+Somni said that it was because I was being victimized by the same forces of gaslighting, and that I wasn't lying about my agenda. Maybe she _should_ be complaining about me?—but I seemed to be following a somewhat earnest epistemic process, whereas Kelsey, Scott, and Anna were not. If I were to start going, "Here's my rationality org; rule #1: no transfems (except me); rule #2, no telling people about rule #1", then she would talk about it.
+
+I would later remark to Anna that Somni and Ziz saw themselves as being oppressed by people's hypocritical and manipulative social perceptions and behavior. Merely using the appropriate language ("Somni ... she", _&c._) protected her against threats from the Political Correctness police, but it actually didn't protect against threats from _them_. It was as if the mere fact that I wasn't optimizing for PR (lying about my agenda, as Somni said) was what made me not a direct enemy (although still a collaborator) in their eyes.
+
+--------
+
+I had a phone call with Michael in which he took issue with Anna having described Ziz as having threatened to kill Gwen, when that wasn't a fair paraphrase of what Ziz's account actually said.[^ziz-gwen-account] In Michael's view, this was tantamount to indirect attempted murder using the State as a weapon to off her organization's critics: Anna casting Ziz as a Scary Bad Guy in [the improv scene of social reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) is the kind of maneuver that contributes to the legal system ruining weird people's lives with spurious charges because weird gets [cast as villains in the act](https://unstableontology.com/2018/11/17/act-of-charity/).
+
+[^ziz-gwen-account]: The relevant passage from [one of Ziz's memoir posts](https://archive.ph/an5rp#selection-419.0-419.442) is:
+
+ > I said if they were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level, and treat fighting back as new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down, and if our conflicting definitions of the ground state where no further retaliation was necessary meant we were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there.
+
+ Talking about murder hypothetically as the logical game-theoretic consequence of a revenge spiral isn't the same thing as directly threatening to kill someone. I wasn't sure what exact words Anna had used in her alleged paraphrase; Michael didn't remember the context when I asked him later.
+
+I told Michael that this made me think I might need to soul-search about having been complicit with injustice, but I couldn't clearly articulate why.
+
+I figured it out later (Subject: "complicity and friendship"). I think part of my emotional reaction to finding out about Ziz's legal trouble was the hope that it would lead to less pressure on Anna. I had been nagging Anna a lot on the theme of "rationality actually requires free speech", and she would sometimes defend her policy of guardedness on the grounds of (my paraphrase—), "Hey, give me some credit, oftentimes I do take a calculated risk of telling people things. Or I did, but then ... Ziz."
+
+I think at some level, I was imagining being able to tell Anna, "See, you were so afraid that telling people things would make enemies, and you used Ziz as evidence that you weren't cautious enough. But look, Ziz _isn't going to be a problem for you anymore_. Your fear of making enemies actually happened, and you're fine! This is evidence in favor of my view that you were far too cautious, rather than not being cautious enough!"
+
+But that was complicit with injustice, because the _reason_ I felt that Ziz wasn't going to be a problem for Anna anymore was because Ziz's protest got SWATted, which didn't have anything to do with the merits of Ziz's claims against Anna. I still wanted Anna to feel safer to speak, but I now realized that more specifically, I wanted Anna to feel safe _because_ Speech can actually win. Feeling safe because one's enemies can be crushed by the state wasn't the same thing.
+
+--------
+
+I had a pretty productive blogging spree in December 2019. In addition to a number of [more](/2019/Dec/political-science-epigrams/) [minor](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) [posts](/2019/Dec/i-want-to-be-the-one/) [on](/2019/Dec/promises-i-can-keep/) [this](/2019/Dec/comp/) [blog](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/) [and](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XbXJZjwinkoQXu4db/funk-tunul-s-legacy-or-the-legend-of-the-extortion-war) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) _[Less](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tCwresAuSvk867rzH/speaking-truth-to-power-is-a-schelling-point) [Wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jrLkMFd88b4FRMwC6/don-t-double-crux-with-suicide-rock)_, I also got out some more significant posts bearing on my agenda.
+
+On this blog, in ["Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender"](/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/), I finally got out at least a partial reply to [Ozy's June 2018 reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), affirming the relevance of an analogy Ozy had made between the socially-constructed natures of money and social gender, while denying that the analogy supported gender by self-identification. (I had been [working on a more exhaustive reply](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#reply-to-ozy), but hadn't managed to finish whittling it into a shape that I was totally happy with.)
+
+I also polished and pulled the trigger on ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), my reply to Yudkowsky's implicit political concession to me back in March. I had been reluctant to post it based on an intuition of, "My childhood hero was trying to _do me a favor_; it would be a betrayal to reject the gift." The post itself explained why that intuition was crazy, but _that_ just brought up more anxieties about whether the explanation constituted leaking information from private conversations—but I had chosen my words carefully such that it wasn't. ("Even if Yudkowsky doesn't know you exist [...] he's _effectively_ doing your cause a favor" was something I could have plausibly written in the possible world where the antecedent was true.) Jessica said the post seemed good.
+
+On _Less Wrong_, the mods had just announced [a new end-of-year Review event](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review), in which the best post from the year before would be reviewed and voted on, to see which had stood the test of time and deserved to be part of our canon of cumulative knowledge. (That is, this Review period starting in late 2019 would cover posts published in _2018_.)
+
+This provided me with [an affordance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review?commentId=d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE) to write some "defensive"[^defensive] posts, critiquing posts that had been nominated for the Best-of-2018 collection that I didn't think deserved such glory. In response to ["Decoupling _vs._ Contextualizing Norms"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms) (which had been [cited in a way that I thought obfuscatory during the "Yes Implies the Possibility of No" trainwreck](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/wejvnw6QnWrvbjgns)), I wrote ["Relevance Norms; Or, Grecian Implicature Queers the Decoupling/Contextualizing Binary"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling), appealing to our [academically standard theory of how context affects meaning](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/) to explain why "decoupling _vs._ contextualizing norms" is a false dichotomy.
+
+[^defensive]: Criticism is "defensive" in the sense of trying to _prevent_ new beliefs from being added to our shared map; a critic of an idea "wins" when the idea is not accepted (such that the set of accepted beliefs remains at the _status quo ante_).
+
+More significantly, in reaction to Yudkowsky's ["Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge Cases"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases), I published ["Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), explaining why merely refraining from making false statments is an unproductively narrow sense of "honesty", because the ambiguity of natural language makes it easy to deceive people in practice without technically lying. (The ungainly title of my post was "softened" from an earlier draft following feedback from the posse; I had originally written "... Surprisingly Useless".)
+
+I thought this one cut to the heart of the shocking behavior that we had seen from Yudkowsky lately. (Less shocking as the months rolled on, and I told myself to let the story end.) The "hill of meaning in defense of validity" affair had been been driven by Yudkowsky's pathological obsession with not-technically-lying, on two levels: he had proclaimed that asking for new pronouns "Is. Not. Lying." (as if _that_ were the matter that anyone cared about—as if conservatives and gender-critical feminists should just pack up and go home after it had been demonstrated that trans people aren't _lying_), and he had seen no interest in clarifying his position on the philosophy of language, because he wasn't lying when he said that preferred pronouns weren't lies (as if _that_ were the matter that my posse cared about—as if I should keep honoring him as my Caliph after it had been demonstrated that he hadn't _lied_). But his Sequences had articulated a _higher standard_ than merely not-lying. If he didn't remember, I could at least hope to remind everyone else.
+
+I also wrote a little post on 20 December 2019, ["Free Speech and Triskadekaphobic Calculators: A Reply to Hubinger on the Relevance of Public Online Discussion to Existential Risk"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to).
+
+Wei Dai had written ["Against Premature Abstraction of Political Issues"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bFv8soRx6HB94p5Pg/against-premature-abstraction-of-political-issues)—itself plausibly an abstraction inspired by my philosophy-of-language blogging?—and had cited a clump of _Less Wrong_ posts about gender and pick-up artistry back in 'aught-nine as a successful debate that would have been harder to have if everyone had to obsfuscate the concrete topics of interest.
+
+A MIRI researcher, Evan Hubinger, asked:
+
+> Do you think having that debate online was something that needed to happen for AI safety/x-risk? Do you think it benefited AI safety at all? I'm genuinely curious. My bet would be the opposite—that it caused AI safety to be more associated with political drama that helped further taint it.
+
+In my reply post, I claimed that our belief that AI safety was the most important problem in the world was causally downstream from from people like Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom trying to do good reasoning, and following lines of reasoning to where they led. The [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms) of assuming that your current agenda was the most important thing, and then distorting the process of inquiry to preserve its political untaintedness wouldn't have led us to _noticing_ the alignment problem, and I didn't think it would be sufficient to solve it.
+
+In some sense, it should be easier to have a rationality/alignment community that _just_ does systematically correct reasoning, rather than a politically-savvy community that does systematically correct reasoning _except_ when that would taint AI safety with political drama, analogously to how it's easier to build a calculator that just does correct arithmetic, than a calculator that does correct arithmetic _except_ that it never displays the result 13.
+
+In order to build a "triskadekaphobic calculator", you would need to "solve arithmetic" anyway, and the resulting product would be limited not only in its ability to correctly compute `6 + 7`, but also the infinite family of calculations that included 13 as an intermediate result: if you can't count on `(6 + 7) + 1` being the same as `6 + (7 + 1)`, you lose the associativity of addition. And so on. (I had the "calculator that won't display 13" analogy cached from previous email correspondence.)
+
+It could have been a comment instead of a top-level post, but I wanted to bid for the extra attention. I think, at some level, putting Hubinger's name in the post title was deliberate. It wasn't inappropriate—"Reply to Author's Name on Topic Name" is a very standard academic title format, [which](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) [I](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/) [often](/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/) [use](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) [myself](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins)—but it also wasn't necessary, and might have been a little weird given that I was mostly using Hubinger's comment as a jumping-off point for my Free Speech for Shared Maps campaign, rather than responding point-by-point to a longer piece Hubinger might have written. It's as if the part of my brain that chose that subtitle wanted to set an example, that arguing for cowardice, being in favor of concealing information for fear of being singled out by a mob, would just get you singled out _more_.
+
+I had [an exchange with Scott Alexander in the comment section](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to/comment/JdsknCuCuZMAo8EbP).
+
+"I know a bunch of people in academia who do various verbal gymnastics to appease the triskaidekaphobics, and when you talk to them in private they get everything 100% right," [he said](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to?commentId=mHrHTvzg8MGNH2CwB) (in a follow-up comment on 5 January 2020).
+
+I'm happy for them, I replied, but I thought the _point_ of having taxpayer-funded academic departments was so that people who _aren't_ insider experts can have accurate information with which to inform decisions?
+
+-----
+
+During a phone call around early December 2019, Michael had pointed out that since [MIRI's 2019 fundraiser](https://intelligence.org/2019/12/02/miris-2019-fundraiser/) was going on, and we had information about how present-day MIRI differed from its marketing story, there was a time-sensitive opportunity to reach out to a perennial major donor, whom I'll call "Ethan", and fill him in on what we thought we knew about the Blight.
+
+I wrote to Jessica and Jack Gallagher (cc'ing Michael) on 14 December asking how we should organize this. (Jessica and Jack had relevant testimony about working at MIRI, which would be of more central interest to "Ethan" than my story about how the "rationalists" had lost their way.) Michael mentioned "Tabitha", a lawyer who had been in the MIRI orbit for a long time, as another person to talk to.
+
+On 22 December, I apologized, saying that I wanted to postpone setting up the meeting, partially because I was on a roll with my productive blogging spree, and partially for a psychological reason: I was feeling subjective pressure to appease Michael by doing the thing that he explicitly suggested because of my loyalty to him. But that would be wrong, because Michael's ideology said that people should follow their sense of opportunity rather than obeying orders. I might feel motived to reach out to "Ethan" and "Tabitha" in January.
+
+Michael said that that implied my sense of opportunity was driven by politics, and that I believed that simple honesty couldn't work. I wasn't sure about this. It seemed like any conversation with "Ethan" and "Tabitha" would be partially optimized to move money, which I thought was politics.
+
+Jessica pointed out that "it moves money, so it's political" was erasing the non-zero-sum details of the situation. If people can make better decisions (including monetary ones) with more information, then informing them was pro-social. If there wasn't any better decisionmaking from information to be had, and it was just a matter of exerting social pressure in favor of one donation target over another, then that would be politics.
+
+I agreed that my initial "it moves money so it's political" intuition was wrong. But I didn't think I knew how to inform people about giving decisions in an honest and timely way, because the arguments [written above the bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) were an entire traumatic worldview shift. You couldn't just say "CfAR is fraudulent, don't give to them" without explaining things like ["bad faith is a disposition, not a feeling"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/) as prerequisites. I felt more comfortable trying to share the worldview update in January even if it meant the December decision would be wrong, because I didn't know how to affect the December decision in a way that didn't require someone to trust my judgement.
+
+Michael wrote:
+
+> That all makes sense to me, but I think that it reduces to "political processes are largely processes of spontaneous coordination to make it impossible to 'just be honest' and thus to force people to engage in politics themselves. In such a situation one is forced to do politics in order to 'just be honest', even if you would greatly prefer not to".
+>
+> This is surely not the first time that you have heard about situations like that.
+
+I ended up running into "Ethan" at the grocery store in early 2020, and told him that I had been planning to get in touch with him. (I might have mentioned the general topic, but I didn't want to get into a long discussion at the grocery store.)
+
+COVID hit shortly thereafter. I never got around to following up.