+[^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:
+
+> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (_e.g._, from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
+
+Michael replied:
+
+> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
+
+I tagged Anna and Divia into the thread as cc's, because they seemed more grounded. "Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him", I said.
+
+Even if I _was_ getting a few things right in my paranoid/schizotypal state, the important thing was trying to do philosophy. The parts where I felt like a _very important person_ (in this simulation/Everett branch) receiving special simulator attention should be interpreted as standard manic-episode [delusions of reference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference); _lots_ of people feel just like that when they're agitated and haven't gotten enough sleep. Social reality may be crazy, but I should still be putting a lot more weight on the social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative was my intuition about the machines trying to kill me.
+
+Michael wrote:
+
+> I certainly put a lot less weight on 'nice people doing their jobs' then I do on 'six sigma processes homeostatically adjusting to dampen the variance in outputs that is their representation of me.', which is basically equivalent to 'these well documented machines, the ones they teach you about in business school, do the thing they do. 'Trying to kill' is what an anthropomorphized version of the process looks like from the inside. We have enough documentation to know about the nice people doing their jobs paradigm being untenable.
+
+I wrote:
+
+> Sure, I guess I meant that the "Machines trying to kill me" framing is scary, and I don't like being scared, so I want to focus on finding ways to cooperate with the nice people doing their jobs while defecting against the homeostatic system that they're embedded in (but not actually doing anything crazy like trying to destroy the system, because it's doing useful things for us and I don't have anything better to replace it with).
+
+The next day, I changed my mind (Subject: "slowly coming around to you"):
+
+> Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage in the war against the control system. Or, not a war. An endeavor to map what the control system is in detail, and publish the map on the internet.
+
+------
+
+As part of being less submissive to authorities in general and the medical establishment in particular, it felt appropriate to get some gray-market HRT, so on 6 March, I ordered a pack of Progynova 1mg (estradiol) and a pack of Aldactone 25mg (spironolactone) from AllDayChemist, an online pharmacy based out of India, which presumably has fewer laws about this sort of thing.
+
+I didn't need it (and didn't end up using it); my regular health care provider got me equipped to [re-start my HRT experiment](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/) (including the spiro this time). It was the principle: that I could just buy drugs of my own choice using money, without the pretense of an authority diagnosing me with "gender dysphoria".
+
+I had heard about AllDayChemist from Alice Monday, a local trans woman who wasn't very nice, but seemed to have some Vassar-like insights about penetrating the veil of social reality. It turned out that Alice was facing some bureaucratic obstacles to getting her own HRT refill, so I placed another AllDayChemist order on her behalf on 31 March, for five packs of E and two of spiro.
+
+------
+
+I [wrote about my credit-assignment ritual idea on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/). People know that institutions are flawed and like to perform gritty cynicism about it, but what if no one is gritty and cynical enough? People are _predatory animals_ built to _murder_ other forms of life for the benefit of ourselves, our family, and our friends. To the extent that we have this glorious technological civilization that keeps us safe and lies to us about there being higher ideals, it's because some of the predatory animals happen to stumbled upon behavioral patterns that mirror the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe.
+
+Science approximates Bayesian updating; markets
+
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics
+
+In artificial intelligence, the credit-assignment problem refers to the difficulty of attributing success or failure to particular actions
+
+[TODO: drafting credit-assignment ritual 10 March
+ * (science is updating; microeconomics isn't about humans; democracy is counterfactual civil war)
+ * We should be looking for more social technologies like that, but which also take into account that we're not agents, but animals that want to help our friends
+ * In analogy to funding solutions with retrospectivbe prizes (rather than funding a team in advance that might solve the problem), what if you did that on a personal scale—rewarding and praising people who helped you through a major life crisis
+ * In AI, the credit-assignment problem is about how you tell which of your actions helped under sparse rewards; similarly, here you want the people who resulted in the succesful navigation of the crisis to be strengthened
+]