+Really, a lot of the epistemic heroism here is just in [noticing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) the conflict between Feelings and Truth, between Politeness and Truth, rather than necessarily acting on it. If telling a person they smell bad would predictably meet harsh social punishment, I couldn't blame someone for consciously choosing silence and safety over telling the truth.
+
+What I can and do blame someone for is actively fighting for Feelings while misrepresenting himself as the rightful caliph of epistemic rationality. There are a lot of trans people who would benefit from feedback that they don't pass but aren't getting that feedback by default. I wouldn't necessarily expect Yudkowsky to provide it. (I don't, either.)
+
+I _would_ expect the person who wrote the Sequences not to publicly proclaim that the important thing is the feelings of people describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Smells Bad bucket which don't bear on the factual question of whether someone smells bad.
+
+That person is dead now, even if his body is still breathing.
+
+I think he knows it. In a November 2022 Discord discussion, [he remarked](/images/yudkowsky-i_might_have_made_a_fundamental_mistake.png):
+
+> I might have made a fundamental mistake when I decided, long ago, that I was going to try to teach people how to reason so that they'd be able to process my arguments about AGI and AGI alignment through a mechanism that would discriminate true from false statements.
+>
+> maybe I should've just learned to persuade people of things instead
+
+I got offended. I felt like a devout Catholic watching the Pope say, "Jesus sucks; I hate God; I never should have told people about God."
+
+Later, I felt the need to clarify exactly what I found offensive. The problem wasn't the condescension of the suggestion that other people couldn't reason. People being annoyed at the condescension was fine. The problem was that "just learn[ing] to persuade people of things instead" was giving up on the principle that the arguments you use to convince others should be the same as the ones you used to decide which conclusion to argue for. Giving up on that amounted to giving up on the _concept_ of intellectual honesty, choosing instead to become a propaganda AI that calculates what signals to output in order to manipulate an agentless world.
+
+[He put a check-mark emoji on it](/images/davis-amounts-to-giving-up-on-the-concept-of-intellectual-honesty.png), indicating agreement or approval.
+
+If the caliph has lost his faith in the power of intellectual honesty, I can't necessarily say he's wrong on the empirical merits. It is written that our world is [beyond the reach of God](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god); there's no law of physics that says honesty must yield better results than propaganda.
+
+But since I haven't relinquished my faith, I have the responsibility to point out that the formerly rightful caliph has relinquished his Art and lost his powers.
+
+The modern Yudkowsky [writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584):