+(Remember, this was 2017. Five years later in March 2022, we were in fact still alive, but the short-timelines people were starting to look more prescient than Michael had given them credit for.)
+
+If we—my sense of the general culture of "we"—were obviously getting gender wrong, plausibly got the election wrong, plausibly were getting AI timelines wrong, and I thought Moldbug and neoreactionary friends were pointing to some genuinely valuable Bayes-structure ... it seemed like we were doing a _really poor_ job of [pumping against cultishness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult). Was it maybe worth bidding for a cheerful price conversation with Yudkowsky again to discuss this? (I wasn't important enough for him to spontaneously answer my emails, and I was too submissive to just do it without asking Michael first.)
+
+Michael said there were better ways to turn dollars into opposition to cultishness. Then I realized that I had been asking Michael for permission, not advice. (Of _course_ Michael was going to say No, there's a better way to turn dollars into anti-cultishness, which would turn out to be apophenic Vassarian moonspeak that will maybe later turn out to be correct in ways that I wouldn't understand for eight years; I shouldn't have asked.) I went ahead an emailed Yudkowsky. (Again, I won't confirm or deny whether a conversation actually happened.)
+
+------
+
+I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)
+
+At standup meeting on my last day (3 March 2017), I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.
+
+-------
+
+[TODO: correspondence with sex researchers
+ * I had sent Blanchard fan mail on 10 August 2016
+ * I had sent Bailey fan mail on 7 January 2017, and then followed up on 11 February with a link to the blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message")
+ * "fan mail; and, self-promotion" to Alice Dreger on 2 March
+ * Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160 (11 Feb), https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528 (3 Mar)
+ * The world is not actually large; "famous" people (on the order of scientists or professors) often answer their email. (Although this probably stops being true for, like, Taylor Swift.)
+ * I wrote to Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence/Cantor (Subject: "trans infovism against trans activism?? (was: Fwd: The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought)")
+
+> It gets worse! I think this absurd situation is illustrative of a flaw in democracy itself: activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
+
+ * I mean, you're already doing this with your work, obviously, but I want to know if there's any way I can help?
+
+> If polarizing cultural forces force you to make a choice between joining the "Your gender is whatever you say it is! Maximize the number of trans people!" coalition, or the "Transitioning is against God's will! Minimize the number of trans people!" coalition, the only sane thing to do is ignore the noise and sit out the fight.
+
+> Maybe there's a role for some kind of very narrowly scoped political behavior (making friends and allies, trading favors, alienating people, &c.), with the goal of just getting the correct theory (sexual dimorphism is real, societies have gender roles, there are these two distinct classes of motivation for why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone) in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but not trying to dictate what the social norms
+
+ * Bailey was tentatively working on a website ("Resources for Families with Gender Dysphoria" (RFGD.org).) (not sure what happened with that)
+
+ * Lawrence—
+> I think it is a fool's errand to try to convince anyone to accept our ideas about "what the thing actually is." The best one can do, I feel, is to present the autogynephilia model as a potentially useful one and make it available, comprehensible, and perhaps somewhat palatable to those who might benefit from it.
+
+"I'd prefer to pick the fights I think I could win."
+
+]
+
+-------
+
+Michael asked me what I thought of recently disgraced right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (Subject: "Milo"). I said I hadn't been following that drama, except that I was really annoyed at local effective-altruism priestess Kelsey Piper (then blogging as _The Unit of Caring_) [playing dumb about what was at issue](http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/156812598746/calling-milos-conduct-random-cruelty-to-people) when criticizing Yiannopoulos for calling out a trans student by name during a speech. ("The woman in question was not 'still choosing to present as a man', she was not passing for a cis woman [...] If my university weren't letting me use the women's restrooms I would absolutely file a title IX complaint," Piper wrote.)
+
+I agreed that ridiculing a named individual in a public speech is _mean_, and it's preferable to avoid mean things if there's any way to make the same point with the same force and quality; it would be better if we could just directly renegotiate social norms without being mean. In that sense, I was not pro-Milo. But if we couldn't peacefully coordinate and were doomed to do politics, the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus's strategy of gerrymandering categories seemed like a strategy of [asymmetrical warfare](http://devinhelton.com/afghanistan-fractally-stupid-war), less of a fair fight than just trading insults. I could respect Yiannopoulos as an ordinary soldier.
+
+Michael said that [the issue that ultimately took down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Remarks_on_paedophilia_and_child_sexual_abuse) Yiannopoulos was actually as obvious as my issue, and that it was striking that it did so even while Trump [got away with being open about sexual assault](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/locker-room-talk/).
+
+He wasn't specific about the issue or its obviousness, but I filled in the blanks: young teen boys who have just hit puberty want sex, and wouldn't obviously be harmed by getting it from adults if it weren't for the social consensus that this would somehow harm them? Yes, that _did_ seem more obvious to a far larger population than autogynephilia motivating transgenderism. (Obligate-AGP sexuality is probably hard to empathize with if you haven't experienced it—I didn't feel like Michael understood it when we had talked in Berkeley a few months before—but the vast majority of men remember what it was like to be a horny teenager.)
+
+Michael said that the most plausible anti-Trump consensus perspective was that free speech would be physically dangerous for a majority of people in the medium term. The Yiannopoulos case suggested that maybe Trump and Kanye (and perhaps some other rappers) could speak without fear.
+
+I wasn't sure what he meant about free speech being physically dangerous. Was it that most men would be thuggish rapists if they thought for themselves in the service of their own values, such that school/media/memetic social control was necessary to keep them in check?
+
+No, Michael clarified, selfish people are almost never a problem. The problem was with mobs, not individual bad people. In the absence of taboos against racism, mobs would form and coerce people to demand blood from the most convenient Schelling point: in practice, Jews or blacks.
+
+What made the ACLU important was that it credibly [made a reliable committment to defend people like Yiannopoulos](http://www.npr.org/2017/02/12/514785623/the-aclu-explains-why-theyre-supporting-the-rights-of-milo-yiannopoulos).[^aclu] But Michael didn't think that many of them understood how bad I saw the situation as being. The ACLU needed to address how plausible the arguments for censorship are. People accepting censorship needed to address arguments about how real the harms are. As far as he can tell, I was the maximally concrete and articulate case of a person harmed by political correctness in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide.
+
+[^aclu]: Remember, this was 2017. The reliability of the committment [seems to have frayed in the intervening few years](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html) as the [Great Awokening](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020) continued.
+
+I asked him to be more specific about the class of people he thought were being genocided (nerdy men?) and by what (the political-correctness memeplex that evolved as a social-control mechanism to prevent the United States from descending into racialized violence like Yugoslavia?).
+
+I could see a picture where the underlying bug in male sexual psychology that leads to AGP would be far less likely to progress to "gender dysphoria" (actually doing something about it) in a world where it was socially-acceptable for highly-verbal 13-year-old boys to seek out sex, instead of internalizing socially-desirable admonitions against trying (which were adapted to the norm of reaction of a largely dumber population), resulting in Comment 171 syndrome. Blanchard [had posited "developmental competition"](/papers/blanchard-nonmonotonic_relation_of_agp_and_heterosexual_attraction.pdf) between AGP and normal heterosexual attraction, the balance between the two being set early in psychosexual development. Maybe pre-autogynephilic boys who chase girls develop mostly normally, while those deprived of that outlet double down on their perversion?
+
+It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has very strong autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
+
+[^heinlein-agp]: There was that scene in _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where a man watching a woman perform on stage uses a telepathic link to share her experiences—but there was also an entire book, [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read it as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
+
+So if the forces of political correctness won and "trans" became an entrenched cultural practice, that could be seen as genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues—and at the same time, from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, the efforts of people opposing gender identity ideology look like trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. And from inside the bubble of my own eclectic ideology, I wanted to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) a Julia Serano-like æsthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity—and that's just _not my style_.)
+
+"Much faster in person," replied Michael. "Notice that genocide, by conception, is about genes." (I don't remember if we followed up in person, but I agree that whatever genetic variants make one susceptible to transitioning in the current year, are not proving to be evolutionarily fit—and we know that's not inevitable; guys like me _used_ to get married and have children, even if we don't now.)
+
+-------
+
+Even though I was free and taking care of myself, I don't think my psychology was entirely back to baseline. I remembered that Michael or Anna had once given humanity an approximately 30% "win" probability.[^p-doom] Nate Silver had given Trump a 30% chance to win the 2016 presidential election. These facts felt _really related_ to me. I was aware that many people would dismiss this style of thinking as useless garbage—_lots_ of probabilities are close to 0.3—but somehow it still felt like a _clue_ to me (Subject: "apophenic numerology").
+
+[^p-doom]: This is the quantity that, these days, we would call 1 − P(doom).
+
+In retrospect, I agree with the "useless garbage" verdict. I can reconstruct a story about how the subjective sensation of cluefulness might arise from associative reasoning on the concepts I was preoccupied with at the time (Trump was the anti-political-correctness candidate, political correctness fostered bad epistemology, but humanity needed good epistemology to "win"), but that's _not_ a story about how that kind of thinking connects numerical probabilities to reality.
+
+Michael wrote to me (Subject: "Sleep"), noting that while "I don't need to sleep" is classic mania, it fit the pattern of what might be a lie under the circumstances. I might have asked myself for evidence on both sides, and remembered having personally seen animals sleep, maybe even in the wild (sea lions on the beach?). On the other hand, if I had asked why "I don't need to sleep" was a salient hypothesis, I might have noticed that the claim that everyone needs to sleep is the kind of lie that would be told by a worldview of people having high status as objects (it being wrong to sadistically cause pain), but low status as agents (it being right to control them and irresponsible not to); an important fact about the modern world was that it was common to oppress people by pretending they're like babies.
+
+I replied: