-If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
+Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much many of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
+
+I view this conflict as entirely incidental, nothing to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a positive technical discipline, adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
+
+https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
+
+[Leeroy Jenkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins) Option.
+
+People use trans as political cover;
+
+[It would have been harder to recruit me]
+
+https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790
+> "Who cares about a blog for male nerd know-it-alls?"
+> The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders.
+
+https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310
+
+> Another thing that would've complicated the picture: the rationalist community’s legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities]