+You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism", but that's only convincing if you've _already_ been trained in the "use empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes" tradition; the people with a California-public-school-social-studies-plus-Tumblr education didn't already _know_ that. ([_I_ didn't know this](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism) at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't even have Tumblr then.)
+
+In that light, you could see why someone might find "blow the whistle on people who are claiming to be innocent but are actually guilty (of thinking bad thoughts)" to be a more compelling ethical consideration than "respect confidentiality requests".
+
+Indeed, it seems important to notice (though I didn't at the time of my comment) that _Brennan didn't break any promises_. In [Brennan's account](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857), Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott _unilaterally_ said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.
+
+To see why the lack of a promise is significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or [stealing billions of dollars of their customers' money](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy)), unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance, but added, "never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge". In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the whistleblower and against "privacy."
+
+In the Brennan–Alexander case, I don't think Scott has anything to be ashamed of—but that's _because_ I don't think learning from right-wingers is a crime. If our _actual_ problem was "Genuinely consistent rationalism is realistically always going to be an enemy of the state, because [the map that fully reflects the territory is going to include facts that powerful coalitions would prefer to censor, no matter what specific ideology happens to be on top in a particular place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)", but we _thought_ our problem was "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies", then we were in trouble!
+
+[TODO—
+ * Yudkowsky commented that everyone has an evil bullies problem, we also had a Kolmogorov problem, but that's a separate thing even if bullies use Kolmogorov as an attack vector
+ * reality is complicated: I put some weight on the evil bullies model, but I think it's important to notice that we're participating in a political cover-up
+ * really, Topher and I are trying to do the same thing (reveal that rationalist leaders are thoughtcriminals), for different reasons (Topher thinks thoughtcrime is bad, and I think thoughtcrime it's fraud to claim the banner of "rationality" while hiding your thoughtcrimes); I'm being more scrupulous about accomplishing my objective while respecting other people's privacy hang-ups (and I think I have more latitude to do so _because_ I'm pro-thoughtcrime; people can tell that I'm saying this selfishly rather than spitefully), but don't think I don't sympathize with Topher; there are non-evil-bully reasons to want to _reveal information_ rather than participate in a conspiracy to protect the "rationalists" as non-threatening to the egregore
+ * It's one thing to believe in keeping promsies that someone explicitly made, but instructing commenters not to link to the email, implies not just that Topher should keep his promises, but that _everyone else_ is bound to participate in a conspiracy to respect Scott's privacy
+]