+As for the attempt to intervene on Yudkowsky—well, [again](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-privacy-constraint), I don't think I should say whether he replied to Michael's and my emails, or whether he accepted the money, because any conversation that may or may not have occured would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
+
+> I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/. Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING."
+
+Look at that! The great _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ said that my position is not ontologically confused. That's _probably_ high praise coming from him! You might think that should be the end of the matter. Yudkowsky denounced a particular philosophical confusion; I already had a related objection written up; and he acknowledged my objection as not being the confusion he was trying to police. I _should_ be satisfied, right?
+
+I wasn't, in fact, satisfied. This little "not ontologically confused" clarification buried in the replies was _much less visible_ than the bombastic, arrogant top level pronouncement insinuating that resistance to gender-identity claims _was_ confused. (1 Like on this reply, _vs._ 140 Likes/21 Retweets on start of thread.) I expected that the typical reader who had gotten the impression from the initial thread that the great Eliezer Yudkowsky thought that gender-identity skeptics didn't have a leg to stand on, would not, actually, be disabused of this impression by the existence of this little follow-up. Was it greedy of me to want something _louder_?
+
+Greedy or not, I wasn't done flipping out. On 1 December, I wrote to Scott Alexander (ccing a few other people), asking if there was any chance of an _explicit_ and _loud_ clarification or partial-retraction of ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (Subject: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph"). _Forget_ my boring whining about the autogynephilia/two-types thing, I said—that's a complicated empirical claim, and _not_ the key issue.
+
+The _issue_ is that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful): you want to [draw your category boundaries such that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your [information-theoretically limited budget](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) of short words on the simplest and most wide-rangingly useful categories.
+
+It's true that the reason _I_ was continuing to freak out about this to the extent of sending him this obnoxious email telling him what to write (seriously, who does that?!) had to with transgender stuff, but wasn't the reason _Scott_ should care.
+
+The other year, Alexander had written a post, ["Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/), explaining the consequences of political censorship by means of an allegory about a Society with the dogma that thunder occurs before lightning. The problem isn't so much the sacred dogma itself (it's not often that you need to _directly_ make use of the fact that thunder comes first), but that the need to _defend_ the sacred dogma _destroys everyone's ability to think_.
+
+It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any direct practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that trying to talk about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" gets you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—_bullshit nitpicking_. (What about complete androgen insensitivity syndrome? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said imply that lesbians aren't women? _&c. ad infinitum_.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks can and should be satisfactorily answered. (Any ones that couldn't would presumably fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks.) But while I was in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hoped Alexander could see why I feel somewhat gaslighted.
+
+(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. _Somehow_ no one seemed to think I had the right to define _that_ category boundary for my convenience.)
+
+If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that [the person in this photograph](https://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg) isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a _convenient rhetorical shorthand_ for a much longer statement about [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) and [high-dimensional configuration spaces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) and [defensible Schelling points for social norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes)), then our techniques are _worse than useless_.
+
+If Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves", there's a long and nuanced conversation you could have about the consequences of using the word "moves" in Galileo's preferred sense or some other sense that happens to result in the theory needing more epicycles. It may not have been obvious in November 2014, but in retrospect, _maybe_ it was a _bad_ idea to build a [memetic superweapon](https://archive.is/VEeqX) that says the number of epicycles _doesn't matter_.
+
+And the reason to write this as a desperate email plea to Scott Alexander when I could be working on my own blog, was that I was afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propagating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Alexander and Yudkowsky rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who didn't [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the _Zeitgeist_, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
+
+Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the function of language is to describe reality. Now, we didn't. If Scott didn't want to cite my creepy blog about my creepy fetish, that was _totally fine_; I _liked_ getting credit, but the important thing is that this "No, the Emperor isn't naked—oh, well, we're not claiming that he's wearing any garments—it would be pretty weird if we were claiming _that!_—it's just that utilitarianism implies that the _social_ property of clothedness should be defined this way because to do otherwise would be really mean to people who don't have anything to wear" gaslighting maneuver needed to _die_, and he alone could kill it.
+
+... Scott didn't get it.
+
+[TODO:
+ * Soon, other conversations continued with Michael and Sarah and Ben—and with Anna
+Michael sees a world of gaslighting and complicity
+]
+
+
+[TODO:
+on ostracism—
+ * There's a view that says, as long as everyone is being polite, there's no problem
+ * I think there's a problem where the collective discourse is biased, even if it's surface-level polite
+ * Berkley rats are very good at not being persecutory (we might not have been if Scott hadn't a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college)
+]
+
+
+[TODO:
+ * Ben thought the bullshit nitpicking was meaningfully anti-epistemic: the game is that I have to choose between infinite interpretive labor, or being cast as "never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections
+ * I was inclined to meet the objections, to say, "well, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly" rather than "you're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me"; by meeting the objections I become a stronger writer
+ * Ben thought that being a better writer by responding to nitpicks from people who are trying not to understand was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to explain how people were failing to engage, rather than continuing to press the object-level itself—like, I had a model of "the rationalists" that keeps making bad predictions, what's going on there?
+ * I guess I'm only now, years later, taking Ben's advice on this. Sorry, Ben.
+]
+
+
+[TODO:
+ * If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
+ * There have been times when I thought, "What the Hell am I doing?" [...]
+]
+
+[TODO:
+ * Anna and intellectual property
+]
+
+[TODO: RIP Culture War thread, defense against alt-right categorization
+ * "the degree to which category boundaries are being made a conscious and deliberate focus of discussion": it's a problem when category boundaries are being made a conscious and deliberate focus of discussion as an isolated-demand-for-rigor because people can't get the conclusion they want on the merits; I only started focusing on the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition part after the autogynephilia discussions kept getting derailed
+]
+
+[TODO: relying on Michael too much; I'm not crazy
+ * This may have been less effective than it was in my head; I _remembered_ Michael as being high-status
+ * "I should have noticed earlier that my emotional dependence on "Michael says X" validation is self-undermining, because Michael says that the thing that makes me valuable is my ability to think independently."
+ * fairly destructive move
+* _Everyone got it wrong_. there was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex the other week that cited Scott, Eliezer, Ozy, Kelsey, and Rob as leaders of rationalist movement. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/
+]
+
+[TODO: on private universes
+
+]