But I considered myself to be prosecuting _not_ the object-level question of which gender categories to use, but the meta-level question of the cognitive function of categorization, for which, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice" wasn't adequate. I didn't have a simple, [mistake-theoretic](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) characterization of the language and social conventions that everyone should use such that anyone who defected from the compromise would be wrong. The best I could do was try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventions—and of _conflicts_ over possible conventions.
-["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) had concluded with a section on Emperor Norton, a 19th century San Francisco resident who declared himself Emperor of the United States. Certainly, it's not hard for the citizens of San Francisco to _address_ Norton as "Your Majesty". But there's more to being the Emperor of the United States than people calling you "Your Majesty." Unless we abolish Congress and have the military enforce Norton's decrees, he's not _actually_ functioning in the role of emperor—at least not according to the currently generally-understood meaning of the word "emperor."
+["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) had concluded with a section on Emperor Norton, a 19th century San Francisco resident who declared himself Emperor of the United States. Certainly, it's not hard for the citizens of San Francisco to _address_ Norton as "Your Majesty" as a courtesy or a nickname. But there's more to being the Emperor of the United States than people calling you "Your Majesty." Unless we abolish Congress and have the military enforce Norton's decrees, he's not _actually_ functioning in the role of emperor—at least not according to the currently generally-understood meaning of the word "emperor."
What are you going to do if Norton takes you literally? Suppose he says, "I ordered the Imperial Army to invade Canada last week; where are the troop reports? And why do the newspapers keep talking about this so-called 'President' Rutherford B. Hayes? Have this pretender Hayes executed at once and bring his head to me!"
-You're not really going to bring him Rutherford B. Hayes's head. So what are you going to tell him? "Oh, well, you're not a _cis_ emperor who can command executions. But don't worry! Trans emperors are emperors"?
+You're not really going to bring him Rutherford B. Hayes's head. So what are you going to tell him? "Oh, well, you're not a _cis_ emperor who can command executions. But don't worry! Trans emperors are emperors"? To be sure, words can be used in many ways depending on context, but insofar as Norton _is_ interpreting "emperor" in the traditional sense, and you keep calling him your emperor, _you are lying to him_.
... Scott still didn't get it.
Anyway, I _did_ end up in more conversation with Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin, who were game to help me with reaching out to Yudkowsky again to explain the problem in more detail—and to appeal to the conscience of someone who built their career on [higher standards](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger).
-Yudkowsky probably didn't think much of _Atlas Shrugged_ (judging by [a remark in _Harry Potter and the Methods_](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20)), but I kept thinking of the part where Dagny entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce [a not-technically-lying statement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly) by the State Science Institute. Stadler has become cynical in his old age, and demurrs: "How can one deal with truth when one deals with the public?" I expected Yudkowsky to do better than that.
+Yudkowsky probably didn't think much of _Atlas Shrugged_ (judging by [an offhand remark by our protagonist in _Harry Potter and the Methods_](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20)), but I kept thinking of the part where our heroine Dagny Taggart entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce [an egregiously deceptive but technically-not-lying statement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly) by the State Science Institute, whose legitimacy derives from its association with his name. Stadler has become cynical in his old age, and demurrs: "I can't help what people think—if they think at all!" ... "How can one deal with truth when one deals with the public?"
+
+At this point, I still trusted that _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ could deal with truth when he deals with the public.
+
+(I was wrong.)
If we had this entire posse, I felt bad and guilty and ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it was geniunely a proxy for "Has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?" But the group seemed to agree that my philosophy-of-language grievance was a useful test case for prosecuting deeper maladies affecting our subculture.
-There were times during these weeks where it felt like my mind shut down with the only thought, "What am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'me and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
+There were times during these weeks where it felt like my mind shut down with the only thought, "What am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'me and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
Except ... I had been raised back in the 'aughts to believe that you're you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument that makes you change your mind, and I couldn't actually point to one. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is _not a counterargument_.
-Meanwhile, Anna continued to be disinclined to take a side in the brewing Category War, and it was beginning to put a strain on our friendship, to the extent that I kept ending up crying at some point during our occasional meetings. She told me that my "You have to pass my philosophy-of-language litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that I'd cop to [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits?
+Meanwhile, Anna continued to be disinclined to take a side in the brewing Category War, and it was beginning to put a strain on our friendship, to the extent that I kept ending up crying at some point during our occasional meetings. She told me that my "You have to pass my philosophy-of-language litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that I'd cop to [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" brand name as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits?
-My _hope_ was that it was possible to apply just enough "What 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—though I wasn't sure if that actually works, and I was growing exhausted from all the social aggression I was doing about it. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
+My _hope_ was that it was possible to apply just enough "What kind of rationalist are _you_?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad ([Red](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments—though I wasn't sure if that actually works, and I was growing exhausted from all the social aggression I was doing about it. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
There's a view that assumes that as long as everyone is being cordial, our truthseeking public discussion must be basically on-track: if no one overtly gets huffily offended and calls to burn the heretic, then the discussion isn't being warped by the fear of heresy.
Especially compared to normal Berkeley, I had to give the Berkeley "rationalists" credit for being _very good_ at free speech norms. (I'm not sure I would be saying this in the world where Scott Alexander didn't have a [traumatizing experience with social justice in college](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/), causing him to dump a ton of anti-social-justice, pro-argumentative-charity antibodies in the "rationalist" collective "water supply" after he became our subculture's premier writer. But it was true in _our_ world.) I didn't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)". I wasn't angry at the "rationalists" for being silenced or shouted down (which I wasn't); I was angry at them for _making bad arguments_ and systematically refusing to engage with the obvious counterarguments when they're made.
-Ben thought I was wrong to think of this as non-ostracisizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people are playing when they do that is to force me to choose between doing arbitarily large amounts of interpretive labor, or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
+For example, in an argument on Discord in January 2019, I said, "I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that's trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology."
+
+Kelsey Piper replied, "[T]he people getting surgery to have bodies that do 'women' more the way they want are mostly cis women [...] I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints."
+
+Another woman said, "'the original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me" (to the acclaim of 4 "+1" emoji reactions).
+
+The problem with this kind of exchange is not that anyone is being shouted down, nor that anyone is lying. The _problem_ is that people are motivatedly, [algorithmically](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) "playing dumb." I wish we had better terminology for this phenomenon. By "playing dumb", I don't mean that to suggest that Kelsey was _consciously_ thinking, "I'm playing dumb in order gain an advantage in this argument". I don't doubt that, _subjectively_, mentioning that cis women also get cosmetic surgery sometimes felt like a relevant reply. It's just that, in context, I was very obviously trying to talk about the "biological sex" thing, and Kelsey could have figured that out _if she had wanted to_.
+
+It's not that anyone explicitly said, "Biological sex isn't real" in those words. But if everyone correlatedly plays dumb whenever someone tries to _talk_ about sex in clear language in a context where that could conceivably hurt someone's feelings, I think what you have is a culture of _de facto_ biological sex denialism.
+
+Ben thought I was wrong to think of this kind of behavior as non-ostracisizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people are playing when they do that is to force me to choose between doing arbitarily large amounts of interpretive labor, or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than to say, "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people who he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of _making_ them understand if I just never gave up. Not to be _so_ much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles—but to hold out hope that people in "the community" could only be _boundedly_ motivatedly dense, and anyway that giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.
One thing I regret about my behavior during this period was the extent to which I was emotionally dependent on my posse, and in some ways particularly Michael, for validation. I remembered Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era (to the extent that there was a "community" in those early days). I had been somewhat skeptical of him, then: the guy makes a lot of stridently "out there" assertions by the standards of ordinary social reality, in a way that makes you assume he must be speaking metaphorically. (He always insists that he's being completely literal.) But he had social proof as the President of the Singularity Institute—the "people person" of our world-saving effort, to complement Yudkowsky's anti-social mad scientist personality—which inclined me to take his "crazy"-sounding assertions more charitably than I otherwise would have.
-Now, the memory of that social proof was a lifeline. Dear reader, if you've never been in the position of disagreeing with the entire weight of Society's educated opinion, _including_ your idiosyncratic subculture that tells itself a story about being smarter than the surrounding the Society—well, it's stressful. [There was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex around this time](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/) that cited Yudkowsky, Alexander, Ozy, _The Unit of Caring_, and Rob Bensinger as leaders of the "rationalist" community—just an arbitrary Reddit comment of no significance whatsoever—but it was salient indicator of the _Zeitgeist_ to me, because _[every](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [single](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) [one](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) of [those](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) [people](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447)_ had tried to get away with some variant on the "word usage is subjective, therefore you have no gounds to object to the claim that trans women are women" _mind game_.
+Now, the memory of that social proof was a lifeline. Dear reader, if you've never been in the position of disagreeing with the entire weight of Society's educated opinion, _including_ your idiosyncratic subculture that tells itself a story about being smarter than the surrounding the Society—well, it's stressful. [There was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex around this time](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/) that cited Yudkowsky, Alexander, Ozy, Piper, and Rob Bensinger as leaders of the "rationalist" community—just an arbitrary Reddit comment of no significance whatsoever—but it was salient indicator of the _Zeitgeist_ to me, because _[every](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [single](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) [one](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) of [those](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) [people](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447)_ had tried to get away with some variant on the "word usage is subjective, therefore you have no grounds to object to the claim that trans women are women" _mind game_.
-In the face of that juggernaut of received opinion, I was already feeling pretty gaslighted. ("We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. Didn't we? And, and ... [_you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndYouWereThere), and _you_ were there ... It—really happened, right? I didn't just imagine it? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ...") I don't know how I would have held up intact if I were just facing it alone; it's hard to imagine what I would have done in that case. I definitely wouldn't have had the impudence to pester Scott and Eliezer the way I did—especially Eliezer—if it was just me alone against everyone else.
