-I perceived a pattern where people who are in trouble with the orthodoxy feel an incentive to buy their own safety by denouncing _other_ heretics: not just disagreeing with the other heretics _because those other heresies are in fact mistaken_, which would be right and proper Discourse, but denouncing them ("actively hostile to") as a way of paying Danegeld.
+I perceived a pattern where people who are in trouble with the orthodoxy feel an incentive to buy their own safety by denouncing other heretics: not just disagreeing with the other heretics because those other heresies are in fact mistaken, which would be right and proper Discourse, but denouncing them ("actively hostile to") as a way of paying Danegeld.
+
+Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who's on the record believing more than one gets burned as a witch. Then it's impossible to have a unified rationalist community, because people who want to talk about one heresy can't let themselves be seen in the company of people who believe another. That's why Scott Alexander couldn't get the philosophy-of-categorization right in full generality (even though his writings revealed an implicit understanding of the correct way)[^implicit-understanding], and he and I had a common enemy in the social-justice egregore). He couldn't afford to. He'd already spent his Overton budget [on anti-feminism](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/).
+
+[^implicit-understanding]: As I had [explained to him earlier](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#noncentral-fallacy), Alexander's famous [post on the noncentral fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world)
+
+[TODO—stitch together the language here:
+
+Most of Alexander's examples focus on
+
+In ["Does the Glasgow Coma Scale exist? Do comas?"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) (published just three months before "... Not Man for the Categories"), Alexander