I agree that disguising one's self as "someone who cares about X" doesn't require being good at X, at least when you only have short contained contact with them.

I'm trying to emphasize that I don't think Cade has made any progress in learning to "say the right things". I think he has probably learned more individual words that are more frequent in a rationalist context than not (like the word "priors"), but it seems really unlikely that he's gotten any better at even the grammar of rationalist communication.

Like, I'd be mediumly surprised if he, when talking to a rat, said something like "so what's your priors on XYZ?" I'd be incredibly surprised if he said something like "there's clearly a large inferential distance between your world model and the public's world model, so maybe you could help point me towards what you think the cruxes might be for my next article?"

That last sentence seems like a v clear example of something that both doesn't actually require understanding or caring about epistemology to utter, yet if I heard it I'd assume a certain orientation to epistemology and someone could falsely get me to "let my guard down". I don't think Cade can do things like that. And based on Zack's convo and Vassar's convo with him, and the amount of time and exposure he's had to learn between the two convos, I don't think that's the sort of thing he's capable of. 

I might be misunderstanding, I understood the comment I was responding to as saying that Zack was helping Cade do a better job of disguising himself as someone who cared about good epistemics. Something like "if Zack keeps talking, Cade will learn to the surface level features of a good Convo about epistemology and thus, even if he still doesn't know shit, he'll be able to trick more people into thinking he's someone worth talking to."

In response to that claim, I shared an older interview of Cade to demonstrate that his been exposed to people who talk about epistemology for a while, and he did not do a convincing job of pretending to be in good faith then, and in this interview with Zack I don't think he's doing any better a job of seeming like he's acting in good faith.

And while there can still be plenty of reasons to not talk to journalists, or Cade in particular, I really don't think "you'll enable them to mimick us better" is remotely plausible.

I can visibly see you training him, via verbal conversation, how to outperform the vast majority of journalists at talking about epistemics.

Metz doesn't seem any better at seeming like he cares about or thinks at all about epistemics than he did in 2021.

https://naturalhazard.xyz/vassar_metz_interview.html

Symbiotic would be a mutually beneficial relationship. What I described is very clearly not that

Yeah, the parasitic dynamic seems to set up the field for the scapegoating backup such that I'd expect to often find the scapegoating move in parasitic ecosystems that have been running their course for a while.

Your comment seems like an expansion on who is the party being fooled and it also points out another purpose for the obfuscation. A defense of pre-truth would be a theory that shows how it's not deceptive and not a way to cover up a conflict. That being said I agree that an investor that plays pre-truth does want founders to lie, and it seems very plausible that they orient to their language game as a "figure it out" initiation ritual.

I'm with you on the deficiency of the signalling frame when talking about human communication and communication more generally. Skyrms and others who developed the signalling frame explicitly tried to avoid having a notion of of intentionality in order to explore questions like "how could the simplest things that still make sense to call 'communication' develop in systems that don't have human level intelligence?", which means the model has a gaping hole when trying to talk about what people do.

I wrote a post about the interplay between the intentional aspects of meaning and what you're calling the probabilistic information. It's doesn't get too into the weeds, but might provoke more ideas in you.

I remember at some point finding a giant messy graph that was all of The Sequences and the links between posts. I can't track down the link, anyone remember this and have a lead?

When I was drafting my comment, the original version of the text you first quoted was, "Anyone using this piece to scapegoat needs to ignore the giant upfront paragraph about 'HEY DON'T USE THIS TO SCAPEGOAT' (which people are totally capable of ignoring)", guess I should have left that in there. I don't think it's uncommon to ignore such disclaimers, I do think it actively opposes behaviors and discourse norms I wish to see in the world.

I agree that putting a "I'm not trying to blame anyone" disclaimer can be a pragmatic rhetorical move for someone attempting to scapegoat. There's an alternate timeline version of Jessica that wrote this post as a well crafted, well defended rhetorical attack, where the literal statements in the post all clearly say "don't fucking scapegoat anyone, you fools" but all the associative and impressionistic "dark implications" (Vaniver's language) say "scapegoat CFAR/MIRI!" I want to draw your attention to the fact that for a potential dark implication to do anything, you need people who can pick up that signal. For it to be an effective rhetorical move, you need a critical mass of people who are well practiced in ignoring literal speech, who understand on some level that the details don't matter, and are listening in for "who should we blame?"

To be clear, I think there is such a critical mass! I think this is very unfortunate! (though not awkward, as Scott put it) There was a solid 2+ days where Scott and Vaniver's insistence on this being a game of "Scapegoat Vassar vs scapegoat CFAR/MIRI" totally sucked me in, and instead of reading the contents of anyone's comments I was just like "shit, who's side do I join? How bad would it be if people know I hung out with Vassar once? I mean I really loved my time at CFAR, but I'm also friends with Ben and Jess. Fuck, but I also think Eli is a cool guy! Shit!" That mode of thinking I engaged in is a mode that can't really get me what I want, which is larger and larger groups of people that understand scapegoating dynamics and related phenomena. 

This also seems to strong to me. I expect that many movement EAs will read the  post Zoe's and think "well, that's enough information for me to never have anything to do with Geoff or Leverage." This isn't because they're not interested in justice, it's because they don't have time time or the interest to investigate every allegation, so they're using some rough heuristics and policies such as "if something looks sufficiently like a dangerous cult, don't even bother giving it the benefit of the doubt."

Okay, I think my statement was vague enough to be mistaken for a statement I think is too strong. Though I expect you might consider my clarification too strong as well :)

I was thinking about the "in any way that matters" part. I can see how that implies a sort of disregard for justice that spans across time. Or more specifically, I can see how you would think it implies that certain conversations you've had with EA friends were impossible, or that they were lying/confabulating the whole convo, and you don't think that's true. I don't think that's the case either. I'm thinking about it as more piece-wise behavior. One will sincerely care about justice, but in that moment where they read Jess's post, ignore the giant disclaimer about scapegoating, and try to scapegoat MIRI/CFAR/Leverage, in that particular moment the cognitive processes generating their actions aren't aligned with justice, and are working against it. Almost like an "anti-justice traumatic flashback" but most of the time it's much more low-key and less intense than what you will read about in the literature on flashback. Malcolm Ocean does a great job of describing this sort of "falling into a dream" in his post Dream Mashups (his post is not about scapegoating, its about ending up running a cognitive algo that hurts you without noticing).

To be clear, I not saying such behavior is contemptible, blameworthy, bad, or to-be-scapegoated. I am saying it's very damaging, and I want more people to understand how it works. I want to understand how it works more. I would love to not get sucked into as many anti-justice dreams where I actively work against creating the sort of world I want to live in.

So when I said "not aligned with justice in any important relevant way", that was more a statement about "how often and when will people fall into these dreams?" Sorta like the concept of "fair weather friend", my current hunch is that people fall into scapegoating behavior exactly when it would be most helpful for them to not. While reading a post about "here's some problems I see in this institution that is at the core of our community" is exactly when it is most important for one's general atemporal commitment to justice to be present in one's actual thoughts and actions.