+ * Soon, other conversations continued with Michael and Sarah and Ben—and with Anna
+
+[TODO:
+on ostracism—
+ * 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)
+]
+
+[TODO:
+ * Ben thought the bullshit nitpicking was meaningfully anti-epistemic: the game is that I have to choose between infinite interpretive labor, or being cast as "never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections
+ * I was inclined to meet the objections, to say, "well, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly" rather than "you're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me"; by meeting the objections I become a stronger writer
+ * Ben thought that being a better writer by responding to nitpicks from people who are trying not to understand was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to explain how people were failing to engage, rather than continuing to press the object-level itself—like, I had a model of "the rationalists" that keeps making bad predictions, what's going on there?
+ * I guess I'm only now, years later, taking Ben's advice on this. Sorry, Ben.
+
+[TODO:
+ * If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
+ * There have been times when I thought, "What the Hell am I doing?" [...]
+]
+
+[TODO:
+ * Anna and intellectual property