+I may have subconsciously pulled off an interesting political thing. In my final email to Yudkowsky on 20 April (Subject: "closing thoughts from me"), I had written—
+
+> If we can't even get a public consensus from our _de facto_ leadership on something _so basic_ as "concepts need to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic predictions about reality", then, in my view, there's _no point in pretending to have a rationalist community_, and I need to leave and go find something else to do (perhaps whatever Michael's newest scheme turns out to be). I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
+
+And as it happened, on 4 May, Yudkowsky [re-Tweeted Colin Wright on the "univariate fallacy"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124751630937681922)—the point that group differences aren't a matter of any single variable—which was _sort of_ like the clarification I had been asking for. (Empirically, it made me feel a lot less personally aggrieved.) Was I wrong to interpet this as another "concession" to me? (Again, notwithstanding that the whole mindset of extracting "concessions" was corrupt and not what our posse was trying to do.)
+
+Separately, I visited some friends' house on 30 April saying, essentially (and sincerely), "[Oh man oh jeez](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NivwAQ8sUYQ), Ben and Michael want me to join in a rationalist civil war against the corrupt mainstream-rationality establishment, and I'd really rather not, and I don't like how they keep using scary hyperbolic words like 'cult' and 'war' and 'criminal', but on the other hand, they're _the only ones backing me up_ on this _incredibly basic philosophy thing_ and I don't feel like I have anywhere else to _go_." The ensuing group conversation made some progress, but was mostly pretty horrifying.
+
+In an adorable twist, my friends' two-year-old son was reportedly saying the next day that Kelsey doesn't like his daddy, which was confusing until it was figured out he had heard Kelsey talking about why she doesn't like Michael _Vassar_.
+
+And as it happened, on 7 May, Kelsey wrote [a Facebook comment displaying evidence of understanding my point](https://www.facebook.com/julia.galef/posts/pfbid0QjdD8kWAZJMiczeLdMioqmPkRhewcmGtQpXRBu2ruXq8SkKvw5yvvSH2cWVDghWRl?comment_id=10104430041947222&reply_comment_id=10104430059182682).
+
+These two datapoints led me to a psychological hypothesis (which was maybe "obvious", but I hadn't thought about it before): when people see someone wavering between their coalition and a rival coalition, they're motivated to offer a few concessions to keep the wavering person on their side. Kelsey could _afford_ (_pace_ [Upton Sinclair](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something)) to not understand the thing about sex being a natural category ("I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints"!!) when it was just me freaking out alone, but "got it" almost as soon as I could credibly threaten to _walk_ (defect to a coalition of people she dislikes) ... and maybe my "closing thoughts" email had a similar effect on Yudkowsky (assuming he otherwise wouldn't have spontaneously tweeted something about the univariate fallacy two weeks later)?? This probably wouldn't work if you repeated it (or tried to do it consciously)?
+
+----
+
+I started drafting a "why I've been upset for five months and have lost faith in the so-called 'rationalist' community" personal-narrative Diary-like post. Ben said that the target audience to aim for was people like I was a few years ago, who hadn't yet had the experiences I had—so they wouldn't have to freak out to the point of being imprisoned and demand help from community leaders and not get it; they could just learn from me. That is, the actual sympathetic-but-naïve people could learn. Not the people messing with me.
+
+I didn't know how to finish it. I was too psychologically constrained; I didn't know how to tell the Whole Dumb Story without (as I perceived it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations.
+
+I decided to take a break from the religious civil war [for a month](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/) [or two](/2019/May/hiatus/).
+
+My dayjob performance had been suffering terribly for months. The psychology of the workplace is ... subtle. There's a phenomenon where some people are _way_ more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one is cruel enough [to make it _common_ knowledge](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/), which is awkward for people who simultaneously benefit from the culture of common-knowledge-prevention allowing them to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/yr software engineer without actually [performing at that level](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/fortune/), while also having [read enough Ayn Rand as a teenager](/2017/Sep/neither-as-plea-nor-as-despair/) to be ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation. The "everyone knows I feel guilty about underperforming, so they don't punish me because I'm already doing enough internalized domination to punish myself" dynamic would be unsustainable if it were to evolve into a loop of "feeling gulit _in exchange for_ not doing work" rather than the intended "feeling guilt in order to successfully incentivize work". I didn't think they would actually fire me, but I was worried that they _should_. I asked my boss to temporarily take on some easier tasks, that I could make steady progress on even while being psychologically impaired from a religious war. (We had a lot of LaTeX templating of insurance policy amendments that needed to get done.) If I was going to be psychologically impaired _anyway_, it was better to be upfront about how I could best serve the company given that impairment, rather than hoping that the boss wouldn't notice.
+
+My "intent" to take a break from the religious war didn't take. I met with Anna on the UC Berkeley campus, and read her excerpts from some of Ben's emails. (She had not acquiesced to my request for a comment on "... Boundaries?", including in the form of two paper postcards that I stayed up until 2 _a.m._ on 14 April writing; I had figured that spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding physical postcards was more polite (and funnier) than my usual habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.) While we (my posse) were aghast at Yudkowsky's behavior, she was aghast at ours: reaching out to try to have a conversation with Yudkowsky, and then concluding he was a fraud because we weren't satisfied with the outcome was like hiding soldiers in an ambulance.
+
+I complained that I had _actually believed_ our own marketing material about the "rationalists" remaking the world using Reason. Was that all a lie? Were we not trying to do the thing anymore? Anna was dismissive: she thought that the idea I had gotten about what "the thing" was, was never actually part of the original vision. She kept repeating that she had _tried_ to warn me in previous years that public reason didn't work, and I didn't listen. (Back in the late 'aughts, she had often recommended Paul Graham's essay ["What You Can't Say"](http://paulgraham.com/say.html) to people—that you should figure out the things you can't say in your culture, and then don't say them.)
+
+It was true that she had tried to warn me for years, and (not yet having gotten over [my teenage ideological fever dream](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism)), I hadn't known how to listen. But this seemed really fundamentally unresponsive to how _I_ kept repeating that I only expected consensus on the basic philosophy-of-language stuff (not my object-level special interest). Why was it so unrealistic to imagine that the actually-smart people could [enforce standards](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/) in our own tiny little bubble of the world?
+
+My frustration bubbled out into follow-up emails:
+
+> To: Anna Salamon <[redacted]>
+> Date: 7 May 2019 12:53 _p.m._
+> Subject: Re: works cited
+>
+> I'm also still pretty _angry_ about how your response to my "I believed our own propaganda" complaint is (my possibly-unfair paraphrase) "what you call 'propaganda' was all in your head; we were never _actually_ going to do the unrestricted truthseeking thing when it was politically inconvenient." But ... no! **I _didn't_ just make up the propaganda! The hyperlinks still work! I didn't imagine them! They were real! You can still click on them:** ["A Sense That More Is Possible"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible), ["Raising the Sanity Waterline"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline)
+>
+> Can you please _acknowledge that I didn't just make this up?_ Happy to pay you $200 for a reply to this email within the next 72 hours
+
+<p></p>
+
+> To: Anna Salamon <[redacted]>
+> Date: 7 May 2019 3:35 _p.m._
+> Subject: Re: works cited
+>
+> Or see ["A Fable of Science and Politics"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics), where the editorial tone is pretty clear that we're supposed to be like Daria or Ferris, not Charles.
+
+(This being a parable about an underground Society polarized into factions with different beliefs about the color of the unseen sky, and how different types of people react to the discovery of a passage to the overworld which reveals that the sky is blue. Daria (formerly of the Green faction) steels herself to confront and accept the unpleasant truth. Ferris reacts with delighted curiosity. Charles, thinking only of preserving the existing social order and unconcerned with what some would call "facts", _covers up the passage_.)
+
+> To: Anna Salamon <[redacted]>
+> Date: 7 May 2019 8:26 _p.m._
+> Subject: Re: works cited
+>
+> But, it's kind of bad that I'm thirty-one years old and haven't figured out how to be less emotionally needy/demanding; feeling a little bit less frame-locked now; let's talk in a few months (but offer in email-before-last is still open because rescinding it would be dishonorable)
+
+Anna said she didn't want to receive monetary offers from me anymore; previously, she had regarded my custom of throwing money at things as good-faith libertarianism between consenting adults, but now she was afraid that if she ever accepted, it would be portrayed in some future Ben Hoffman essay as an instance of her _using_ me. She agreed that someone could have gotten the ideals I had gotten out of "A Sense That More Is Possible", "Raising the Sanity Waterline", _&c._, but there was also evidence from that time pointing the other way (_e.g._, ["Politics Is the Mind-Killer"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer)), that it shouldn't be surprising if people steered clear of controversy.
+
+I replied: but when forming the original let's-be-apolitical vision in 2008, we did not anticipate that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a political issue. That was _new evidence_ about whether the original vision was wise! I wasn't trying to do politics with my idiosyncratic special interest; I was trying to _think seriously_ about the most important thing in my life and only do the minimum amount of politics necessary to protect my ability to think. If 2019-era "rationalists" were going to commit a trivial epistemology mistake that interfered with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, but couldn't correct the mistake, then the 2019-era "rationalists" were _worse than useless_ to me personally. This probably didn't matter causally (I wasn't an AI researcher, therefore I didn't matter), but it might matter timelessly (if I was part of a reference class that includes AI researchers).
+
+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."
+
+Steven's objection:
+> the Earth's gravitational field directly hurts NASA's mission and doesn't hurt Paul Graham's mission, but NASA shouldn't spend any more effort on reducing the Earth's gravitational field than Paul Graham.
+
+we're in a coal-mine, and my favorite one of our canaries just died, and I'm freaking out about this, and Anna/Scott/Eliezer/you are 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'm 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." 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?
+
+such is the way of the world; what can you do when you have to work with people?" But like ... I thought part of our founding premise was that the existing way of the world wasn't good enough to solve the really hard problem?
+
+]
+
+[TODO: tussle on new _Less Wrong_ FAQ 31 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk
+
+A draft of a new _Less Wrong_ FAQ was to include a link to "... Not Man for the Categories".