-But I _did_ end up in more conversation with Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin, who were game to help me with reaching out to Yudkowsky again to explain the problem in more detail. If we had this entire posse, I felt bad and guilty and ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it was geniunely a proxy for "Has Eliezer and/or everyone else lost the plot, and if so, how do we get it back?" But the group seemed to agree that my philosophy-of-language grievance was a useful test case for prosecuting deeper maladies affecting our subculture.
+But I considered myself to be prosecuting _not_ the object-level question of which gender categories to use, but the meta-level question of the cognitive function of categorization, for which, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice" wasn't adequate. I didn't have a simple, [mistake-theoretic](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) characterization of the language and social conventions that everyone should use such that anyone who defected from the compromise would be wrong. The best I could do was try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventions—and of _conflicts_ over possible conventions.
+
+["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) had concluded with a section on Emperor Norton, a 19th century San Francisco resident who declared himself Emperor of the United States. Certainly, it's not hard for the citizens of San Francisco to _address_ Norton as "Your Majesty". But there's more to being the Emperor of the United States than people calling you "Your Majesty." Unless we abolish Congress and have the military enforce Norton's decrees, he's not _actually_ functioning in the role of emperor—at least not according to the currently generally-understood meaning of the word "emperor."
+
+What are you going to do if Norton takes you literally? Suppose he says, "I ordered the Imperial Army to invade Canada last week; where are the troop reports? And why do the newspapers keep talking about this so-called 'President' Rutherford B. Hayes? Have this pretender Hayes executed at once and bring his head to me!"
+
+You're not really going to bring him Rutherford B. Hayes's head. So what are you going to tell him? "Oh, well, you're not a _cis_ emperor who can command executions. But don't worry! Trans emperors are emperors"?
+
+... Scott still didn't get it.
+
+Anyway, I _did_ end up in more conversation with Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin, who were game to help me with reaching out to Yudkowsky again to explain the problem in more detail—and to appeal to the conscience of someone who built their career on [higher standards](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger).
+
+Yudkowsky probably didn't think much of _Atlas Shrugged_ (judging by [a remark in _Harry Potter and the Methods_](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20)), but I kept thinking of the part where Dagny entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce [a not-technically-lying statement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly) by the State Science Institute. Stadler has become cynical in his old age, and demurrs: "How can one deal with truth when one deals with the public?" I expected Yudkowsky to do better than that.
+
+If we had this entire posse, I felt bad and guilty and ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it was geniunely 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?" But the group seemed to agree that my philosophy-of-language grievance was a useful test case for prosecuting deeper maladies affecting our subculture.