+We _lost?!_ How could we _lose?!_ The philosophy here was _very clear-cut_. This _shouldn't_ be hard or expensive or difficult to clear up. I could believe that Alexander was "honestly" confused, but Yudkowsky ...!?
+
+I could see how, under ordinary circumstances, asking Yudkowsky to weigh in on my post would be inappropriately demanding of a Very Important Person's time, given that an ordinary programmer such as me was surely as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Such that I would have humbly given up much sooner without the social proof from Michael and Ben and Sarah and secret posse member and Jessica.)
+
+But the only reason for my post to exist was because it would be even _more_ inappropriately demanding to ask for a clarification in the original gender-political context. I _don't_ think it was inappropriately demanding to expect "us" (him) to _be correct about the cognitive function of categorization_. (If not, why pretend to have a "rationality community" at all?) I was _trying_ to be as accomodating as I could, short of just letting him (us?) be wrong.
+
+Jessica mentioned talking with someone about me writing to Yudkowsky and Alexander requesting that they clarify the category boundary thing. This person described having a sense that I should have known that wouldn't work—because of the politics involved, not because I wasn't right. I thought Jessica's takeaway was very poignant:
+
+> Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
+
+_Should_ I have known that it wouldn't work? _Didn't_ I "already know", at some level?
+
+I guess in retrospect, the outcome does seem kind of "obvious"—that it should have been possible to predict in advance, and to make the corresponding update without so much fuss and wasting so many people's time.
+
+But ... it's only "obvious" if you _take as a given_ that Yudkowsky is playing a savvy Kolmogorov complicity strategy like any other public intellectual in the current year. Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult?