Breaking the vicious cycle

To be honest, I had you pegged as being stuck in a partisan spiral. The fact that you are willing to do this is pretty cool. Have some utils on the house. I don’t know if officially responding to your blog is worth MIRI’s time; it would imply some sort of status equivalence.

Also, you published some very embarrassing quotes from Yudkowsky. I’m guessing you caused him quite a bit of distress, so he’s probably not inclined to do you any favors. Mining someone’s juvenilia for outrageous statements is not productive – I mean he was 16 when he wrote some of the stuff you quote. I would remove those pages. Same with the usenet stuff – I know it was posted publicly but it feels like furtively-recorded conversations to me all these years later. Stick to arguments against positions MIRI and Yudkowsky currently hold. Personally I’ve moved from highly-skeptical of MIRI to moderately approving. I made this comment a year ago:

The fact that MIRI is finally publishing technical research has impressed me. A year ago it seemed, to put it bluntly, that your organization was stalling, spending its funds on the full-time development of Harry Potter fanfiction and popular science books. Perhaps my intuition there was uncharitable, perhaps not. I don't know how much of your lead researcher's time was spent on said publications, but it certainly seemed, from the outside, that it was the majority. Regardless, I'm very glad MIRI is focusing on technical research. I don't know how much farther you have to walk, but it's clear you're headed in the right direction.

And MIRI has stayed on course and is becoming a productive think tank with three full-time researchers and, it seems to me, a highly competent CEO. It is a very different organization now than the one you started out criticizing.

Upvoted for the reflection and change of strategy. Congratulations for using the skills we admire, in very difficult circumstances. On meta level, I admire this article. (EDIT: Although your further comments in this thread kinda undermine it.)

On the object level, uhm, your proposal is between you and MIRI, none of my business. (EDIT: But I think it would be wiser for MIRI to not respond to you officially.)

The health effects you describe are scary. I never had anything this intense, but I think the closest approximation were some political debates (not on LW) which made my heart beat faster, and I felt I have to scream or jump, preferably both. Nice adaptation for a chimp, very unhealthy for a human with a sedentary lifestyle.

Please take care about your health!

I don't enjoy doing this and do not want to continue with it.

The easiest way to not continue with something is to not continue with it.

I respect both updates and hostile ceasefires.

• You can update by posting a header to all of your blog posts saying, "I wrote this blog during a dark period of my life. I now realize that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a decent and honest person with no ill intent, and that anybody can be made to look terrible by selectively collecting all of his quotes one-sidedly as I did. I regret this page, and leave it here as an archive to that regret." If that is how you feel and that is what you do, I will treat with you starting from scratch in any future endeavors. I've been stupid too, in my life. (If you then revert to pattern, you do not get a second second chance.)

• I have not found it important to say very much at all about you so far, unless you show up to a thread in which I am participating. If carrying on your one-sided vendetta is affecting your health and you want to declare a one-sided ceasefire for instrumental reasons, and you feel afraid that your brain will helplessly drag you back in if anyone mentions your name, then I state that: if you delete your site, withdraw entirely from all related online discussions, and do not say anything about MIRI or Eliezer Yudkowsky in the future, I will not say anything about Xixidu or Alexander Kruel in the future. I will urge others to do the same. I do not control anyone except myself. I remark that you cannot possibly expect anything except hostility given your past conduct and that feeding your past addiction by posting one little comment anywhere, only to react with shock as people don't give you the respect to which you consider yourself entitled, is likely to drag you back in and destroy your health again.

Failing either of these actions:

I am probably going to put up a page about Roko's Basilisk soon. I am not about to mention you just to make your health problems worse, nor avoid mentioning you if I find that a net positive while I happen to be writing; your conduct has placed you outside of my circle of concern. If the name Alexander Kruel happens to arise in some other online discussion or someone links to your site, I will explain that you have been carrying on a one-sided vendetta against MIRI for unknown psychological reasons. If for some reason I am talking about the hazards of my existence, I might bring up the name of Alexander Kruel as that guy who follows me around the 'Net looking for sentences that can be taken out of context to add to his hateblog, and mention with some bemusement that you didn't stop even after you posted that all the one-sided hate was causing you health problems. Either a ceasefire or an update will prevent me from saying any such thing.

I urge you to see a competent cognitive-behavioral therapist and talk to them about the reason why your brain is making you do this even as it destroys your health.

I have written this note according to the principles of Tell Culture to describe my own future actions conditional on yours. Reacting to it in a way I deem inappropriate, such as taking a sentence out of context and putting it on your hateblog, will result in no future such communications with you.

To those who seem to not like the manner in which XiXiDu is apologizing: If someone who genuinely thinks the sky is falling apologizes to you while still wearing their metal hat—then that's the best you can possibly expect. To reject the apology until the hat is removed is...

I'm not MIRI affiliated, but as a member of the LessWrong forum, and talking for myself alone, I'll just repeat what I've said before: There's only so many times someone can call me a brainwashed cultist, before I stop forgiving them.

You've spent the past few years insulting and mocking people for having different opinions tha8n you. That's it. That's the entirety of the crime of LessWrong/MIRI: you've not produced a hint of unethicality or dishonesty in regards to any of MIRI and/or LessWrong's doings, but you bash them viciously for having different opinions.

LessWrongers always treated you (and Rationalwiki too), and is still treating you and any of your different opinions, much more civilly than you (or Rationalwiki) ever did us and any of ours. So you getting health related issues as a result of the viciousness you perpetrate -- okay, that's like repeatedly punching someone and then complaining that your fist has started to hurt.

We don't have, nor ever had, a "Why Alexander Kruel/Xixidu sucks" page that we can take down. You are the one with the bazillion "Why LessWrong/MIRI sucks" pages. Unlike you have done with EY, I haven't even screenshotted the comments by you that you've later chosen to take down because you found them embarrassing to yourself. Gee, it must be nice NOT having someone devoted to mocking you.

I wish you good health, as a general moral principle of my humanism. But I also care about the problems you caused on the targets of your viciousness.

Congratulations for updating. Writing that post probably wasn't easy.

Thank you for extending an olive branch! ::sends magic positive feedback rays::

The amount of criticism does not reflect the amount of extraordinary statements being made here.

This is an important point brought up in a comment. Even though XiXiDu isn't a true outside perspective by any means, that's how I would imagine many newcomers to react, at first glance.

What we need to keep in mind is that the inferential gap between LW's claims and the general populace is gargantuan. We're dealing with people who often still believe in a man in the sky. Even if we restricted the target audience to the "decision makers", who are generally better at compartmentalizing their unreasonable beliefs away, the inferential gap is still very large. Especially because we're not talking about an unbiased audience. There are strong economic and reputational incentives to pumping out the most intelligent artificial agent, and very weak incentives (who wants to anonymously potentially save the planet if you can get rich instead?) to curtail one's efforts due to friendliness considerations. Even in a best case scenario, the world is largely doomed if this goes the same way that Tragedies of the Commons usually go.

Yeah, people at MIRI know about the enormity of the task, and yet we should perpetually remind ourselves of it, because most of the claims are just so self-evidently obvious that it's easy to forget that they're like an ugh-field to outsiders who don't want to slay their holy cows and are looking for some motivated-cognition getaway. It's easy to forget that what is akin to 2+2=4 (e.g., orthogonality thesis) for us is "what? crackpot!" territory for others (even if it's getting slightly more mainstream-palatable, see e.g. Elon Musk's recent comments).

Therefore I think that criticisms -- immediately available, immediately answered -- of those claims are really important. Any official document should have a highlighted link to, if not an appendix of, the most convincing criticisms of the new claim, together with answers. If we lack the manpower, even just encouraging top-level authors to compile criticisms from the comments, or to include a final section with their own best "devil's advocate" arguments and their responses.

The people who need convincing aren't the ones who are nodding along anyways. It's those who suspiciously narrow their eyes while reading, going "surely they are crackpots", then come up with some convenient "unaddressed/devastating criticism" which serves as a pretense to shake their heads and close the site. But -- if there are immediate criticisms, steelmanned, and addressed, a significant fraction might come around. At least their go-to excuse would be invalidated.

A convincing narrative is even more so if it has convincing critics, who are convincingly addressed. As much as XiXiDu may have been considered a thorn in MIRI's side, the value of publicly addressing criticisms as strengthening MIRI's arguments may have been underestimated. Also, reporters who during their "research" come across XiXiDu's blog and see his criticisms addressed, even if only by linking to LW articles, will have a harder job at their usual "lol look at the nerd rapture"-hackjobs.

ETA: Sorry for the subpar phrasing, my writing environment is ... not ... ideal.

there very likely exist misrepresentations. There are many reasons for this, but I can assure you that I never deliberately lied and that I never deliberately tried to misrepresent anyone. The main reason might be that I feel very easily overwhelmed

I think the thing to remember is that, when you've run into contexts where you feel like someone might not care that they're setting you up to be judged unfairly, you've been too overwhelmed to keep track of whether or not your self-defense involves doing things that you'd normally be able to see would set them up to be judged unfairly.

You've been trying to defend a truth about a question -- about what actions you could reasonably be expected to have been sure you should have taken, after having been exposed to existential-risk arguments -- that's made up of many complex implicit emotional and social associations, like the sort of "is X vs. Y the side everyone should be on?" that Scott Alexander discusses in "Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments". But you've never really developed the necessary emotional perspective to fully realize that the only language you've had access to, to do that with, is a different language: that of explicit factual truths. If you try to state truths in one language using the other without accounting for the difference, blinded by pain and driven by the intuitive impulse escape the pain, you're going to say false things. It only makes sense that you would have screwed up.

written in a tearing hurry, akin to a reflexive retraction from the painful stimulus

Try to progress to having a conscious awareness of your desperation, I mean a conscious understanding of how the desperation works and what it's tied to emotionally. Once you've done that, you should be able to consciously keep in mind better the other ways that the idea of "justice" might also relate to your situation, and so do a lot less unjust damage. (Contrariwise, if you do choose to do damage, a significantly greater fraction of it will be just.)

It might also help to have a stronger deontological proscription against misrepresenting anyone in a way that would cause them to be judged unfairly. That proscription would put you under more pressure to develop this kind of emotional perspective and conscious awareness, although it would do this at the cost of adding extra deontological hoops you have to jump through to escape the pain when it comes. If this leaves you too bound-up to say anything, you can usually go meta and explain how you're too bound-up, at least once you have enough practice at explaining things like that.

I'm sorry. I claim to have some idea what it's like.

(Also, on reflection, I should admit that mostly I'm saying this because I'm afraid of third parties keeping mistakenly unfavorable impressions about your motives; so it's slightly dishonest of me to word some of the above comments as simply directed to you, the way I have. And in the process I've converted an emotional truth, "I think it's important for other people not to believe as-bad things about your motives, because I can see how that amount of badness is likely mistaken", into a factual claim, "your better-looking motives are exactly X".)

So you getting health related issues as a cause of the viciousness you perpetrate -- okay, that's like repeatedly punching someone and then complaining that your fist has started to hurt.

I read this (from here), smiled and thought, "there's some karma for you. In no way metaphysical."

Then, I thought, "we have a literal karma system on this site." I checked. He has karma in the quadrupedal digits, 75 percent positive. I don't understand. If XiXiDu was so abusive, why is does he so upvoted? It seems like he must of said things worth saying, perhaps useful critiques. Is the karma system broken (or at least not designed to deal with this sort of thing) or are the accusations not as bad as they seem? Someone explain my confusion.

I am also aware that LW and MIRI are bothered by RationalWiki.

I was a little bit at first, but then I tried clicking "random page" a few times to get a sense of what RationalWiki is like as a whole. Other than stubs, every page I landed on contained an attack of some sort. Being upset about a RationalWiki entry being unfair and negative is... like being upset about Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary being linguistically inaccurate. It doesn't really matter and that's not really what they do.

There's no "fight". You've been a very aggressive and mean-spirited critic of LW/MIRI/EY for a few years. Doesn't mean that there's a fight. Doesn't mean anyone "wins" if, say, you shut up and go away.

Your suggestion is not constructive, because coming up with retorts to mean-spirited past posts and endorsing them would be a poor use of MIRI's time, and would only add to drama rather than reduce it. Here's what you should do instead:

First, consider just going away. It may be best for your physical and mental health to stay away from LW and LW-related topics. Delete your old posts, forget you ever cared about this stuff, take up some other hobbies, etc. If you feel you can't, presumably because you think these issues are really important, read on.

1. Come up with a generously-sized kindly-worded update that negates the meanness and stick it on top of your relevant past posts. E.g. if I were in your position I would write something like "I wrote the post below during years in which, I now recognize, I was locked in a venom-filled flamewar against a community which I actually like and appreciate, despite what I perceive as its faults. I do not automatically repudiate my arguments and factual points, but if you read the below, please note that I regret the venom and the personal attacks and that I may well have quote-mined and misrepresented persons and communities. I now wish I wrote it all in a kinder spirit".

2. Continue participating on LW as you desire, trying your best to be kind and not get into drama. Plenty of people manage to be skeptical of MIRI/EY and criticize them here without being you. (If you're not sure you can do this well, ask some regular(s) to help you out. Precommit that if people you asked PM you about your future LW comment or blog post saying you're being an asshole, you'll believe them and mend it.)

3. Accept that some people will continue to hate/dislike/hold a grudge against you. Issue private apologies to them if you feel you should, but don't do it publicly (because drama). If that doesn't help, accept and move on.

FWIW I actually know you as the guy who made this bleeping awesome resources page. However, your attacks on MIRI/LW/EY have always felt rather silly and harmful (the internet makes doing both of those things easy) and maybe you should just take all of the stuff about it down.

I've had to deal with the stress you are contributing to putting on the broader perception of transhumanism for the weekend, and that is on top of preexisting mental problems. (Whether MIRI/LW is actually representative to this is entirely orthogonal to the point; public perception has and is shifting towards viewing the broader context of futurism as run by neoreactionaries and beige-os with parareligious delusions.)

Of course, that's no reason to stop anything. People are going to be stressed by things independent of their content.

But you are expecting an entity which you have devoted most of blog to criticizing to be caring enough about your psychological state that they take time out to write header statements for each of your posts?

If you want to stop accusations of lying and bad faith, stop spreading the "LW believes in Roko's Basilisk" meme, and do something less directly reputation-warfare escalatory, and more productive-- like hunting down Nazis and creating alternatives to the current decision-theoretic paradigm. (I don't think anybody's going to get that upset over abstract discussions of Newcomb's Problem. At least, I hope.)

I don't think MIRI has any reason to take you up on this offer, as responding in this way would elevate the status of your writings. High status entities do not need to respond specifically to low status entities, and when they do, it will be obliquely and non-specifically addressed to the broader class which contains the specific low-status entity. Additionally, it would look mean-spirited to try to 'kick someone while their down', especially as this post in some ways resembles a call for a truce. As such, it would be a mistake for MIRI to accept your offer, even before taking into account the resources that would be required. If I was MIRI I would totally ignore this.

Given this, either you have failed to understand what apologizing actually consists in, or are still (perhaps subconsciously) trying to undermine MIRI. At the moment all you offer is the implication that you would continue your disruption were it not for the toll it has taken on your health. Contrition would demand at least a genuine apology - something like "I am sorry for acting badly" - if not actively working to undo the harm you have done.

Fortunately, I think you overestimate the impact you had. Probably your biggest effect was wasting everyone's time.

I don't really have much to say here, since I'm not affiliated with MIRI, but I'd just like to say that I am genuinely impressed by this attempt at reconciliation. I do think that much of what you have previously written is/was uncharitable toward MIRI and EY, especially some of the more egregious quote-mining you've done, but this post has caused me to significantly revise my probability estimate of you deliberately engaging in character assassination downward. Now I think it's more likely that you simply mentioned some (perceived) shortcomings of MIRI/LW, possibly phrased your criticisms a bit too aggressively, received negative feedback, and then it all just escalated from there. (I was not around in 2010, so obviously the specifics are unavailable to me and this is just conjecture.) I have now positively updated my opinion of you.

I think Toggle's observations are very good, and that you should consider everything said there. I started writing up my own response before I realised I was essentially repeating it.

I would like to add something, though - I think that it would be fair to characterize some of what you were doing as informed, insightful criticism, and some of what you were doing as unproductive and possibly hurtful. I don't think it is an all-or-nothing situation. In which case, as well-reasoned constructive criticism is very valuable, you should definitely continue to do that whereever possible, and similarly, you should probably cease the other stuff, the nasty stuff, the unproductive stuff, the hurtful stuff.

If you believe that I am, or was, a troll then check out this screenshot from 2009 (this was a year before my first criticism). And also check out this capture of my homepage from 2005, on which I link to MIRI's and Bostrom's homepage (I have been a fan).

If you believe that I am now doing this because of my health, then check out this screenshot of a very similar offer I made in 2011.

In summary: (a) None of my criticisms were ever made with the intent of giving MIRI or LW a bad name, but were instead meant to highlight or clarify problematic issues (b) I believe that my health issues allow me to quit caring about the problems I see, but they are not the crucial reason for wanting to quit. The main reason is that I hate fights and want people to be happy rather than being constantly engaged in emotional battles.

