-But we had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way (which was a extremely high standard, and not a special flaw of Yudkowsky in the current environment). If, after we had _tried_ to talk to him privately, Yudkowsky couldn't be bothered to either live up to his own stated standards or withdraw his validation from the machine he built, then we had a right to talk about what we thought was going on.
-
-This wasn't about direct benefit _vs._ harm. This was about what, substantively, the machine and its operators were doing. They claimed to be cultivating an epistemically rational community, while in fact building an army of loyalists.
-
-Ben compared the whole set-up to that of Eliza the spambot therapist in my short story ["Blame Me for Trying"](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/): regardless of the initial intent, scrupulous rationalists were paying rent to something claiming moral authority, which had no concrete specific plan to do anything other than run out the clock, maintaining a facsimile of dialogue in ways well-calibrated to continue to generate revenue. Minds like mine wouldn't survive long-term in this ecosystem. If we wanted minds that do "naïve" inquiry (instead of playing savvy power games) to live, we needed an interior that justified that level of trust.
+But my posse and I had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way. Maybe _he_ didn't think he had done anything wrong (because he [hadn't strictly lied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly)), and probably a normal person would think we were making a fuss about nothing, but as far as we were concerned, the formerly rightful caliph had relinquished his legitimacy. A so-called "rationalist" community that couldn't clarify this matter of the cognitive function of categories was a sham. Something had to change if we wanted a place in the world for the spirit of "naïve" (rather than politically savvy) inquiry to survive.