memoir: MIRIcult, SRS roulette

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
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@@ -276,9 +276,27 @@ Without revealing the other side of any private conversation that may or may not
 
 It was also around this time that our posse picked up a new member, who would prefer not to be named.
 
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 On 5 January, I met with Michael and his associate Aurora in San Francisco to attempt mediated discourse with [Ziz](https://sinceriously.fyi/) and [Gwen](https://everythingtosaveit.how/), who were considering suing CfAR for discriminating against trans women. Michael hoped to dissuade them from a lawsuit—not because Michael approved of CfAR's behavior, but because involving lawyers makes everything worse.
 
-Ziz recounted [her story](https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative) story of Anna's alleged discrimination, engaging in [conceptual warfare](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) to portray Ziz as a predatory male. I was unimpressed: in my worldview, I didn't think Ziz had the right to say "I'm not a man," and expect people to just believe that. (I remember at one point, Ziz answered a question with, "Because I don't run off masochistic self-doubt like you." I replied, "That's fair.") But I _did_ respect that Ziz actually believed in an intersex brain theory: in Ziz and Gwen's worldview, people's genders were a _fact_ of the matter, not just a manipulation of consensus categories to make people happy.
+Ziz recounted [her story](https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative) story of Anna's alleged discrimination, engaging in [conceptual warfare](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) to portray Ziz as a predatory male. I was unimpressed: in my worldview, I didn't think Ziz had the right to say "I'm not a man," and expect people to just believe that. (I remember at one point, Ziz answered a question with, "Because I don't run off masochistic self-doubt like you." I replied, "That's fair.") But I did respect that Ziz actually believed in an intersex brain theory: in Ziz and Gwen's worldview, people's genders were a _fact_ of the matter, not just a manipulation of consensus categories to make people happy.
+
+Probably the most ultimately significant part of this meeting for future events was Michael verbally confirming to Ziz that MIRI had settled with a disgruntled former employee who had put up a website slandering them. I don't actually know the details of the alleged settlement. (I'm working off of [Ziz's notes](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) rather than particularly remembering that part of the conversation clearly; I don't know what Michael knew.)
+
+What was significant was that if MIRI _had_ paid the former employee as part of an agreement to get the slanderous website taken down, then, whatever the nonprofit best-practice books said, that would decision-theoretically amount to a blackmail payout, which seemed to contradict MIRI's advocacy of timeless decision theories (according to which you [shouldn't be the kind of agent that yields to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)).
+
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+Something else Ben had said while chiming in on the second attempt to reach out to Yudkowsky hadn't quite sit right with me—that he was worried that if he pointed out the _physical injuries_ sustained by some of the smartest, clearest-thinking, and kindest people he knew as a result of the political silencing dynamics we were worried about, he'd be dismissed as a mean person who wants to make other people feel bad.
+
+I didn't know what he was talking about. My trans widow friend's 2015 psychiatric imprisonment had probably been partially related to her husband's transition and had involved rough handling by the cops. I had been through some Bad Stuff, but none of it was "physical injuries." What were the other cases, if he could share without telling me Very Secret Secrets With Names?
+
+Ben said that, probabilistically, he expected that some fraction of the trans women he knew who had "voluntarily" had bottom surgery, had done so in response to social pressure, even if some of them might very well have sought it out in a less weaponized culture.
+
+I said that saying "I am worried that if I actually point out the physical injuries ..." when the actual example turned out to be sex reassignment surgery seemed pretty dishonest to me. I had thought he might have more examples of situations like mine or my trans widow friend, where gaslighting escalated into more tangible harm in a way that people wouldn't know about by default. In contrast, people _already know_ that bottom surgery is a thing; Ben just had reasons to think it's Actually Bad—reasons that his friends couldn't engage with if we didn't know what he was talking about_. It was already bad enough that Yudkowsky was being so cagey; if _everyone_ did it, then we were really doomed.
+
+Ben said that he was more worried that saying politically loaded things in the wrong order would reduce the chances of getting engagement from Yudkowsky, than someone sharing his words out of context in a way that caused him distinct harm—and maybe more than both of those, that saying the wrong keywords would cause his correspondent to talk about him using the wrong keywords, in ways that caused illegible, hard-to-trace damage.
 
 There's a view that assumes that as long as everyone is being cordial, our truthseeking public discussion must be basically on-track: if no one overtly gets huffily offended and calls to burn the heretic, then the discussion isn't being warped by the fear of heresy.
 
@@ -340,7 +358,7 @@ But I had no idea what 2019!Yudkowsky would say. If the moral of the "hill of me
 
 And this was just _correct_. For example, Alexander's ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) favorably cites Cochran _et al._'s genetic theory of Ashkenazi achievement as "really compelling." Scott was almost certainly "guilty" of the category-membership that the speech against him was meant to convey—it's just that Sneer Club got to choose the category. The correct response to the existence of a machine-learning classifer that returns positive on both Scott Alexander and Richard Spencer is not that the classifier is "lying" (what would that even mean?), but that the classifier is not very useful for understanding Scott Alexander's effects on the world.
 
-Of course, Scott is great, and we should defend him from the bastards trying to ruin his reputation, and it was plausible that the most politically convenient way to do that was to pound the table and call them lying sociopaths rather than engaging with the substance of their claims—much as how someone being tried under an unjust law might dishonestly plead "Not guilty" to save their own skin rather than tell the whole truth and hope for jury nullification.
+Of course, Scott is great, and it was right that we should defend him from the bastards trying to ruin his reputation, and it was plausible that the most politically convenient way to do that was to pound the table and call them lying sociopaths rather than engaging with the substance of their claims—much as how someone being tried under an unjust law might dishonestly plead "Not guilty" to save their own skin rather than tell the whole truth and hope for jury nullification.
 
 But, I argued, political convenience came at a dire cost to [our common interest](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). There was a proverb Yudkowsky [had once failed to Google](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings), which ran something like, "Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."