+In the face of that juggernaut of received opinion, I was already feeling pretty gaslighted. ("We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. Didn't we? And, and ... [_you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndYouWereThere), and _you_ were there ... It—really happened, right? I didn't just imagine it? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ...") I don't know how I would have held up intact if I were just facing it alone; it's hard to imagine what I would have done in that case. I _definitely_ wouldn't have had the impudence to pester Scott and Eliezer the way I did—especially Eliezer—if it was just me alone against everyone else.
But _Michael thought I was in the right_—not just intellectually on the philosophy issue, but morally in the right to be _prosecuting_ the philosophy issue with our leaders, and not accepting stonewalling as an answer. That social proof gave me a lot of bravery that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to muster up—even though it would have been better if I could have propagated the implications of the observation that my dependence on him was self-undermining, because Michael himself said that the thing that made me valuable was my ability to think independently.
-The social proof was probably more effective in my own head, than it was with anyone we were arguing with. _I remembered_ Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era, but that was a long time ago. (Luke Muelhauser had taken over leadership of the Singularity Institute in 2011; some sort of rift between Michael and Eliezer had widened in recent years, the details of which had never been explained to me.) Michael's status in "the community" of 2019 was much more mixed. He was intensely critical of the rise of Effective Altruism, which he saw as preying on the energies of the smartest and most scrupulous people with bogus claims about how to do good in the world. (I remember at a party in 2015, on asking Michael what else I should spend my San Francisco software engineer money on, if not the EA charities I was considering, being surprised that his answer was, "You.")
+The social proof was probably more effective in my own head, than it was with anyone we were arguing with. _I remembered_ Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era, but that had been a long time ago. (Luke Muelhauser had taken over leadership of the Singularity Institute in 2011; some sort of rift between Michael and Eliezer had widened in recent years, the details of which had never been explained to me.) Michael's status in "the community" of 2019 was much more mixed. He was intensely critical of the rise of Effective Altruism, which he saw as preying on the energies of the smartest and most scrupulous people around with bogus claims about how to do good in the world. (I remember being at a party in 2015 and asking Michael what else I should spend my San Francisco software engineer money on, if not the EA charities I was considering. I was surprised when his answer was, "You.")
Another blow to Michael's "community" reputation was dealt on 27 February, when Anna [published a comment badmouthing Michael and suggesting that talking to him was harmful](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-thinkers-in-not-out?commentId=JLpyLwR2afav2xsyD), which I found pretty disappointing—more so as I began to realize the implications.
I agreed with her point about how "ridicule of obviously-fallacious reasoning plays an important role in discerning which thinkers can (or can't) help fill these functions." That's why I was so heartbroken about about the "categories are arbitrary, therefore trans women are women" thing, which deserved to be _laughed out the room_. Why was she trying to ostracize the guy who was one of the very few to back me up on this incredibly obvious thing!? The reasons to discredit Michael given in the comment seemed incredibly weak. (He ... flatters people? He ... _didn't_ tell people to abandon their careers? What?) And the evidence against Michael she offered in private didn't seem much more compelling (_e.g._, at a CfAR event, he had been insistent on continuing to talk to someone who Anna thought was looking sleep-deprived and needed a break).
-It made sense for Anna to not like Michael, because of his personal conduct, or because he didn't like EA. (Expecting all of my friends to be friends with _each other_ would be [Geek Social Fallacy #4](http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html).) If she didn't want to invite him to CfAR stuff, fine; that's her business not to invite him. But what did she gain from _escalating_ to publicly denouncing him as someone whose "lies/manipulations can sometimes disrupt [people's] thinking for long and costly periods of time"?! She said that she was trying to undo the effects of her previous endorsements of him, and that the comment seemed like it ought to be okay by Michael's standards (which didn't include an expectation that people should collude to protect each other's reputation).
+It made sense for Anna to not like Michael, because of his personal conduct, or because of his opposition to EA. (Expecting all of my friends to be friends with _each other_ would be [Geek Social Fallacy #4](http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html).) If she didn't want to invite him to CfAR stuff, fine; that's her business not to invite him. But what did she gain from _escalating_ to publicly denouncing him as someone whose "lies/manipulations can sometimes disrupt [people's] thinking for long and costly periods of time"?! She said that she was trying to undo the effects of her previous endorsements of him, and that the comment seemed like it ought to be okay by Michael's standards (which didn't include an expectation that people should collude to protect each other's reputation).
-----
-Anyway, I wasn't the only one whose life was being disrupted by political drama in early 2019. On 22 February, Scott Alexander [posted that the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread was being moved](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/) to a new non–_Slate Star Codex_–branded subreddit in the hopes that it would hope help curb some of the harrassment he had been receiving. According to poll data and Alexander's personal impressions, the Culture War Thread featured a variety of ideologically diverse voices, but had nevertheless acquired a reputation as being a hive of right-wing scum and villainy.
+I wasn't the only one whose life was being disrupted by political drama in early 2019. On 22 February, Scott Alexander [posted that the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread was being moved](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/) to a new non–_Slate Star Codex_–branded subreddit in the hopes that it would hope help curb some of the harrassment he had been receiving. According to poll data and Alexander's personal impressions, the Culture War Thread featured a variety of ideologically diverse voices, but had nevertheless acquired a reputation as being a hive of right-wing scum and villainy.
