+> 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 were still just a philosophy club. This was 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 _more_ important for public discussions to reach the truth, compared to philosophy club—but it also increased the likelihood of obfuscatory behavior that 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: 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 still thought of ourselves as [trying to correct people's mistakes rather than being in a conflict](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) against the Blight. "Riley" said that this was a terrifying you-have-become-the-abyss suggestion; Ben thought it was obviously a good idea.
+
+I was 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](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) as a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness. I was happy to have Michael/Ben/Jessica as allies, but I hadn't been seeing the Blight as a unified problem. Now I was seeing _something_.
+
+An in-person meeting was arranged for 23 July 2019 at the _Less Wrong_ office, with Ben, Jessica, me, and most of the _Less Wrong_ team (Ray, Ruby, Oliver Habryka, Vaniver, Jim Babcock). I don't have notes and don't really remember what was discussed in enough detail to faithfully recount it.[^memory] I ended up crying at one point and left the room for a while.
+
+[^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