+But ... "I thought X seemed Y to me"[^pleonasm] and "X is Y" _do not mean the same thing_. [The map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory). [The quotation is not the referent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). [The planning algorithm that maximizes the probability of doing a thing is different from the algorithm that maximizes the probability of having "tried" to do the thing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try). [If my character is actually quite stupid, I want to believe that my character is actually quite stupid.](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski)
+
+[^pleonasm]: The pleonasm here ("to me" being redundant with "I thought") is especially galling coming from someone who's usually a good writer!
+
+It might seem like a little thing of no significance—requiring "I" statements is commonplace in therapy groups and corporate sensitivity training—but this little thing _coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly "rationalist" space_ made a pattern click. If everyone is forced to only make narcissistic claims about their map ("_I_ think", "_I_ feel"), and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question and thereby threaten them, because [disagreement is disrespect](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/disagreement-is.html)), that's great for reducing social conflict, but it's not great for the kind of collective information processing that actually accomplishes cognitive work, like good literary criticism. A rationalist space _needs to be able to talk about the territory_.
+
+I understand that Yudkowsky wouldn't agree with that characterization, and to be fair, the same comment I quoted also lists "Being able to consider and optimize literary qualities" is one of the major considerations to be balanced. But I think (_I_ think) it's also fair to note that (as we had seen on _Less Wrong_ earlier that year), lip service is cheap. It's easy to _say_, "Of course I don't think politeness is more important than truth," while systematically behaving as if you did.
+
+"Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors," Yudkowsky wrote in the post on reducing negativity, correctly pointing out that if a work's true level of mistakenness is _M_, the _i_-th commenter's estimate of mistakenness has an error term of _E<sub>i</sub>_, and commenters leave a negative comment when their estimate _M_ + _E<sub>i</sub>_ is greater than their threshold for commenting _T<sub>i</sub>_, then the comments that get posted will have been selected for erroneous criticism (high _E<sub>i</sub>_) and commmenter chattiness (low _T<sub>i</sub>_).
+
+I can imagine some young person who really liked _Harry Potter and the Methods_ being intimidated by the math notation, and uncritically accepting this wisdom from the great Eliezer Yudkowsky as a reason to be less critical, specifically. But a somewhat less young person who isn't intimidated by math should notice that the the math here is just [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean). The same argument applies to praise!
+
+What I would hope for from a rationality teacher and a rationality community, would be efforts to instill the _general_ skill of modeling things like regression to the mean and selection effects, as part of the general project of having a discourse that does collective information-processing.
+
+And from the way Yudkowsky writes these days, it looks like he's ... not interested in collective information-processing? Or that he doesn't actually believe that's a real thing? "Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private," he writes! I agree that the positive purpose of public criticism isn't solely to help the author. (If it were, there would be no reason for anyone but the author to read it.) But readers _do_ benefit from insightful critical commentary. (If they didn't, why would they read the comments section?) When I read a story, and am interested in reading the comments _about_ a story, it's because _I want to know what other readers were actually thinking about the work_. I don't _want_ other people to self-censor comments on any plot holes or [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) they noticed for fear of dampening someone else's enjoyment or hurting the author's feelings.
+
+Yudkowsky claims that criticism should be given in private because then the target "may find it much more credible that you meant only to help them, and weren't trying to gain status by pushing them down in public." I'll buy this as a reason why credibly _altruistic_ unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private. Indeed, meaning _only_ to help the target just doesn't seem like a plausible critic motivation in most cases. But the fact that critics typically have non-altruistic motives, doesn't mean criticism isn't helpful. In order to incentivize good criticism, you _want_ people to be rewarded with status for making good criticisms! You'd have to be some sort of communist to disagree with this.
+
+There's a striking contrast between the Yudkowsky of 2019 who wrote the "Reducing Negativity" post, and an earlier Yudkowsky (from even before the Sequences) who maintained [a page on Crocker's rules](http://sl4.org/crocker.html): if you declare that you operate under Crocker's rules, you're consenting to other people optimizing their speech for conveying information rather than being nice to you. If someone calls you an idiot, that's not an "insult"; they're just informing you about the fact that you're an idiot, and you should plausibly thank them for the tip. (If you _were_ an idiot, wouldn't you be better off knowing rather than not-knowing?)