memoir: motive to deal reputational damage; Scott gets a pass

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index 46e1d13..d542fd6 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -204,9 +204,13 @@ Supppose Alice messages Bob at 5 _p.m._, "Can you come to the party?", and also,
 
 I think commonsense privacy-norm-adherence intuitions actually say _No_ here: the text of Alice's messages makes it too easy to guess that sometime between 5 and 6, Bob probably said that he couldn't come to the party because he has gout. It would seem that Alice's right to talk about her own actions in her own life _does_ need to take into account some commonsense judgement whether that leaks "sensitive" information about Bob.
 
-In part of the Dumb Story that follows, I'm going to describe several times when I others emailed Yudkowsky to try to argue with what he said in public, without telling whether Yudkowsky replied, or what he might have said if he did reply. I maintain that I'm within my rights here, because I think commonsense judgement will agree that me talking about the arguments _I_ made, doesn't leak any sensitive information about the other side of a conversation that may or may not have happened: the story comes out about the same whether Yudkowsky didn't reply at all, or whether he replied in a way that I found sufficiently unsatisfying as to merit the futher emails with followup arguments that I describe. (Talking about later emails _does_ rule out the world where Yudkowsky said, "Please stop contacting me," because I would have respected that, but the fact that he didn't say that isn't "sensitive": you probably don't reply to spammers demanding your precious time, either.)
+In part of the Dumb Story that follows, I'm going to describe several times when I others emailed Yudkowsky to try to argue with what he said in public, without telling whether Yudkowsky replied, or what he might have said if he did reply. I maintain that I'm within my rights here, because I think commonsense judgement will agree that me talking about the arguments _I_ made, doesn't leak any sensitive information about the other side of a conversation that may or may not have happened: the story comes off about the same whether Yudkowsky didn't reply at all, or whether he replied in a way that I found sufficiently unsatisfying as to merit the futher emails with followup arguments that I describe. (Talking about later emails _does_ rule out the possible world where Yudkowsky had said, "Please stop contacting me," because I would have respected that, but the fact that he didn't say that isn't "sensitive": you probably don't reply to spammers demanding your precious time, either.)
 
-In accordance with the privacy-norm-adherence policy just described, I don't think I should say whether Yudkowsky replied to Michael's and my emails, nor ([again](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-privacy-constraint)) whether he accepted the cheerful price money, because any conversation that may or may not have occured would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
+It seems particularly important to lay out these principles of adherence to privacy norms in connection to my attempts to contact Yudkowsky, because part of what I'm trying to accomplish in telling this Whole Dumb Story is to deal reputational damage to Yudkowsky, which I claim is deserved. (We want reputations to track reality. If you see Carol exhibiting a pattern of intellectual dishonesty, and she keeps doing it even after you try talking to her about it privately, you might want to write a blog post describing the pattern in detail—not to _hurt_ Carol, particularly, but so that everyone else can make higher-quality decisions about whether they should believe the things that Carol says.)
+
+In that context, it seems right that I only try to hang Yudkowsky with the rope of what he said in public, where you can click the links and read the context for yourself. In the Dumb Story that follows, I _also_ describe some of my correspondence with Scott Alexander, but that doesn't seem sensitive in the same way, because I'm not particularly trying to deal reputational damage to Scott. (Not because Scott performed well, but because I didn't really _expect_ Scott to perform well in this situation.)
+
+In accordance with the privacy-norm-adherence policy just described, I don't think I should say whether Yudkowsky replied to Michael's and my emails, nor ([again](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-privacy-constraint)) whether he accepted the cheerful price money, because any conversation that may or may not have occured would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is that we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
 
 > I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING."