+Yudkowsky seems to think this level of bad faith is fine, because allegedly "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment." But the _reason_ censorship is such an effective tool in the hands of dictators like Stalin is because it ensures that many people _don't_ know—and that those who know (or suspect) don't have [game-theoretic common knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Dictators_and_freedom_of_speech) that others do too.
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+Zvi Mowshowitz has [written about how the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is used justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex (the reasoning goes), then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex when it would otherwise be relevant.
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+But if it were _actually_ the case that everybody knew (and everybody knew that everybody knew), then what would be the point of the censorship? It's not coherent to claim that no one is being harmed by censorship because everyone knows about it, because the entire appeal and purpose of censorship is precisely that someone doesn't know and someone with power wants to _keep_ it that way.
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+For the savvy people in the know, it would certainly be _convenient_ if everyone secretly knew: then they wouldn't have to face the tough choice between playing along with
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+["People are better off at the end of that"— _who_ is better off? We need a conflict-theoretic analysis]
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+[I was going to save the Whole Dumb Story for a different post, and keep this post narrowly scoped to just critiquing the Feb. 2021 pronouns post, but in order to explain the problem with "Everybody knows" and "People are better off after that", I need to breifly summarize the context of this discussion which explains why _I_ didn't know and _I'm_ not better off—with the understanding that this only a brief summary, and I might tell the long version in a separate post—if it's still necessary, relative to everything else I need to get around to writing]
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+[I _never_ expected to end up arguing about the mintuiae of pronoun conventions; I wanted to talk about the real issues]
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+[It all started back in the 'aughts, when the occasional things about sex differences that cropped up in the Sequences (especially "Changing Emotions" and the Extropians mailing list pre) turned out to be useful for understanding what was going on with my gender thing; I wrote about this in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).]
+
+[But that was all about me—I assumed "trans" was a different thing. My first clue that I might not be living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky, with the "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" thing]
+
+[So I ended up arguing with people about the two-type taxonomy, and I noticed that those discussions kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word woman doesn't actually mean that". So I took the bait, and starting arguing against that, and then Yudkowsky comes back to the subject with his "Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"—and I go on a philosophy of language crusade, and Yudkowsky eventually clarifies, and _then_ he comes back _again_ in Feb. 2022 with his "simplest and best protocol"]
+
+[At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to mood-affiliate with being on the right side of history, subject to the constraint of not saying anything false. I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world, because _I need the correct answer to decided whether or not to cut my dick off_. On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles." On my turn, I put in an absurd amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation was substantively misleading as constrated to what you would say if you were actually trying to make sense of the world.]