That said, many of the replies to this post perfectly resemble the reason for why I kept going on for so long: lots of misunderstandings combined with smug personal attacks against me. Anyway, I made the above offer expecting that this would continue, so it still stands. And if this isn't worthwhile for MIRI, fine. But because of people like ArisKatsaris, paper-machine, wedrifid and others with a history of vicious personal attacks against me, I am unable to just delete everything, because that would only leave their misrepresentations of my motives and actions behind. Yes, you understand that correctly. I believe myself to be the one who has been constantly mishandled and forced to strike back (if you constantly call someone a troll and liar then you shouldn't be surprised if they call you brainwashed). And yet I offer you the chance to leave this battle as the winner by posting counterstatements to my blog.

Under what circumstances is the 'olive branch' valuable to MIRI- that is, what are the conditions under which they would want you to stop?

It seems to me that informed, insightful criticism is of tremendous value to anyone, although it's not always fun to get. It's great to find an intellectual opponent that can see weaknesses in your implementation and offer corrections, or even give you strong reason to reassess your whole plan. I go looking for principled opposition to transhumanism, Quinean philosophy, and what have you- these debates can offer some of the most and best insights into one's own position. And it seems that the rationalist position is especially well suited to profit from and even enjoy such dialogues.

It seems implicit in your perspective that people don't like what you've been posting. That means, at some point, there's been a breakdown in the effectiveness in these arguments. Possibly those arguments are of an unproductive nature, hurt for the sake of hurt and not for the sake of making things better. Possibly they are productive, but there is no significant part of LW/MIRI that is receptive to these arguments, because there has been some breakdown in this group's ability to perform your kind of self-analysis.

If the former is true, I would urge you to end your arguments unconditionally, because your actions are immoral and making the world a less wonderful place. If the latter is true, then you are a valuable resource and I hope that you won't stop. But I'm afraid I just don't see the hypothetical universe where MIRI should pay some kind of intellectual weregeld to keep you quiet.

So MIRI and LW are no longer a focus for you going forward?

I had a similar issue, although I think it was just a product of OCD. I used to have insane, tear-your-hair out arguments online with idiots which I could never ever not respond to, no matter how petty. It just bounced around in my brain until I had to vomit out a response to stop myself from going nuts.

I'd like to see a competent cognitive-behavioral therapist, as Eliezer recommended, but I don't believe that competent mental health professionals actually exist. Better to do your own research, and find your own solution.

Breaking the vicious cycle

I endorse this suggestion.

Don't Feed The Trolls!

I think that all the involved people deserve a break time to time. Every one is always attacking them and I have some aesthetic differences and some minor intellectually structural differences, but on the good side of the sanity waterline they're great.

As a somewhat recent follower of LW (less than 1 year), it was actually quite useful to sift through your critiques back then (while occasionally they felt a bit personal and unnecessarily emotionally-motivated, I still valued the gist of the content - they were refreshingly contrarian).

Basically, when I first stumbled upon LW, I was excited, awed, and to some extent hypnotized.

The content was an interesting mixture of mathematics, computer science, philosophy and cognitive science, and as a new reader, I found myself easily convinced of many of the main positions advocated. I'm typically skeptical of any extraordinary claims, but the way the content is generally presented here, seemingly scientific and authoritative, evaded my usual defenses.

After a few weeks of taking in a lot of this content, I googled LW and Eliezer to find out more, and stumbled upon some criticisms, as well as your blog, the RationalWiki, ..etc.

Yes, it was interesting to hear about the basilisk, and the apparent knee-jerk reaction of Eliezer, and the ensuing censorship. That exercise helped restore my usual (and useful) skepticism, and consequently I re-examined a lot of the claims and positions with a more careful eye.

I also remember checking out your user profile here on LW, and seeing that you are an active member of the community, and that even though you and others occasionally engaged in some of these heated debates, the fact that one of LW's more vocal critics was not banned or censored was also useful information that I gleaned from this exercise.

As a consumer of your critiques, I was enlightened but not turned-off from LW. In other words, I still somewhat drink the kool-aid, but I carefully check the drink before each sip.

So, thanks for providing a different perspective, and humanizing LW and its contributors, and good luck with your health and future endeavors.

Hehe. I just checked out that blog of yours.

I advise anyone tempted to respond to this to first do so as well.