+
+Great at free speech norms, there's a level above free speech where you _converge on the right answer
+
+(I cried my tears for three good years; you can't be mad at me.)
+
+a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation
+
+Technical mistake
+
+_politically load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.
+
+https://economicsofgender.tumblr.com/post/188438604772/i-vaguely-remember-learning-trans-women-are : "for a while nobody argued about the truth or implications of 'trans women are women.' It would be like arguing over whether, in fact, the birthday boy really gets the first piece of cake."
+
+So, while I have been seeking out a coalition/bandwagon/flag-rally for the past few weeks, I've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts, the different definitions imply different probabilistic inferences, so banning one definition as hurtful is an epistemic issue that rationalists should notice because it makes it artificially more expensive to express probabilistic inferences that can be expressed concisely with that definition."
+
+I do usually mention the two-types model at the same time because that's where I think the truth is and it's hard to see the Bayes-structure-of-language problem without concrete examples. (Why is it that that only ~3% of women-who-happen-to-be-cis identify as lesbians, but 60% of women-who-happen-to-be-trans do? If you're careful, you can probably find a way to encode the true explanation in a way that doesn't offend anyone. But if you want to be able to point to the truth concisely—in a way that fits in a Tweet, or to an audience that doesn't know probabilistic graphical models—then "Because trans women are men" needs to be sayable. You don't need to say it when it's not relevant or if a non-rationalist who might be hurt by it is in the room, but it can't be unsayable.)
+
+Do I need to be much louder about the "This philosophy-of-language point can be accepted independently of any empirical claims" disclaimer and much quieter about the empirical claims, because literally no one understands disclaimers!?
+
+(I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
+
+I don't want to fall into the bravery-debate trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)."
+
+Strongly agree with this. I have some misgivings about the redpilly coalition-seeking I've been doing recently. My hope has been that it's possible to apply just enough "What the fuck kind of rationalist are you?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments. I don't know if that actually works.
+
+"Moshe": "People rightly distrust disclaimers and nearly no one except me & Michael can say so instead of acting like it’s common knowledge with people who don’t fully know this."
+
+Standards! https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/
+
+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)."
+
+_Why_ is it humorous? Because you don't like sports? (["Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn't yours. A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-challenge))
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1065666629155995648 "The only leaders in the current ecosystem who express any kind of controversial opinion, ever, are organisms that specialize in subsisting on the resource flows produced by expressing that kind of controversial opinion."
+
+https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/14/cancer-research-removes-word-women-smear-campaign-amid-transgender/ "anyone who has a cervix"
+
+A rationality mistake is made that's useful for supporting political agenda X, now no one can ever correct the rationality mistake (even in the most abstract terms with examples about dolphins) for fear of being smeared as anti-X
+
+if THAT is now too politically contentious to affirm in public, we're DEAD
+
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/ "you yourself admit that your model won't assign literally all of its probability mass to the exact outcome?!"
+
+"category boundaries" were just a visual metaphor for talking about beliefs? There's a little naive Bayes model in my head with "blueness" and "eggness" observation nodes hooked up to a central "blegg" category-membership node, such that I can use observations to update my beliefs about category-membership, and use my beliefs about category-membership to predict observations. The set of things I'll classify as a blegg with probability greater than p is conveniently visualized as an area with a boundary in blueness–eggness space, but the beliefs are the important thing.
+
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/
+
+(I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto" even while I'm expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—I just _need to tell the story_ about why I've been crazy all year so that I can stop grieving and _move on_.)
+
+"Don't Revere the Bearer of Good Info" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info
+
+casuistry
+
+Schelling: "One must seek, in other words, a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."'— this was basically what I was hoping to do with "Where to Draw The Boundaries?"—I was hoping to get a victory on _just_ the philosophy-of-language part
+
+Eliezer's NRx 2013 vs. 2019 takes
+
+In the English language as it is spoken today, third-person singular gender pronouns _do_ have truth conditions. If a stranger crossing your path is rude to you, you'll say, "What's _her_ problem?" or "What's _his_ problem?" depending on your perception of their secondary sex characteristics.
+
+(1) If _x_ is a noun, you can't define _x_ any way you want without negative side-effects on your cognition (for at least 37 different reasons).
+(2) _Woman_ is a noun.
+[From (1), (2), and _modus ponens_] Therefore, you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want without negative side-effects on your cognition.
+
+It's _unhealthy_ to spend this many hours stuck in a loop of, "We had an entire Sequence about this! You lying motherfuckers!"
+
+What are you looking at me like that for? [It's not a cult!](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness)
+
+At least, it [_wasn't_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) a cult.
+
+(A _secondary_ reason for explaining, is that it could _possibly_ function as a useful warning to the next guy to end up in an similar situation of trusting the branded systematically-correct-reasoning community to actually be interested in doing systematically correct reasoning, and incurring a lot of wasted effort and pain [making an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) to [try to](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth) correct the situation. But I don't know how common that is.)
+
+https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/
+https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/
+
+I feel betrayed, but that doesn't
+
+"chromosomes" isn't as dumb as it sounds—it's the "root" of the causal net of all other sex differences
+
+Am I suffering from a "hostile media" effect?
+
+Choose a gerrymandered or thin-subspace category isn't that dangerous in itself—it's the dark-side epistemology that kills everyone
+
+deconfusion https://intelligence.org/2018/11/22/2018-update-our-new-research-directions/
+
+I want the thing Ozy is doing here to be _socially unacceptable_; I want it to be _laughed out of the room_
+https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/in-my-culture/
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zGJw9PGhu9e8Z6BEX/fake-norms-or-truth-vs-truth
+
+https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/
+
+ the elephant in my brain has been using "I'm going to be in incredible emotional pain until I write the story down" as a precommitment device
+
+If an Outer Party member in the world of George Orwell's 1984 says, "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia," even though they clearly remember events from last week, when Oceania was at war with Eurasia instead [...] even if it's not really their fault
+
+
+> but not worth starting over over
+
+I mean, this is the part where I do a very not Effective Altruist-themed thing, and stop talking as if I do anything for the good of the lightcone. (Maybe see Ben on "Against Responsibility" and "The Humility Argument for Honesty".) I internalized a particular vision [...] of what conduct is appropriate to a "rationalist"; I'm didn't that standard upheld with respect to my Something to Protect; so I am doing a halt–melt–catch-fire on "the community." It's worth starting over over _for me_. If my actions (implausibly) represent a PR risk to someone else's Singularity strategy, then they're welcome to try to persuade or negotiate with me.