+But I _did_ end up in more conversation with Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin, who were game to help me with reaching out to Yudkowsky again to explain the problem in more detail. If we had this entire posse, I felt bad and guilty and ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it was geniunely a proxy for "Has Eliezer and/or everyone else lost the plot, and if so, how do we get it back?" But the group seemed to agree that my philosophy-of-language grievance was a useful test case for prosecuting deeper maladies affecting our subculture.
+
+There were times during these weeks where it felt like my mind shut down with the only thought, "What am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'me and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
+
+Except ... I had been raised back in the 'aughts to believe that you're you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument that makes you change your mind, and I couldn't actually point to one. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is _not a counterargument_.
+
+Meanwhile, Anna continued to be disinclined to take a side in the brewing Category War, and it was beginning to put a strain on our friendship, to the extent that I kept ending up crying at some point during our occasional meetings. She told me that my "You have to pass my philosophy-of-language litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that I'd cop to [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits?
+
+My _hope_ was that it was possible to apply just enough "What kind of rationalist are _you_?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments—though I wasn't sure if that actually works, and I was growing exhausted from all the social aggression I was doing about it. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
+
+There's a view that assumes that as long as everyone is being cordial, our truthseeking public discussion must be basically on-track: if no one overtly gets huffily offended and calls to burn the heretic, then the discussion isn't being warped by the fear of heresy.
+
+I do not hold this view. I think there's a _subtler_ failure mode where people know what the politically-favored bottom line is, and collude to ignore, nitpick, or just be targetedly _uninterested_ in any fact or line of argument that doesn't fit the party line. I want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture they're embedded in."
+
+Especially compared to normal Berkeley, I had to give the Berkeley "rationalists" credit for being _very good_ at free speech norms. (I'm not sure I would be saying this in the world where Scott Alexander didn't have a traumatizing experience with social justice in college, causing him to dump a ton of anti-social-justice, pro-argumentative-charity antibodies in the "rationalist" collective "water supply" after he became our subculture's premier writer. But it was true in _our_ world.) I didn't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)". I wasn't angry at the "rationalists" for being silenced or shouted down (which I wasn't); I was angry at them for _making bad arguments_ and systematically refusing to engage with the obvious counterarguments when they're made.
+
+Ben thought I was wrong to think of this as non-ostracisizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people are playing when they do that is to force me to choose between doing arbitarily large amounts of interpretive labor, or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
+
+I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than to say "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people who he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of _making_ them understand if I just never gave up. Not to be _so_ much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles—but to hold out hope that people in "the community" could only be _boundedly_ motivatedly dense, and anyway that giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.
+
+(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor!")
+
+Ben thought that making them understand was hopeless and that becoming a stronger writer was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to jump up an additional meta level and explain _how_ people were failing to engage. That is, I had a model of "the rationalists" that kept making bad predictions. What's going on there? Something interesting might happen if I try to explain _that_.
+
+(I guess I'm only now, after spending an additional three years exhausting every possible line of argument, taking Ben's advice on this by writing this memoir. Sorry, Ben—and thanks.)
+
+One thing I regret about my behavior during this period was the extent to which I was emotionally dependent on my posse, and in some ways particularly Michael, for validation. I remembered Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era (to the extent that there was a "community" in those early days). I had been somewhat skeptical of him, then: the guy makes a lot of stridently "out there" assertions by the standards of ordinary social reality, in a way that makes you assume he must be speaking metaphorically. (He always insists that he's being completely literal.) But he had social proof as the President of the Singularity Institute—the "people person" of our world-saving effort, to complement Yudkowsky's anti-social mad scientist personality—so I had been inclined to take his "crazy"-sounding assertions more charitably than I would have in the absence of that social proof.
+
+Now, the memory of that social proof was a lifeline. Dear reader, if you've never been in the position of disagreeing with the entire weight of Society's educated opinion, _including_ your idiosyncratic subculture that tells itself a story about being smarter than the surrounding the Society—well, it's stressful. [There was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex around this time](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/) that cited Yudkowsky, Alexander, Ozy, _The Unit of Caring_, and Rob Bensinger as leaders of the "rationalist" community—just an arbitrary Reddit comment of no significance whatsoever—but it was salient indicator of the _Zeitgeist_ to me, because _[every](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [single](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) [one](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) of [those](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) [people](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447)_ had tried to get away with some variant on the "categories are subjective, therefore you have no gounds to object to the claim that trans women are women" _mind game_.
+
+In the face of that juggernaut of received opinion, I was already feeling pretty gaslighted. ("We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. Didn't we? And, and ... [_you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndYouWereThere), and _you_ were there ... It—really happened, right? I didn't just imagine it? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ...") I don't know how my mind would have held up intact if I were just facing it alone; it's hard to imagine what I would have done in that case. I definitely wouldn't have had the impudence to pester Scott and Eliezer the way I did—especially Eliezer—if it was just me alone against everyone else.
+
+But _Michael thought I was in the right_—not just intellectually on the philosophy issue, but morally in the right to be _prosecuting_ the philosophy issue, and not accepting stonewalling as an answer. That social proof gave me a lot of social bravery that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to muster up—even though it would have been better if I could have propagated the implications of the observation that my dependence on him was self-undermining, because Michael himself said that the thing that made me valuable was my ability to think independently.
+
+The social proof was probably more effective in my own head, than it was with anyone we were arguing with. _I remembered_ Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era, but that was a long time ago. (Luke Muelhauser had taken over leadership of the Singularity Institute in 2011; some sort of rift between Michael and Eliezer had widened in recent years, the details of which had never been explained to me.) Michael's status in "the community" of 2019 was much more mixed. He was intensely critical of the rise of Effective Altruism. (I remember at a party in 2015, on asking Michael what else I should spend my San Francisco software engineer money on if not the EA charities I was considering, being surprised that his answer was, "You.")
+
+Another blow to Michael's "community" reputation was dealt on 27 February, when Anna [published a comment badmouthing Michael and suggesting that talking to him was harmful](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-thinkers-in-not-out?commentId=JLpyLwR2afav2xsyD), which I found pretty disappointing—more so as I began to realize the implications.
+
+I agreed with her point about how "ridicule of obviously-fallacious reasoning plays an important role in discerning which thinkers can (or can't) help fill these functions." That's why I was so heartbroken about about the "categories are arbitrary, therefore trans women are women" thing, which deserved to be _laughed out the room_. Why was she trying to ostracize the guy who was one of the very few to back me up on this incredibly obvious thing!? The reasons to discredit Michael given in the comment seemed incredibly weak. (He ... flatters people? He ... _didn't_ tell people to abandon their careers? What?) And the evidence against Michael she offered in private didn't seem much more compelling (_e.g._, at a CfAR event, he had been insistent on continuing to talk to someone who Anna thought was looking sleep-deprived and needed a break).
+
+It made sense for Anna to not like Michael, because of his personal conduct, or because he didn't like EA. (Expecting all of my friends to be friends with _each other_ would be [Geek Social Fallacy #4](http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html).) If she didn't want to invite him to CfAR stuff, fine; that's her business not to invite him. But what did she gain from _escalating_ to publicly denouncing him as someone whose "lies/manipulations can sometimes disrupt [people's] thinking for long and costly periods of time"?!
+
+-----
+
+Anyway, I wasn't the only one whose life was being disrupted by political drama in early 2019. On 22 February, Scott Alexander [posted that the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread was being moved](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/) to a new non–_Slate Star Codex_–branded subreddit in the hopes that it would hope help curb some of the harrassment he had been receiving. According to poll data and Alexander's personal impressions, the Culture War Thread featured a variety of ideologically diverse voices, but had nevertheless acquired a reputation as being a hive of right-wing scum and villainy.
+
+[Yudkowsky Tweeted](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1099134795131478017):
+
+> Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A.
+
+I found Yudkowsky's use of the word "lie" here interesting given his earlier eagerness to police the use of the word "lie" by gender-identity skeptics. With the support of my posse, wrote to him again, a third time (Subject: "on defending against 'alt-right' categorization").
+
+Imagine if someone were to reply: "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to."
+
+How would Yudkowsky react, if someone said that? _My model_ of Sequences-era 2009!Yudkowsky would say, "This is an incredibly intellectually dishonest attempt to [sneak in connotations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations) by performing a categorization and trying to avoid the burden of having to justify it with an [appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters); go read ['A Human's Guide to Words.'](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb)"
+
+But I had no idea what 2019!Yudkowsky would say. If the moral of the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread had been that the word "lie" was reserved for _per se_ direct falsehoods, well, what direct falsehood was being asserted by Scott's detractors? I didn't think anyone is claiming that, say, Scott _identifies_ as alt-right (not even privately), any more than anyone is claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes.
+
+Commenters on /r/SneerClub had been pretty explicit in [their](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh0xlgx/) [criticism](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh3jrth/) that the Culture War thread harbored racists (_&c._) and possibly that Scott himself was a secret racist, _with respect to_ a definition of racism that includeed the belief that there are genetically-mediated population differences in the distribution of socially-relevant traits and that this probably has decision-relevant consequences that should be discussable somewhere.