-If you were Alice, and a _solid supermajority_ of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group _including Eliezer Yudkowsky_ (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob (and reaped microhedonic social rewards for it in the form of, _e.g._, hundreds of Twitter likes), that would be a _pretty worrying_ sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things (_e.g._, AI alignment), right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the _problem_ is that Bob is [_selectively_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language insight to try to _undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world_, even though Bob obviously knows goddamned well what Alice was trying to say; it's _incredibly_ obfuscatory in a way that people would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.
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-It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public. (Despite my misgivings, and the fact that it's basically a running joke at this point, this blog is still published under a pseudonym; it would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to, especially when you look at what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author.)
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-But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting political fight about a topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of the opposition and stonewalling with "That's a policy question" when people try to point out the problem?!
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-... I didn't have all of that criticism collected so legibly on 28 November 2018. But that, basically, is why I _flipped the fuck out_ when I saw that Twitter thread. If the "rationalists" didn't [click](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click) on the autogynephilia thing, that was disappointing, but forgivable. If the "rationalists", on Scott Alexander's authority, were furthermore going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this, that was—I don't want to say _forgivable_ exactly, but it was—tolerable. I had learned from my misadventures the previous year that I had been wrong to trust "the community" as a reified collective and put it on a pedastal—that had never been a reasonable mental stance in the first place.
+If you were Alice, and a _solid supermajority_ of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group _including Eliezer Yudkowsky_ (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob (and reaped microhedonic social rewards for it in the form of, _e.g._, hundreds of Twitter likes), that would be a _pretty worrying_ sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things (_e.g._, AI alignment), right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the _problem_ is that Bob is [_selectively_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language insight to try to _undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world_, even though Bob _obviously knows goddamned well what Alice was trying to say_; it's _incredibly_ obfuscatory in a way that people would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.