Author: Zack M. Davis
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
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, madness, sex differences, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
> MUGATU
>
> —[_Zoolander_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbKBWtoH93Q) (paraphrased)
-Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told you about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which, at the time, I thought of as a weird private quirk about me that was clearly not the same thing as "actually" being transgender, and which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about—and also about how I used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these great Sequences of blog posts about normatively correct reasoning by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which explained how beliefs are for making predictions about reality (such that it's immoral to _not_ believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are a real thing), and (incidentally) why my obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman was philosophically fraught if not outright delusional, separately from its not being remotely achieveable with forseeable technology.
+Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told you about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which, at the time, I thought of as a weird private quirk about me that was clearly not the same thing as "actually" being transgender, and which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about—and also about how I used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these great Sequences of blog posts about normatively correct reasoning by someone named Eliezer Yudkowsky, which explained how beliefs are for making predictions about reality (such that it's immoral to _not_ believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are a real thing), and (incidentally) [why my obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman was philosophically fraught if not outright delusional](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), [separately from its not being remotely achieveable with forseeable technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions).
-In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", I told you about how, in 2016, everyone of significance in my normatively-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly decided that guys like me actually are women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, prompting me to do some reading and interviews that led me to the belief that my weird obsessive erotic fantasy _was_ the same thing (rather, the more common of at least two such things) as actually being transgender, after all—prompting me to start this then-pseudonymous secret blog to write about how the entire educated world had been systematically lying to me about the most important thing in my life for the last twelve years. (I also made arrangements to start feminizing hormone replacement therapy. Everyone else was doing it. Why should I miss out on account of being more self-aware?)
+In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", I told you about how, in 2016, everyone of significance in my normatively-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly decided that guys like me actually _are_ women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, prompting me to do some reading and interviews that led me to the belief that my weird obsessive erotic fantasy _was_ the same thing (rather, the more common of at least two such things) as actually being transgender, after all—prompting me to start this then-pseudonymous secret blog to write about how the entire educated world had been systematically lying to me about the most important thing in my life for the last twelve years. (I also made arrangements to start feminizing hormone replacement therapy. Everyone else was doing it. Why should I miss out on account of being more self-aware?)
But, you know, I didn't want to be a _fanatic_ about it. The previous post leaves off with me promising myself not to talk about this stuff under my real name through June 2017. That was what my pseudonymous secret blog was for.
------
-As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Thomas", who provided a refreshing contrary perspective to the things I was hearing from everyone else. When the rationalists were anxious that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended an increased risk of nuclear war, "Thomas" pointed out that Clinton was actually much more hawkish towards Russia.
+As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Thomas", who provided a refreshing contrary perspective to the things I was hearing from everyone else. For example, when the rationalists were anxious that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended an increased risk of nuclear war, "Thomas" pointed out that Clinton was actually much more hawkish towards Russia.
-I shared with him an early draft of ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), which fleshed out his idea from back in March about political forces optimizing for people to adopt an identity as a persecuted trans person.
+I shared an early draft of ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) with him, which fleshed out his idea from back in March 2016 about political forces incentivizing people to adopt an identity as a persecuted trans person.
-He identified the "talking like like an AI" phenomenon as possession by an egegore, a group-mind that held sway over the beliefs of the humans comprising it. The function of the traditional wisdom of having kings and priests was about putting an individual human with judgement in the position of being able to tame, control, or at least negotiate with egregores. Individualism was flawed because [individual humans couldn't be rational on their own](http://web.archive.org/web/20160319033509/http://sett.com/aesop/memes-are-people-humans-arent). Being an individualist in an environment full of egregores was like being an attractive woman alone at a bar, yelling, "I'm single!"—practically calling out for unaligned entities to wear down your psychological defenses and subvert your will.
+He identified the "talking like like an AI" phenomenon that I mentioned in the post as possession by an egegore, a group-mind that held sway over the beliefs of the humans comprising it. The function of traditional leaders like kings and priests was to put an individual human with judgement in the position of being able to tame, control, or at least negotiate with egregores. Individualism was flawed because [individual humans couldn't be rational on their own](http://web.archive.org/web/20160319033509/http://sett.com/aesop/memes-are-people-humans-arent). Being an individualist in an environment full of egregores was like being an attractive woman alone at a bar yelling, "I'm single!"—practically calling out for unaligned entities to wear down your psychological defenses and subvert your will.
-Rationalists implicitly seek [Aumann-like agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem) with perceived peers, he explained: when the other person is visibly unmoved by one's argument, there's a tendency to think "hm, they must know something I don't" and update towards the other's position. Without an understanding of egregoric possession, this is disastrous: the possessed person never budges on anything significant, and the rationalist slowly gets eaten by their egregore.
+Rationalists implicitly seek [Aumann-like agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem) with perceived peers, he explained: when the other person is visibly unmoved by one's argument, there's a tendency to think, "huh, they must know something I don't" and update towards the other's position. Without an understanding of egregoric possession, this is disastrous: the possessed person never budges on anything significant, and the rationalist slowly gets eaten by their egregore.
-I was nonplussed: I had heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this was ridiculous. The "egregore" framing was an interesting alternative way of looking at things, but it seemed kind of—nonlocal. There were inhuman patterns in human agency that we wanted to build models of, but it seemed like he was attributing too much agency to the patterns. In contrast, "This idea creates incentives to propogate itself" was [a mechanism I understood](https://devinhelton.com/meme-theory.html). (Or was I being like one of those dumb Dawkins critics who protests that genes aren't _actually_ selfish? We know that, but the anthropomorphic language is convenient.)
+I was nonplussed: I had heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this was ridiculous. This "egregore" framing was an interesting alternative way of looking at things, but it seemed kind of—nonlocal. There were inhuman patterns in human agency that we wanted to build models of, but it seemed like he was attributing too much agency to the patterns. In contrast, "This idea creates incentives to propogate itself" was [a mechanism I understood](https://devinhelton.com/meme-theory.html). (Or was I being like one of those dumb critics of [Richard Dawkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene) who protest that genes aren't _actually_ selfish? We know that, but the anthropomorphic language is convenient.)
-I supposed I was sort of modeling "Thomas" as being possessed by the neoreaction egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist egregore.
+I supposed I was modeling "Thomas" as being possessed by the neoreaction egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist egregore.
-He was a useful sounding board when I was frustrated with my so-far-mostly private trans discussions.
+He was a useful sounding board when I was frustrated with my so-far-mostly-private trans discussions.
-"If people with fragile identities weren't useful as a proxy weapon for certain political coalitions, then they would have no incentive to try to play language police and twist people's arms into accepting their identities," he said.
+"If people with fragile identities weren't useful as a proxy weapon for certain political coalitions, then they would have no incentive to try to play language police and twist people's arms into accepting their identities," he said once.
"OK, but I still want my own breasts," I said.
"Thomas" didn't think this was feasible. The problem, he explained, was that "hypomasculine men are often broken people who idolize feminists, and worship the first one who throws a few bones of sympathy towards men". (He had been in this category, so he could make fun of them.) Thus, in feminist communities, the female person would win a priestly battle, regardless of quality of arguments. It wasn't Ozy's fault, really. She[^ozy-pronouns] wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.
-[^ozy-pronouns]: The feminine pronoun in this paragraph reflects the fact that "Thomas" and I used feminine pronouns for Ozy in our private messages. I don't misgender people _in public!_ But I do argue that public summaries of private conversations are not, technically, the same thing.
+[^ozy-pronouns]: The feminine pronoun in this paragraph reflects the fact that "Thomas" and I felt free to use natal-sex pronouns for nonbinary people in our private conversations. I don't misgender people _in public!_ But I do argue that public summaries of private conversations are not, technically, the same thing.
-I mentioned that there was a woman who had been hanging around the "rationalist"[^scare-quotes] community despite being mildly contemptuous of our disrespect for academic philosophy, who was very trigger-happy with sexism accusations, who I privately thought would be _less_ respected if she were a man making similar-quality arguments—but there was no way to give her feedback on the matter without alienating her. I supposed that in a NRx (_i.e._, evil) space, they would probably say, "who cares if you alienate the bitch". But she was a _woman paying attention to us_.
+I mentioned that there was a woman who had been hanging around the "rationalist"[^scare-quotes] community despite being mildly contemptuous of our disrespect for academic philosophy, who was a bit trigger-happy with sexism accusations, who I privately thought would be _less_ respected if she were a man making similar-quality arguments—but there was no way to give her feedback on the matter without alienating her. I supposed that in a neoreactionary (_i.e._, evil) space, they would probably say, "Who cares if you alienate the bitch?". But she was a _woman paying attention to us_.
[^scare-quotes]: I mentioned that these days, I just used scare quotes rather than tacking the word _aspiring_ in front.
-"Thomas" summarized the NRx response:
+"Thomas" summarized the neoreactionary response:
> 1. Women should never have been weaponiz[ed] by democracy into being cultural/corporate commissars
> 2. Why is an unmarried woman making a nuisance of herself in a mostly male community? Where is her family? Why is she not married yet?
-I said that #2 still seemed monstrously unfair to the non-nuisance woman contributing to the community's endeavor; even if biology had something to do with their rarity, not giving them a chance was way worse than the problem thereby solved (with respect to my historically aberrant pro-androgyny utility function that I would defend to the death).
+I said that #2 still seemed monstrously unfair to the non-nuisance women contributing to the community's shared endeavor; even if biology had something to do with their rarity, not giving them a chance was way worse than any problem solved by excluding them. (Worse with respect to my historically aberrant pro-androgyny utility function that I would defend to the death.)
-"Thomas" said that exceptions could be made for intellectually eminent women at the discretion of the authorities, but that the vast majority of young women didn't have the temperment to participate in male communities, instead having incentives to behave like busybodies, cause drama, and test males for mates. This wasn't something "Thomas" had previously wanted to believe, even in his anti-feminist (but not yet fully reactionary) days. But once you understood how past generations would have seen certain behavior, upon seeing it in the wild, among people who claim to be "above" gender roles—it was hard to unsee.
