[^not-endorsements]: In general, retweets are not necessarily endorsements—sometimes people just want to draw attention to some content without further comment or implied approval—but I was inclined to read this instance as implying approval, partially because this doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone would retweet for attention-without-approval, and partially because of the working relationship between Soares and Yudkowsky.
-Soares's points seemed cribbed from part I of Scott Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), which post I had just dedicated _more than three years of my life_ to rebutting in [increasing](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [technical](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), _specifically using dolphins as my central example_—which Soares didn't necessarily have any reason to have known about, but Yudkowsky (who retweeted Soares) definitely did. (Soares's [specific reference to the Book of Jonah](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670796997660675) made it seem particularly unlikely that he had invented the argument independently from Alexander.) [One of the replies (which Soares Liked) pointed out the similar _Slate Star Codex_ article](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185), [as did](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [a couple of](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) quote-Tweet discussions.
+Soares's points seemed cribbed from part I of Scott Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), which post I had just dedicated more than three years of my life to rebutting in [increasing](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [technical](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), specifically using dolphins as my central example—which Soares didn't necessarily have any reason to have known about, but Yudkowsky (who retweeted Soares) definitely did. (Soares's [reference to the Book of Jonah](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670796997660675) made it seem particularly unlikely that he had invented the argument independently from Alexander.) [One of the replies (which Soares Liked) pointed out the similar _Slate Star Codex_ article](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185), [as did](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [a couple of](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) quote-Tweet discussions.
-The elephant in my brain took this as another occasion to _flip out_. I didn't _immediately_ see anything for me to overtly object to in the thread itself—[I readily conceded that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1402073131276066821) there was nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to use the symbol "fish" to refer to the cluster of similarities induced by convergent evolution to the acquatic habitat rather than the cluster of similarities induced by phylogenetic relatedness—but in the context of our subculture's history, I read this as Soares and Yudkowsky implicitly lending more legitimacy to "... Not Man for the Categories", which was _hostile to my interests_. Was I paranoid to read this as a potential [dogwhistle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics))? It just seemed _implausible_ that Soares would be Tweeting that dolphins are fish in the counterfactual in which "... Not Man for the Categories" had never been published.
+The elephant in my brain took this as another occasion to _flip out_. I didn't immediately see anything for me to overtly object to in the thread itself—[I readily conceded that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1402073131276066821) there was nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to use the symbol "fish" to refer to the cluster of similarities induced by convergent evolution to the acquatic habitat rather than the cluster of similarities induced by phylogenetic relatedness—but in the context of our subculture's history, I read this as Soares and Yudkowsky implicitly lending more legitimacy to "... Not Man for the Categories", which was hostile to my interests. Was I paranoid to read this as a potential [dogwhistle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics))? It just seemed implausible that Soares would be Tweeting that dolphins are fish in the counterfactual in which "... Not Man for the Categories" had never been published.
-After a little more thought, I decided the thread _was_ overtly objectionable, and [quickly wrote up a reply on _Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins): Soares wasn't merely advocating for a "swimmy animals" sense of the word _fish_ to become more accepted usage, but specifically deriding phylogenetic definitions as unmotivated for everyday use ("definitional gynmastics [_sic_]"!), and _that_ was wrong. It's true that most language users don't directly care about evolutionary relatedness, but [words aren't identical with their definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels). Genetics is at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism; creatures that are more closely evolutionarily related are more similar _in general_. Classifying things by evolutionary lineage isn't an arbitrary æsthetic whim by people who care about geneology for no reason. We need the natural category of "mammals (including marine mammals)" to make sense of how dolphins are warm-blooded, breathe air, and nurse their live-born young, and the natural category of "finned cold-blooded vertebrate gill-breathing swimmy animals (which excludes marine mammals)" is also something that it's reasonable to have a word for.
+After a little more thought, I decided that the thread _was_ overtly objectionable, and [quickly wrote up a reply on _Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins): Soares wasn't merely advocating for a "swimmy animals" sense of the word _fish_ to become more accepted usage, but specifically deriding phylogenetic definitions as unmotivated for everyday use ("definitional gynmastics [_sic_]"!), and _that_ was wrong. It's true that most language users don't directly care about evolutionary relatedness, but [words aren't identical with their definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels). Genetics is at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism; creatures that are more closely evolutionarily related are more similar in general. Classifying things by evolutionary lineage isn't an arbitrary æsthetic whim by people who care about geneology for no reason. We need the natural category of "mammals (including marine mammals)" to make sense of how dolphins are warm-blooded, breathe air, and nurse their live-born young, and the natural category of "finned cold-blooded vertebrate gill-breathing swimmy animals (which excludes marine mammals)" is also something that it's reasonable to have a word for.
(Somehow, it felt appropriate to use a quote from Arthur Jensen's ["How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Can_We_Boost_IQ_and_Scholastic_Achievement%3F) as an epigraph.)
-[TODO: dolphin war con'td
+On [Twitter](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402888263593959433) Soares conceded my main points, but said that the tone, and the [epistemic-status followup thread](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401761124429701121), were intended to indicate that the original thread was "largely in jest"—"shitposting"—but that he was "open to arguments that [he was] making a mistake here."
- * Nate conceded all of my points (https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402888263593959433), said the thread was in jest ("shitposting"), and said he was open to arguments that he was making a mistake (https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402889976438611968), but still seemed to think his shitposting was based
+I didn't take that too well, and threw an eleven-Tweet tantrum. I somewhat regret this. My social behavior during this entire episode was histrionic, and I probably could have gotten an equal-or-better outcome if I had kept my cool. The reason I didn't want to keep my cool was because after years of fighting this Category War, MIRI doubling down on "dolphins are fish" felt like a gratuitous insult. I was used to "rationalist" leaders ever-so-humbly claiming to be open to arguments that they were making a mistake, but I couldn't take such assurances seriously if they were going to keep sending PageRank-like credibility to "... Not Man for the Categories".
- * I got frustrated and lashed out; "open to arguments that he was making a mistake" felt fake to me; rats are good at paying lip service to humility, but I'd lost faith in getting them to change their behavior, like not sending PageRank to "... Not Man for the Categories"
+Soares wrote a longer comment on _Less Wrong_ the next morning, and I [pointed out that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/BBtSuWcdaFyvgddE4) Soares's followup thread had lamented ["the fact that nobody's read A Human's Guide to Words or w/e"](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401761130041659395), but—with respect—he wasn't behaving like _he_ had read it. Specifically, [#30](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) on the list of ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) had characterized the position that dolphins are fish as "playing nitwit games". This didn't seem controversial at the time in 2008.
- * Nate wrote a longer reply on Less Wrong the next morning
+And yet it would seem that sometime between 2008 and the current year, the "rationalist" party line (as observed in the public statements of SingInst/MIRI leadership) on whether dolphins are fish shifted from (my paraphrases) "No; _despite_ the surface similarities, that categorization doesn't carve reality at the joints; stop playing nitwit games" to "Yes, _because_ of the surface similarities; those who contend otherwise are the ones playing nitwit games." A complete 180° reversal, on this specific example! Why? What changed?
- * I pointed out that his followup thread lamented that people hadn't read "A Human's Guide to Words", but that Sequence _specifically_ used the example of dolphins. What changed?!?
+It would make sense if people's opinions changed due to new arguments. (Indeed, Yudkowsky's original "stop playing nitwit games" dismissal had been sloppy, and I had had occasion in ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) to explain the specific senses in which dolphins both do and do not cluster with fish.)
- * [Summarize Nate's account of his story], phylogeny not having the courage of its convictions
+But when people change their mind due to new arguments, you'd expect them to acknowledge the change, and explain how the new arguments show that why they thought before was actually wrong. Soares hadn't even acknowledged the change!
