+Still, there's something precious about a culture where people appreciate the _obvious normative ideal_ underlying Crocker's rules, even if social animals can't reliably live up to the normative ideal. Speech is for conveying information. People can say things—even things about me or my work—not as a command, or as a reward or punishment, but just to establish a correspondence between words and the world: a map that reflects a territory.
+
+Appreciation of this obvious normative ideal seems almost entirely absent from Yudkowsky's modern work—as if he's given up on the idea that using Speech in public in order to reason is useful or possible.
+
+The "Reducing Negativity" post also warns against the failure mode of attempted "author telepathy": _attributing_ bad motives to authors and treating those attributions as fact without accounting for uncertainty or distinguishing observations from inferences. I should be explicit, then: when I say negative things about Yudkowsky's state of mind, like it's "as if he's given up on the idea that reasoning in public is useful or possible", that's definitely an inference, not an observation. I definitely don't think Yudkowsky _thinks of himself_ as having given up on Speech _in those words_.
+
+Why attribute motives to people that they don't attribute to themselves, then? Because I need to, in order to make sense of the world. Words aren't imbued with intrinsic "meaning"; just to _interpret_ text entails building some model of the mind on the other side.
+
+The text that Yudkowsky emitted in 2007–2009 made me who I am. The text that Yudkowsky has emitted since at least March 2016 _looks like_ it's being generated by a different and _much less trustworthy_ process. According to the methods I was taught in 2007–2009, I have a _duty_ to notice the difference, and try to make sense of the change—even if I'm not a superhuman neuroscience AI and have no hope of getting it right in detail. And I have a right to try to describe the change I'm seeing to you.
+
+_Good_ criticism is hard. _Accurately_ inferring authorial ["intent"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) is much harder. There is certainly no shortage of bullies in the world eager to make _bad_ criticism or _inaccurately_ infer authorial intent in order to achieve their social goals. But I don't think that's a good reason to give up on _trying_ to do good criticism and accurate intent-attribution. If there's any hope for humans to think together and work together, it has to go though distiguishing good criticism from bad criticism, and treating them differently. Suppressing criticism-in-general is intellectual suicide.