+I was annoyed at how the discussion seemed to be ignoring the obvious political angle, and the next day, I wrote [a comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0WJ2h9CRnqzrenpccajdU6SYJkT4967KCstW5dqESt4ArJLjjGHY7yZMk6mjar15Sl?comment_id=10159410429909228) (which ended up yielding 49 Like and Heart reactions): I agreed that there was a grain of truth to the claim that our detractors hate us because they're evil bullies, but stopping the analysis there seemed _incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving_.
+
+If you listened to why _they_ said they hate us, it was because we were racist, sexist, transphobic fascists. The party-line response to seemed to be trending towards, "That's obviously false (Scott voted for Warren, look at all the social democrats on the _Less Wrong_/_Slate Star Codex_ surveys, _&c._); they're just using that as a convenient smear because they like bullying nerds."
+
+If "sexism" included "it's an empirical question whether innate statistical psychological sex differences of some magnitude exist, it empirically looks like they do, and this has implications about our social world" (as articulated in, for example, Alexander's ["Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)), then the "_Slate Star Codex_ _et al._ are crypto-sexists" charge was _absolutely correct_.
+
+You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism", but that's only convincing if you've _already_ been trained in the "use empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes" tradition; the people with a California-public-school-social-studies-plus-Tumblr education didn't already _know_ that. ([_I_ didn't know this](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism) at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't even have Tumblr then.)
+
+In that light, you could see why someone might find "blow the whistle on people who are claiming to be innocent but are actually guilty (of thinking bad thoughts)" to be a more compelling ethical consideration than "respect confidentiality requests".
+
+Indeed, it seems important to notice (though I didn't at the time of my comment) that _Brennan didn't break any promises_. In [Brennan's account](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857), Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott _unilaterally_ said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.
+
+To see why the lack of a promise is significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or stealing their customers' money), unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance, but added, "never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge". In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the whistleblower and against "privacy."
+
+In the Brennan–Alexander case, I don't think Scott has anything to be ashamed of—but that's _because_ I don't think learning from right-wingers is a crime. If our _actual_ problem was "Genuinely consistent rationalism is realistically always going to be an enemy of the state, because [the map that fully reflects the territory is going to include facts that powerful coalitions would prefer to censor, no matter what specific ideology happens to be on top in a particular place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)", but we _thought_ our problem was "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies", then we were in trouble!
+
+[TODO—
+ * Yudkowsky commented that everyone has an evil bullies problem, we also had a Kolmogorov problem, but that's a separate thing even if bullies use Kolmogorov as an attack vector
+ * reality is complicated: I put some weight on the evil bullies model, but I think it's important to notice that we're participating in a political cover-up
+ * really, Topher and I are trying to do the same thing (reveal that rationalist leaders are thoughtcriminals), for different reasons (Topher thinks thoughtcrime is bad, and I think thoughtcrime it's fraud to claim the banner of "rationality" while hiding your thoughtcrimes); I'm being more scrupulous about accomplishing my objective while respecting other people's privacy hang-ups (and I think I have more latitude to do so _because_ I'm pro-thoughtcrime; people can tell that I'm saying this selfishly rather than spitefully), but don't think I don't sympathize with Topher; there are non-evil-bully reasons to want to _reveal information_ rather than participate in a conspiracy to protect the "rationalists" as non-threatening to the egregore
+ * It's one thing to believe in keeping promsies that someone explicitly made, but instructing commenters not to link to the email, implies not just that Topher should keep his promises, but that _everyone else_ is bound to participate in a conspiracy to respect Scott's privacy
+]
+
+
+
+
+> Oh, maybe it's relevant to note that those posts were specifically part of my 21-month rage–grief campaign of being furious at Eliezer all day every day for lying-by-implicature about the philosophy of language? But, I don't want to seem petty by pointing that out! I'm over it!
+
+And I think I _would_ have been over it, except—
+
+... except that Yudkowsky _reopened the conversation_ four days later on 22 February 2021, with [a new Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228) explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions and concluding that, "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically rude_, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_."
+
+(_Why!?_ Why reopen the conversation, from the perspective of his chessboard? Wouldn't it be easier to just stop digging?)