- * Twitter exchange where he said he wasn't sure I would count his self-report as evidnece, I said it totally counts
+Soares wrote [a comment explaining](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/HwSkiN62QeuEtGWpN) why he didn't think it was such a large reversal. I [started drafting a counterreply](/ancillary/dolphin-war/), but decided that it would need to become a full post on the timescale of days or weeks, partially because I needed to think through how to reply to Soares about paraphyletic groups, and partially because the way the associated Twitter discussion had gone (including some tussling with Yudkowsky) made me want to modulate my tone. (I noted that I had probably lost some in-group credibility in the Twitter fight, but the information gained seemed more valuable. Losing in-group credibility didn't hurt so much when I didn't respect the group anymore.)
- * I overheated. This was an objectively dumb play. (If I had cooled down and just written up my reply, I might have gotten real engagement and a resolution, but I blew it.) I apologized a few days later.
+I was feeling some subjective time pressure on my reply, and in the meantime, I ended up adding [a histrionic comment](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/rMHcWfqkH89LWt4y9) to the _Less Wrong_ thread taking issue with Soares's still-flippant tone. That was a terrible performance on my part. (It got downvoted to oblivion, and I deserved it.)
- * Nate's reaction to me blowing up said it looked like I was expecting deference. I deny this; I wouldn't expect people to defer to me—what I did expect was a fair hearing, and at this point, I had lost faith that I would get one. (Could you blame me, when Yudkowsky says a fair hearing is less important than agreeing with Stalin?)
+Soares [wrote that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/8nmjnrm4cwgCCyYrG) I was persistently mis-modeling his intentions, that I seemed to be making a plea for deference that he rejected.
- * My theory of what's going on: I totally believe Nate's self report that he wasn't thinking about gender. (As Nate pointed out, you could give the thread an anti-trans interpretation, too.) Nevertheless, it remains the case that Nate's thinking is causally downstream of Scott's arguments in "... Not Man for the Categories." Where did Scott get it from? I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient.
+I don't think I wanted deference. I write these thousands of words in the hopes that people will read my arguments and think it through for themselves; I would never expect anyone to take my word for the conclusion. What I was hoping for was a fair hearing, and by that point, I had lost hope of getting one.
- * This is like radiocontrast dye for dark side epistemology: we can see Scott sneezing his bad epistemology onto everyone else because he's such a popular writer. No one can think fast enough to think their own thoughts, but you would hope for an intellectual community that can do error-correction, rather than copying smart people's views including mistakes.
+As for my skill at modeling intent, I think it's less relevant than Soares seemed to think (if I don't err in attributing to him the belief that modeling intent is important). I believe Soares's self-report that he wasn't trying to make a coded statement about gender; my initial impression otherwise _was_ miscalibrated. (As Soares pointed out, his "dolphins are fish" position could be given an "anti-trans" interpretation, too, in the form of "you intellectuals get your hands off my intuitive concepts". The association between "dolphins are fish" and "trans women are women" ran through their conjunction in Alexander's "... Not Man for the Categories", rather than being intrinsic to the beliefs themselves.)
- * I look up the relevant phylogenetics definitions, and write "Blood Is Thicker Than Water"
-]
+The thing is, I was _right_ to notice the similarity between Soares's argument and "... Not Man for the Categories." Soares's [own account](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/HwSkiN62QeuEtGWpN) agreed that there was a causal influence. Okay, so _Nate_ wasn't trying to play gender politics; Scott just alerted him to the idea that people didn't used to be interested in drawing their categories around phylogenetics, and Nate ran with that thought.
+
+So where did _Scott_ get it from?
+
+I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient. I think if you asked Scott Alexander whether dolphins are fish in 2012, he would have said, "No, they're mammals," like any other educated adult.
+
+In a world where the clock of "political time" had run a little bit slower, such that the fight for gay marriage had taken longer [such that the progressive _zeitgeist_ hadn't pivoted to trans as the new cause _du jour_](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/), I don't think Alexander would have had the occasion to write "... Not Man for the Categories." And in that world, I don't think "Dolphins are fish, fight me" or "Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary" would have become _memes_ in our subculture.
+
+This case is like [radiocontrast dye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocontrast_agent) for [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology). Because Scott Alexander won [the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) and writes faster than everyone else, he has the power to _sneeze his mistakes_ onto everyone who trusts Scott to have done his homework, even when he obviously hasn't.
+
+[No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2MD3NMLBPCqPfnfre/cached-thoughts), but you would hope for an intellectual community that can do error-correction, rather than copying smart people's views including mistakes?
+
+To be sure, it's true that there's a cluster of similarities induced by adaptations to the acquatic environment. It's reasonable to want to talk about that subspace. But it doesn't follow that phylogenetics is irrelevant.
+
+Genetics is at the root of the causal graph of all other traits of an organism, which induces the kind of conditional independence relationships that make "categories" a useful AI trick.
+
+But in a world where more people are reading "... Not Man for the Categories" than ["Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace), and even the people who have read "Density in Thingspace" (once, ten years ago) are having most of their conversations with people who only read "... Not Man for the Categories"—what happens is that you end up with a so-called "rationalist" culture that completely forgot the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition/carve-reality-at-the-joints skill! People only remember the specific subset of "A Human's Guide to Words" that's useful for believing whatever you want (by cherry-picking the features you need to include in category Y to make your favorite "X is a Y" sentence look "true", which is easy for intricate high-dimensional things like biological creatures that have a lot of similarities to cherry-pick from), rather than the part about the conditional independence structure in the environment.
+
+After I cooled down, I did eventually write up the explanation for why paraphyletic categories are okay, in ["Blood Is Thicker Than Water"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). But I'm not sure that anyone cared.
+
+--------
[TODO:
--- /dev/null
+Title: Dolphin War!! 🐬 (draft reply to Nate Soares, 16 June 2021)
+Status: Hidden
+
+> I noticed my own discomfort as the lines around "fruit" and "berry" started wavering
+
+"Started" wavering? How often does this come up for you? I'm somehwat (not hugely) surprised at your self-report, because I can't actually recall _ever_ having been in a dispute over the [extensions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) of "fruit" or "berry" before!
+
+Furthermore, when I try to imagine how I would have reacted if it _did_ happen, I don't imagine myself feeling any discomfort at wavering lines! I'm imagining mentioning to a friend that I'd been ordering frozen fruit (which keeps longer) in grocery deliveries while avoiding going to supermarkets in person during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that I liked the [Cascadian Farm Cherry Berry Blend (of cherries, strawberries, and blueberries)](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078HM7V5R/) better than the [Wyman's of Maine mixed berry bag (of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries)](https://www.amazon.com/Wymans-Mixed-Berries-15-Frozen/dp/B000YG4I62).
+
+If the friend were to reply, "Well, _actually_, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries aren't berries", I think my reaction would be to [look at the _Wikipedia_ page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry) and say, "Oh, it looks like that's true with respect to the botanical definition of the word _berry_, but the fruit companies were clearly using the colloquial definition. It's possible for the same word to have multiple meanings that can usually be distinguished from context, or explicitly clarified by the speaker if the context alone is insufficient to disambiguate!"
+
+_Wikipedia_ is _very clear_ about the multiple definitions: "In common usage, the term "berry" differs from the scientific or botanical definition [...] The botanical definition includes many fruits that are not commonly known or referred to as berries". They even have a _separate page_ for ["Berry (botany)"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_(botany))!
+
+_Wiktionary_ [also lists both definitions](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/berry), with the botanical usage clearly marked as such with a [context label](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Entry_layout#Context_labels), and with a usage note explaining further:
+
+> **Noun**
+> **berry** (plural **berries**)
+>
+> 1. A small succulent fruit, of any one of many varieties.
+> 2. (_botany_) A soft fruit which develops from a single ovary and contains seeds not encased in pits.
+> [...]
+> **Usage Notes**
+> Many fruits commonly regarded as berries, such as strawberries and raspberries, are not berries in the botanical sense, while many fruits which are berries in the botanical sense are not regarded as berries in common parlance, such as bananas and pumpkins.
+
+The same situation pertains with _fruit_: both _Wikipedia_ (["In common language usage [...] In botanical usage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit)) and _Wiktionary_ ([senses 2 _vs._ 3](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fruit)) are _very clear_ about the two meanings coexisting!
