+In summary, what I see is a culture that has given up on the common interest of many causes, a culture where even our best and brightest are mostly focused on colluding to be nice to each other, minimizing social attack surface, and funneling money to branded EA institutions—even when their own fans can see that they're capable of so much more. In contrast, I want to work on asking interesting questions and then getting the right answer for the right reasons, in public (so that people who aren't already my closest trusted friends can learn, too). Under these circumstances, I don't want the main gravity well to award itself more authority to clear the neighborhood around its orbit, because I haven't been given sufficient reason not to expect that authority to be wielded against me and mine.
+
+ * "losing his ability to model other people and I'm worried about him", I think Ben-and-Jessica would see as [...] angry about living in simulacrum level 3 and we're worried about everyone else."
+
+
+It seems to that according to Zack's own account, even writing the memoir privately feels like an act of war that he'd rather avoid, not just using his own territory as he sees fit to create internal clarity around a thing.
+
+I think this has to mean either
+(a) that Zack isn't on the side of clarity except pragmatically where that helps him get his particular story around gender and rationalism validated
+or
+(b) that Zack has ceded the territory of the interior of his own mind to the forces of anticlarity, not for reasons, but just because he's let the anticlaritarians dominate his frame.
+
+This seems like a pretty important impasse to resolve. I don't think even Zack seriously thinks option (a) is sustainable long-run, which is some evidence for (b) but not decisive. I'm not sure (a) and (b) are actually separate hypotheses, rather than just different frames.
+
+or (c) I've ceded the territory of the interior of my own mind to Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular, and while I've made a lot of progress unwinding this, I'm still, still not done, and him seeming to respect me in person at the Newtonmas party set me back a bit ("Ooh, I wish you'd want me to stay / I'll be alright / Just not tonight")
+
+So a philosopher trying to recover a partially-destroyed word using ostensive definition needs to say, "You know all these specific examples (training data) of things we call 'X'? Okay, so, that training data has been mislabeled. Actually, these-and-such specific things are false-positives (your corrupt Society calls them 'X', but they're not) and these-and-such specific things are false-negatives (your corrupt Society doesn't call them 'X', but they are)—and that's the true meaning of 'X'."
+
+angels who timelessly perceive the universal wavefunction sub specie aeternitatis would have no motivation for a shorter encoding for "sex characteristics not changeable at tech level x". But mortal creatures who actually live in a Society with tech level x:=x₀ would, because they need it to compress their descriptions of the world they see (in which, e.g., trans men sometimes get pregnant).
+
+Oh, I think I see what you're getting at if I forget the "application" and just think about binary vectors. In the beginning, there are two kinds of vectors: [0, 0, 0, 0, ... 0], and [1, 1, 1, 1, ..., 1]. As technology gets better, we gain the ability to flip more coordinates from 0 to 1. First we learn how to make [1, 0, 0, 0, ... 0], then we learn how to make [1, 1, 0, 0, 0, ... 0], then [1, 1, 1, 0, 0, ... 0].
+
+I think you're saying it's lame to make a classifier with a pretentious name that's like, "One 1, then zeroes" when the tech allows that, but then the classifier gets updated to "Two 1s, then zeroes" when the tech allows that, &c.
+
+What I'm saying is that, in any tech regime between the stone age and the Singularity, your population does in fact have three distinct clusters that you might want to use language to talk about: the "all 0's" cluster, the "some 1s, then 0s" cluster, and the "all 1s" cluster. In the very early and very late tech regimes, maybe you don't care about the middle category and just use a two-category system. I think that we live in an early regime that needs three categories.
+
+As far as the state ideology of California is concerned, people who learn math from textbooks rather than dutifully attending classes don't exist. As far as the ideology taught in those schools' social-science classes is concerned, males who wish they were shaped like you but think this is obviously not an intersex condition don't exist and merely having a word for to name them is harmful. I think it makes sense that I'm at war here! If I can avoid it, I don't want to cause collateral damage to you if you're at war with a strain non-progressive authoritarian collectivism which is lower on my enemy list than yours. But if I can't cheaply avoid it (in that I don't want to say silent in situations like this or pay a disclaimer tax), maybe we need to accept some small amount of collateral damage from each other???
+
+Let's add the "lawyer" structure back in. I'm sitting at a restaurant and someone else complains that they ordered a burger but got a veggie burger. Why is it trolling if I speak up in their defense, but not if I speak up about my own burger order? It seems to me that the same interest is being defended (the right to use unmarked "burger" to mean "meat(1)" and expect people to know what you meant rather than pretend not to in order to save animals), and that's what matters (rather than whose name gets listed as "defendant" or who has the philosophy skills to explain why they feel cheated by the veggie burger).
+
+
+> If you are rounding off "they're trying to make me say I'm one of these other things instead of 'autogynephile'" to "they're trying to kill me" then, uhh, stop trying to kill trans and nonbinary people who Blanchard's model fits poorly??? (Like, this is all really hyperbolic! Maybe we shouldn't do this silly exaggeration thing???)
+> - Like, if you can understand why being misrepresented even in this slight way is painful, can't you try to reduce the harm that would come from imposing an ill-fitting ontology on lots of socially vulnerable people???
+> - (Also some trans people don't think it's an intersex brain thing!! They might have a social constructionist view etc.)
+> So it seems like you're going about this "getting a short message length" thing in an overly zero-sum fashion (trying to gain representation at the expense of other people's representation).
+
+(zero-sum actors, e.g. neo nazis, are going to be pushing in various ways that make it easier to push along in their direction than it would if it were just you).
+
+I think this is how the political factions end up being "protect minorities and be incoherent" and "harm minorities and be locally coherent". Different respectability/violence tradeoffs (to get a mix of zero sum and non zero sum energy). And these define the Overton window, whereas many other Overton windows could be drawn instead.