Anyone else being wrong on the internet like that wouldn't have seemed like a big deal, but Scott Alexander had [semi-jokingly](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html) written that [rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/). After extensive attempts by me and allies to get clarification from Yudkowsky amounted to nothing, we felt justified in concluding that he and his Caliphate of so-called "rationalists" was corrupt.
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### Origins of the Rationalist Civil War (April–May 2019)
Anyway, given that the "rationalists" were fake and that we needed something better, there remained the question of what to do about that, and how to relate to the old thing.
I asked my boss to temporarily assign me some easier tasks that I could make steady progress on. (We had a lot of LaTeX templating of insurance policy amendments that needed to get done.) If I was going to be psychologically impaired, it was better to be up-front about how I could best serve the company given that impairment, rather than hoping the boss wouldn't notice.
-My intent of a break from the religious war didn't take. I met with Anna on the UC Berkeley campus and read her excerpts from Ben's and Jessica's emails. (She had not provided a comment on "... Boundaries?" despite my requests, including in the form of two paper postcards that I stayed up until 2 _a.m._ on 14 April 2019 writing; spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding postcards felt more distinctive than my usual habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.) While we (my posse) were aghast at Yudkowsky's behavior, Anna was aghast at ours: reaching out to try to have a conversation with Yudkowsky, then concluding that he was a fraud because we weren't satisfied with the outcome was like hiding soldiers in an ambulance, introducing a threat into a context where he had a right to be safe.
+My intent of a break from the religious war didn't take. I met with Anna on the UC Berkeley campus and read her excerpts from Ben's and Jessica's emails. (She had not provided a comment on ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) despite my requests, including in the form of two paper postcards that I stayed up until 2 _a.m._ on 14 April 2019 writing; spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding postcards felt more distinctive than my usual habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.) While we (my posse) were aghast at Yudkowsky's behavior, Anna was aghast at ours: reaching out to try to have a conversation with Yudkowsky, then concluding that he was a fraud because we weren't satisfied with the outcome was like hiding soldiers in an ambulance, introducing a threat into a context where he had a right to be safe.
I complained that I had believed our own [marketing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aFEsqd6ofwnkNqaXo/go-forth-and-create-the-art) [material](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jP583FwKepjiWbeoQ/epistle-to-the-new-york-less-wrongians) about the "rationalists" remaking the world by wielding a hidden Bayesian structure of Science and Reason that applies [outside the laboratory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory). Was that all a lie? Were we not trying to do the thing anymore? Anna was dismissive: she thought that the idea I had gotten about "the thing" was never actually part of the original vision. She kept repeating that she had tried to warn me, and I didn't listen. (Back in the late 'aughts, she had often recommended Paul Graham's essay ["What You Can't Say"](http://paulgraham.com/say.html) to people, summarizing Graham's moral that you should figure out the things you can't say in your culture and then not say them, in order to avoid getting drawn into pointless conflicts.)
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