+
+I don't see any wavering lines here at all: I see two _different_ category boundaries that happen to share the same label (requiring disambiguation in cases of doubt), with all authoritative sources explicitly flagging the label collision!
+
+Based on this evidence, I find your claim that ["they're coming for 'fruit'"](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670803326787588) hard to believe. _Who_ is doing that, in the social spaces you inhabit? Is anyone with equal or greater influence than the executive director of MIRI doing this? If you cannot provide evidence of people using their social power to deprecate the common meaning in favor of the botanical one, then your attempt to use _your_ power to deprecate the botanical meaning reeks of pure [DARVO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO). When you sneer "Invent a new word for your thing" in reference to a usage that already has already been established (_e.g._, the first definition of _fish_, or berry/fruit among botanists in particular), then _you_ are the one trying to steal concepts!
+
+It's _really weird_ that your epistemic-status thread laments that not enough people read "A Human's Guide to Words", but you're acting as if you _not only_ haven't read ["Where to Draw the Boundary?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary), but that you _also_ haven't read ["Disputing Definitions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-definitions) and ["Variable Question Fallacies"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/shoMpaoZypfkXv84Y/variable-question-fallacies). Are strawberries berries? Well, "berry" has two senses—strawberries are a _berry(1)_ but not a _berry(2)_. This is _not a difficult concept_. Your _low quality_ shitposting makes me think less of MIRI as an institution—and therefore think less of humanity's hopes for a future. If you _clowns_ can't get _your own_ philosophy of language right, why should we trust you to save the world? [_You betrayed your uniform!_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-apnLvSq-gQ)
+
+> I don't actually believe phylogenetics is generally a good way to carve up the life forms around me
+
+Do you still feel this way after considering the "genetics are at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism" argument offered in this post? This seems like the kind of deep structural insight that you'd think so-called "rationalists" would be interested in! The variable you use as your category definition being at the root of the causal graph _guarantees_ [the conditional independence structure that makes naïve-Bayes-like categories _work_, as an AI algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes)!!
+
+If you live in human civilization and don't really _need_ to carve up the life forms around you in much detail—if your use-case for thinking about acquatic animals is _watching a nature documentary_ (for entertainment??) rather than living and working with them every day, then you might think the deeper causal structure isn't buying you anything, but I think you would change your mind if you were a veternarian or a zoologist who actually had skin in the game in describing this part of the world.
+
+When people have skin in the game, they care about the underlying mechanisms and want short codewords for them. If you hurt your ankle while running, you would probably be interested to _know_ whether it was a [sprain or a stress fracture](https://ercare24.com/difference-sprain-vs-fracture/) because that affects your decisions about how to recover. You wouldn't say, "Well, all I know is that my ankle hurts—that's all a child would know—so I'm going to call it a _hurtankle_; I don't care about anatomy."
+
+Phylogenetics is also a lot more _objective_: it's easier to [stabilize a _shared_ map](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) on the facts of evolutionary history (which we can all agree on in the limit of good science) then the vagaries of what I personally think tastes good on pizza.
+
+And this subjectivity also applies to animal classification. Some might be inclined to argue "bats are birds" (flappy flying animals) on the same grounds as "dolphins are fish" (flappy swimmy animals). But did you know the German word for bat is [_Fledermaus_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Fledermaus) ("flutter mouse"), which dates back to _fledarmūs_ in [Old High German](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_High_German)? Apparently, people way back in the tenth century or so (long before evolution was understood) already thought bats were like a mammal-that-happened-to-fly rather than a bird-that-happened-to-be-furry.
+
+> the subtle background forces that whisper (at least to blue tribe members in their youth) "phylogenetic classification is the one true way to organize life forms"
+
+Why to Blue Tribe members in their youth, particularly? Yesterday, I mentioned to my mother (born 1951, old enough that the forces shaping her worldview long predate the polarization leading to the [local coinage of "Blue Tribe"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)) that the reason I had a terrible week was because I got into a fight about dolphins.
+
+"Dolphins?" she asked, incredulously.
+
+"They're not fish, right?" I asked.
+
+"No, of course not," she said. "They're mammals. Dolphins take care of their young. Dolphins can communicate with each other; they're intelligent."
+
+>> Why? What changed?
+>
+> On the object level question?
+> [...]
+> Scott's post is I think the source of the first two in me
+
+As for my cynical theorizing of what changed, I'm _most_ interested as to what conversations we would be having in the counterfactual where trans rights didn't become a popular political issue. (Imagine a world where the dice of previous elections and judicial appointments landed such that the gay-marriage fight would have taken much longer to win, such that the LGBT activism machine was still focused on that even through the current year, and didn't have the resources to mount [the psychological warfare campaign](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) to replace the public concept of sex with "gender identity" that we're experiencing in this timeline.)
+
+I would be surprised if Scott genuinely, _honestly_ thought dolphins should be fish _if you asked him in 2012_ (or in my alternate timeline where we still didn't have gay marriage yet). I think it's much more likely that he _first_ felt psychological pressure to come up with a clever casuistry for [the bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) of "trans women are women / trans men are men" [(sections IV.–VI.)](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), and _then_ came up with the "whales are fish" thing for the intro section.
+
+I know, I know: [caution on bias arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/), [we have a terrible track record in guessing Scott's motives](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-have-a-terrible-track-record). I agree that [psychologizing](https://arbital.com/p/psychologizing/) about your interlocutor's political incentives is a fraught endeavor and most people get it wrong! We're probably _designed_ to get it wrong, if there were payoffs in [the environment of evolutionary adaptedness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/epZLSoNvjW53tqNj9/evolutionary-psychology) to think badly of enemies—either because of asymmetric payoffs (less expensive to fear a nonexistent murder plot than fail to notice a real one), or to search for clever arguments to recruit allies to oppose the enemy.
+
+Nevertheless, think about it: can you imagine Scott making the "whales are fish" case, if he _weren't_ leading to that politically convenient bottom line? Imagine the same post with _just_ the whales-are-fish and categories-are-like-national-borders parts, no parts IV.–VI.? Do you think that post would be popular?
+
+It's notable that the ["algorithmic"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) lie (far too _optimized_ to call a mere "mistake", even if Scott wasn't _consciously_ lying) that makes sections IV.–VI. of "... Not Man for the Categories" mind-poison—the idea that we can legitimately choose categories _in order to make people happy_ (!?!?!), rather than to reflect the territory—isn't something that Scott does _anywhere else_ during that period of his work. For example, ["Does the Glasgow Coma Scale exist? Do comas?"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/), published three months earlier, gets the categories issue _right_: "there is a common-sense concept of being-in-a-coma which is valuable in predicting various things we want to predict, like whether someone is able to talk and able to walk and able to solve math problems and so on"—the "coma" concept should be optimized to _reflect the territory_, not to _make someone feel better_.
+
+(It's all so _pointless_, too—that people think they have to support these Orwellian _mind games_ in order to support trans people. I'm not against trans _people_, who I'm arguably one of—depending on where you draw the boundary. I'm grateful [that I got to try hormone replacement therapy for five months](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) with medical supervision, instead of it being illegal. Body modding to more closely resemble the opposite sex (in the [sad absence of the technology to do it for real](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)) is probably a reasonable thing for some people to do in some circumstances, and _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women! But one would have hoped that social support for this could have been won on principled morphological freedom grounds (the same reason people should be free to get a tattoo or a piercing) rather than this culture of _mind games_ bent on destroying the language that _I, as a transgender person_, need to [_tell the truth_ about what I _want_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).)
+
+Anyway, in the world where the gay marriage fight took longer, I don't think "Dolphins are fish, fight me" or ["Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fRwdkop6tyhi3d22L/there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-tree-phylogenetically) would have become _memes_. But since Scott won [the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) and writes faster and better than everyone else, he has the power to _sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else_ who trusts Scott to do his homework even when he obviously hasn't. (Would section I. of "... Not Man for the Categories" have concluded with "(also, bats)" if Scott knew about _die Fledermäuse_?)
