Sunday memoir confrontation: review emails through 19 December 2018

Sunday memoir confrontation: review emails through 19 December 2018

There's a lot of good content in these emails! For the email-dense
parts of the story, I'm thinking that an easy and high-quality way to
write this memoir is to just—summarize the emails!

I guess I had been thinking that this wasn't an option, because I'm
not allowed to talk about Yudkowsky's responses to us because of
privacy constraints? But our coordination group also had a lot of
interesting "What is wrong with our thoughts" discussion; it's more
interesting to be in the mode of telling the Whole Dumb Story as a
story, rather being hyperfocused on brining a fraud case against
Yudkowsky. (It's a story _about_ bringing a fraud case, but a story
first and foremost.)

Paraphrasing emails also solves a couple other writing problems. I
wasn't sure how to balance between "narrating what happened" and
"talking about ideas". (Theorizing about the state of "the community"
needs to be part of the memoir, but it's not bound to a particular
time as something that happened.) But if all the important ideas were
talked about in emails, that naturally binds them to an event in the
narrative. Or commentary on the Emperor Norton example—where would
that fit, exactly, if it's a little too chunky for my initial
discussion of the categories issue? It fits where I told Scott about
it.

I also don't like my current characterization of the "Hill of Meaning"
thread: partially because my anger at Yudkowsky's dishonesty is
leaking through in an anachronistic way, and partially because I'm so
sick of explaining this over and over again that I can't even muster
up the energy for precise criticism. I think if I rewrite that whole
section based on my January 2019 re-salvo email, it'll be much better.