+> "No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand." —@ESYudkowsky (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) [end/3]
+
+Only it wasn't quite appropriate. The quote is about failure resulting in the need to invent new methods of rationality, better than the ones you were taught. But ... the methods I had been taught were great! I don't have a pressing need to improve on them! I just couldn't cope with everyone else having _forgotten!_
+
+I did, eventually, get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn't finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 _a.m._, I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my [2013](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/) and [2017](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments). We didn't want another bad outcome like that; we really didn't. There was a couch in the office, and probably another four hours until my coworkers started to arrive. The thing I needed to do was just lie down on the couch in the dark and have faith that sleep will come. Meeting my manager's deadline wasn't _that_ important. When people come in to the office, I might ask for help getting an Uber home? Or help buying melatonin? The important thing was to be calm.
+
+I sent an email explaining this to Scott and my posse and two other friends (Subject: "predictably bad ideas").
+
+Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc 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 that 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 doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? The mind games seemed much 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! Did that matter at all? 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're not going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermines the _reason_ that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever; you can't just forfeit the mandate of Heaven like that and still expect to still rule China. Also, Scott had proposed a super-Outside View of the culture war as an evolutionary process that produces memes optimized to trigger PTSD syndromes in people, 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 harrass) 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 the culture-war PTSD that he propsed, _and_ that 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 immediately 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 to get 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 I guessed that's also kind of Michael's style?
+
+Michael was _furious_ with me, and he emailed and called me to say so. 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 deescalating just after he 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 successfully get to my apartment and get a few hours of sleep. One of the other friends I had cc'd on some of the emails came to visit me later than morning with her young son—I mean, her son at the time.
+
+(Incidentally, the code that I wrote 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, every time someone needs to modify that function and finds it harder to make sense of than it would be if I had been less emotionally overwhelmed in March 2019 and written something sane instead.)
+
+I think 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 then 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 obviously true, but I was psychologically limited in how much overt aggression I was willing to deploy against my friends. (And particularly Yudkowsky, who 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_.)
+
+Was the answer just that I needed to accept that there wasn't such a thing in the world as a "rationalist community"? (Sarah had told me as much two years ago, at BABSCon, and I just 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 just expect people to have read. I could spontaneously 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. That's a massive "home field advantage." If I just 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.
+
+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 was having me making crazy decisions.
+
+Michael said that a reason to make a stand here in "the community" was that if we didn't, the beacon 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 literally doing the rationality thing anymore.
+
+As it happened, the next day, Wednesday, we saw these Tweets from @ESYudkowsky, linking to a _Quillette_ article interviewing Lisa Littman on her work on rapid onset gender dysphoria:
+
+> [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/
+
+> [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 "concession" to my general political agenda. 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 by publicly offering an argument that there's probably a more-than-one-type typology.
+
+At this point, some readers might think that 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 there being "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an artifact of human coalitional instincts; it's not something that _actually 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 [...]"), which I claimed was substantively misleading. 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 actually _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.
+
+As such, 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 especially more likely to be true.
+
+Had Yudkowsky been thinking that maybe if he Tweeted something favorable to my agenda, then me 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 dysphoria has more than one proton, you're still misinforming people for political reasons, which was the _general_ problem we were trying to alert Yudkowsky to. (Someone who trusted you as a source of wisdom about rationality might try to apply your _fake_ "everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties" rationality lesson in some other context, and get the wrong answer.) 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, which was that dread was tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while its existence was still being denied.
+
+Another thing that happened that week was that 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). 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 train that Friday, the twenty-second. He said that 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 think this was a pedagogy decision that Yudkowsky had gotten right back in 'aught-eight. 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 that "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 _in fact_ relative to other specific, definite things.
+
+I told him 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.
+
+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 for 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 was kind of bad 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-Melkior 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 not 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 ourselves _wanting to be lied to_. 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 always easy to _say_ "_X_ is a _Y_" for arbitrary _X_ and _Y_ if the stakes demand it, but if you're _actually_ using that concept of _Y_ internally, that does have effects on 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 with 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've 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 an ugly war (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.
+
+This is why I felt like 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 fucking with me," then I didn't see how that led anywhere good, even if they really _were_ just fucking with me.
+
+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 for you is a threat to your marketing story and therefore a threat to your livelihood. As a result, it's easier to create clarity down power gradients than up power gradients: it was easy for me to blow the whistle on trans people's narcissistic delusions, but hard to blow the whistle on Eliezer Yudkowsky's narcissistic delusions.
+
+But _selectively_ creating clarity down but not up power gradients just reinforces existing power relations—just like how 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. If I was being cowardly or otherwise unprincipled, I should own that instead of generating spurious justifications. Jessica was on board with a project to tear down narcissistic fantasies in general, but not on board with a project that starts by tearing down trans people's narcissistic fantasies, but 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 very significant to me?—and that avoiding leaking info from private conversations seemed like an important obligation, too. I would be way 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 to 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 in desperation of other ways to make the point having failed.) 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 useful for making the speech act less of an attack? Was I wrong?
+
+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 don'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 that 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, 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 the Draw the Boundary?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) (note: "boundary", singular), a post from Yudkowsky's original Sequence on the ways in which 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 [...] 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 with 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?
+
+In "... Boundaries?", I unify the two positions and explain how both Yudkowsky and Alexander have a point: in high-dimensional configuration space, there's a cluster of finned water-dwelling animals in the subspace of the dimensions along which finned water-dwelling animals are similar to each other, and a cluster of mammals in the subspace of the dimensions along which mammals are similar to each other, and dolphins belong to _both_ of them. _Which_ subspace you pay attention to can legitimately depend on your values: if you don't care about predicting or controlling some particular variable, you have no reason to look for clusters along that dimension.
+
+But _given_ a subspace of interest, the _technical_ criterion of drawing category boundaries around [regions of high density in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) still applies. There is Law governing which uses of communication signals transmit which information, and the Law can't be brushed off with, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice." I demonstrate the Law with a couple of simple mathematical examples: if you redefine a codeword that originally pointed to one cluster, to also include another, that changes the quantitative predictions you make about an unobserved coordinate given the codeword; if an employer starts giving the title "Vice President" to line workers, that decreases the mutual information between the job title and properties of the job.
+
+(Jessica and Ben's [discussion of the job title example in relation to the _Wikipedia_ summary of Jean Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_ ended up getting published separately](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), and ended up taking on a life of its own [in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blame-games/) [future](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) [posts](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/), [including](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z5wF8mdonsM2AuGgt/negative-feedback-and-simulacra) [a](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NiTW5uNtXTwBsFkd4/signalling-and-simulacra-level-3) [number](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tF8z9HBoBn783Cirz/simulacrum-3-as-stag-hunt-strategy) [of](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels) [posts](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/03/on-negative-feedback-and-simulacra/) [by](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/) [other](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/unifying-the-simulacra-definitions/) [authors](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-four-children-of-the-seder-as-the-simulacra-levels/).)
+
+Sarah asked if the math wasn't a bit overkill: were the calculations really necessary to make the basic point that good definitions should be about classifying the world, rather than about what's pleasant or politically expedient to say? I thought the math was _really important_ as an appeal to principle—and [as intimidation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/). (As it is written, [_the tenth virtue is precision!_](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)
+
+"... Boundaries?" explains all this in the form of discourse with a hypothetical interlocutor arguing for the I-can-define-a-word-any-way-I-want position. In the hypothetical interlocutor's parts, I wove in verbatim quotes (without attribution) from Alexander ("an alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false") and Yudkowsky ("You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", "Using language in a way _you_ dislike is not lying. The propositions you claim false [...] is not what the [...] is meant to convey, and this is known to everyone involved; it is not a secret"), and Bensinger ("doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at").
+
+My thinking here was that the posse's previous email campaigns had been doomed to failure by being too closely linked to the politically-contentious object-level topic which reputable people had strong incentives not to touch with a ten-foot pole. So if I wrote this post _just_ explaining what was wrong with the claims Yudkowsky and Alexander had made about the philosophy of language, with perfectly innocent examples about dolphins and job titles, that would remove the political barrier and [leave a line of retreat](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) for Yudkowsky to correct the philosophy of language error. And then if someone with a threatening social-justicey aura were to say, "Wait, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", stonewall them. (Stonewall _them_ and not _me_!)
+
+I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include subtext and then expect people to engage with the text, but if we weren't going to get into full-on gender-politics on _Less Wrong_ (which seemed like a bad idea), but gender politics _was_ motivating an epistemology error, I wasn't sure what else I was supposed to do! I was pretty constrained here!
+
+(I did regret having accidentally "poisoned the well" the previous month by impulsively sharing the previous year's ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently [deniably allegorical](/tag/deniably-allegorical/). It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" as not-politically-threatening philosophy, if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the 60+-comment trainwreck on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
+
+-----
+
+[TODO: Jessica on corruption—
+> I am reminded of someone who I talked with about Zack writing to you and Scott to request that you clarify the category boundary thing. This person had an emotional reaction described as a sense that "Zack should have known that wouldn't work" (because of the politics involved, not because Zack wasn't right). Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
+]
+
+[TODO small section: concern about bad faith nitpicking—
+
+One reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.
+
+I wondered if maybe, in Scott or Eliezer's mental universe, I was a blameworthy (or pitiably mentally ill) nitpicker for flipping out over a blog post from 2014 (!) and some Tweets (!!) from November. Like, really? I, too, had probably said things that were wrong _five years ago_.
+
+But, well, I thought I had made a pretty convincing that a lot of people are making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction (about the philosophy of language specifically, not any possible implications for gender politics) would actually be justified here. If someone had put _this much_ effort into pointing out an error _I_ had made four months or five years ago and making careful arguments for why it was important to get the right answer, I think I _would_ put some serious thought into it.
+
+]
+
+[TODO: We lost?! How could we lose??!!?!? And, post-war concessions ...
+
+curation hopes ... 22 Jun: I'm expressing a little bit of bitterness that a mole rats post got curated https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness
+
+"Univariate fallacy" also a concession
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/
+"Yes Requires the Possibility of No" 19 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019
+scuffle on LessWrong FAQ 31 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk
+
+]
+
+Since arguing at the object level had failed (["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/)), and arguing at the strictly meta level had failed (["... Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)), the obvious thing to do next was to jump up to the meta-meta level and tell the story about why the "rationalists" were Dead To Me now, that [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) was not being met. (Just like Ben had suggested in December and in April.)
+
+I found it trouble to make progress on. I felt—constrained. I didn't know how to tell the story without (as I perceived it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise "the rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy-of-language blogging!
+
+
+[TODO 2019 activities—
+"Schelling Categories" Aug 2019, "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019, "Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019, "Heads I Win" Sep 2019, "Firming Up ..." Dec 2019
+"epistemic defense" meeting
+
+bitter comments about rationalists—
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
+
+]
+
+[TODO section on factional conflict:
+Michael on Anna as cult leader
+Jessica told me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards)
+24 Aug: I had told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood
+me being regarded as Michael's pawn
+assortment of agendas
+mutualist pattern where Michael by himself isn't very useful for scholarship (he just says a lot of crazy-sounding things and refuses to explain them), but people like Sarah and me can write intelligible things that secretly benefited from much less legible conversations with Michael.
+]
+
+[TODO: Yudkowsky throwing NRx under the bus; tragedy of recursive silencing
+15 Sep Glen Weyl apology
+]
+
+
+
+In November, I received an interesting reply on my philosophy-of-categorization thesis from MIRI researcher Abram Demski. Abram asked: ideally, shouldn't all conceptual boundaries be drawn with appeal-to-consequences? Wasn't the problem just with bad (motivated, shortsighted) appeals to consequences? Agents categorize in order to make decisions. The best classifer for an application depends on the costs and benefits. As a classic example, it's very important for evolved prey animals to avoid predators, so it makes sense for their predator-detection classifiers to be configured such that they jump away from every rustling in the bushes, even if it's usually not a predator.
+
+I had thought of the "false-positives are better than false-negatives when detecting predators" example as being about the limitations of evolution as an AI designer: messy evolved animal brains don't bother to track probability and utility separately the way a cleanly-designed AI could. As I had explained in "... Boundaries?", it made sense for _what_ variables you paid attention to, to be motivated by consequences. But _given_ the subspace that's relevant to your interests, you want to run an epistemically legitimate clustering algorithm on the data you see there, which depends on the data, not your values. The only reason value-dependent gerrymandered category boundaries seem like a good idea if you're not careful about philosophy is because it's _wireheading_. Ideal probabilistic beliefs shouldn't depend on consequences.
+
+Abram didn't think the issue was so clear-cut. Where do "probabilities" come from, in the first place? The reason we expect something like Bayesianism to be an attractor among self-improving agents is _because_ probabilistic reasoning is broadly useful: epistemology can be _derived_ from instrumental concerns. He agreed that severe wireheading issues _potentially_ arise if you allow consequentialist concerns to affect your epistemics—
+
+But the alternative view had its own problems. If your AI consists of a consequentialist module that optimizes for utility in the world, and an epistemic module that optimizes for the accuracy of its beliefs, that's _two_ agents, not one: how could that be reflectively coherent? You could, perhaps, bite the bullet here, for fear that consequentialism doesn't tile and that wireheading was inevitable. On this view, Abram explained, "Agency is an illusion which can only be maintained by crippling agents and giving them a split-brain architecture where an instrumental task-monkey does all the important stuff while an epistemic overseer supervises." Whether this view was ultimately tenable or not, this did show that trying to forbid appeals-to-consequences entirely led to strange places. I didn't immediately have an answer for Abram, but I was grateful for the engagement. (Abram was clearly addressing the real philosophical issues, and not just trying to mess with me the way almost everyone else in Berkeley including up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky was trying to mess with me.)
+
+Also in November, I wrote to Ben about how I was still stuck on writing the grief-memoir. My _plan_ had been that it should have been possibly to tell the story of the Category War while glomarizing about the content of private conversations, then offer Scott and Eliezer pre-publication right of reply (because it's only fair to give your former-hero-current-[frenemies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenemy) warning when you're about to publicly characterize them as having been intellectually dishonest), then share it to _Less Wrong_ and the /r/TheMotte culture war thread, and then I would have the emotional closure to move on with my life (learn math, go to gym, chop wood, carry water) and not be a mentally-dominated cultist.
+
+The reason it _should_ be safe to write is because Explaining Things is Good. It should be possible to say, "This is not a social attack; I'm not saying 'rationalists Bad, Yudkowsky Bad'; I'm just trying to carefully _tell the true story_ about why, as a matter of cause-and-effect, I've been upset this year, including addressing counterarguments for why some would argue that I shouldn't be upset, why other people could be said to be behaving 'reasonably' given their incentives, why I nevertheless wish they'd be braver and adhere to principle rather than 'reasonably' following incentives, _&c_."
+
+So why couldn't I write? Was it that I didn't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? Maybe because it's wasn't true?? I was afraid that telling a story about our leader being intellectually dishonest was "the nuclear option" in a way that I couldn't credibly cancel with "But I'm just telling a true story about a thing that was important to me that actually happened" disclaimers. If you're slowly-but-surely gaining territory in a conventional war, _suddenly_ escalating to nukes seems pointlessly destructive. This metaphor is horribly non-normative ([arguing is not a punishment!](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends.html) carefully telling a true story _about_ an argument is not a nuke!), but I didn't know how to make it stably go away.
+
+A more motivationally-stable compromise would be to try to split off whatever _generalizable insights_ that would have been part of the story into their own posts that don't make it personal. ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) had been a huge success as far as I was concerned, and I could do more of that kind of thing, analyzing the social stuff I was worried about, without making it personal, even if, secretly, it actually was personal.
+
+Ben replied that it didn't seem like it was clear to me that I was a victim of systemic abuse, and that I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abuser. He thought if I could internalize that, I would be able to forgive myself a lot of messiness, which would reduce the perceived complexity of the problem.
+
+I said I would bite that bullet: yes! Yes, I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abusers, and it was an important question to get right! "Other people's lack of standards harmed me, therefore I don't need to hold myself to standards in my response because I have [extenuating circumstances](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYrcTJFJoYKX2DxNL/extenuating-circumstances)" would be a _lame excuse_.
+
+(This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if that word _ever_ meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important way in which things were messed up, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate defender's reply that the Vassarite usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between vastly different senses of _fraud_; I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a _more precise theory_ of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things are messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.)
+
+[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver]
+
+[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick]
+
+[TODO:
+Scott replies on 21 December https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E
+
+> since these are not about factual states of the world (eg what the definition of "lie" REALLY is, in God's dictionary) we have nothing to make those decisions on except consequences
+
+I snapped https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7
+
+Christmas party
+
+people reading funny GPT-2 quotes
+Tsvi said it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area
+motivation deflates after Christmas victory
+5 Jan memoir as nuke
+]
+
+There's another very important part of the story that would fit around here chronologically, but unfortunately, it's not my story to tell.
+
+[TODO: theorizing about on the margin]
+
+[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common"]
+
+[TODO: help from Jessica for "Unnatural Categories"]
+
+[TODO: "out of patience" email]
+[TODO: Sep 2020 categories clarification from EY—victory?!]
+
+[TODO: briefly mention breakup with Vassar group]
+
+[TODO: "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"
+
+Abram was right
+
+the fact that it didn't means that not tracking it can be an effective AI design! Just because evolution takes shortcuts that human engineers wouldn't doesn't mean shortcuts are "wrong" (instead, there are laws governing which kinds of shortcuts work).
+
+Embedded agency means that the AI shouldn't have to fundamentally reason differently about "rewriting code in some 'external' program" and "rewriting 'my own' code." In that light, it makes sense to regard "have accurate beliefs" as merely a convergent instrumental subgoal, rather than what rationality is about
+
+somehow accuracy seems more fundamental than power or resources ... could that be formalized?
+]
+
+
+[TODO: That should have been the end of the story, but then—he revisited the pronouns issue!!!]
+
+[TODO: based on the timing, the Feb. 2021 pronouns post was likely causally downstream of me being temporarily more salient to EY because of my highly-Liked response to his "anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside" from 17 February; it wasn't gratuitously out of the blue]
+
+
+If Yudkowsky was playing dumb (consciously or not) and his comments can't be taken seriously, what was _actually_ going on here? When smart people act dumb, [it's usually wisest to assume that their behavior represents _optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning.
+
+Fortunately, Yudkowsky graciously grants us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
+
+> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members [...]
+>
+> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.