[Yudkowsky Tweeted](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1099134795131478017):
> Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A.
-I found Yudkowsky's use of the word "lie" here interesting given his earlier eagerness to police the use of the word "lie" by gender-identity skeptics. With the support of my posse, wrote to him again, a third time (Subject: "on defending against 'alt-right' categorization").
+I found Yudkowsky's use of the word "lie" here interesting given his earlier eagerness to police the use of the word "lie" by gender-identity skeptics. With the support of my posse, I wrote to him again, a third time (Subject: "on defending against 'alt-right' categorization").
Imagine if one of Alexander's critics were to reply: "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to."
How would Yudkowsky react, if someone said that? _My model_ of Sequences-era 2009!Yudkowsky would say, "This is an incredibly intellectually dishonest attempt to [sneak in connotations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations) by performing a categorization and trying to avoid the burden of having to justify it with an [appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters); go read ['A Human's Guide to Words.'](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb)"
-But I had no idea what 2019!Yudkowsky would say. If the moral of the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread had been that the word "lie" should be reserved for _per se_ direct falsehoods, well, what direct falsehood was being asserted by Scott's detractors? I didn't think anyone was _claiming_ that, say, Scott _identifies_ as alt-right (not even privately), any more than anyone was claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes. Commenters on /r/SneerClub had been pretty explicit in [their](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh0xlgx/) [criticism](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh3jrth/) that the Culture War thread harbored racists (_&c._) and possibly that Scott himself was a secret racist, _with respect to_ a definition of racism that includeed the belief that there exist genetically-mediated population differences in the distribution of socially-relevant traits and that this probably has decision-relevant consequences that should be discussable somewhere.
+But I had no idea what 2019!Yudkowsky would say. If the moral of the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread had been that the word "lie" should be reserved for _per se_ direct falsehoods, well, what direct falsehood was being asserted by Scott's detractors? I didn't think anyone was _claiming_ that, say, Scott _identified_ as alt-right (not even privately), any more than anyone was claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes. Commenters on /r/SneerClub had been pretty explicit in [their](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh0xlgx/) [criticism](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh3jrth/) that the Culture War thread harbored racists (_&c._) and possibly that Scott himself was a secret racist, _with respect to_ a definition of racism that included the belief that there exist genetically-mediated population differences in the distribution of socially-relevant traits and that this probably has decision-relevant consequences that should be discussable somewhere.
And this was just _correct_. For example, Alexander's ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) favorably cites Cochran _et al._'s genetic theory of Ashkenazi achievement as "really compelling." Scott was almost certainly "guilty" of the category-membership that the speech against him was meant to convey—it's just that Sneer Club got to choose the category. The correct response to the existence of a machine-learning classifer that returns positive on both Scott Alexander and Richard Spencer is not that the classifier is "lying" (what would that even mean?), but that the classifier is not very useful for understanding Scott Alexander's effects on the world.
Well, you're still _somewhat_ better off listening to them than the whistling of the wind, because the wind in various possible worlds is presumably uncorrelated with most of the things you want to know about, whereas [clever arguers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence) who [don't tell explicit lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/) are constrained in how much they can mislead you. But it seems plausible that you might as well listen to any other arbitrary smart person with a bluecheck and 20K followers. I know you're very busy; I know your work's important—but it might be a useful exercise, for Yudkowsky to think of what he would _actually say_ if someone with social power _actually did this to him_ when he was trying to use language to reason about Something he had to Protect?
-(Note, my claim here is _not_ that "Pronouns aren't lies" and "Scott Alexander is not a racist" are similarly misinformative. Rather, I'm saying that whether "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" makes sense _as a response to_ "X isn't a Y" shouldn't depend on the specific values of X and Y. Yudkowsky's behavior the other month made it look like he thought that "You're not standing in defense of truth if ..." _was_ a valid response when, say, X = "Caitlyn Jenner" and Y = "woman." I was saying that, whether or not it's a valid response, we should, as a matter of [local validity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization), apply the _same_ standard when X = "Scott Alexander" and Y = "racist.")
+(Note, my claim here is _not_ that "Pronouns aren't lies" and "Scott Alexander is not a racist" are similarly misinformative. Rather, I'm saying that whether "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" makes sense _as a response to_ "X isn't a Y" shouldn't depend on the specific values of X and Y. Yudkowsky's behavior the other month had made it look like he thought that "You're not standing in defense of truth if ..." _was_ a valid response when, say, X = "Caitlyn Jenner" and Y = "woman." I was saying that, whether or not it's a valid response, we should, as a matter of [local validity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization), apply the _same_ standard when X = "Scott Alexander" and Y = "racist.")
-Anyway, without disclosing any _specific content_ from private conversations with Yudkowsky that may or may not have happened, I think I _am_ allowed to say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from Yudkowsky that we were hoping for. (That is, I'm Glomarizing over whether Yudkowsky just didn't reply, or whether he did reply and our posse was not satisfied with the response.)
+Without disclosing any specific content from private conversations with Yudkowsky that may or may not have happened, I think I _am_ allowed to say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from Yudkowsky that we were hoping for. (That is, I'm Glomarizing over whether Yudkowsky just didn't reply, or whether he did reply and our posse was not satisfied with the response.)
Michael said that it seemed important that, if we thought Yudkowsky wasn't interested, we should have common knowledge among ourselves that we consider him to be choosing to be a cult leader.
_Even if_ you're opposed to abortion, or have negative views about the historical legacy of Dr. King, this isn't the right way to argue. If you call Janie a _murderer_, that causes me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations—about Janie's moral character, about the suffering of victim whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Janie's relationship with the law, _&c._—most of which get violated when you subsequently reveal that the murder victim was a four-week-old fetus.
-Thus, we see that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is really complaining about the _same_ category-gerrymandering move that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with declaring, "I ought to accept an unexpected abortion or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally not be considered murder if it'll save someone's life." Maybe abortion _is_ wrong and relevantly similar to the central sense of "murder", but you need to make that case _on the merits_, not by linguistic fiat.
+Thus, we see that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is really complaining about the _same_ category-gerrymandering move that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with declaring, "I ought to accept an unexpected abortion or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally not be considered murder if it'll save someone's life." Maybe abortion _is_ wrong and relevantly similar to the central sense of "murder", but you need to make that case _on the empirical merits_, not by linguistic fiat.
-... Scott still didn't get it. He said that he didn't see why he shouldn't accept one unit of categorizational awkwardness in exchange for sufficiently large utilitarian benefits. He made an analogy to some [Glowfic](https://www.glowfic.com/) lore, a story about orcs who had unwisely sworn a oath to serve the evil god Melkor. Though the orcs intend no harm of their own will, they're magically bound to obey Melkor's commands and serve as his terrible army or else suffer unbearable pain. Our heroine comes up with a solution: she founds a new religion featuring a deist noninterventionist God, who also happens to be named Melkor. She convinces the orcs that since the oath didn't specify _which_ Melkor, they're free to follow her new God instead of evil-Melkor, and the magic making the oath binding apparently accepts this casuistry if the orc themelf does.
+... Scott still didn't get it. He said that he didn't see why he shouldn't accept one unit of categorizational awkwardness in exchange for sufficiently large utilitarian benefits. He made an analogy to some [Glowfic](https://www.glowfic.com/) lore, a story about orcs who had unwisely sworn a oath to serve the evil god Melkor. Though the orcs intend no harm of their own will, they're magically bound to obey Melkor's commands and serve as his terrible army or else suffer unbearable pain. Our heroine comes up with a solution: she founds a new religion featuring a deist God who also happens to be named Melkor. She convinces the orcs that since the oath didn't specify _which_ Melkor, they're free to follow her new God instead of evil-Melkor, and the magic making the oath binding apparently accepts this casuistry if the orc themelf does.
-Scott's attitude towards the new interpretation of the oath in the story was analogous to his thinking about transgenderedness: sure, the new definition may be somewhat awkward and unnatural in some sense, but it's not literally objectively false, and it made life better for so many orcs. If [rationalists should win](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality), then the true rationalist in this situation is the one who thought up this clever hack to save an entire species.
+Scott's attitude towards the new interpretation of the oath in the story was analogous to his thinking about transgenderedness: sure, the new definition may be a little awkward and unnatural in some sense, but it's not literally objectively false, and it made life better for so many orcs. If [rationalists should win](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality), then the true rationalist in this situation is the one who thought up this clever hack to save an entire species.
I started drafting a long reply—but then I remembered that in recent discussion with my posse about what we might have done wrong in our attempted outreach to Yudkowsky, the idea had come up that in-person meetings are better for updateful disagreement-resolution. Would Scott be up for meeting in person some weekend? Non-urgent. Ben would be willing to moderate, unless Scott wanted to suggest someone else, or no moderator.
I sent an email explaining this to Scott and my posse and two other friends (Subject: "predictably bad ideas").
-Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc my posse plus Anna about why I was so mad (both senses). I had a better draft sitting on my desktop at home, but since I was here and couldn't sleep, I might as well type this version (Subject: "five impulsive points, hastily written because I just can't even (was: Re: predictably bad ideas)"). Scott had been continuing to insist that it's okay to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand. If creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is okay ... why doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? The mind games seemed much crueler to me than a simple lie. Also, if "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then, why didn't _my_ mental health matter? Wasn't I trans, sort of? Getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism (!?!?) when I was trying to use reason to make sense of the world was observably really bad for my sanity! Did that matter at all? Also, Scott had asked me if it wouldn't be embarrassing, if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and I had rejected it because of gender stuff? But the _original reason_ it had ever seemed _remotely_ plausible that we would create Utopia forever wasn't "because we're us, the self-designated world-saving good guys", but because we were going to perfect an art of _systematically correct reasoning_. If we're not going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermines the _reason_ that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever; you can't just forfeit the mandate of Heaven like that and still expect to still rule China. Also, Scott had proposed a super-Outside View of the culture war as an evolutionary process that produces memes optimized to trigger PTSD syndromes in people, and suggested that I think of _that_ as what was happening to me. But, depending on how much credence Scott put in social proof, mightn't the fact that I managed to round up this whole posse to help me repeatedly argue with (or harrass) Yudkowsky shift his estimate over whether my concerns had some objective merit that other people could see, too? It could simultaneously be the case that I had the culture-war PTSD that he propsed, _and_ that my concerns had merit.
+Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc my posse plus Anna about why I was so mad (both senses). I had a better draft sitting on my desktop at home, but since I was here and couldn't sleep, I might as well type this version (Subject: "five impulsive points, hastily written because I just can't even (was: Re: predictably bad ideas)"). Scott had been continuing to insist that it's okay to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand. If creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is okay ... why doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? The mind games seemed much crueler to me than a simple lie. Also, if "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then, why didn't _my_ mental health matter? Wasn't I trans, sort of? Getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism (!?!?) when I was trying to use reason to make sense of the world was observably really bad for _my_ sanity! Did that matter at all? Also, Scott had asked me if it wouldn't be embarrassing, if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and I had rejected it because of gender stuff? But the _original reason_ it had ever seemed _remotely_ plausible that we would create Utopia forever wasn't "because we're us, the world-saving good guys", but because we were going to perfect an art of _systematically correct reasoning_. If we're not going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermines the _reason_ that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever; you can't just forfeit the mandate of Heaven like that and still expect to still rule China. Also, Scott had proposed a super-Outside View of the culture war as an evolutionary process that produces memes optimized to trigger PTSD syndromes in people, and suggested that I think of _that_ as what was happening to me. But, depending on how much credence Scott put in social proof, mightn't the fact that I managed to round up this whole posse to help me repeatedly argue with (or harrass) Yudkowsky shift his estimate over whether my concerns had some objective merit that other people could see, too? It could simultaneously be the case that I had the culture-war PTSD that he propsed, _and_ that my concerns had merit.
Michael replied at 5:58 _a.m._, saying that everyone's first priority should be making sure that I could sleep—that given that I was failing to adhere to my commitments to sleep almost immediately after making them, I should be interpreted as immediately needing help, and that Scott had comparative advantage in helping, given that my distress was most centrally over Scott gaslighting me.
I think at some level, I wanted Scott to know how frustrated I was about his use of "mental health for trans people" as an Absolute Denial Macro. But then when Michael started advocating on my behalf, I started to minimize my claims because I had a generalized attitude of not wanting to sell myself as a victim. Ben pointed out that [making oneself mentally ill in order to extract political concessions](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) only works if you have a lot of people doing it in a visibly coordinated way. And even if it did work, getting into a dysphoria contest with trans people didn't seem like it led anywhere good.
-I supposed that, in Michael's worldview, aggression is more honest than passive-aggression. That seemed obviously true, but I was psychologically limited in how much overt aggression I was willing to deploy against my friends. (And particularly Yudkowsky, who I still hero-worshipped.) But clearly, the tension between "I don't want to do too much social aggression" and "losing the Category War within the rationalist community is _absolutely unacceptable_" was causing me to make wildly inconsistent decisions. (Emailing Scott at 4 a.m., and then calling Michael "aggressive" when he came to defend me was just crazy: either one of those things could make sense, but not _both_.)
+I supposed that, in Michael's worldview, aggression is more honest than passive-aggression. That seemed obviously true, but I was psychologically limited in how much overt aggression I was willing to deploy against my friends. (And particularly Yudkowsky, who I still hero-worshipped.) But clearly, the tension between "I don't want to do too much social aggression" and "losing the Category War within the rationalist community is _absolutely unacceptable_" was causing me to make wildly inconsistent decisions. (Emailing Scott at 4 _a.m._, and then calling Michael "aggressive" when he came to defend me was just crazy: either one of those things could make sense, but not _both_.)
Was the answer just that I needed to accept that there wasn't such a thing in the world as a "rationalist community"? (Sarah had told me as much two years ago, at BABSCon, and I just hadn't made the corresponing mental adjustments.)
Maybe that's why I felt like I had to stand my ground and fight for the world I was made in, even though the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness was having me making crazy decisions.
+Michael said that a reason to make a stand here in "the community" was that if we didn't, the beacon of "rationalism" would continue to lure and mislead others, but that more importantly, we needed to figure out how to win this kind of argument decisively, as a group; we couldn't afford to accept a _status quo_ of accepting defeat when faced with bad faith arguments _in general_. Ben reported writing to Scott to ask him to alter the beacon so that people like me wouldn't think "the community" was the place to go for literally doing the rationality thing anymore.
+
As it happened, the next day, Wednesday, we saw these Tweets from @ESYudkowsky, linking to a _Quillette_ article interviewing Lisa Littman on her work on rapid onset gender dysphoria:
> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties. https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/
I asked the posse if this analysis was worth sending to Yudkowsky. Michael said it wasn't worth the digression. He asked if I was comfortable generalizing from Scott's behavior, and what others had said about fear of speaking openly, to assuming that something similar was going on with Eliezer? If so, then now that we had common knowledge, we needed to confront the actual crisis, which was that dread was tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while its existence was still being denied.
+Another thing that happened that week was that former MIRI researcher Jessica Taylor joined our posse (being at an in-person meeting with Ben and Sarah and another friend on the seventeenth, and getting tagged in subsequent emails). Significantly for political purposes, Jessica is trans. We didn't have to agree on all gender issues for her to see the epistemology problem with "... Not Man for the Categories". (On the seventeenth, when I lamented the state of a world that incentivized us to be political enemies, her response was, "Well, we could talk about it first.") Michael said that me and Jess together had more moral authority than either of us alone.
+
As it happened, I ran into Scott on the train that Friday, the twenty-second. He said that he wasn't sure why the oft-repeated moral of "A Human's Guide to Words" had been "You can't define a word any way you want" rather than "You _can_ define a word any way you want, but then you have to deal with the consequences."
Ultimately, I think this was a pedagogy decision that Yudkowsky had gotten right back in 'aught-eight. If you write your summary slogan in relativist language, people predictably take that as license to believe whatever they want without having to defend it. Whereas if you write your summary slogan in objectivist language—so that people know they don't have social permission to say that "it's subjective so I can't be wrong"—then you have some hope of sparking useful thought about the _exact, precise_ ways that _specific, definite_ things are _in fact_ relative to other specific, definite things.
I told him I would send him one more email with a piece of evidence about how other "rationalists" were thinking about the categories issue, and give my commentary on the parable about orcs, and then the present thread would probably drop there.
-On Discord, Kelsey Piper had told me in January that everyone else experienced their disagreement with me as being about where the joints are and which joints are important, where usability for humans was a legitimate criterion for importance, and it was annoying that I thought they didn't believe in carving reality at the joints at all and that categories should be whatever makes people happy.
+On Discord in January, Kelsey Piper had told me that everyone else experienced their disagreement with me as being about where the joints are and which joints are important, where usability for humans was a legitimate criterion for importance, and it was annoying that I thought they didn't believe in carving reality at the joints at all and that categories should be whatever makes people happy.
I [didn't want to bring it up at the time because](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1088459797962215429) I was so overjoyed that the discussion was actually making progress on the core philosophy-of-language issue, but ... Scott _did_ seem to be pretty explicit that his position was about happiness rather than usability? If Kelsey thought she agreed with Scott, but actually didn't, that's kind of bad for our collective sanity, wasn't it?
-As for the parable about orcs, I thought it was significant that Scott chose to tell the story from the standpoint of non-orcs deciding what [verbal behaviors](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password) to perform while orcs are around, rather than the standpoint of the _orcs themselves_. For one thing, how do you _know_ that serving evil-Melkior is a life of constant torture? Is it at all possible, in the bowels of Christ, that someone has given you _misleading information_ about that? Moreover, you _can't_ just give an orc a clever misinterpretation of an oath and have them believe it. First you have to [cripple their _general_ ability](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) to correctly interpret oaths, for the same reason that you can't get someone to believe that 2+2=5 without crippling their general ability to do arithmetic. We're not talking about a little "white lie" that the listener will never get to see falsified; the orcs _already know_ the text of the oath, and you have to break their ability to _understand_ it. Are you willing to permanently damage an orc's ability to reason, in order to save them pain? For some sufficiently large amount of pain, surely. But this isn't a choice to make lightly—and the choices people make to satisfy their own consciences, don't always line up with the volition of their alleged beneficiaries. We think we can lie to save others from pain, without ourselves _wanting to be lied to_. But behind the veil of ignorance, it's the same choice!
-
-
-[TODO section: Ben's comment about altering the beacon https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/]
-
-[TODO: Jessica joins the coalition; she tell me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards);
-Jessica, personally, views herself as injured by this specific "don't tell people things that hurts their feelings" norm.
-Michael said that me and Jess together have more moral authority]
-[TODO: Michael on Anna as cult leader]
-[30 Mar: Michael—we need to figure out how to win against bad faith arguments}
+As for the parable about orcs, I thought it was significant that Scott chose to tell the story from the standpoint of non-orcs deciding what [verbal behaviors](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password) to perform while orcs are around, rather than the standpoint of the _orcs themselves_. For one thing, how do you _know_ that serving evil-Melkior is a life of constant torture? Is it at all possible, in the bowels of Christ, that someone has given you _misleading information_ about that? Moreover, you _can't_ just give an orc a clever misinterpretation of an oath and have them believe it. First you have to [cripple their _general_ ability](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) to correctly interpret oaths, for the same reason that you can't get someone to believe that 2+2=5 without crippling their general ability to do arithmetic. We weren't not talking about a little "white lie" that the listener will never get to see falsified (like telling someone their dead dog is in heaven); the orcs _already know_ the text of the oath, and you have to break their ability to _understand_ it. Are you willing to permanently damage an orc's ability to reason, in order to save them pain? For some sufficiently large amount of pain, surely. But this isn't a choice to make lightly—and the choices people make to satisfy their own consciences, don't always line up with the volition of their alleged beneficiaries. We think we can lie to save others from pain, without ourselves _wanting to be lied to_. But behind the veil of ignorance, it's the same choice!
+I _also_ had more to say about philosophy of categories: I thought I could be more rigorous about the difference between "caring about predicting different variables" and "caring about consequences", in a way that Yudkowsky would _have_ to understand even if Scott didn't. But after consultation with the posse, I concluded that further email prosecution was not useful at this time; the philosophy argument would work better as a public _Less Wrong_ post. So my revised Category War to-do list was:
-[SECTION: treachery, faith, and the great river
-
-I concluded that further email prosecution was not useful at this time. My revised Category War to-do list was:
-
- * Send a _brief_ wrapping-up/end-of-conversation email to Scott (with the anecdote from Discord and commentary on his orc story).
+ * Send the brief wrapping-up/end-of-conversation email to Scott (with the Discord anecdote and commentary on the orc story).
* Mentally write-off Scott, Eliezer, and the so-called "rationalist" community as a loss so that I wouldn't be in horrible emotional pain from cognitive dissonance all the time.
- * Write up the long, engaging, depoliticized mathy version of the categories argument for _Less Wrong_ (which I thought might take a few months—I had a dayjob, and write slowly, and might need to learn some new math, which I'm also slow at).
+ * Write up the mathy version of the categories argument for _Less Wrong_ (which I thought might take a few months—I had a dayjob, and write slowly, and might need to learn some new math, which I'm also slow at).
* _Then_ email the link to Scott and Eliezer asking for a signal-boost and/or court ruling.
Ben didn't think the mathematically precise categories argument was the most important thing for _Less Wrong_ readers to know about: a similarly careful explanation of why I've written off Scott, Eliezer, and the "rationalists" would be way more valuable.
Michael said this was importantly backwards: less precise targeting is more violent. If someone said, "Michael Vassar is a terrible person", he would try to be curious, but if they don't have an argument, he would tend to worry more "for" them and less "about" them, whereas if someone said, "The Jews are terrible people", he saw that more serious threat to his safety. (And rationalists and trans women are exactly the sort of people that get targeted by the same people who target Jews.)
-]
-
+Polishing the advanced categories argument from earlier email drafts into a solid _Less Wrong_ post didn't take that long: by 6 April, I had an almost-complete draft of the new post, ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), that I was pretty happy with.
-[SECTION about monastaries (with Ben and Anna in April 2019)
-I complained to Anna: "Getting the right answer in public on topic _X_ would be too expensive, so we won't do it" is _less damaging_ when the set of such <em>X</em>es is _small_. It looked to me like we added a new forbidden topic in the last ten years, without rolling back any of the old ones.
-"Reasoning in public is too expensive; reasoning in private is good enough" is _less damaging_ when there's some sort of _recruiting pipeline_ from the public into the monasteries: lure young smart people in with entertaining writing and shiny math, _then_ gradually undo their political brainwashing once they've already joined your cult. (It had [worked on me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)!)
-
-I would be sympathetic to "rationalist" leaders like Anna or Yudkowsky playing that strategy if there were some sort of indication that they had _thought_, at all, about the pipeline problem—or even an indication that there _was_ an intact monastery somewhere.
-
-]
-
-[TODO: Jessica on corruption—
-
-> I am reminded of someone who I talked with about Zack writing to you and Scott to request that you clarify the category boundary thing. This person had an emotional reaction described as a sense that "Zack should have known that wouldn't work" (because of the politics involved, not because Zack wasn't right). Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
-]
[TODO: after some bouncing off the posse, what was originally an email draft became a public _Less Wrong_ post, "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" (note, plural)
* I had already poisoned the well with "Blegg Mode" the other month, bad decision
]
+[TODO: Jessica on corruption—
+> I am reminded of someone who I talked with about Zack writing to you and Scott to request that you clarify the category boundary thing. This person had an emotional reaction described as a sense that "Zack should have known that wouldn't work" (because of the politics involved, not because Zack wasn't right). Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
+]
[TODO small section: concern about bad faith nitpicking—
]
-
* We lost?! How could we lose??!!?!?
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/
+
[TODO: my reluctance to write a memoir, displacement behavior
Ben thought it was imporant on 30 Apr, 12 Aug , I confess to being stuck on 9 Nov
I write more about the philosophy of language instead
[TODO scuffle on LessWrong FAQ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk ]
[TODO section on factional conflict:
-Michael on Anna as an enemy
+Michael on Anna as cult leader
+Jessica told me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards)
24 Aug: I had told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood
me being regarded as Michael's pawn
assortment of agendas
mutualist pattern where Michael by himself isn't very useful for scholarship (he just says a lot of crazy-sounding things and refuses to explain them), but people like Sarah and me can write intelligible things that secretly benefited from much less legible conversations with Michael.
]
+
+
[TODO: Yudkowsky throwing NRx under the bus; tragedy of recursive silencing
15 Sep Glen Weyl apology
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff