Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Author: Zack M. Davis
-Date: 2023-05-01 05:00
+Date: 2023-07-01 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
In retrospect, I was not, entirely, feeling like a normal human. The world was starting to seem much more mysterious—and threatening—than it previously had. I told Sophia I wouldn't actually be able to make it to Portland that weekend (Subject: "I don't think I can make it to Portland/Wizardworld after all, sorry (eom)"). I presumably told my work I wouldn't be in at all anymore this week.
-I want to be fair to my past self. In retrospect, it's clear that I was having a paranoid nervous breakdown due to stress and sleep deprivation. Looking back at a lot of the things I thought at the time, I no longer think those thoughts were correct. Actually, they were pretty crazy. But in a world where all the _sane_ people were insisting that men could be women by means of saying so, can you blame me for finding it hard to tell? If the paranoid hypotheses I was starting to generate didn't match ordinary social reality, how much reason did I have to believe that ordinary social reality was actually in the right?
+I want to be fair to my past self. In retrospect, it's clear that I was having a paranoid nervous breakdown due to stress and sleep deprivation. Looking back at a lot of the things I was thinking at the time, I no longer think those thoughts were correct. Actually, they were pretty crazy. You might hope that people who are going crazy for largely "biological" reasons (like stress and sleep deprivation) would notice this, and correct for it by trusting their own thoughts less, deferring more to ordinary social reality when it disagreed with their own altered perceptions.
+
+But in a world where all the _sane_ people were insisting that men could be women by means of saying so, can you blame me for finding it hard to tell? If the paranoid hypotheses I was starting to generate didn't match ordinary social reality, how much reason did I really have to believe that ordinary social reality was actually in the right?
I don't want to say that I was having persecution _delusions_, exactly—just that persecution hypotheses were much more _salient_ than they usually were; I was a little bit fixated on the idea of scary men coming to kill me. Somehow, I developed the idea that an HSTS transsexual I had been corresponding with was actually AGP and in denial. I sent her an email trying to gently hint about it (Subject: "one last thing before I disappear for a while"), and then I felt scared—scared that she would she would track me down and take revenge? In a followup email, I disclaimed that I was kind of losing my mind right now, and disavowed the offensive hypothesis. ("But if you're sure, I believe you!") She replied, mentioning that she also questions people's self-reports of being HSTS. She said that her husband had a knack for spotting AGPs, and did not find them attractive, calling them "cross dressers on steroids." I said I was afraid that the husband wanted to kill me.
I sent some delusional emails to Eliezer Yudkowsky (Subjects: "positive reinforcement! But, updating away from you and towards Paul Christiano and Michael Vassar (eom)" and "You and Greg Egan had that public fight on Baez's blog! Was that staged on purpose? If not, you should update towards Egan (eom)"), and some probably nice and non-concerning emails to each of my parents (Subjects: "You've been a good [mother/father] to me in ways that I didn't always understand at the time (eom)")
-At 1:17 _p.m._, I sent my boss an email saying that I was thinking of taking a sabbatical—leaving the company to persue another project (_i.e._, this blog)—but that I'd like to talk to him as soon as possible to think about the decision together. Without waiting for a reply, I got on a train to San Francisco.
+At 1:17 _p.m._, I sent my boss an email saying that I was thinking of taking a sabbatical—leaving the company to persue another project (_i.e._, this blog)—but that I'd like to talk to him as soon as possible to think about the decision together. Without waiting too long for a reply, I soon got on a train to San Francisco.
------
The first time I went insane from sleep deprivation, in 2013, I remember having a distinct mental sensation where two words kept running through my head, over and over. That time, the words had been "science" and "female." Maybe a Society with a more advanced discipline of psychiatry would be able to pinpoint the nature and origin of this symptom more exactly, but I suspect it might be a real regularity, because around this time, it started happening to me again. This time, the words were "cooperate" and "defect".
-I wandered around downtown San Francisco, and used my phone to repeatedly message the word "Cooperate" to various people—to "Chaya" (six times), to Ben (five times), to "Noreen" (six times), to "Wilhelm" (twice), to my insufficiently requited love "Beatrice" (five times), to Ziz (six times), to Brent Dill (five times) ... a few other people. (I was imagining the act of saying or sending the word being analogous to playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)
-
-[TODO: review "Chaya" messages and timestamps
-I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip (15:39:48)
-She asked me to clarify whether I meant I was on psychadelics, or had gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said. (15:44:42)
-]
+I wandered around downtown San Francisco, and used my phone to repeatedly message the word "Cooperate" to various people—to "Chaya" (six times), to Ben (five times), to "Noreen" (six times), to "Wilhelm" (twice), to my insufficiently requited love "Beatrice" (five times), to Ziz (six times), to Brent Dill (five times) ... a few other people. (I was imagining the act of saying or sending the word constituting an act of playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)
-[TODO: review Ben messages and timestamps
+"I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip", I told "Chaya" and Ben. "Chaya" asked me to clarify whether I meant I had taken acid, or gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said.
-(Feb 16 2017 15:51:32)
-I remember being afraid that the thing which (I had decided) had happened to Eliezer Yudkowsky and to Scott Alexander that made them such good writers was now happening to me, a phenomenon that would bring terrible suffering along with the awakening into genius. I messaged Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet".
+I remember being afraid that the thing which (I had decided) had happened to Eliezer Yudkowsky and to Scott Alexander that made them such good writers was now happening to me, a phenomenon that would bring indescribable suffering along with an awakening into genius. I messaged Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet".
-]
+At 1:47 _p.m._, I had messaged Ziz, "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu; that's why I've chosen the confessor route"—a reference to Yudkowsky's story ["Three Worlds Collide"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT), in which an alien rationalist trained for command is contrasted with their human counterpart, tasked only with telling the truth.
-[TODO: review Ziz messages and timestamps]
+[(I don't do policy.)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)
+After I asked for "positive reinforcement" and sent some "Cooperate" messages at 3:15 _p.m._, Ziz responded with some heartwarming anecdotes about how others thought of me. She said that Michael Vassar had been talking approvingly about me, in the context of a war between gaslighting _vs._ having the ability to think, that I was one of the three fronts in "the community" that the war was playing out on: Sarah _vs._ Ben, Rob _vs._ Ben Todd, and Zack Davis _vs._ the world.[^war-fronts]
-Thu Feb 16 15:15:53 I message Ziz with "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu; that's why I've chosen the confessor route" / then "I need positive reinforcement" / "Cooperate" / "Cooperate"
-Ziz: Vassar was talking about you recently approvingly, having read your facebook wall. Something about a war between being able to think and gaslighting.
-Like he named you as one of three fronts the war is playing out on. Jack also seemed to agree. \"Sarah vs Ben, Rob vs Ben Todd, Zack Davis vs the world Thu Feb 16 2017 16:06:42 GMT-0800
+[^war-fronts]: I think "Rob" was referring to Rob Wiblin. When I asked Michael later how Sarah and Ben were in conflict (Subject: "request for clarification re war fronts"), he said that Sarah and Ben were allies and that he wasn't sure how the misunderstanding happened.
Eventually I made it to my office. My boss said he hadn't seen my email about wanting to meet.
+At this point, my memories aren't very clear or detailed. I think I said something that caused my coworkers to be very concerned for me, but I remember being very careful about the wording, to make sure I _wasn't_ saying one of the things that would give people cause to lock me up. I think it was something like, "I think I'm in the mental state that causes people to perform the verbal behavior of saying they want to commit suicide."
+In retrospect, I don't think people pay attention to such distinctions.
+A coworker volunteered to secure me a ride home. There was some question about whether the relevant "home" was my apartment in Berkeley, or the house in Walnut Creek where my mother lived, and where I had lived until just ten months before. As a newly awakened-social conservative, I intuited that staying with family was the right choice. (I was wrong.) At 6:22 _p.m._, I sent an email from my work computer to my parents, Anna, and Michael (Subject: "I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)").
+We still owned the house. My coworker took an Uber with me to the house in Walnut Creek, and talked to my mother.
+(Meanwhile, Ziz had made her way to my apartment. "Brought chocolate, allegedly good against dementors," she messaged at 5:43 _p.m._. "Believe I can cooperate better if I can see your face." I was apparently in no state to appreciate the gesture; I messaged back "OK" a couple times when she asked to be let in, and confirmed which address she was at, even though I wasn't there. My flatmate eventually arrived and let her in.)
-"I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)" 16 February, 1822 (and that was the last email until the 21st because I was in the psych ward)
+I tried to sleep that night, at my mom's house. It wasn't very effective. I was scared of being attacked by criminals. Sure, I _remembered_ feeling physically secure at almost all times in my life; I _remembered_ Walnut Creek being a safe place. But how trustworthy were memories from life inside an ideological bubble? Maybe people like me got assaulted and brutalized all the time, but our culture had trained us to block out all the evidence and even memories that good smart nice liberals _prefered not to see_.
-Thu Feb 16 16:39:06 PST 2017: Ziz says, "Am still here. Brought chocolate, allegedly good against dementors. Believe I can cooperate better if I can see your face."
-Thu Feb 16 18:18:43 PST 2017: Ziz says "Watson returned. Am currently in ur house, using ur wifi. Are you coming here? Am unclear on your intent, but am happy to sit here and work on stupid resume padding stuff for a while if you're coming."
+[TODO— check if KP records corroborate this happening on 17 February?
+Mom taking me to Kaiser, me resisting, saying over and over again, "People are better at taking care of each other than institutions"; having quasi-religious visions of prying seeing AGP as a separate taxon, and negotiating to pry apart the concept
+]
-Fri Feb 17 14:19, "I'm so confused I just woke up / I'm so sorry"
+I sent some more messages from my phone in the afternoon. I couldn't sleep because I was scared, I told "Chaya". I had built up a distinction between social reality and physical reality, and I didn't know what to do now that it had been undermined.
