+[SECTION: treachery and faith
+
+I concluded that further email prosecution was not useful at this time. My revised Category War to-do list was:
+
+ * Send a _brief_ wrapping-up/end-of-conversation email to Scott (with the anecdote from Discord and commentary on his orc story).
+ * Mentally write-off Scott, Eliezer, and the so-called "rationalist" community as a loss so that I wouldn't be in horrible emotional pain from cognitive dissonance all the time.
+ * Write up the long, engaging, depoliticized mathy version of the categories argument for _Less Wrong_ (which I thought might take a few months—I had a dayjob, and write slowly, and might need to learn some new math, which I'm also slow at).
+ * _Then_ email the link to Scott and Eliezer asking for a signal-boost and/or court ruling.
+
+Ben didn't think the categories argument was the most important thing for
+
+
+
+
+(Subject: "treachery, faith, and the great river (was: Re: DRAFTS: 'wrapping up; or, Orc-ham's razor' and 'on the power and efficacy of categories')"
+
+
+]
+
+
+[SECTION: about monastaries—
+
+"Getting the right answer in public on topic _X_ would be too expensive, so we won't do it" is _less damaging_ when the set of such <em>X</em>es is _small_. It looked to me like we added a new forbidden topic in the last ten years, without rolling back any of the old ones.
+
+"Reasoning in public is too expensive; reasoning in private is good enough" is _less damaging_ when there's some sort of _recruiting pipeline_ from the public into the monasteries: lure young smart people in with entertaining writing and shiny math, _then_ gradually undo their brainwashing once they've already joined your cult. (It had [worked on me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)!)
+
+I would be sympathetic to "rationalist" leaders like Anna or Yudkowsky playing that strategy if there were some sort of indication that they had _thought_, at all, about the pipeline problem—or even an indication that there _was_ an intact monastery somewhere.
+
+]
+
+[TODO small section: concern about bad faith nitpicking—
+
+One reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.