+Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc'ing my posse plus Anna about why I was so mad (both senses). I had a better draft sitting on my desktop at home, but since I was here and couldn't sleep, I might as well type this version (Subject: "five impulsive points, hastily written because I just can't even (was: Re: predictably bad ideas)"). Scott had been continuing to insist it's okay to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand. If creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is okay, why didn't that generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? The mind games seemed crueler to me than a simple lie. Also, if "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then why didn't _my_ mental health matter? Wasn't I trans, sort of? Getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism when I was trying to use reason to make sense of the world was observably really bad for _my_ sanity!
+
+Also, Scott had asked me if it wouldn't be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and I had rejected it because of gender stuff. But the original reason it had ever seemed remotely plausible that we would create Utopia forever wasn't "because we're us, the world-saving good guys," but because we were going to perfect an art of _systematically correct reasoning_. If we weren't going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermined the reason that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever.
+
+Also-also, Scott had proposed a super–[Outside View](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inside-outside-view) of the culture war as an evolutionary process that produces memes optimized to trigger PTSD syndromes and suggested that I think of _that_ as what was happening to me. But, depending on how much credence Scott put in social proof, mightn't the fact that I managed to round up this whole posse to help me repeatedly argue with (or harass) Yudkowsky shift his estimate over whether my concerns had some objective merit that other people could see, too? It could simultaneously be the case that I had culture-war PTSD _and_ my concerns had merit.
+
+Michael replied at 5:58 _a.m._, saying that everyone's first priority should be making sure that I could sleep—that given that I was failing to adhere to my commitments to sleep almost immediately after making them, I should be interpreted as urgently needing help, and that Scott had comparative advantage in helping, given that my distress was most centrally over Scott gaslighting me.
+
+That seemed a little harsh on Scott to me. At 6:14 _a.m._ and 6:21 _a.m._, I wrote a couple emails to everyone that my plan was to get a train back to my own apartment to sleep, that I was sorry for making such a fuss despite being incentivizable while emotionally distressed, that I should be punished in accordance with the moral law for sending too many hysterical emails because I thought I could get away with it, that I didn't need Scott's help, and that I thought Michael was being a little aggressive about that, but that I guessed that's also kind of Michael's style.
+
+Michael was _furious_ with me. ("What the FUCK Zack!?! Calling now," he emailed me at 6:18 _a.m._) I texted and talked with him on my train ride home. He seemed to have a theory that people who are behaving badly, as Scott was, will only change when they see a victim who is being harmed. Me escalating and then immediately deescalating just after Michael came to help was undermining the attempt to force an honest confrontation, such that we could _get_ to the point of having a Society with morality or punishment.
+
+Anyway, I did get to my apartment and sleep for a few hours. One of the other friends I had cc'd on some of the emails, whom I'll call "Meredith", came to visit me later that morning with her 2½-year-old son—I mean, her son at the time.
+
+(Incidentally, the code that I had written intermittently between 11 _p.m._ and 4 _a.m._ was a horrible bug-prone mess, and the company has been paying for it ever since.)
+
+At some level, I wanted Scott to know how frustrated I was about his use of "mental health for trans people" as an Absolute Denial Macro. But when Michael started advocating on my behalf, I started to minimize my claims because I had a generalized attitude of not wanting to sell myself as a victim. Ben pointed out that [making oneself mentally ill in order to extract political concessions](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) only works if you have a lot of people doing it in a visibly coordinated way—and even if it did work, getting into a dysphoria contest with trans people didn't seem like it led anywhere good.
+
+I supposed that in Michael's worldview, aggression is more honest than passive-aggression. That seemed true, but I was psychologically limited in how much overt aggression I was willing to deploy against my friends. (And particularly Yudkowsky, whom I still hero-worshipped.) But clearly, the tension between "I don't want to do too much social aggression" and "Losing the Category War within the rationalist community is _absolutely unacceptable_" was causing me to make wildly inconsistent decisions. (Emailing Scott at 4 _a.m._ and then calling Michael "aggressive" when he came to defend me was just crazy: either one of those things could make sense, but not both.)
+
+Did I just need to accept that was no such a thing as a "rationalist community"? (Sarah had told me as much two years ago while tripsitting me during my psychosis relapse, but I hadn't made the corresponing mental adjustments.)
+
+On the other hand, a possible reason to be attached to the "rationalist" brand name and social identity that wasn't just me being stupid was that _the way I talk_ had been trained really hard on this subculture for _ten years_. Most of my emails during this whole campaign had contained multiple Sequences or _Slate Star Codex_ links that I could expect the recipients to have read. I could use [the phrase "Absolute Denial Macro"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t2NN6JwMFaqANuLqH/the-strangest-thing-an-ai-could-tell-you) in conversation and expect to be understood. If I gave up on the "rationalists" being a thing, and went out into the world to make friends with _Quillette_ readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates, then I would lose all that accumulated capital. Here, I had a massive home territory advantage because I could appeal to Yudkowsky's writings about the philosophy of language from ten years ago and people couldn't say, "Eliezer _who?_ He's probably a Bad Man."
+
+The language I spoke was _mostly_ educated American English, but I relied on subculture dialect for a lot. My sister has a chemistry doctorate from MIT (and so speaks the language of STEM intellectuals generally), and when I showed her ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), she reported finding it somewhat hard to read, likely because I casually use phrases like "thus, an excellent [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/)" and expect to be understood without the reader taking 10 minutes to read the link. That essay, which was me writing from the heart in the words that came most naturally to me, could not be published in _Quillette_. The links and phraseology were just too context bound.
+
+Maybe that's why I felt like I had to stand my ground and fight for the world I was made in, even though the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness had me making crazy decisions.
+
+<a id="alter-the-beacon"></a>Michael said that a reason to make a stand here in "the community" was because if we didn't, the [beacon](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) of "rationalism" would continue to lure and mislead others—but that more importantly, we needed to figure out how to win this kind of argument decisively, as a group. We couldn't afford to accept a _status quo_ of accepting defeat when faced with bad faith arguments _in general_. Ben reported writing to Scott to ask him to alter the beacon so that people like me wouldn't think "the community" was the place to go for the rationality thing anymore.
+
+As it happened, the next day, we saw these Tweets from @ESYudkowsky, linking to a _Quillette_ article interviewing Lisa Littman about her work positing a socially contagious "rapid onset" type of gender dysphoria among young females:
+
+> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties. [https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/](https://web.archive.org/web/20190320012155/https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/)
+>
+> [To be clear, I don't](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857) know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.
+
+(Why now? Maybe he saw the tag in my "tools have shattered" Tweet on Monday, or maybe the _Quillette_ article was just timely?)
+
+The most obvious reading of these Tweets was as a political concession to me. The two-type taxonomy of MtF was the thing I was originally trying to talk about, back in 2016–2017, before getting derailed onto the present philosophy-of-language war, and here Yudkowsky was backing up my side on that.
+
+At this point, some readers might think that this should have been the end of the matter, that I should have been satisfied. I had started the recent drama flare-up because Yudkowsky had Tweeted something unfavorable to my agenda. But now, Yudkowsky was Tweeting something favorable to my agenda! Wouldn't it be greedy and ungrateful for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he'd thrown me a bone here? Shouldn't I call it even?
+
+That's not how it works. The entire concept of "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an artifact of human coalitional instincts. It's not something that makes sense as a process for constructing a map that reflects the territory. My posse and I were trying to get a clarification about a philosophy-of-language claim Yudkowsky had made a few months prior ("you're not standing in defense of truth if [...]"). Why would we stop prosecuting that because of this unrelated Tweet about the etiology of gender dysphoria? That wasn't the thing we were trying to clarify!
+
+Moreover—and I'm embarrassed that it took me another day to realize this—this new argument from Yudkowsky about the etiology of gender dysphoria was wrong. As I would later get around to explaining in ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), when people claim that some psychological or medical condition "comes in varieties", they're making a substantive _empirical_ claim that the [causal or statistical structure](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) of the condition is usefully modeled as distinct clusters, not merely making the trivial observation that instances of the condition are not identical down to the subatomic level.
+
+So we _shouldn't_ think that there are probably multiple kinds of gender dysphoria because things are made of protons. If anything, _a priori_ reasoning about the cognitive function of categorization should actually cut in the other direction, (mildly) _against_ rather than in favor of multi-type theories: you only want to add more categories to your theory [if they can pay for their additional complexity with better predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length). If you believe in Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy of MtF, or Littman's proposed rapid-onset type, it should be on the empirical merits, not because multi-type theories are _a priori_ more likely to be true (which they aren't).
+
+Had Yudkowsky been thinking that maybe if he Tweeted something favorable to my agenda, then I and the rest of Michael's gang would be satisfied and leave him alone?
+
+But if there's some _other_ reason you suspect there might be multiple species of dysphoria, but you _tell_ people your suspicion is because "everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties", you're still misinforming people for political reasons, which was the _general_ problem we were trying to alert Yudkowsky to. Inventing fake rationality lessons in response to political pressure is not okay, and the fact that in this case the political pressure happened to be coming from me didn't make it okay.
+
+I asked the posse if this analysis was worth sending to Yudkowsky. Michael said it wasn't worth the digression. He asked if I was comfortable generalizing from Scott's behavior, and what others had said about fear of speaking openly, to assuming that something similar was going on with Eliezer? If so, then now that we had common knowledge, we needed to confront the actual crisis, "that dread is tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while its existence is still being denied."
+
+-----
+
+That week, former MIRI researcher Jessica Taylor joined our posse (being at an in-person meeting with Ben and Sarah and another friend on the seventeenth, and getting tagged in subsequent emails). I had met Jessica for the first time in March 2017, shortly after my psychotic break, and I had been part of the group trying to take care of her when she had [her own break in late 2017](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards), but other than that, we hadn't been particularly close.
+
+Significantly for political purposes, Jessica is trans. We didn't have to agree up front on all gender issues for her to see the epistemology problem with "... Not Man for the Categories", and to say that maintaining a narcissistic fantasy by controlling category boundaries wasn't what _she_ wanted, as a trans person. (On the seventeenth, when I lamented the state of a world that incentivized us to be political enemies, her response was, "Well, we could talk about it first.") Michael said that me and Jessica together had more moral authority than either of us alone.
+
+As it happened, I ran into Scott on the [BART](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit) train that Friday, the twenty-second. He said he wasn't sure why the oft-repeated moral of "A Human's Guide to Words" had been "You can't define a word any way you want" rather than "You _can_ define a word any way you want, but then you have to deal with the consequences."
+
+Ultimately, I thought this was a pedagogy decision that Yudkowsky had gotten right back in 2008. If you write your summary slogan in relativist language, people predictably take that as license to believe whatever they want without having to defend it. Whereas if you write your summary slogan in objectivist language—so that people know they don't have social permission to say, "It's subjective, so I can't be wrong"—then you have some hope of sparking useful thought about the _exact, precise_ ways that _specific, definite_ things are relative to other specific, definite things.
+
+I told Scott I would send him one more email with a piece of evidence about how other "rationalists" were thinking about the categories issue and give my commentary on the parable about orcs, and then the present thread would probably drop there.
+
+Concerning what others were thinking: on Discord in January, Kelsey Piper had told me that everyone else experienced their disagreement with me as being about where the joints are and which joints are important, where usability for humans was a legitimate criterion of importance, and it was annoying that I thought they didn't believe in carving reality at the joints at all and that categories should be whatever makes people happy.
+
+I [didn't want to bring it up at the time because](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1088459797962215429) I was so overjoyed that the discussion was actually making progress on the core philosophy-of-language issue, but Scott _did_ seem to be pretty explicit that his position was about happiness rather than usability? If Kelsey _thought_ she agreed with Scott, but actually didn't, that sham consensus was a bad sign for our collective sanity, wasn't it?
+
+As for the parable about orcs, I thought it was significant that Scott chose to tell the story from the standpoint of non-orcs deciding what [verbal behaviors](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password) to perform while orcs are around, rather than the standpoint of the orcs themselves. For one thing, how do you _know_ that serving evil-Melkor is a life of constant torture? Is it at all possible, in the bowels of Christ, that someone has given you misleading information about that?
+
+Moreover, you _can't_ just give an orc a clever misinterpretation of an oath and have them believe it. First you have to [cripple their _general_ ability](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) to correctly interpret oaths, for the same reason that you can't get someone to believe that 2+2=5 without crippling their general ability to do arithmetic. We weren't talking about a little "white lie" that the listener will never get to see falsified (like telling someone their dead dog is in heaven); the orcs already know the text of the oath, and you have to break their ability to _understand_ it. Are you willing to permanently damage an orc's ability to reason in order to save them pain? For some sufficiently large amount of pain, surely. But this isn't a choice to make lightly—and the choices people make to satisfy their own consciences don't always line up with the volition of their alleged beneficiaries. We think we can lie to save others from pain, without wanting to be lied to ourselves. But behind the veil of ignorance, it's the same choice!
+
+I also had more to say about philosophy of categories: I thought I could be more rigorous about the difference between "caring about predicting different variables" and "caring about consequences", in a way that Eliezer would _have_ to understand even if Scott didn't. (Scott had claimed that he could use gerrymandered categories and still be just as good at making predictions—but that's just not true if we're talking about the _internal_ use of categories as a [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms), rather than mere verbal behavior. It's easy to _say_ "_X_ is a _Y_" for arbitrary _X_ and _Y_ if the stakes demand it, but that's not the same thing as using that concept of _Y_ internally as part of your world-model.)
+
+But after consultation with the posse, I concluded that further email prosecution was not useful at this time; the philosophy argument would work better as a public _Less Wrong_ post. So my revised Category War to-do list was:
+
+ * Send the brief wrapping-up/end-of-conversation email to Scott (with the Discord anecdote about Kelsey and commentary on the orc story).
+ * Mentally write off Scott, Eliezer, and the so-called "rationalist" community as a loss so that I wouldn't be in horrible emotional pain from cognitive dissonance all the time.
+ * Write up the mathy version of the categories argument for _Less Wrong_ (which I thought might take a few months—I had a dayjob, and write slowly, and might need to learn some new math, which I'm also slow at).
+ * _Then_ email the link to Scott and Eliezer asking for a signal boost and/or court ruling.
+
+Ben didn't think the mathematically precise categories argument was the most important thing for _Less Wrong_ readers to know about: a similarly careful explanation of why I'd written off Scott, Eliezer, and the "rationalists" would be way more valuable.
+
+I could see the value he was pointing at, but something in me balked at the idea of attacking my friends in public (Subject: "treachery, faith, and the great river (was: Re: DRAFTS: 'wrapping up; or, Orc-ham's razor' and 'on the power and efficacy of categories')").
+
+Ben had previously written (in the context of the effective altruism movement) about how [holding criticism to a higher standard than praise distorts our collective map](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#A_tax_on_criticism). He was obviously correct that this was a distortionary force relative to what ideal Bayesian agents would do, but I was worried that when we're talking about criticism of _people_ rather than ideas, the removal of the distortionary force would just result in social conflict (and not more truth). Criticism of institutions and social systems should be filed under "ideas" rather than "people", but the smaller-scale you get, the harder this distinction is to maintain: criticizing, say, "the Center for Effective Altruism", somehow feels more like criticizing Will MacAskill personally than criticizing "the United States" does, even though neither CEA nor the U.S. is a person.
+
+That was why I couldn't give up faith that [honest discourse _eventually_ wins](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/). Under my current strategy and consensus social norms, I could criticize Scott or Kelsey or Ozy's _ideas_ without my social life dissolving into a war of all against all, whereas if I were to give in to the temptation to flip a table and say, "Okay, now I _know_ you guys are just messing with me," then I didn't see how that led anywhere good, even if they really _were_.
+
+Jessica explained what she saw as the problem with this. What Ben was proposing was _creating clarity about behavioral patterns_. I was saying that I was afraid that creating such clarity is an attack on someone. But if so, then my blog was an attack on trans people. What was going on here?
+
+Socially, creating clarity about behavioral patterns _is_ construed as an attack and _can_ make things worse for someone. For example, if your livelihood is based on telling a story about you and your flunkies being the only sane truthseeking people in the world, then me demonstrating that you don't care about the truth when it's politically inconvenient is a threat to your marketing story and therefore to your livelihood. As a result, it's easier to create clarity down power gradients than up them: it was easy for me to blow the whistle on trans people's narcissistic delusions, but hard to blow the whistle on Yudkowsky's.[^trans-power-gradient]
+
+[^trans-power-gradient]: Probably a lot of _other_ people who lived in Berkeley would find it harder to criticize trans people than to criticize some privileged white guy named Yudkowski or whatever. But those weren't the relevant power gradients in _my_ world.
+
+But _selectively_ creating clarity down but not up power gradients just reinforces existing power relations—in the same way that selectively criticizing arguments with politically unfavorable conclusions only reinforces your current political beliefs. I shouldn't be able to get away with claiming that [calling non-exclusively-androphilic trans women delusional perverts](/2017/Mar/smart/) is okay on the grounds that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but that calling out Alexander and Yudkowsky would be unjustified on the grounds of starting a war or whatever. Jessica was on board with a project to tear down narcissistic fantasies in general, but not a project that starts by tearing down trans people's narcissistic fantasies, then emits spurious excuses for not following that effort where it leads.
+
+Somewhat apologetically, I replied that the distinction between truthfully, publicly criticizing group identities and _named individuals_ still seemed important to me?—as did avoiding leaking info from private conversations. I would be more comfortable writing [a scathing blog post about the behavior of "rationalists"](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/), than about a specific person not adhering to good discourse norms in an email conversation that they had good reason to expect to be private. I thought I was consistent about this; contrast my writing with the way that some anti-trans writers name and shame particular individuals. (The closest I had come was [mentioning Danielle Muscato as someone who doesn't pass](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#photo-of-danielle-muscato)—and even there, I admitted it was "unclassy" and done out of desperation.) I had to acknowledge that criticism of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women in general _implied_ criticism of Jessica, and criticism of "rationalists" in general _implied_ criticism of Yudkowsky and Alexander and me, but the extra inferential step and "fog of probability" seemed to make the speech act less of an attack. Was I wrong?
+
+<a id="less-precise-is-more-violent"></a>Michael said this was importantly backwards: less precise targeting is more violent. If someone said, "Michael Vassar is a terrible person," he would try to be curious, but if they didn't have an argument, he would tend to worry more "for" them and less "about" them, whereas if someone said, "The Jews are terrible people," he saw that as a more serious threat to his safety. (And rationalists and trans women are exactly the sort of people who get targeted by the same people who target Jews.)
+
+-----
+
+Polishing the advanced categories argument from earlier email drafts into a solid _Less Wrong_ post didn't take that long: by 6 April 2019, I had an almost complete draft of the new post, ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), that I was pretty happy with.
+
+The title (note: "boundaries", plural) was a play off of ["Where to Draw the Boundary?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) (note: "boundary", singular), a post from Yudkowsky's [original Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) on the [37 ways in which words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong). In "... Boundary?", Yudkowsky asserts (without argument, as something that all educated people already know) that dolphins don't form a natural category with fish ("Once upon a time it was thought that the word 'fish' included dolphins [...] Or you could stop playing nitwit games and admit that dolphins don't belong on the fish list"). But Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) directly contradicts this, asserting that there's nothing wrong with the biblical Hebrew word _dagim_ encompassing both fish and cetaceans (dolphins and whales). So who's right—Yudkowsky (2008) or Alexander (2014)? Is there a problem with dolphins being "fish", or not?