- * There's a view that says, as long as everyone is being polite, there's no problem
- * I think there's a problem where the collective discourse is biased, even if it's surface-level polite
- * Berkley rats are very good at not being persecutory (we might not have been if Scott hadn't a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college)
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+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.
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+I do not hold this view. I think there's a _subtler_ failure mode where people know what the politically-favored bottom line is, and collude to ignore, nitpick, or just be targetedly _uninterested_ in any fact or line of argument that doesn't fit the party line. I want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture they're embedded in."
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+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, 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.)
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+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 mostly wasn't); I was angry at them for _making bad arguments_ and systematically refusing to engage with the obvious counterarguments.
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