(If you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_.)
-Unfortunately, a lot of other people seem to have strong intuitions about "privacy", which bizarrely impose constraints on what _I'm_ allowed to say about my own life: in particular, it's considered unacceptable to publicly quote or summarize someone's emails from a conversation that they had reason to expect to be private. I feel obligated to comply with these widely-held privacy norms, even if _I_ think they're paranoid and [anti-social](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blackmailers-are-privateers-in-the-war-on-hypocrisy/). (This secrecy-hating trait probably correlates with the autogynephilia blogging; someone otherwise like me who believed in privacy wouldn't be telling you this Whole Dumb Story.)
+<a id="privacy-constraints"></a>Unfortunately, a lot of other people seem to have strong intuitions about "privacy", which bizarrely impose constraints on what _I'm_ allowed to say about my own life: in particular, it's considered unacceptable to publicly quote or summarize someone's emails from a conversation that they had reason to expect to be private. I feel obligated to comply with these widely-held privacy norms, even if _I_ think they're paranoid and [anti-social](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blackmailers-are-privateers-in-the-war-on-hypocrisy/). (This secrecy-hating trait probably correlates with the autogynephilia blogging; someone otherwise like me who believed in privacy wouldn't be telling you this Whole Dumb Story.)
So I would _think_ that while telling this Whole Dumb Story, I obviously have an inalienable right to blog about _my own_ actions, but I'm not allowed to directly refer to private conversations with named individuals in cases where I don't think I'd be able to get the consent of the other party. (I don't think I'm required to go through the ritual of asking for consent in cases where the revealed information couldn't reasonably be considered "sensitive", or if I know the person doesn't have hangups about this weird "privacy" thing.) In this case, I'm allowed to talk about emailing Yudkowsky (because that was _my_ action), but I'm not allowed to talk about anything he might have said in reply, or whether he did.
After some more discussion within the me/Michael/Ben/Sarah posse, on 4 January 2019, I wrote to Yudkowsky again (a second time), to explain the specific problems with his "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter performance, since that apparently hadn't been obvious from the earlier link to ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). I cc'ed the posse, who chimed in afterwards.
-Ben explained what kind of actions we were hoping for from Yudkowsky: that he would (1) notice that he'd accidentally been participating in an epistemic war, (2) generalize the insight (if he hadn't noticed, what were the odds that MIRI had adequate defenses?), and (3) join the conversation about how to _actually_ have a rationality community, while noticing this particular way in which the problem seemed harder than it used to. For my case in particular, something that would help would be either (A) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the general rule that categories are nonarbitrary, _or_ (B) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that he's been silenced on this matter. If even (B) was too politically expensive, that seemed like important evidence about (1).
+<a id="ex-cathedra-statement-ask"></a>Ben explained what kind of actions we were hoping for from Yudkowsky: that he would (1) notice that he'd accidentally been participating in an epistemic war, (2) generalize the insight (if he hadn't noticed, what were the odds that MIRI had adequate defenses?), and (3) join the conversation about how to _actually_ have a rationality community, while noticing this particular way in which the problem seemed harder than it used to. For my case in particular, something that would help would be either (A) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the general rule that categories are nonarbitrary, _or_ (B) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that he's been silenced on this matter. If even (B) was too politically expensive, that seemed like important evidence about (1).
Without revealing the other side of any private conversation that may or may not have occurred, I can say that we did not get either of those _ex cathedra_ statements at this time.
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