-[TODO—
- * Jessica: scortched-earth campaign should mostly be in meatspace social reality
- * my comment on emotive conjugation (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare#GaoyhEbzPJvv6sfZX)
-
-> I'm also not sure if I'm sufficiently clued in to what Ben and Jessica are modeling as Blight, a coherent problem, as opposed to two or six individual incidents that seem really egregious in a vaguely similar way that seems like it would have been less likely in 2009??
-
- * Vassar: "Literally nothing Ben is doing is as aggressive as the basic 101 pitch for EA."
- * Ben: we should be creating clarity about "position X is not a strawman within the group", rather than trying to scapegoat individuals
- * my scuffle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality" (my previous interaction with Ruby had been on the LW FAQ; maybe he couldn't let me "win" again so quickly?)
- * it gets worse: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality#NbrPdyBFPi4hj5zQW
- * Ben's comment: "Wow, he's really overtly arguing that people should lie to him to protect his feelings."
- * Jessica: "tone arguments are always about privileged people protecting their feelings, and are thus in bad faith. Therefore, engaging with a tone argument as if it's in good faith is a fool's game, like playing chess with a pigeon. Either don't engage, or seek to embarrass them intentionally."
- * there's no point at being mad at MOPs
- * me (1 Jul): I'm a _little bit_ mad, because I specialize in cognitive and discourse strategies that are _extremely susceptible_ to being trolled like this
- * me to "Wilhelm" 1 Jul: "I'd rather not get into fights on LW, but at least I'm 2-0-1"
- * "collaborative truth seeking" but (as Michael pointed out) politeness looks nothing like Aumann agreement
- * 2 Jul: Jessica is surprised by how well "Self-consciousness wants to make everything about itself" worked; theory about people not wanting to be held to standards that others aren't being held to
- * Michael: Jessica's example made it clear she was on the side of social justice
- * secret posse member: level of social-justice talk makes me not want to interact with this post in any way
-]
-
-On 4 July, Scott Alexander published ["Some Clarifications on Rationalist Blogging"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/), disclaiming any authority as a "rationalist" leader. ("I don't want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special 'rationality' work beyond showing people interesting problems [...] Insofar as [_Slate Star Codex_] makes any pretensions to being 'rationalist', it's a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.") I assumed this was inspired by Ben's request back in March that Scott "alter the beacon" so as to not confuse people about what the current-year community was. I appreciated it.
-
-[TODO: "AI Timelines Scam"
- * I still sympathize with the "mainstream" pushback against the scam/fraud/&c. language being used to include Elephant-in-the-Brain-like distortions
- * Ben: "What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you? Investigations of financial fraud don't inquire as to the conscious motives of the perp."
- * 11 Jul: I think the law does count _mens rea_ as a thing: we do discriminate between vehicular manslaughter and first-degree murder, because traffic accidents are less disincentivizable than offing one's enemies
- * call with Michael about GiveWell vs. the Pope
-]
-
-[TODO: secret thread with Ruby; "uh, guys??" to Steven and Anna; people say "Yes, of course criticism and truthseeking is important; I just think that tact is important, too," only to go on and dismiss any _particular_ criticism as insufficiently tactful.]
-
-[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
-]
-
-[TODO: epistemic defense meeting;
- * I ended up crying at one point and left the room for while
- * Jessica's summary: "Zack was a helpful emotionally expressive and articulate victim. It seemed like there was consensus that "yeah, it would be better if people like Zack could be warned somehow that LW isn't doing the general sanity-maximization thing anymore"."
- * Vaniver admitting LW is more of a recruiting funnel for MIRI
- * I needed to exhaust all possible avenues of appeal before it became real to me; the first morning where "rationalists ... them" felt more natural than "rationalists ... us"
-]
-
-[TODO: Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip; make sure to include the part about Michael threatening to sue]
-
-[TODO: State of Steven]
-
-I still wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constrained; I was still bound by internal silencing-chains. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise the "rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy blogging!
+> I've been collaborating with Michael a lot recently, and I'm happy to contribute whatever information I can to make the report more accurate. What are the charges?
+
+They replied:
+
+> To be clear, we are not a court of law addressing specific "charges." We're a subcommittee of the Berkeley REACH Panel tasked with making decisions that help keep the space and the community safe.
+
+I replied:
+
+> Allow me to rephrase my question about charges. What are the reasons that the safety of the space and the community require you to write a report about Michael? To be clear, a community that excludes Michael on inadequate evidence is one where _I_ feel unsafe.
+
+We arranged a call, during which I angrily testified that Michael was no threat to the safety of the space and the community—which would have been a bad idea if it were the cops, but in this context, I figured my political advocacy couldn't hurt.
+
+Concurrently, I got into an argument with Kelsey Piper about Michael, after she had written on Discord that her "impression of _Vassar_'s threatening schism is that it's fundamentally about Vassar threatening to stir shit up until people stop socially excluding him for his bad behavior". I didn't think that was what the schism was about (Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip").
+
+In the course of litigating Michael's motivations (the details of which are not interesting enough to summarize here), Kelsey mentioned that she thought Michael had done immense harm to me: that my models of the world and ability to reason were worse than they were a year ago. I thanked her for the concern, and asked if she could be more specific.
+
+She said she was referring to my ability to predict consensus and what other people believe. I expected arguments to be convincing to other people which the other people found, not just not convincing, but so obviously not convincing that it was confusing I bothered raising them. I believed things to be in obvious violation of widespread agreement, when everyone else thought it wasn't. My shocked indignation at other people's behavior indicated a poor model of social reality.
+
+I considered this an insightful observation about a way in which I'm socially retarded. I had had [similar](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/) [problems](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [school](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/strategy-overhaul/). We're told that the purpose of school is education (to the extent that most people think of _school_ and _education_ as synonyms), but the consensus behavior is "sit in lectures and trade assignments for grades." Faced with what I saw as a contradiction between the consensus narrative and the consensus behavior, I would assume that the narrative was the "correct" version, and so I spent a lot of time trying to start conversations about math with everyone and then getting outraged and indignant when they'd say, "What class is this for?" Math isn't for classes; it's the other way around, right?
+
+Empirically, not right! But I had to resolve the contradiction between narrative and reality somehow, and if my choices were "People are [mistakenly](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) failing to live up to the narrative" and "[Everybody knows](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) the narrative is a lie; it would be crazy to expect people to live up to it", the former had been more appealing.
+
+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 in 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 supposedly 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 appropriate 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 distortion myself (for I, too, am bound by norms), but when I do, I feel dirty about it.
+
+As far as appropriate ethical standards go, I didn't approve of silencing critics with lawsuit threats, even while I agreed with Michael that "the process is the punishment." I imagine that if the REACH wanted to publish a report about me, I would expect to defend myself in public, having faith that the [beautiful weapon](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) of my Speech would carry the day against a corrupt community center—or for that matter, against /r/SneerClub.
+
+This is arguably one of my more religious traits. Michael and Kelsey are domain experts and probably know better.
+
+-------
+
+I wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constrained, bound by internal silencing-chains. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing [bitter](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare/comment/Nhv9KPte7d5jbtLBv) and [insulting](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tkuknrjYCbaDoZEh5/could-we-solve-this-email-mess-if-we-all-moved-to-paid/comment/ZkreTspP599RBKsi7) [comments](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE) whenever I saw someone praise the "rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy blogging!