+In contrast, Yudkowsky's bad faith gambit is the exact reverse: he's making the discussion worse in the hopes of correcting people's beliefs about his own ideological alignment. (He's not a right-wing Bad Guy, but people would tar him as a right-wing Bad Guy if he ever said anything negative about trans people.) This doesn't improve our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued about; it's a _pure_ ass-covering move.
+
+Yudkowsky names the alleged fact that "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" as a mitigating factor. 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.
+
+Zvi Mowshowitz has [written about how the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is typically 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 extremely relevant.
+
+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 _not_ everybody knows and that someone with power wants to _keep_ it that way.
+
+For the savvy people in the know, it would certainly be _convenient_ if everyone secretly knew: then the savvy people wouldn't have to face the tough choice between
+acceding to Power's demands (at the cost of deceiving their readers) and informing their readers (at the cost of incurring Power's wrath).
+
+Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Faced with this kind of dilemma, I can't say that defying Power is necessarily the right choice: if there really _were_ no other options between deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance, and incurring Power's wrath, and Power's wrath would be too terrible to bear, then maybe deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance is the right thing to do.
+
+But if you actually _cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky playing dumb: if he _wanted_ to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose flaws I have analyzed in detail above).
+
+"I think people are better off at the end of that," Yudkowsky writes of the consequences of agreeing-with-Stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles policies. But here I think we need a more conflict-theoretic analysis that looks at a more detailed level than "people." _Who_ is better off, specifically?
+
+... and, I had been planning to save the Whole Dumb Story about my alienation from Yudkowsky's so-called "rationalists" for a _different_ multi-thousand-word blog post, because _this_ multi-thousand-word blog post was supposed to be narrowly scoped to _just_ exhaustively replying to Yudkowsky's February 2021 Facebook post about pronoun conventions. But in order to explain the problems with "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" and "people are better off at the end of that", I may need to _briefly_ recap some of the history leading to the present discussion, which explains why _I_ didn't know and _I'm_ not better off, with the understanding that it's only a summary and I might still need to tell the long version in a separate post, if it's still necessary relative to everything else I need to get around to writing.
+
+I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
+
+You see, back in the 'aughts when Yudkowsky was writing his Sequences, he occasionally said some things about sex differences that I often found offensive at the time, but which ended up being hugely influential on me, especially in the context of my ideological affinity towards feminism and my secret lifelong-since-puberty erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman. I wrote about this at length 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/)].
+
+In particular, in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (and its precursor in a [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW)), Yudkowsky explains
+
+
+[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.]
+
+[nearest unblocked strategy; I would prefer to have a real discussion under the assumption of good faith, but _I tried that first_. Object-level disucssion with Yudkowsky is a waste of time as long as he's going to play these games; there's nothing left for me to do but jump up a meta level and explain, to anyone who capable of hearing it, why in this case the assumption of good faith has been empirically falsified]
+
+[If it were _actually true_ that there was no harm from the bad faith because people know they're living in a half-Stalinist environment, then he wouldn't have tried to get away with the "20% of the ones with penises" thing]
+
+[All this despite the fact that all my heretical opinions are _literally_ just his opinions from the 'aughts. Seriously, you think I'm smart enough to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts when he still gave a shit about telling the truth in this domain. Does he expect us not to notice? Well, I guess it's been working out for him so far.]
+
+[Agreeing with Stalin that 2+2=4 is fine; the problem is a sustained pattern of _selectively_ bring up pro-Party points while ignoring anti-Party facts that would otherwise be relevant to the topic of interest, including stonewalling commenters who try to point out relevance; I think I'm doing better: I can point to places where I argue "the other side", because I know that sides are fake]
+
+[I can win concessions, like "On the Argumentative Form", but I don't want concessions; I want to _actually get the goddamned right answer_]
+
+[our beliefs about dolphins are downstream of Scott's political incentives]