+"Thomas" said that exceptions could be made for intellectually eminent women at the discretion of the authorities, but that the vast majority of young women didn't have the temperment to participate in male communities, instead having incentives to be busybodies, cause drama, and test males for mates. This wasn't something "Thomas" had previously wanted to believe, even in his anti-feminist (but not yet fully reactionary) days. But once you understood how past generations would have seen certain behavior upon seeing it in the wild, among people who claim to be "above" gender roles—it was hard to unsee.
I said that I was done pretending to be stupid; I didn't want to not see the pattern if the pattern was there, even if I wasn't going to adopt the solutions of our ancestors.
("Restore patriarchy!" "_Never!_ I mean, I see the point you're trying to make, but the real solution is embryo selection for more nerd girls!")
-When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Thomas" mentioned it as a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the evolutionarily stable strategies of relating had been re-labeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
+When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Thomas" mentioned it as a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the traditional (_i.e._, evolutionarily stable) strategies of relating had been re-labeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
-He advised me that if I did find an androgynous women I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a small "dab" of patriarchy worked better than none.
+He advised me that if I did find an androgynous woman I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a small "dab" of patriarchy worked better than none.
-(What I really wanted was to have the kind of meta psychological engineering conversation I was having with "Thomas", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)
+(What I really wanted was to have the kind of meta psychological engineering conversation I was now having with "Thomas", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)
I wasn't immediately sold on all these heresies—but I was _listening_. Even if I didn't like the theory and didn't trust the theory, I admitted that it was refreshing that someone _actually had a theory_, which was more than you could say for the blank slate.
In a Facebook thread in January 2017 about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, "Helen" said something about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria.
-I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back out of security fastidiousness, but really (I soon let slip) because I was angry about the deceptively pompous Facebook comment: _maybe_ it wouldn't take so much _metacognition_ if someone would just mention the _other_ diagnostic criterion!
+I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back out of security fastidiousness, but really (I quickly let slip) because I was angry about the deceptively pompous Facebook comment: _maybe_ it wouldn't take so much _metacognition_ if someone would just mention the _other_ diagnostic criterion!
She sent me a photo of the key with half of the blade snapped off (next to set of pliers, which had presumably done the snapping), sent me $8 (presumably for the cost of the key), and told me to go away.
I followed it up the next morning with a hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends".[^terf-allusion] As a transhumanist, I believed that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, "being a woman", but apparently I felt like being vague) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not _propagate backwards in time_. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a _goddamned moral responsibility_ to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by _crazy people who think they can edit the past_.
-[^terf-allusion]: The initial letters were a [deliberate allusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Trans-exclusionary_radical_feminists_(TERFs)).
+[^terf-allusion]: The initial letters were a [deliberate allusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism).
It got 170 comments (!), a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman whom I'll call "Noreen" (who I had _also_ had an exchange with in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).
-------
-You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an h-index of 90" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
+You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an [h-index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) of 73" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
In previous months, I had sent thanks-for-your-work fan mail to Blanchard and to Bailey, and later sent Bailey a link to this blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message"). That seemed to have gone over quite well (Bailey shared the link with Blanchard, who [tweeted a link and screenshot–quote](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160)), such that I felt relatively less presumptuous writing to to Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence (and Kevin Hsu and James Cantor for good measure) about my new political project, where I was in favor of the right to transition on morphological freedom grounds, but believed strongly that in order to help people make the best decisions, it was important to be realistic about the limitations of the existing technology and about what the underlying psychological condition actually is. To the extent that my attempts to be realistic put me in the minority of elite opinion in Berkeley, I feared for our collective epistemology.
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.
+It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has some 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_.
+[^heinlein-agp]: [TODO] Some of this is circumstantial [...] The scenes in chapter XXIX of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where Michael Valentine Smith uses his telepathic powers [...] sex change in "All You Zombies" [...] _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 _I Will Fear No Evil_ 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_.)
(Nice people doing their jobs!)
-Lex seemed to agree with my model, but also agree with "Kyle"'s action recommendations: the general model was that systems are corrupt and unFriendly, responding at every level to incentives for breaking things in order for someone to gain a little more personal power, while most individuals wanted to be good and were just going with the flow. If we could change the flow, they might help us, but they weren't going to see the error of their ways when even _Scott_ had written about lacking the agency to not commit people who shouldn't be committed.
+Lex seemed to agree with my model, but also agree with "Kyle"'s action recommendations: the general model was that systems are corrupt and unFriendly, responding at every level to incentives for breaking things in order for someone to gain a little more personal power, while most individuals wanted to be good and were just going with the flow. If we could change the flow, they might help us, but they weren't going to see the error of their ways when even _Scott_ had [written about lacking the agency to not commit people who shouldn't be committed](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/05/the-right-to-waive-your-rights/).
I said that I _didn't care_ about not making life unpleasant for people trying to do their absolute best in a difficult job. I wanted "Roberta" out of prison. If the best way of accomplishing that goal was to be nice and make sure a lot of receptionists and nurses feel good about themselves, great. If the best way of accomplishing that goal means meant making a lot of receptionists and nurses feel miserable and guilty to the point where they have their own psychotic break and get locked up by their employer, I was _okay with that outcome_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff