-[TODO: "progress towards discussing the real thing"
- * Jessica acks Ray's point of "why are you using court language if you don't intend to blame/punish"
- * Michael 20 Jul: court language is our way of saying non-engagement isn't an option
- * Michael: we need to get better at using SJW blamey language
- * secret posse member: that's you-have-become-the-abyss terrifying suggestion
- * Ben thinks SJW blame is obviously good
-]
+Ruby wrote a document about ways in which one's speech could harm people, which was discussed in the comments of a draft _Less Wrong_ post by some of our posse members and some of the _Less Wrong_ mods. (The draft was hidden, but the API apparently didn't filter out comments on hidden posts, and the thread was visible on the third-party [GreaterWrong](https://www.greaterwrong.com/) site; I [filed a bug](https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2/issues/2161).)
+
+Ben wrote:
+
+> What I see as under threat is the ability to say in a way that's actually heard, not only that opinion X is false, but that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction. Frequently, attempts to say this are construed _primarily_ as moves to attack some person or institution, pushing them into the outgroup. Frequently, people suggest to me an "equivalent" wording with a softer tone, which in fact omits important substantive criticisms I mean to make, while claiming to understand what's at issue.
+
+Ray Arnold (another _Less Wrong_ mod) replied:
+
+> My core claim is: "right now, this isn't possible, without a) it being heard by many people as an attack, b) without people having to worry that other people will see it as an attack, even if they don't."
+>
+> It seems like you see this something as _"there's a precious thing that might be destroyed"_ and I see it as _"a precious thing does not exist and must be created, and the circumstances in which it can exist are fragile."_ It might have existed in the very early days of LessWrong. But the landscape now is very different than it was then. With billions of dollars available and at stake, what worked then can't be the same thing as what works now.
+
+(!!)[^what-works-now]
+
+[^what-works-now]: Arnold qualifies this in the next paragraph:
+
+ > [in public. In private things are much easier. It's _also_ the case that private channels enable collusion—that was an update [I]'ve made over the course of the conversation. ]
+
+ Even with the qualifier, I still think this deserves a "(!!)".
+
+Jessica pointed this out as a step towards discussing the real problem (Subject: "progress towards discussing the real thing??"). She elaborated in the secret thread: now that the "EA" scene was adjacent to real-world money and power, people were incentivized to protect their reputations (and beliefs related to their reputations) in anti-epistemic ways, in a way that they wouldn't if the scene was still just a philosophy club, catalyzing a shift of norms from "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" towards protecting feelings—where "protecting feelings" was actually about protecting power. The fact that the scene was allocating billions of dollars made it strictly _more_ important for public discussions to reach the truth, compared to philosophy club—but it also increased the likelihood of obfuscatory action, which philosophy-club norms (like "assume good faith") didn't account for. We might need to extend philosophy-club norms to take into account the possibility of adversarial action: there's a reason that courts of law don't assume good faith. We didn't want to disproportionately _punish_ people for getting caught up in obfuscatory patterns—that would just increase the incentive to obfuscate—but we did need some way to reveal what was going on.
+
+In email, Jessica acknowledged that Ray had a point that it was confusing to use court-inspired language if we didn't intend to blame and punish people. Michael said that court language was our way to communicate, "You don't have the option of non-engagement with the complaints that are being made." (Courts can _summon_ people; you can't ignore a court summons the way you can ignore ordinary critics.)
+
+Michael said that we should also develop skill in using social-justicey blame language, as was used against us, harder, while we were still acting under mistake-theoretic assumptions. "Riley" said that this was a terrifying you-have-become-the-abyss suggestion; Ben thought it was obviously a good idea.
+
+I was pretty horrified by the extent to which _Less Wrong_ moderators (!!) seemed to be explicitly defending "protect feelings" norms. Previously, I had mostly been seeing the present struggle through the lens of my idiosyncratic Something to Protect, as a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness; I was happy to have Michael/Ben/Jessica as allies, but I wasn't _seeing_ the Blight as a unified problem. Now ... I was seeing _something_.