+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 Yudkowsky the way I did—_especially_ Yudkowsky—if it was just me 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 meant a lot to me.
+
+
+[TODO SECTION: Anna Michael feud
+ * This may have been less effective than it was in my head; _I remembered_ Michael as being high-status
+ * Anna's 2 Mar comment badmouthing Michael
+ * my immediate response: I strongly agree with your point about "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'm so heartbroken about the "categories are arbitrary, therefore trans women are women" thing, which deserves to be laughed out of the room.
+ * "sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys"
+ * Anna's case against Michael: he was talking to Devi even when Devi needed a break, and he wanted to destroy EA
+ * I remember at a party in 2015ish, asking Michael what else I should invest my money in, if not New Harvest/GiveWell, and his response was, "You"
+ * backstory of anti-EA sentiment: Ben's critiques, Sarah's "EA Has a Lying Problem"—Michael had been in the background
+ * Anna had any actual dirt on him, you'd expect her to use it while trashing him in public, but her only example basically amounts to "he gave people career advice I disagree with"
+ * "I should have noticed earlier that my emotional dependence on "Michael says X" validation is self-undermining, because Michael says that the thing that makes me valuable is my ability to think independently."
+ * fairly destructive move
+ * https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position
+ http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/why-i-am-no-longer-supporting-reach/
+ He ... flatters people? He ... _didn't_ tell people to abandon their careers? What?!
+]
+