+> If you think you can win a battle about 2 + 3 = 5, then it can feel like victory or self-justification to write a huge long article hammering on that; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with how the Other does not think they are arguing 2 + 3 = 6, they're talking about 2 * 3.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270
+
+But I think Eliezer and I _agree_ on what he's doing; he just doesn't see it's bad
+
+Speaking of narcissism and perspective-taking, "deception" isn't about whether you personally "lied" according to your own re-definitions; it's about whether you predictably made others update in the wrong direction
+
+[
+> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans) - I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
+
+Tweet said "I've never persuaded anyone to go trans" in light of his track record; is like thinking it's personally prudent and not community-harmful to bash Democrats and praise Republicans. If any possible good thing about Democrats is something you mention that "the other side" would say. Even if you can truthfully say "I've never _told_ anyone to _vote_ Republican", you shouldn't be surprised if people regard you as a Republican shill ; the "30% of the ones with penises" proclamation sort of was encouraging it, really!
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
+> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
+
+I really appreciated Anatoly Vorobey's comments:
+
+> to provide context how it may (justifiably?) seem like over the last 7-8 years the rat. community largely fell *hard* for a particular gender philosophy
+
+> ... fell for it in ways that seemed so spectacularly uncritical, compared to other beliefs carefully examined and dissected, and more so, even justified with a veneer of "rationality" (as in Scott's Categories post) that beautifully coincided with the tumblr dogma of the time...
+
+> ...(then twitter dogma of the time, and now almost the blue tribe dogma of our time)... that I can understand how someone like Zack, embedded in the rat culture physically and struggling with this reigning ideology, could feel it as gaslighting.
+
+]
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
+> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
+> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
+> I'm curious about how much you think these opinions have been arrived at independently by yourself, Paul, and the rest of the OpenPhil complex?
+
+If he's worried about Carl being corrupted by OpenPhil; it make sense for me to worry about him being corrupted by Glowfic cluster
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
+> If you mean that say Mike Blume starts getting paid $20m/yr base salary
+Weirdly specific that Mike (random member of your robot cult) is getting namedropped
+
+example of hero-worship, David Pearce writes—
+https://www.facebook.com/algekalipso/posts/4769054639853322?comment_id=4770408506384602
+> recursively cloning Scott Alexander—with promising allelic variations - and hothousing the “products” could create a community of super-Scotts with even greater intellectual firepower
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
+
+> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
+
+Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
+
+Or as Yudkowsky put it—
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228
+> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
+
+It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
+
+An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
+
+Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Scott and Eliezer is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. Nullius in verba.
+
+
+
+Respect needs to be updateable. No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts. I have a draft explaining the dolphins thing, about why Nate's distaste for paraphyly is wrong. In Nate's own account, he "suspect[s] that ['[...] Not Man for the Categories'] played a causal role in [...] starting the thread out on fish." Okay, where did Scott get it from, then? I don't have access to his thoughts, but I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient for him. I suspect that if you asked him in 2012 whether dolphins are fish, he would have said, "No, they're mammals" like any other educated adult. Can you imagine "... Not Man for the Categories" being as popular as it is in our world if it just cut off after section III? Me neither.
+
+I think it's a problem for our collective epistemology that Scott has the power to sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else—that our 2021 beliefs about dolphins (literally, dolphins in particular!) is causally downstream of Scott's political incentives in 2014, even if Scott wasn't consciously lying and Nate wasn't thinking about gender politics. I think this is the problem that Eliezer identified as dark side epistemology: people invent fake epistemology lessons to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits, and the fake lessons can spread, even if the meme-recipients aren't trying to force anything themselves. I would have expected people with cultural power to be interested in correcting the problem once it was pointed out.
+
+And the thing where David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
+
+https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937
+
+> Also: Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at *all* the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a *lot* of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
+
+"Speak out in order to make it clear how not alt-right you are; nothing wrong with that because I'm not lying" is being inconsistent about whether signaling and mood-affiliation matters—it's trying to socially profit by signaling pro-Stalin-ness, while simultaneously denying that anyone could object (because you didn't lie—pivoting to a worldview where only literal meanings matter and signals aren't real). Can I sketch this out mathematically?
+
+3 January 2020 text from Michael to me:
+> because I want to make it very clear to you, and to encourage you to make it very clear to others [...] that you are experiencing extremely articulate and extremely by the book trauma, caused in a very canonical manner by institutional betrayal and causing silencing of a sort very similar to that which causes investigation of sex crimes to be problematic (as in the high quality current Netflix show "Unbelievable", which you all might benefit from watching)
+
+Forget it, Jake—it's the rationalist community
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong
+> The act of defining a word to refer to all humans, except black people, seems kind of suspicious.
+That's not the only implication on race of the philosophy of categorization—actually, I'm going to bite the bullet here; "Eurasian" is actually fine as a paraphyletic category (and @CovfefeAnon uses it productively)
+
+[For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096):
+
+> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
+
+Sure, _in the limit of arbitrarily advanced technology_, everyone could be exactly where they wanted to be in sexpsace. Having said this, we have _not_ said all the facts relevant to decisionmaking in our world, where _we do not have arbitrarily advanced technology_. As Yudkowsky [acknowledges in the previous Tweet](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067488844122021888), "Hormone therapy changes some things and leaves others constant." The existence of HRT does not take us into the Glorious Transhumanist Future where everyone is the sex they say they are.
+
+Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.
+
+But the _reason_ for having sex-segregated sports leagues is because the sport-relevant multivariate trait distributions of female bodies and male bodies are quite different.
+
+[TODO: (clean up and consolidate the case here after reading the TW-in-sports articles)
+
+The "multivariate" part is important, because
+
+Different traits have different relevance to different sports; the fact that it's apples-to-oranges is _why_ women do better in ultraswimming—that competition is sampling a corner of sportspace where body fat is an advantage
+
+It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average
+
+It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight"
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
+
+If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in almost all sports, with some exceptions [like ultra-distance swimming](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/)).
+
+]
+
+Given the empirical reality of the different multivariate trait distributions, "Who are the best athletes _among females_" is a natural question for people to be interested in, and want separate sports leagues to determine.
+
+(Similarly, when conducting [automobile races](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_racing), you want there to be rules enforcing that all competitors have the same type of car for some common-sense-reasonable operationalization of "the same type", because a race between a sports car and a [moped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped) would be mostly measuring who has the sports car, rather than who's the better racer.)
+
+Including males people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league.
+
+[TODO: more sentences explaining why HRT doesn't break taxonicity of sex, and why "gender identity" is a much less plausible joint anyway]
+
+[TODO: sentences about studies showing that HRT doesn't erase male advantage
+https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
+https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
+https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
+]
+
+[TODO sentences about Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405 (Thomas and Tefler's feats occured after Yudkowsky's 2018 Tweets, but this kind of thing was easily predictable to anyone familiar with sex differences)
+https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
+https://twitter.com/sharrond62/status/1495802345380356103 Lia Thomas event coverage
+https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-lia-thomas-birth-certificates Zippy inv. cluster graph!
+https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/a-look-at-the-numbers-and-times-no-denying-the-advantages-of-lia-thomas/
+]
+
+In light of these _empirical_ observations, Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant comittment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports, is revealed as an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically-literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue _at all_, as contrasted to having _first_ decided (consciously or not) to bolster one's reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and wielding one's philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant empirical facts are _not subtle_, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions".
+
+Yudkowsky's pretension to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions isn't credible: if you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" strawman and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
+
+(And in this case, the empirical facts are _so_ lopsided, that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. Lia Thomas trounces the entire field by _4.2 standard deviations_ (!!), and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
+
+when worrying about the future and what I should do about it, I find myself more concerned with whether Eliezer would disapprove rather than the everyone-dying part
+
+me criticizing dath ilan (after being blocked from his Twitter) is also a nearest-unblocked-strategy
+
+If there's a generalized remembering-history skill, it should apply to "remembering when pronouns implied sex" and as well as "remembering when neural nets weren't used in the Netflix contest" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cCrpbZ4qTCEYXbzje/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-scientific-reasoning-and-pivotal-acts
+
+----
+
+Having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?
+
+Of course, presumably he _doesn't_ think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He graciously explains in the Facebook comments](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228):
+
+> it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.
+
+Ah, _prudence_! He continues:
+
+> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
+
+The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in an line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your presented conclusion, after the fact.
+
+The best explanation of this I know was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
+
+> As a campaign manager reading a book on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind: "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"
+>
+> Sorry. It can't be done.
+>
+> "What?" you cry. "But what if I use only valid support to construct my structure of reason? What if every fact I cite is true to the best of my knowledge, and relevant evidence under Bayes's Rule?"
+>
+> Sorry. It still can't be done. You defeated yourself the instant you specified your argument's conclusion in advance.
+
+The campaign manager is in possession of a survey of mayoral candidates on which Snodgrass compares favorably to other candidates, except for one question. The post continues (bolding mine):
+
+> So you are tempted to publish the questionnaire as part of your own campaign literature ... with the 11th question omitted, of course.
+>
+> **Which crosses the line between _rationality_ and _rationalization_.** It is no longer possible for the voters to condition on the facts alone; they must condition on the additional fact of their presentation, and infer the existence of hidden evidence.
+>
+> Indeed, **you crossed the line at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it.** "What!" you cry. "A campaign should publish facts unfavorable to their candidate?" But put yourself in the shoes of a voter, still trying to select a candidate—why would you censor useful information? You wouldn't, if you were genuinely curious. If you were flowing _forward_ from the evidence to an unknown choice of candidate, rather than flowing _backward_ from a fixed candidate to determine the arguments.
+
+The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of _illogical_ argument, even though the both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) _and_ the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't _follow_ from the premises; the _reason_ all squares are rectangles isn't _because_ they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general _form_ "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.
+
+Yudkowsky's conception of a "rational" argument—at least, Yudkowsky's conception in 2007, which the Yudkowsky of the current year seems to disagree with—has a similar flavor: the stated reasons should be the actual reasons. The post concludes:
+
+> If you really want to present an honest, rational argument _for your candidate_, in a political campaign, there is only one way to do it:
+>
+> * _Before anyone hires you_, gather up all the evidence you can about the different candidates.
+> * Make a checklist which you, yourself, will use to decide which candidate seems best.
+> * Process the checklist.
+> * Go to the winning candidate.
+> * Offer to become their campaign manager.
+> * When they ask for campaign literature, print out your checklist.
+>
+> Only in this way can you offer a _rational_ chain of argument, one whose bottom line was written flowing _forward_ from the lines above it. Whatever _actually_ decides your bottom line is the only thing you can _honestly_ write on the lines above.
+
+I remember this being pretty shocking to read back in 'aught-seven. What an alien mindset! But it's _correct_. You can't rationally argue "for" a chosen conclusion, because only the process you use to _decide what to argue for_ can be your real reason.
+
+This is a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to live up to—but what made Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changingly valuable, was that they articulated the _existence_ of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.
+
+... which is why it's so _bizarre_ that the Yudkowsky of the current year acts like he's never heard of it! If your _actual_ bottom line is that it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin, then sure, you can _totally_ find something you agree with to write on the lines above! Probably something that "exhibits generally rationalist principles", even! It's just that any rationalist who sees the game you're playing is going to correctly identify you as a partisan hack on this topic and take that into account when deciding whether they can trust you on other topics.
+
+"I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot," Yudkowsky muses (where presumably, 'getting shot' is a metaphor for a large negative utility, like being unpopular with progressives). Yes, an astute observation! And _any other partisan hack could say exactly the same_, for the same reason. Why does the campaign manager withhold the results of the 11th question? Because he doesn't see what the alternative is besides getting shot.
+
+Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings) [quotes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832) _Calvin and Hobbes_: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low."
+
+If the idea of being fired from the Snodgrass campaign or being unpopular with progressives is _so_ terrifying to you that it seems analogous to getting shot, then, if those are really your true values, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job and your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price. But if the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
+
+I see the phrase "bad faith" thrown around more than I think people know what it means. "Bad faith" doesn't mean "with ill intent", and it's more specific than "dishonest": it's [adopting the surface appearance of being moved by one set of motivations, while actually acting from another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith).
+
+For example, an [insurance company employee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_adjuster) who goes through the motions of investigating your claim while privately intending to deny it might never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but is definitely acting in bad faith: they're asking you questions, demanding evidence, _&c._ in order to _make it look like_ you'll get paid if you prove the loss occurred—whereas in reality, you're just not going to be paid. Your responses to the claim inspector aren't completely casually _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that the loss occurred as you say, then the claim inspector might need to put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse to deny your claim in ways that exhibit general claim-inspection principles. But at the end of the day, the inspector is going to say what they need to say in order to protect the company's loss ratio, as is personally prudent.
+
+With this understanding of bad faith, we can read Yudkowsky's "it is sometimes personally prudent [...]" comment as admitting that his behavior on politically-charged topics is in bad faith—where "bad faith" isn't a meaningless insult, but [literally refers](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) to the pretending-to-have-one-set-of-motivations-while-acting-according-to-another behavior, such that accusations of bad faith can be true or false. Yudkowsky will never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but he'll go through the motions to _make it look like_ he's genuinely engaging with questions where I need the right answers in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions—whereas in reality, he's only going to address a selected subset of the relevant evidence and arguments that won't get him in trouble with progressives.
+
+To his credit, he _will_ admit that he's only willing to address a selected subset of arguments—but while doing so, he claims an absurd "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking" while _simultaneously_ blatantly mischaracterizing his opponents' beliefs! ("Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" doesn't pass anyone's [ideological Turing test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html).)
+
+Counterarguments aren't completely causally _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity, Yudkowsky will put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse for why he _technically_ never said otherwise, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles. But at the end of the day, Yudkowsky is going to say what he needs to say in order to protect his reputation, as is personally prudent.
+
+Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with them than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception because I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
+
+[TODO: the term is "concern trolling"; speak of trying to correct a distortion]
+
+That is, my bad faith Twitter gambit of deceiving people about my ideological alignment in the hopes of improving the discussion seems like something that makes our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued-about _more_ accurate. (And the topic-being-argued-about is presumably of greater collective interest than which "side" I personally happen to be on.)
+
+In contrast, the "it is sometimes personally prudent [...] to post your agreement with Stalin" gambit is the exact reverse: it's _introducing_ a distortion into the discussion in the hopes of correcting people's beliefs about the speaker's ideological alignment. (Yudkowsky is not a right-wing Bad Guy, but people would tar him as a right-wing Bad Guy if he ever said anything negative about trans people.) This doesn't improve our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued about; it's a _pure_ ass-covering move.