddit history.

2. My reddit account ("MittRomneysCampaign" -- and yes, this is a joking account name) was inactive since 2017. It has been outright deleted since 2019, so the person who referenced this must know me and cannot be someone who just googled me recently.

3. Colin was my friend from 2013-2018.

4. Colin Popell ("orthonormalist") knows my reddit history, and the messages might be referencing a campaign where we pushed antifeminist media to the top of reddit's frontpages.

4.a. This is not even kind-of a secret; I wrote a popular post about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/36wwr6/the_types_of_manipulation_on_votebased_forums/ (The "Ryan" here is my friend from undergrad and unrelated to rationality groups.)

4.b. In fact, reddit is how I met Colin. Until we stopped talking he openly self-identified as "machiavellian", although I think this is a LARP and that he is actually a good guy. ("I know conspiracy theories are real because other people like me must exist" is a Colin quote I'll never forget.) For a long time we were in a groupchat called -- this was his name choice, not mine -- "Dark Triad Tendencies". I and Jeremy Cahill thought the name was cringe so I changed it to "Jaded Rationalist Tendencies" which was its name until the chat died off in 2018 and was replaced by War Club which became Not War Club which is its current incarnation and has about 60 participants.

5. Some people here know Colin through twitter and his web forum.

6. Colin is moving to Texas with his friend Paul Bragulla, who I don't think is part of this circle. Several people here have been talking about this privately.

7. Colin often posts about knowing Samuel IRL.

8. Colin is also trying to get Samuel to move to Texas.

9. Samuel's wife, Mackenzie ("selentelechia"), used to be involved with me and clearly -- in ways I am not going into here but can if this is necessary to refute the accusations -- desired more investment from me.

9.a. Some of you will not get the above subtext no matter how much I gesture, so I will make this explicit: if I hadn't turned her down, their relationship would not exist.

10. Male competitiveness and insecurity is certainly enough to make men in this situation weird about me, and I would not be surprised if that were part of it. It's also the case that, in relationships, to explain away targets of jealousy women will villainize previous men they've been interested in. Any combination of these things are plausible.

10.a. I understand that this is probably awkward and uncomfortable to hear. It's also awkward and uncomfortable to say, but it's pertinent to the accusations.

10.b. This is the kind of inconsequential drama shit I don't like talking about, but because of the messages sent about me am compelled to talk about as this information is an obvious motive for unscrupulous behavior. This is something I would never have discussed had whoever sent those messages not done so. (If you are that person and reading this, I suggest never doing it again.)

11. In addition to the above, I know embarrassing details about Colin's history that I'm not going into here, but his details are less directly relevant than Samuel's because they are redundant with the existing motives.

12. Colin is a person who self-identifies as power-seeking. This is not just my opinion; this is public information.

13. If you are a person who currently identifies as a power-seeking, and used to identify as machiavellian, someone knowing a lot of embarrassing details about your circle might be a problem.

13.a. But once again, I think this is a LARP and he's a decent guy who happened to just think I became a trainwreck. And I was! The period from summer 2017 to summer 2018 was probably the most retrograde year of my life since 2006, and 2006 was when I had revenge masturbation videos circulated of me to a large gaming community wherein I was micro-famous. This is not to claim victimhood points but to say that 2017-2018 was, in fact, that bad and unlike 2006 was mostly my fault.

14. It is a near-certainty that someone from this circle sent you this message in an attempt to save their own sense of status; specifically, due to the degree to which I could compromise their image, or reputation, or both if it came to that.

15. Colin at one point during my relationship with my ex girlfriend Laila suddenly stopped talking to me.

15.a. This was additionally weird because he introduced me to her in the first place. (If I recall they hooked up once in high school or whatever.)

16. Regardless, she would DM him for advice during the low points of our relationship. Like most engagements of this kind she wouldn't message him during the high points, so their relationship involved exclusively negative information.

17. These weren't just normal "low points"; they were *really low* because that was a dumpster fire of a relationship.

17.a. To name one element among a shitload, just about every BPD stereotype you can imagine occured, as well as just about every toxic relationship stereotype. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDFdroN7d0w Take this sort of intensity, except consider that we weren't important people, and reiterate that once a week and for hour-long stretches. To wit, I was broken up with thirteen times; the relationship ended when I gave up and ended it myself. In no other relationship of mine has this dynamic occurred; to name some examples I'm still friends with my last ex, Rachel, who some of you have met, and am also still friends with my longest ex, Jessica, who is director of digital customer experience at UTSA.

17.a. If were receiving DMs about that relationship from anyone, I would think they were insane. So, I didn't blame Colin nor Mackenzie for not wanting to speak to me then because I wouldn't have wanted to talk to me either.

18. However, there is reason to believe they acted as a cohort. Mackenzie stopped talking to me roughly around the period Colin did. My last dated interaction with Mackenzie is 2/17/18 and my last with Colin is 12/4/2017; my last "seen" message by Colin is 3/16/2018 and they go dark after that. These are proximal and they lived in roughly the same area and hung out with similar people. They could have just both independently wanted nothing to do with my dumpster fire relationship -- which I wouldn't fault -- but nonetheless the proximity and circumstances do make this look like it was a decision made as a cohort.

19. Colin runs a forum at https://aristillus.xyz

20. All of the above-mentioned people are by-design influential on this forum.

21. All of the above-mentioned people are additionally influential among their twittersphere.

21.a. To wit, their accounts have been linked in the discord several times; "the discourse" has been used to describe them and it's clear several users think postrationalist discourse gravitates around Samuel in particular.

Due to the above, the messages some of you received could be any of them or none of them, but:

22. those are their respective motives, and

23. it's indisputable that someone connected to that circle is talking about it.

To emphasize, "someone connected to" is the essential verbiage. It's entirely plausible that whoever is messaging you is neither Mackenzie nor Samuel nor Colin but in fact some rando from Colin's forum and/or twitter who has heard enough poor thirdhand information from them to foolishly think that they benefit from acting on it.

Nonetheless it remains the case that this part of my life was hearsaid to *someone* involved with this circle, which led to the telephone-game bullshit you're getting now.

But let's be real. If whoever is anonymously messaging you were confident, they would have attached this accusation to something more than an anonymous message. I, personally, doubt it's Colin or Mackenzie themselves because both know me well enough to know that I would, eventually, issue a refutation of this kind.

Once again: had those messages never occurred, none of you would know any of this, and I am annoyed I've even had to type about it.

With that said, I've given you *vastly* more information to work with and corroborate. You may scrutinize any of it, and in fact I encourage you to; what I'm saying will hold up. What's going on here should be obvious by now.

****** 5. NO I AM NOT, NOR EVER WAS, THE "STOP BEING A BITCH ALEX Z" ACCOUNT ******

This should be obvious because of how direct I am otherwise. The writing style may be similar, the indirectness is out-of-character.

****** 6. THE UTTER UNMATTERING OF THIS ******

This isn't Edward Snowden shit. No one is being tangibly harmed. This is a fucking discord. These are luxury problems.

I remember when I was explaining this drama to my friend Jose, and his immediate reaction was just "what the fuck? Weird white people."

And that's ... what it is. This is such an HR-ish, university conduct level disagreement. None of this matters. All of this is just mildly discomforting feelings.

This is a 2/10 on the spectrum of harm at most, and it none of this is going to actually, tangibly, affect the course of people's lives. This isn't a leg injury, this isn't unemployment; high school kids going through breakups are going through realer shit than this.

So please, at very least, have perspective.


part 3: https://app.simplenote.com/p/lmlrpv