+> The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray's offensive views on race. This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
+
+It _is_ a weirdly brazen invalid _inference_. But by calling it a "falsehood", Alexander heavily implies this means he disagrees with Murray's offensive views on race: in invalidating the _Times_'s charge of guilt-by-association with Murray, Alexander validates Murray's guilt.
+
+But ... anyone who's read _and understood_ Alexander's work should be able to infer that Scott probably finds it plausible that there exist genetically-mediated ancestry-group differences in socially-relevant traits (as a value-free matter of empirical Science with no particular normative implications): for example, his [review of Judith Rich Harris](https://archive.ph/Zy3EL) indicates that he accepts the evidence from [twin studies](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#twin-studies) for individual behavioral differences having a large genetic component, and section III. of his ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) indicates that he accepts genetics as an explantion for group differences in the particular case of cognitive ability in Ashkenazi Jews.
+
+There are a lot of standard caveats that go here that Scott would no doubt scrupulously address if he ever chose to tackle the subject of genetically-mediated group differences in general: [the mere existence of a group difference in a "heritable" trait doesn't itself imply a genetic cause of the group difference (because the groups' environments could also be different)](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#heritability-caveats). It is without a doubt _entirely conceivable_ that the Ashkenazi IQ advantage is real and genetic, but black–white IQ gap is fake and environmental.[^bet] Moreover, group averages are just that—averages. They don't imply anything about individuals and don't justify discrimination against individuals.
+
+[^bet]: It's just—how much do you want to bet on that? How much do you think _Scott_ wants to bet?
+
+But ... anyone who's read _and understood_ Charles Murray's work, knows that [Murray _also_ includes the standard caveats](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#individuals-should-not-be-judged-by-the-average)![^murray-caveat] (Even though the one about group differences not implying anything about individuals is [actually wrong](/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/).) The _Times_'s insinuation that Scott Alexander is a racist _like Charles Murray_ seems like a "[Gettier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem) attack": the charge is essentially correct, even though the evidence used to prosecute the charge before a jury of distracted _New York Times_ readers is completely bogus.
+
+[^murray-caveat]: For example, the introductory summary for Ch. 13 of _The Bell Curve_, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", states: "Even if the differences between races were entirely genetic (which they surely are not), it should make no practical difference in how individuals deal with each other."
+
+Why do I keep repeatedly bringing this up, that "rationalist" leaders almost certainly believe in cognitive race differences (even if it's hard to get them to publicly admit it in a form that's easy to selectively quote in front of _New York Times_ reader)?
+
+Because one of the things I noticed while trying to make sense of why my entire social circle suddenly decided in 2016 that guys like me could become women by means of saying so, is that in the conflict between the "rationalist" Caliphate and mainstream progressives, the "rationalists"' defensive strategy is one of deception.
+
+Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much most of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
+
+I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).[^logical-induction]
+
+[^logical-induction]: I sometimes wonder how hard it would have been to come up with MIRI's [logical induction result](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03543) (which describes an asymptotic algorithm for estimating the probabilities of mathematical truths in terms of a betting market composed of increasingly complex traders) in the Soviet Union.
+
+Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows it—even if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful about what they say in public. (I am not smart.)
+
+So the _New York Times_ implicitly accuses us of being racists, like Charles Murray, and instead of pointing out that being a racist _like Charles Murray_ is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach in the course of being sensible, we disingenuously deny everything.[^deny-everything]
+
+[^deny-everything]: Or rather, people are distributed on a spectrum between disingenuously denying everything and sincerly accepting that Charles Murray is Actually Bad, with the older and more skilled among us skewed somewhat more towards disingenuous denial.
+
+It works surprisingly well. I fear my love of Truth is not so great that if I didn't have Something to Protect, I would have happily participated in the cover-up.
+
+As it happens, in our world, the defensive cover-up consists of _throwing me under the bus_. Facing censure from the progressive egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (_We_ think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a generous handful of Asians, exactly as you'd expect from chapters 13 and 14 of _The Bell Curve_.) [Subjectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic), I felt like the sex balance got a little better after we hybridized with Tumblr and Effective Alruism (as [contrasted with the old days](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/)), but it turns out that survey data doesn't back this up. (From 89% male in the [2011 _Less Wrong_ survey](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAEPbGaMygJq8L59k/2011-survey-results), to a virtually unchanged 88.7% male on the [2020 _Slate Star Codex_ survey](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/).)
+
+But _trans!_ We have plenty of trans people to trot out as a shield to definitively prove that we're not counter-revolutionary right-wing Bad Guys! (Alexander once joked that ["We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup).) Thus, [Jacob Falkovich noted](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) (on 23 June 2020, just after _Slate Star Codex_ went down), "The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders", and Scott Aaronson [noted (in commentary on the February 2021 _Times_ article) that](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
+
+Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong"](https://archive.is/SlJo1), wrote one.
+
+Under these circumstances, dethroning the supremacy of gender identity ideology is politically impossible. All our [Overton margin](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) is already being spent somewhere else; sanity on this topic is our [dump stat](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DumpStat).
+
+But this being the case, _I have no reason to participate in the cover-up_. What's in it for me? Why should I defend my native subculture from external attack, if the defense preparations themselves have already rendered it uninhabitable to me?
+
+On 17 February 2021, Topher Brennan [claimed that](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857) Scott Alexander "isn't being honest about his history with the far-right", and published [an email he had received from Scott in February 2014](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/), on what Scott thought some neoreactionaries were getting importantly right.
+
+I think that to people who have read _and understood_ Scott's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email. In the email, Scott said that biologically-mediated group differences are probably real, and that neoreactionaries were the only people discussing the object-level hypotheses or the meta-level question of why our Society's collective epistemology is obfuscating this. He said that reactionaries as a whole generate a lot of garbage, but that he trusted himself to sift through the noise and extract the novel insights. (In contrast, [RationalWiki](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page) didn't generate garbage, but by hewing so closely to the mainstream, it also didn't say much that Scott doesn't already know.) The email contains some details that Scott hadn't already blogged about—most notably the section headed "My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts", explaining his social strategizing [_vis á vis_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vis-%C3%A0-vis#Preposition) the neoreactionaries and his own popularity—but again, none of it is really _surprising_ if you know Scott from his writing.
+
+I think the main reason someone _would_ consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn't read _Slate Star Codex_ that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was, "that guy who's _so_ committed to charitable discourse that he [wrote up an explanation of what _reactionaries_ (of all people) believe](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/)—and then, of course, [turned around and wrote up the definitive explanation of why they're totally wrong and you shouldn't pay them any attention](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/)." As a first approximation, it's not a terrible picture. But what it misses—what _Scott_ knows—is that charity isn't about putting on a show of superficially respecting your ideological opponent, before concluding (of course) that they were wrong and you were right all along in every detail. Charity is about seeing what the other guy is getting _right_.
+
+The same day, Yudkowsky published [a Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02ZoAPjap94KgiDg4CNi1GhhhZeQs3TeTc312SMvoCrNep4smg41S3G874saF2ZRSQl) which said[^brennan-condemnation-edits]:
+
+> I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them, but in case it wasn't obvious consider the point made explicitly. (Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher's publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)
+
+[^brennan-condemnation-edits]: The post was subsequently edited a number of times in ways that I don't think are relevant to my discussion here.
+
+I was annoyed at how the discussion seemed to be ignoring the obvious political angle, and the next day, 18 February 2021, I wrote [a comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0WJ2h9CRnqzrenpccajdU6SYJkT4967KCstW5dqESt4ArJLjjGHY7yZMk6mjar15Sl?comment_id=10159410429909228) (which ended up yielding 49 Like and Heart reactions): I agreed that there was a grain of truth to the claim that our detractors hate us because they're evil bullies, but stopping the analysis there seemed _incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving_.
+
+If you listened to why _they_ said they hated us, it was because we were racist, sexist, transphobic fascists. The party-line response to seemed to be trending towards, "That's obviously false (Scott voted for Warren, look at all the social democrats on the _Less Wrong_/_Slate Star Codex_ surveys, _&c._); they're just using that as a convenient smear because they like bullying nerds."
+
+But if "sexism" included "it's an empirical question whether innate statistical psychological sex differences of some magnitude exist, it empirically looks like they do, and this has implications about our social world" (as articulated in, for example, Alexander's ["Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)), then the "_Slate Star Codex_ _et al._ are crypto-sexists" charge was _absolutely correct_. (Crypto-racist, cypto-fascist, _&c._ left as an exercise to the reader.)
+
+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)) and 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!
+
+Yudkowsky [commented that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02ZoAPjap94KgiDg4CNi1GhhhZeQs3TeTc312SMvoCrNep4smg41S3G874saF2ZRSQl?comment_id=10159410429909228&reply_comment_id=10159410753284228) everyone (including, for example, organizers of science fiction conventions) had a problem of figuring out how to exclude evil bullies. We also had an inevitable Kolmogorov complicity problem, but that shouldn't be confused with the evil bullies issue, even if bullies attack via Kolmogorov issues.
+
+To this, I'll agree that the problems shouldn't be confused. Psychology is complicated, and people have more than one reason for doing things: I can easily believe that Brennan was largely driven by bully-like motives even if he told himself a story about being a valiant whistleblower defending Cade Metz's honor against Scott's deception.
+
+But I think it's also important to _notice both problems_, instead of pretending that the only problem was Brennan's disregard for Alexander's privacy on account of Brennan being an evil bully.
+
+It's one thing to believe that people should keep promises that they, themselves, explicitly made. But instructing commenters not to link to the email seems to imply not just that Brennan should keep _his_ promises, but that _everyone else_ is obligated to participate in a conspiracy to conceal information that Alexander would prefer concealed. I can see an ethical case for it, analogous to returning stolen property after it's already been sold, and expecting buyers not to buy items that they know have been stolen. (If Brennan had obeyed Alexander's confidentiality demand, we wouldn't have an email to link to, so if we wish Brennan had obeyed, we can just _act as if_ we don't have an email to link to.) But also I think expecting people to _pretend not to know things_ is a _big ask_, not something you can casually demand.
+
+In a way, Brennan and I are trying to do the same thing—reveal that "rationalist" leaders are thoughtcriminals—for different reasons. (Brennan thinks that thoughtcrime is bad, and I think it's morally and intellectually fraudulent to claim the banner of "rationality" as property of you and your robot cult if you're not going to admit thoughtcrimes onto the robot cult's shared map.) I think I'm being more scrupulous about accomplishing my objective while respecting people's hang-ups about "privacy"—and I think I have more latitude to do so _because_ I'm pro-thoughtcrime; I think you can tell that I selfishly want the "rationalists" to be more like we were in 2008, rather than spitefully trying to destroy us—but don't think I don't have any sympathy for Brennan. There are non-evil-bully reasons to want to _reveal information_ rather than participate in a cover-up to protect the image of the "rationalists" as non-threatening to the egregore.