+It was the same thing here. Kelsey said that it was completely predictable that Yudkowsky wouldn't make a public statement, even one as uncontroversial as "category boundaries should be drawn for epistemic and not instrumental reasons", because his experience of public statements was that they'd be taken out of context and used against MIRI by the likes of /r/SneerClub. This wasn't an update at all. (Everyone at "Arcadia" had agreed, in the house discussion on 30 April.) Vassar's insistence that Eliezer be expected to do something that he obviously was never going to do had caused me to be confused and surprised by reality.[^statement]
+
+[^statement]: I thought it was odd that Kelsey seemed to think the issue was that me and my allies were pressuring Yudkowsky to make a public statement, which he never does. From our perspective, the issue was that he _had_ made a statement, and it was wrong.
+
+Kelsey seemed to be taking it as obvious that Eliezer Yudkowsky's public behavior was optimized to respond to the possibility of political attacks by people who hate him anyway, and not optimized to respond to the actuality of thousands of words of careful arguments appealing to his own writings from ten years ago. Very well. Maybe it _was_ obvious. But that being the case, I had no reason to care what Eliezer Yudkowsky said, because not-provoking-SneerClub isn't truth-tracking, and careful arguments are. This was a huge surprise _to me_, even if Kelsey knew better.
+
+What Kelsey saw as "Zack is losing his ability to model other people and I'm worried about him", I thought Ben and Jessica would see as "Zack is angry about living in [simulacrum level 3](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/) and we're worried about _everyone else_."
+
+I did think that Kelsey was mistaken about how much causality to attribute to Michael's influence, rather than me already being socially retarded. From my perspective, validation from Michael was merely the catalyst that excited me from confused-and-sad to confused-and-socially-aggressive-about-it. The social-aggression phase revealed a lot of information—not just to me. Now I was ready to be less confused—after I was done grieving.
+
+Later, talking in person at "Arcadia", Kelsey told me that someone whose identity she would not disclose had threatened to sue over the report about Michael, so REACH was delaying its release for the one-year statute of limitations. As far as my interest in defending Michael went, I counted this as short-term good news (because the report wasn't being published) but longer-term bad news (because the report must be a hit piece if Michael's mysterious ally was trying to hush it).
+
+When I mentioned this to Michael on Signal on 3 August 2019, he replied:
+
+> The person is me, the whole process is a hit piece, literally, the investigation process and not the content. Happy to share the latter with you. You can talk with Ben about appropiate ethical standards.
+
+In retrospect, I feel dumb for not guessing that Michael's mysterious ally was Michael himself. I count this kind of situation as another reason to be [annoyed at how norms protecting confidentiality](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#privacy-constraints) distort information; Kelsey apparently felt obligated to obfuscate any names connected to potential litigation, which led me to the infer the existence of a nonexistent person (because I naïvely assumed that if Michael had been the person who threatened to sue, Kelsey would have said that). I can't say I never introduce this kind of disortion myself (for I, too, am bound by norms), but when I do, I feel dirty about it.