+
+This is the mechanism that Yudkowsky called [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology): _fake_ epistemology lessons that people only have an incentive to invent in order to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits. I don't question your self-report of _your_ motives! I believe that _you_ weren't trying to play political games with me! But your _information environment_ is supersaturated with the toxic waste of everyone else's disinformation, that you don't have the cognitive resources to distangle yourself: if "dolphins are fish, Actually" is suddenly a trendy meme after 2014, and you don't _notice_ that the meme is causally downstream of dark side epistemology, then you won't see anything wrong with running with that thought.
+
+In this specific case—a world where more people are reading "... Not Man for the Categories" than ["Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace), and even the people who _have_ read "Density in Thingspace" (once, ten years ago) are having most of their _conversations_ with people who only read "... Not Man for the Categories"—what happens is that you end up with a so-called "rationalist" culture that _completely forgot_ the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition/carve-reality-at-the-joints skill! People only remember the specific _subset_ of "A Human's Guide to Words" that's useful for believing whatever you want (by cherry-picking the features you need to include in category Y to make your favorite "X is a Y" sentence look "true", which is easy for intricate high-dimensional things like biological creatures that have a lot of similarities to cherry-pick from), rather than the part about the [conditional independence structure in the environment required for "categories" to be a useful AI trick](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception?commentId=FqjsM2AkEkaBgf2wD).
+
+As a result of your _shitposting_, "... Not Man for the Categories" was [cited](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185) [three](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [times](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) by other Twitter users, driving _yet more_ traffic to a post that claims (redacting the specific object-level example)—
+
+> I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
+
+Those sentences are a _complete betrayal of everything we allegedly stand for_. I think you, Nate Soares, need to _condemn_ those sentences, out loud, in public, as a _complete betrayal of everything we allegedly stand for_. And if you can't do it, then you're a fraud. If the leaders of the so-called "rationalist" community can't condemn it (either because of the politics, or because you're somehow _actually that retarded_), then the so-called "rationalist" community needs to _rebrand_, or _disband_, or _be destroyed_.
✓ psychiatric disaster
✓ "Agreeing With Stalin" intro recap
✓ recap of crimes, cont'd
-_ Dolphin War finish
+✓ Dolphin War finish
_ lead-in to Sept. 2021 Twitter altercation
_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
_ plan to reach out to Rick / Michael on creepy men/crazy men
_ Tail vs. Bailey / Davis vs. Yudkowsky analogy (new block somewhere)
_ mention that "Not Man for the Categories" keeps getting cited
+
+
Notes from pt. 3 readthrough—
_ fullname Taylor and Hoffman at start of pt. 3
_ footnote clarifying that "Riley" and Sarah weren't core members of the group, despite being included on some emails?
_ cut lots of words from December 2019 blogging spree
_ in a footnote, defend the "cutting my dick off" rhetorical flourish
_ choice quotes in "end of the Category War" thank you note
+_ do I have a better identifier than "Vassarite"?
+_ maybe I do want to fill in a few more details about the Sasha disaster, conditional on what I end up writing regarding Scott's prosecution?—and conditional on my separate retro email—also the Zolpidem thing
Notes from pt. 4 readthrough—
_ mention Nick Bostrom email scandal (and his not appearing on the one-sentence CAIS statement)
_ cut words from January 2020 Twitter exchange (after war criminal defenses)
_ revise reply to Xu
_ cut lots of words from Scotts comments on Jessica's MIRI post (keep: "attempting to erase the agency", Scott blaming my troubles on Michael being absurd)
-_ do I have a better identifier than "Vassarite"?
-_ maybe I do want to fill in a few more details about the Sasha disaster, conditional on what I end up writing regarding Scott's prosecution?—and conditional on my separate retro email—also the Zolpidem thing
+
+Notes pt. 5—
+_ "as Soares pointed out" needs link
+_ can I rewrite to not bury the lede on "intent doesn't matter"?
+_ also reference "No such thing as a tree" in Dolphin War section
+_ better brief explanation of dark side epistemology
+_ "deep causal structure" argument needs to be crystal clear, not sloopy
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