-Fundamentally, I was skeptical that you _could_ do consisently high-grade reasoning as a group without committing heresy, because of the mechanism that Yudkowsky described in ["Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) and ["Dark Side Epistemology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology). Anna in particular was unusually good at thinking things without saying them; I thought most people facing similar speech restrictions just get worse at thinking (plausibly including Yudkowsky), and the problem gets worse as the group effort scales. (It's easier to recommend ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) to your housemates than to put it on a canonical reading list, for obvious reasons.) You _can't_ optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you can't optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding the [37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+Fundamentally, I was skeptical that you _could_ do consisently high-grade reasoning as a group without committing heresy, because of the mechanism that Yudkowsky described in ["Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) and ["Dark Side Epistemology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology). Anna in particular was unusually good at thinking things without saying them; I thought most people facing similar speech restrictions just get worse at thinking (plausibly including Yudkowsky), and the problem gets worse as the group effort scales. (It's easier to recommend ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) to your housemates than to put it on a canonical reading list, for obvious reasons.) You can't optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding [Occam's razor](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor); you can't optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding the [37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+
+[TODO: tussle on "Yes Implies the Possibility of No"
+
+MIRI researcher Scott Garabrant had written a post on the theme of how ["Yes Requires the Possibility of No"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no). (Information-theoretically, a signal sent with probability one transmits no information: you only learn something from observing the outcome if it could have gone the other way.) I saw an analogy to my thesis about categories: to say that _x_ belongs to category _C_ is meaningful because _C_ imposes truth conditions; just defining _x_ to be a _C_ by fiat would be uninformative.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019
+
+the intent of "MIRI Research Associate ... doesn't that terrify you" is not to demonize or scapegoat Vanessa, because I was just as bad (if not worse) in 2008, but in 2008 we had a culture that could _beat it out of me_
+
+Was "hidden Bayesian structure of Science that applies [outside the laboratory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory)" part of the Sequences a lie?
+
+In "What You Can't Say", Paul Graham had written, "The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work." But surely that depends on what _is_ one's real work. For someone like Paul Graham, whose goal was to make a lot of money writing software, "Don't say it" (except for this one meta-level essay) was probably the right choice. But someone whose goal is to improve our collective ability to reason, should probably be doing _more_ fighting than Paul Graham (although still preferably on the meta- rather than object-level), because political restrictions on speech and thought directly hurt the mission of "improving our collective ability to reason", in a way that they don't hurt the mission of "make a lot of money writing software."