+I felt like—we were in a coal-mine, and my favorite one of our canaries just died, and I was freaking out about this, and represenatives of the Caliphate (Yudkowsky, Alexander, Anna, Steven) were like, Sorry, I know you were really attached to that canary, but it's just a bird; you'll get over it; it's not really that important to the coal-mining mission.
+
+And I was like, I agree that I was unreasonably emotionally attached to that particular bird, which is the direct cause of why I-in-particular am freaking out, but that's not why I expect _you_ to care. The problem is not the dead bird; the problem is what the bird is _evidence_ of: if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".) Ben and Michael and Jessica claim to have spotted their own dead canaries. I feel like the old-timer Rationality Elders should be able to get on the same page about the canary-count issue?
+
+Math and Wellness Month ended up being mostly a failure: the only math I ended up learning was [a fragment of group theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/group-theory-for-wellness-i/), and [some information theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that [actually turned out to super-relevant to understanding sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point). So much for taking a break.
+
+[TODO:
+ * I had posted a linkpost to "No, it's not The Incentives—it's You", which generated a lot of discussion, and Jessica (17 June) identified Ray's comments as the last straw.
+
+> LessWrong.com is a place where, if the value of truth conflicts with the value of protecting elites' feelings and covering their asses, the second value will win.
+>
+> Trying to get LessWrong.com to adopt high-integrity norms is going to fail, hard, without a _lot_ of conflict. (Enforcing high-integrity norms is like violence; if it doesn't work, you're not doing enough of it).
+
+ * posting on Less Wrong was harm-reduction; the only way to get people to stick up for truth would be to convert them to _a whole new worldview_; Jessica proposed the idea of a new discussion forum
+ * Ben thought that trying to discuss with the other mods would be a good intermediate step, after we clarified to ourselves what was going on; talking to other mods might be "good practice in the same way that the Eliezer initiative was good practice"; Ben is less optimistic about harm reduction; "Drowning Children Are Rare" was barely net-upvoted, and participating was endorsing the karma and curation systems
+ * David Xu's comment on "The Incentives" seems important?
+ * secret posse member: Ray's attitude on "Is being good costly?"
+ * Jessica: scortched-earth campaign should mostly be in meatspace social reality
+ * my comment on emotive conjugation (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare#GaoyhEbzPJvv6sfZX)
+
+> I'm also not sure if I'm sufficiently clued in to what Ben and Jessica are modeling as Blight, a coherent problem, as opposed to two or six individual incidents that seem really egregious in a vaguely similar way that seems like it would have been less likely in 2009??
+
+ * _Atlas Shrugged_ Bill Brent vs. Dave Mitchum scene
+ * Vassar: "Literally nothing Ben is doing is as aggressive as the basic 101 pitch for EA."
+ * Ben: we should be creating clarity about "position X is not a strawman within the group", rather than trying to scapegoat individuals
+ * my scuffle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality"
+ * it gets worse: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality#NbrPdyBFPi4hj5zQW
+ * Ben's comment: "Wow, he's really overtly arguing that people should lie to him to protect his feelings."
+ * Jessica: "tone arguments are always about privileged people protecting their feelings, and are thus in bad faith. Therefore, engaging with a tone argument as if it's in good faith is a fool's game, like playing chess with a pigeon. Either don't engage, or seek to embarrass them intentionally."
+ * there's no point at being mad at MOPs
+ * me (1 Jul): I'm a _little bit_ mad, because I specialize in cognitive and discourse strategies that are _extremely susceptible_ to being trolled like this
+ * "collaborative truth seeking" but (as Michael pointed out) politeness looks nothing like Aumann agreement
+ * 2 Jul: Jessica is surprised by how well "Self-consciousness wants to make everything about itself" worked; theory about people not wanting to be held to standards that others aren't being held to
+ * Michael: Jessica's example made it clear she was on the side of social justice
+ * secret posse member: level of social-justice talk makes me not want to interact with this post in any way
+]