+[^memory]: An advantage of mostly living on the internet is that I have logs of the important things. I'm only able to tell this Whole Dumb Story with this much fidelity because for most of it, I can go back and read the emails and chatlogs from the time. Now that [audio transcription has fallen to AI](https://openai.com/blog/whisper/), maybe I should be recording more real-life conversations? In the case of this meeting, supposedly one of the _Less Wrong_ guys was recording, but no one had it when I asked in October 2022.
+
+The next day, I asked Ben and Jessica for their takeaways via email (Subject: "peace talks outcome?"). Jessica said that I was a "helpful emotionally expressive and articulate victim" and that there seemed to be a consensus that people like me should be warned somehow that _Less Wrong_ wasn't doing fully general sanity-maximization anymore. (Because community leaders were willing to sacrifice, for example, ability to discuss non-AI heresies in order to focus on sanity about AI in particular while maintaining enough mainstream acceptability and power.)
+
+I said that for me and my selfish perspective, the main outcome was finally shattering my "rationalist" social identity. I needed to exhaust all possible avenues of appeal before it became real to me. The morning after was the first for which "rationalists ... them" felt more natural than "rationalists ... us".
+
+-------
+
+Michael's reputation in the community, already not what it once was, continued to be debased even further.
+
+The local community center, the Berkeley REACH,[^reach-acronym-expansion] was conducting an investigation as to whether to exclude Michael (which was mostly moot, as he didn't live in the Bay Area). When I heard that the committee conducting the investigation was "very close to releasing a statement", I wrote to them:
+
+[^reach-acronym-expansion]: Rationality and Effective Altruism Community Hub
+
+> 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. This 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 wrote 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 people to be convinced by arguments that they found not only unconvincing, but so unconvincing they didn't see why I would bother. I believed things to be in obvious violation of widespread agreement that everyone else thought were not. 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 indignant when they'd say, "What class is this for?" Math isn't for classes; it's the other way around, right?
+
+Empirically, no! 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 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]: Oddly, Kelsey seemed to think the issue was that my allies and I 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 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 if so, I had no reason to care what Eliezer Yudkowsky said; 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 to 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 latter phase revealed a lot of information, and 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).