-previous psych episode, repeating two words, Science and Female; but this time, it was Cooperate and Defect
+I was so sorry, I told Ben. I wanted to be part of the coalition, but I was so confused, and I said "defect" a bunch of times. I was scared that my boss (who, incidentally, was black) was going to come kill me.
-to Ben: "I'm so sorry; I want to be part of the coalition but I'm so confused; and the fact that I was confused made me say Defect a bunch of time" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:23:53
+Ben said he wouldn't ask a trading partner to not _consider_ defecting; that would be silly. He pointed out that saying the word "defect" is like wearing black robes; it's not the same as the thing it represents. My boss was not personally coming to kill me. ("There's probably some symbolic truth to the worry but it might not resemble the literal content at all and is almost certainly not urgent on the order of hours".)
------
+I got the idea to go to my apartment in Berkeley, and started walking to the Walnut Creek BART station. On my way, I felt a surge of energy, a second wind despite my exhaustion. "I just realized that you're allowed to not be submissive all the time", I told Ben. "I didn't know this before and it feels like an impossible superpower".
+I was stopped by cops before entering the Walnut Creek BART station. (I hadn't told my mother I was leaving; when she noticed my absence, she panicked and called 911. I'm impressed that they found me so quickly.) Questioned by the cops, I explained the situation: that I was a software engineer going through a stressful time, that I had stayed at my mother's house here in Walnut Creek last night, but that now I was trying to get a train to go to my apartment in Berkeley. I said that I had been awake for a couple days. (That's not _normal_, they said.) I said, truthfully, that I wasn't on drugs, but I didn't expect them to believe me—and, somehow, felt as if I were optimizing for them not to believe me.
+I tried to talk the cops into taking me back to my mom's house, not realizing that that's not how their procedure works. In my last message to Ben before getting locked up, at 3:19 _p.m._, I said, "You can use police cars as Ubers????"
+
+--------
+
+[TODO psych ward—
+ * The thing about being institutionalized, is that it wouldn't be such an ordeal if it happened when you were well. Getting kidnapped by strangers, having to spend three days in a bad hotel and do some kindergarten-like activities, would be a mere inconvenience while well. But _while having a psychotic break_ is the _worst time_ to be kidnapped. I often have a sense of "where I am" geographically (not just my immediate surroundings, but also knowing how my surroundings relate to the world, what city I'm in; what freeways connect to that city; doesn't exist when kidnapped)
+ * Even things that are for your benefit during the check-in process are hard to appreciate as such—I remember them counting my money in front of me, and feeling like it was an Orwellian exericse to undermine my connection to reality; maybe, I didn't trust that _she_ knew how to count?
+ * trying to complain to the staff—got told to speak to patient's rights; I didn't even bother, because I didn't think that was real; a later SSC claims that patient's rights is supposed to be adversarial, but that wasn't clear from the inside; I'm reminded of that AmRen article [article by a public defender](https://archive.is/HUkzY); I empathize with the defendant
+ * First facility—separate rooms with beds for men and women; me tapping at the walls trying to teach; pacing, thinking I was one of the most important people in the world
+ * Taken to a separate facility; _very_ lucky to get my own room
+ * paper claims that I "self presented due to your suicidal thoughts"; this isn't true; getting stopped by the cops while trying to
+ * "Now memories are blurred, and their faces are obscured"
+ * racist/sexist intuitions: avoid the gaze of males; males physically smaller than me are OK
+ * a moment of solidarity with a black male smaller than me?
+ * beliefs about evolutionary psychology (make friends, avoid enemies) very salient
+ * fragmented memory: Joy intentionally hurt herself while I was trying to help her, football coach-like orderly said he was only trying to help; Joy says, this never happened
+ * black woman named "Tone" asked what we had for breakfast
+ * black man saying something about his mother, I explained that his mother probably did love him, he got angry, and I hid behind my door
+ * doing better than in 2013 precisely because I was modeling the place as a prison
+ * wanted to avoid taking medication, put on a magician-like "show" to nurse to try to trick her, it didn't work
+ * I ended up with a booklet that claims I have the right to refuse medication, but this isn't actually true in practice
+ * asking Anna on the phone whether I was a political prisoner "Really?" "Really really?" followups (if I were a political prisoner; she might not be able to say so)
+ * mother visited, mother was cranky, Michael Vassar visited; Michael said that rape doesn't really happen in this kind of facility, and I believed him; I handed him papers (which I thought was necessary to escape the powers that be)
+ * vision of needing to pull the fire alarm?
+ * other males pacing the way I pace
+ * my reports were not reliable; I thought Vassar pretended to be a doctor; I thought one of the other inmates had a security code
+ * trope-awareness of being a psych patient; distrustful of other psych patient; thought I could subtly leave clues that I was a Jesus-analogue (as a Jewish male with long hair) to discourage people from murdering me (because the Christianity meme says you're not supposed to do that); I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my 72-hour (== 3 days) evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one.)
+ * my father actually did pick me up three days later!
+]
+
+-----
/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff