memoir: Category War initial defeat

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
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--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
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@@ -531,7 +531,7 @@ I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include subtext and then expect p
 
 (I did regret having accidentally "poisoned the well" the previous month by impulsively sharing the previous year's ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently [deniably allegorical](/tag/deniably-allegorical/). It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" as not-politically-threatening philosophy, if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the 60+-comment trainwreck on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
 
-On 13 April, I pulled the trigger on publishing "... Boundaries?", and wrote to Yudkowsky again, a fourth time (!), asking if he could _either_ publicly endorse the post, _or_ publicly comment on what he thought the post got right and what he thought it got wrong; and, that if engaging on this level was too expensive for him in terms of spoons, if there was any action I could take to somehow make it less expensive? [TODO: my stated justification] (Subject: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing")
+On 13 April, I pulled the trigger on publishing "... Boundaries?", and wrote to Yudkowsky again, a fourth time (!), asking if he could _either_ publicly endorse the post, _or_ publicly comment on what he thought the post got right and what he thought it got wrong; and, that if engaging on this level was too expensive for him in terms of spoons, if there was any action I could take to somehow make it less expensive? The reason I thought this was important was that if rationalists in [good standing](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/) find themselves in a persistent disagreement _about rationality itself_—in this case, my disagreement with Scott Alexander and others about the cognitive function of categories—that seemed like a major concern for [our common interest](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes), something we should be very eager to _definitively settle in public_ (or at least _clarify_ the current state of the disagreement). In the absence of an established "rationality court of last resort", I feared the closest thing we had was an appeal to Eliezer Yudkowsky's personal judgement. Despite the context in which the dispute arose, _this wasn't a political issue_: the post I was asking for his comment on was _just_ about the [_mathematical laws_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) governing how to talk about, _e.g._, dolphins (Subject: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing").
 
 Again, without revealing any content from private conversations that may or may not have occurred, we did not get any public engagement from Yudkowsky.
 
@@ -539,24 +539,18 @@ It seemed that the Category War was over, and we lost.
 
 We _lost?!_ How could we _lose?!_ The philosophy here was _very clear-cut_. This shouldn't be hard or expensive or difficult to clear up. I could believe that Alexander was "honestly" confused, but Yudkowsky ...!?
 
-I could see how, under ordinary circumstances, asking Yudkowsky to weigh in on my post would seem inappropriately demanding of a Very Important Person's time, given that a simple person such as me was surely as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky.
+I could see how, under ordinary circumstances, asking Yudkowsky to weigh in on my post would seem inappropriately demanding of a Very Important Person's time, given that a simple person such as me was surely as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. But the only reason for my post to exist was because it would be even _more_ inappropriately demanding to ask for a clarification in the original gender-political context. I _don't_ think it was inappropriately demanding to expect "us" (him) to _be correct about the cognitive function of categorization_. (If not, why pretend to have a "rationality community" at all?) I was trying to be as accomodating as possible, given that decideratum.
 
-But the only reason for my post to exist was _because_ [...]
+Jessica mentioned talking with someone about me writing to Yudkowsky and Alexander requesting that they clarify the category boundary thing. This person described having a sense that I should have known that wouldn't work—because of the politics involved, not because I wasn't right. I thought Jessica's takeaway was very poignant:
 
-[TODO: Ben on Eliza analogy]
+> 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.
 
-Jessica mentioned talking with someone about me writing to Yudkowsky and Alexander requesting that they clarify the category boundary thing. This person described having a sense that I should have known that wouldn't work—because of the politics involved, not because I 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: Ben on Eliza the bot therapist]
 
 [TODO: asking Anna to weigh in] (I figured that spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding physical postcards was more polite (and funnier) than my recent habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.)
 
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 curation hopes ... 22 Jun: I'm expressing a little bit of bitterness that a mole rats post got curated https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness
 
 "Univariate fallacy" also a concession