-[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"
-]
+I was pretty 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, as a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness; I was happy to have Michael/Ben/Jessica as allies, but I wasn't _seeing_ the Blight as a unified problem. Now ... I was seeing _something_.
+
+An in-person meeting was arranged on 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 recount it.[^memory] I ended up crying at one point and left the room for a while.
+
+[^memory]: An advantage of the important parts of my life taking place on the internet is that I have _logs_ of the important things; I'm only able to tell this Whole Dumb Story with as much fidelity as I am, 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/), should I be recording more real-life conversations?? In this 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", that there seemed to be a consensus that it would be better if people like me could be warned somehow that _Less Wrong_ wasn't doing the general sanity-maximization thing 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".
+
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