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-[TODO: Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip
- * Michael's "position" in the community, already not what it once was, was getting debased even further
- * Berkeley REACH investigation; I asked what the charges were; they say it's not a court; I say _I_ don't feel safe in a place that bans Michael for no good reason
- * Kelsey says in Discord that Michael is trying to get re-included
- * I email her with quotes trying to argue that that's not his game
- * She doesn't find the quotes convincing, because she thinks Vassar is a liar
- * (sleep?!?)
- * I call Ben to the stand, then Sarah ("You're a great prosecutor", I say in the channel)
- * Kelsey in meatspace tells me that Vassar has a benefactor that she can't name; I'm retarded enough to not infer that it's him and she was obfuscating for compliance
- ...
-]
+Michael's reputation in "the community", already not what it once was, continued to be debased even further.
+
+The local community center, the Berkeley REACH,[^reach-acronym-expansion] was conducting an investigation as to whether to exclude Michael (which was mostly moot, as he didn't live in the Bay Area anyway). When I heard that the subcommittee conducting the investigation was "very close to releasing a statement", I wrote to them:
+
+[^reach-acronym-expansion]: Rationality and Effective Altruism Community Hub
+
+> I've been collaborating with Michael a lot recently, and I'm happy to contribute whatever information I can to make the report more accurate. What are the charges?
+
+They replied:
+
+> To be clear, we are not a court of law addressing specific "charges." We're a subcommittee of the Berkeley REACH Panel tasked with making decisions that help keep the space and the community safe.
+
+I replied:
+
+> Allow me to rephrase my question about charges. What are the reasons that the safety of the space and the community require you to write a report about Michael? To be clear, a community that excludes Michael on inadequate evidence is one where _I_ feel unsafe.
+
+We arranged a call, during which I angrily testified that Michael was no threat to the safety of the space and the community—which would have been a bad idea if it were the cops, but in this context, I figured my political advocacy couldn't hurt.
+
+Concurrently, I got into an argument with Kelsey Piper about Michael, after she had written on Discord that her "impression of _Vassar_'s threatening schism is that it's fundamentally about Vassar threatening to stir shit up until people stop socially excluding him for his bad behavior". I didn't think that was what the schism was about (Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip").
+
+In the course of litigating Michael's motivations (the details of which are not interesting enough to summarize), Kelsey mentioned that she thought Michael had done immense harm to me: that my models of the world and ability to reason were worse than they were a year ago. I thanked her for the concern, and asked if she could be more specific.
+
+She said she was referring to my ability to predict consensus and what other people believe. I expected arguments to be convincing to other people which the other people found, not just not convincing, but also so obviously not convincing that it was confusing I bothered raising them. I believed things to be in obvious violation of widespread agreement, when everyone else thought it wasn't. My shocked indignation at other people's behavior indicated a poor model of social reality.
+
+I considered this an insightful observation about a way in which I'm socially retarded.
+
+I had had [similar](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/) [problems](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [school](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/strategy-overhaul/). We're told that the purpose of school is education (to the extent that most people think of _school_ and _education_ as synonyms), but the consensus behavior is "sit in lectures and trade assignments for grades." Faced with what I saw as a contradiction between the consensus narrative and the consensus behavior, I would assume that the narrative was the "correct" version, and so I spent a lot of time trying to start conversations about math with everyone and then getting outraged and indignant when they'd say, "What class is this for?" Math isn't for classes; it's the other way around, right?
+
+Empirically, not right! But I had to resolve the contradiction between narrative and reality somehow, and if my choices were "People are [mistakenly](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) failing to live up to the narrative" and "[Everybody knows](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) the narrative is a lie; it would be crazy to expect people to live up to it", the former had been more appealing.
+
+It was the same thing here. Kelsey said that it was completely predictable that Yudkowsky wouldn't make a public statement, even one as uncontroversial as "category boundaries should be drawn for epistemic and not instrumental reasons", because his experience of public statements was that they'd be taken out of context and used against MIRI by the likes of /r/SneerClub. This wasn't an update at all. (Everyone at "Arcadia" had agreed, in the group discussion on 30 April.) Vassar's insistence that Eliezer be expected to do something that he obviously was never going to do had caused me to be confused and surprised by reality.
+
+Kelsey seemed to be taking it as obvious that Eliezer Yudkowsky's public behavior was optimized to respond to the possibility of political attacks by people who hate him anyway, and not optimized to respond to the actuality of thousands of words of careful arguments appealing to his own writings from ten years ago. Very well. Maybe it _was_ obvious. But that being the case, I had no reason to care what Eliezer Yudkowsky says, because not-provoking-SneerClub isn't truth tracking, and careful arguments are. This was a huge surprise _to me_, even if Kelsey knew better.
+
+What Kelsey saw as "Zack is losing his ability to model other people and I'm worried about him", I thought Ben and Jessica would see as "Zack is angry about living in [simulacrum level 3](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/) and we're worried about _everyone else_."
+
+I did think that Kelsey was mistaken about how much causality to attribute to Michael's influence, rather than me already being socially retarded. From my perspective, validation from Michael was merely the catalyst that excited me from confused-and-sad to confused-and-socially-aggressive-about-it. The social-aggression phase revealed a lot of information—not just to me. Now I was ready to be less confused—after I was done grieving.
+
+-------
+
+Later, talking in person at "Arcadia", Kelsey told me that someone (whose identity she would not disclose) had threatened to sue over the report about Michael, so REACH was delaying its release for the one-year statute of limitations. As far as my interest in defending Michael went, I counted this as short-term good news (because the report wasn't being published) but longer-term bad news (because the report must be a hit piece if Michael's mysterious ally was trying to hush it).
+
+When I mentioned this to Michael on Signal on 3 August 2019, he replied:
+
+> The person is me, the whole process is a hit piece, literally, the investigation process and not the content. Happy to share the latter with you. You can talk with Ben about appropiate ethical standards.
+
+In retrospect, I feel dumb for not guessing that Michael's mysterious ally was Michael himself. I count this kind of situation as another reason to be [annoyed at how norms protecting confidentiality](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#privacy-constraints) distort information; Kelsey apparently felt obligated to obfuscate any names connected to potential litigation, which led me to the infer the existence of a nonexistent person (because I naïvely assumed that if Michael had threatened to sue, Kelsey would have said that). I can't say I never introduce this kind of disortion in my communications (for I, too, am bound by norms), but when I do, I feel dirty about it.
+
+As far as appropriate ethical standards go, I didn't particularly approve of silencing critics with lawsuit threats, even while I agreed with Michael that "the process is the punishment." I imagine that if the REACH wanted to publish a report about me, I would expect to defend myself in public, having faith that Speech would carry the day against a corrupt community center—or for that matter, against /r/SneerClub.
+
+This is arguably one of my more religious traits. Michael and Kelsey are domain experts and probably know better.
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-[TODO: complicity and friendship]
+I had a phone call with Michael in which he took issue with Anna having described Ziz as having threatened to kill Gwen, when that wasn't a fair paraphrase of what Ziz's account actually said.[^ziz-gwen-account] In Michael's view, this was tantamount to indirect attempted murder using the State as a weapon to off her organization's critics: Anna casting Ziz as a Scary Bad Guy in [the improv scene of social reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) is the kind of maneuver that contributes to the legal system ruining weird people's lives with spurious charges because weird gets [cast as villains in the act](https://unstableontology.com/2018/11/17/act-of-charity/).
+
+[^ziz-gwen-account]: The relevant passage from [one of Ziz's memoir posts](https://archive.ph/an5rp#selection-419.0-419.442) is:
+
+ > I said if they were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level, and treat fighting back as new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down, and if our conflicting definitions of the ground state where no further retaliation was necessary meant we were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there.
+
+ Talking about murder hypothetically as the logical game-theoretic consequence of a revenge spiral isn't the same thing as directly threatening to kill someone. I wasn't sure what exact words Anna had used in her alleged paraphrase; Michael didn't remember the context when I asked him later.
+
+I told Michael that this made me think I might need to soul-search about having been complicit with injustice, but I couldn't clearly articulate why.
+
+I figured it out later (Subject: "complicity and friendship"). I think part of my emotional reaction to finding out about Ziz's legal trouble was the hope that it would lead to less pressure on Anna. I had been nagging Anna a lot on the theme of "rationality actually requires free speech", and she would sometimes defend her policy of guardedness on the grounds of (my paraphrase—), "Hey, give me some credit, oftentimes I do take a calculated risk of telling people things. Or I did, but then ... Ziz."
+
+I think at some level, I was imagining being able to tell Anna, "See, you were so afraid that telling people things would make enemies, and you used Ziz as evidence that you weren't cautious enough. But look, Ziz _isn't going to be a problem for you anymore_. Your fear of making enemies actually happened, and you're fine! This is evidence in favor of my view that you were far too cautious, rather than not being cautious enough!"
+
+But that was complicit with injustice, because the _reason_ I felt that Ziz wasn't going to be a problem for Anna anymore was because Ziz's protest got SWATted, which didn't have anything to do with the merits of Ziz's claims against Anna. I still wanted Anna to feel safer to speak, but I now realized that more specifically, I wanted Anna to feel safe _because_ Speech can actually win. Feeling safe because one's enemies can be crushed by the state wasn't the same thing.
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