-----
+I got my COVID-19 vaccine (the one-shot Johnson & Johnson) on 3 April 2021, so I was able to visit Valinor again on 17 April, for the first time in fourteen months.
+
+I had previously dropped by in January to deliver two new board books I had made, _Koios Blume Is Preternaturally Photogenic_ and _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_, but that had been a socially-distanced book delivery, not a "visit".
+
+The copy of _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_ that I sent to my sister in Cambridge differed slightly from the one I brought to Valinor. There was an "Other books by the author" list on the back cover with the titles of my earlier board books. In the Cambridge edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were printed in full: _Merlin Blume and the Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _Merlin Blume and the Steerswoman's Oath_, _Merlin Blume and the Sibling Rivalry_. Whereas in _Preternaturally Photogenic_ and the Valinor edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were abbreviated: _The Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _The Steerswoman's Oath_, _The Sibling Rivalry_.
+
+The visit on the seventeenth went fine. I hung out, talked, played with the kids. I had made a double-dog promise to be on my best no-politics-and-religion-at-the-dinner-table behavior.
+
+At dinner, there was a moment when Koios bit into a lemon and made a funny face, to which a bunch of the grown-ups said "Awww!" A few moments later, he went for the lemon again. Alicorn speculated that Koios had noticed that the grown-ups found it cute the first time, and the grown-ups were chastened. "Aww, baby, we love you even if you don't bite the lemon."
+
+It was very striking to me how, in the case of the baby biting a lemon, Alicorn _immediately_ formulated the hypothesis that what-the-grownups-thought-was-cute was affecting the baby's behavior, and everyone _immediately just got it_. I was tempted to say something caustic about how no one seemed to think a similar mechanism could have accounted for some of the older child's verbal behavior the previous year, but I kept silent; that was clearly outside the pervue of my double-dog promise.
+
+There was another moment when Mike made a remark about how weekends are socially constructed. I had a lot of genuinely on-topic cached witty philosophy banter about [how the social construction of concepts works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), that would have been completely innocuous if anyone _else_ had said it, but I kept silent because I wasn't sure if it was within my double-dog margin of error if _I_ said it.
+
+-----
+
In June 2021, MIRI Executive Director Nate Soares [wrote a Twitter thread aruging that](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273) "[t]he definitional gynmastics required to believe that dolphins aren't fish are staggering", which [Yudkowsky retweeted](https://archive.is/Ecsca).[^not-endorsements]
[^not-endorsements]: In general, retweets are not necessarily endorsements—sometimes people just want to draw attention to some content without further comment or implied approval—but I was inclined to read this instance as implying approval, partially because this doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone would retweet for attention-without-approval, and partially because of the working relationship between Soares and Yudkowsky.
"Crystal" was late (date was originally scheduled for 4 _p.m._, then she texted in the early afternoon to move it to 4:30, then finally texted "I'm here"/"Just valeting my car" at 5:04), and then it turned out that she was expecting to meet me at the hotel while I was waiting at the restaurant, but we met in the middle and walked back to the restaurant.
-It was nice—an opportunity to talk to someone who I otherwise wouldn't get to meet. Messaging someone like her on OKCupid would have felt "fake"; it felt more honest to just pay for her time.
+It was nice—an opportunity to talk to someone who I otherwise wouldn't get to meet. Messaging someone like her on OKCupid would have felt fake, and cold-approaching someone like her in public was unthinkable. It felt more honest to just pay for her time.
What do I mean by "someone like her"? Definitely not race _per se_. Rather ... non-nerds?—normies. I know how to talk to _the kinds of women I meet in "rationalist"/EA circles_, and even (very rarely) ask them on a date.[^romantic-poem] That doesn't feel fake, because they're just peers who happen to be female. (I may have renounced [the ideological psychological sex difference denialism of my youth](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), but I'm not _sexist_.)
I didn't tell her about the book review I was writing.
-We got undressed. I put on a condom, but I didn't let (have?) her touch my penis. That would have seemed unethical to me. I just wanted to admire her naked body, to touch, to cuddle. My own pleasure I could—handle myself. I kept telling her how beautiful she was—and that I was jealous. That I wanted to know what it would be like, if [by some miracle of technology or magic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories), I could look like her, be shaped like her. To have breasts like that (my gynecomastia from that HRT experiment four years before simply didn't compare), and a waist-to-hip ratio like that. (She said I could have her breasts; they were heavy.)
+We got undressed. I put on a condom, but I didn't let (have?) her touch my penis. That would have seemed unethical to me. I just wanted to admire her naked body, to touch, to cuddle. My own pleasure I could—handle myself. I kept telling her how beautiful she was—and that I was jealous. That I wanted to know what it would be like, if [by some miracle of technology or magic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories), I could look like her, be shaped like her. To have that face and that voice and those breasts (my gynecomastia from [that HRT experiment four years before](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) simply didn't compare) and that—waist-to-hip ratio. (She said I could have her breasts; they were heavy.)
-I'm not actually ultra-confident that what I call "ethics" didn't make things weirder for her. She had said that she had been treating her night job was an alternative to conventional dating, that she wasn't seeing anyone nonprofessionally. It's possible that to a woman in that position, a normal man who wants to use a woman in the normal way is actually preferable to the kind of creep I am?—in contrast to my hopes that the kind of creep I am would be gratifyingly easy job for the money.
+I'm not actually ultra-confident that what I call "ethics" didn't make things weirder for her. She had said that she had been treating her night job was an alternative to conventional dating, that she wasn't seeing anyone nonprofessionally. It's possible that to a woman in that position, a normal man who wants to use a woman in the normal way is actually preferable to the kind of creep I am?—in contrast to my hopes that satisfying the kind of creep I am would be gratifyingly easy job for the money.
(At any rate, I think it would have been _more_ creepy if I tried to convince her that I was "actually" a woman in some unspecified metaphysical sense.)
Before she left, as she was using the bathroom and washing up, I tried to say something about how I wished I could have a photo to remember her by, but I knew that it would be impolite to ask. (I had done my reading. "Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.") No photos, she said.
-I wanted to clarify that I wasn't _asking_, I was making a meta-comment about how I _wasn't_ asking—and then I realized that normie culture must not support that level of indirection. To her, there was no semantic difference between apophasis and actually saying the thing, even if my rationalist friends would have understood what I meant. Considering how Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying games relied on a similar abuse of indirection, I wondered if the normie way wasn't superior.
+I wanted to clarify that I wasn't _asking_, I was making a meta-comment about how I _wasn't_ asking—and then I realized that normie culture must not support that level of indirection. To her, there was no semantic difference between apophasis and actually saying the thing, even if my "rationalist" friends would have understood what I meant. Considering my frustration at Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying games, I wondered if the normie way wasn't superior.
------
+------
+
+The New York leg of my trip went fine.
[ TODO— New York
* I made $60 babysitting Zvi Mowshowitz's kids.
* met my NRx Twitter mutual, wore my Quillette shirt
- * he had been banned from Slate Star Codex "for no reason"
+ * he had been banned from Slate Star Codex ["for reasons of total personal caprice"](https://archive.md/sRfBj#selection-1633.27-1633.64)
* he offered to buy me a drink, I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that being drunk was the ritual for how men establish trust, so I had a glass and a half of wine
* it was so refreshing—not being constrained
* I explained the AI risk case; he mentioned black people having larger wingspan
-
* met Ben and his new girlfriend; Jessica wasn't around; he said the psych disaster was a betrayal, but a finite one; Ben's suggestion that if CfAR were serious, they'd hire me
]
At the end of the September 2021 Twitter altercation, I [said that I was upgrading my "mute" of @ESYudkowsky to a "block"](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435468183268331525). Better to just leave, rather than continue to hang around in his mentions trying (consciously [or otherwise](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)) to pick fights, like a crazy ex-girlfriend. (["I have no underlying issues to address; I'm certifiably cute, and adorably obsessed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMHz6FiRzS8) ...)
-I still had more things to say—a reply to the February 2021 post on pronoun reform, and the present memoir telling this Whole Dumb Story—but those could be written and published unilaterally. Given that we clearly weren't going to get to clarity and resolution, I didn't need to bid for any more of my ex-hero's attention and waste more of his time (valuable time, _limited_ time); I owed him that much.
+I did end up impulsively writing one more comment on one of his Facebook posts (with an aside at the top about whether that was OK), and Yudkowsky [said that Twitter looked worse for me than Facebook](/images/yudkowsky-twitter_is_worse_for_you.png)—the implication being that I _did_ still have commenting privileges as far as he was concerned. Good. I'm proud to be a crazy ex-girlfriend who knows she's crazy and _voluntarily_ deletes your number from her phone, rather than the crazy ex-girlfriend you need to block.
+
+I still had more things to say—a reply to the February 2021 post on pronoun reform, and the present memoir telling this Whole Dumb Story—but those could be written and published unilaterally. Given that we clearly weren't going to get to clarity and resolution, I didn't want to bid for any more of my ex-hero's attention and waste more of his time (valuable time, _limited_ time); I still owed him for creating me.
Leaving a personality cult is hard. As I struggled to write, I noticed that I was wasting a lot of cycles worrying about what he'd think of me, rather than saying the things I needed to say. I knew it was pathetic that my religion was so bottlenecked on _one guy_—particularly since the holy texts themselves (written by that one guy) [explicitly said not to do that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus)—but unwinding those psychological patterns was still a challenge.
-An illustration of the psychological dynamics at play: on an EA Forum post about demandingness objections to longtermism, Yudkowsky [commented that](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY) he was "broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism, in that case, as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seems to be the main alternative."
+An illustration of the psychological dynamics at play: on an EA Forum post about demandingness objections to longtermism, Yudkowsky [commented that](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY) he was "broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism [...] as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seem[ed] to be the main alternative."
I found the comment reassuring regarding the extent or lack thereof of my own contributions to the great common task—and that's the problem: I found the _comment_ reassuring, not the _argument_. It would make sense to be reassured by the claim (if true) that human psychology is such that I don't realistically have the option of devoting more than 25% of myself to the great common task. It does _not_ make sense to be reassured that _Eliezer Yudkowsky said he's broadly fine with it_. That's just being a personality-cultist.
-[TODO last email and not bothering him—
- * Although, as I struggled to write, I noticed I was wasting cycles worrying about what he'd think of me
- * January 2022, I wrote to him asking if he cared if I said negative things about him, that it would be easier if he wouldn't hold it against me, and explained my understanding of the privacy norm (Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?")
- * in retrospect, I was wrong to ask that. I _do_ hold it against him. And if I'm entitled to my feelings, isn't he entitled to his?
- * what is the exact scope of not bothering him? I actually had left a Facebook comment shortly after blocking him on Twitter, and his reply seemed to imply that I did have commenting privileges (yudkowsky-twitter_is_worse_for_you.png)
-]
+In January 2022, in an attempt to deal with my personality-cultist writing block, I sent him one last email asking if he particularly _cared_ if I published a couple blog posts that said some negative things about him. If he actually _cared_ about potential reputational damage to him from my writing things that I thought I had a legitimate interest in writing about, I would be _willing_ to let him pre-read the drafts before publishing and give him the chance to object to anything he thought was unfair ... but I'd rather agree that that wasn't necessary. I explained the privacy norms that I intended to follow—that I could explain _my_ actions, but had to Glomarize about the content of any private conversations that may or may not have occurred.
+
+It had taken me a while (with apologies for my atrocious sample-efficiency), but I was finally ready to give up on him; I thought the efficient outcome was that I should just tell my Whole Dumb Story on my blog and never bother him again. Since he probably _didn't_ particularly care (because it's not AGI alignment and therefore unimportant) and it would be psychologically easier on me if I knew he diidn't hold it against me, could I please have his advance blessing to just write and publish what I was thinking so I can get it all out of my system and move on with my life?
+
+If it helped—as far as _I_ could tell, I was only doing what _he_ taught me to do in 2007–2009: [carve reality at the joints](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [speak the truth even if your voice trembles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth), and [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) when you've got [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) (Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?").
+
+I can't say whether he replied (because if he did, that would be covered by the privacy norm), but I think sending the email helped me. Although maybe I was wrong to ask if he wouldn't hold it against me. If you read the text of this memoir, I'm clearly holding things against _him_. If he's not my caliph anymore (with the asymmetrical duties between ruler and subject, the higher to protect and the lower to serve), and I'm entitled to my feelings, isn't he entitled to his?
In February 2022, I finally managed to finish a draft of ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) (A year after the post it replies to! I did other things that year, probably.) It's long (12,000 words), because I wanted to be thorough and cover all the angles. (To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, when you strike at Eliezer Yudkowsky, _you must kill him._)
This parallel between dath ilan's sadism/masochism coverup and the autogynephilia coverup I had fought in real life, was something I was only intending to comment on in passing in the present memoir, rather than devoting any more detailed analysis to, but as I was having trouble focusing on my own writing in September 2022, I ended up posting some critical messages about dath ilan's censorship regime in the "Eliezerfic" Discord server for reader discussion of _Planecrash_, using the masochism coverup as my central example.
-What happens, I asked, to the occasional dath ilani free speech activists, with their eloquent manifestos arguing that Civilization would be better off coordinating on maps that reflect the territory, rather than coordinating to be a Keeper-managed zoo? (They _had_ to exist: in a medianworld centered on Yudkowsky, there are going to a few weirdos who are +2.5 standard deviations on "speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" and −2.5 standard deivations on love of clever plots; this seems less weird than negative utilitarians, who were [established to exist](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1789623#reply-1789623).) I _assumed_ they get dealt with in the end, but there had got to be an interesting story about someone who starts out whistleblowing small lies (which Exception Handling allows; they think it's cute, and it's "priced in" to the game they're playing), and then just keeps _escalating and escalating and escalating_ until Governance decides to unperson him.
+What happens, I asked, to the occasional dath ilani free speech activists, with their eloquent manifestos arguing that Civilization would be better off coordinating on maps that reflect the territory, rather than coordinating to be a Keeper-managed zoo? (They _had_ to exist: in a medianworld centered on Yudkowsky, there are going to a few weirdos who are +2.5 standard deviations on "speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" and −2.5 standard deivations on love of clever plots; this seems less weird than negative utilitarians, who were [established to exist](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1789623#reply-1789623).) I _assumed_ they get dealt with somehow in the end (exiled from most cities? involuntarily cryopreserved?), but there had got to be an interesting story about someone who starts out whistleblowing small lies (which Exception Handling allows; they think it's cute, and it's "priced in" to the game they're playing), and then just keeps _escalating and escalating and escalating_ until Governance decides to unperson him.
Although Yudkowsky participated in the server, I had reasoned that my participation didn't violate my previous intent not to bother him anymore, because it was a publicly-linked Discord server with hundreds of members. Me criticizing the story for the benefit of the _other_ 499 people in the chat room wouldn't generate a notification _for him_, the way it would if I sent him an email or replied to him on Twitter.
I wasn't buying the excuse that secret-Keeping practices that wouldn't be OK on Earth were somehow OK on dath ilan, which was asserted by authorial fiat to be sane and smart and benevolent enough to make it work. Or if I couldn't argue with authorial fiat: the reasons why it would be bad on Earth (even if it wouldn't be bad on dath ilan) are reasons why _fiction about dath ilan is bad for Earth_.
-And just—back in the 'aughts, Robin Hanson had this really great blog called _Overcoming Bias_. (You probably haven't heard of it, I said.) I wanted that _vibe_ back, of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008—the will to _just get the right answer_, without all this galaxy-brained hand-wringing about who the right answer might hurt.
+And just—back in the 'aughts, I said, Robin Hanson had this really great blog called _Overcoming Bias_. (You probably haven't heard of it.) I wanted that _vibe_ back, of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008—the will to _just get the right answer_, without all this galaxy-brained hand-wringing about who the right answer might hurt.
I would have expected a subculture descended from the memetic legacy of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 to respond to that tripe about protecting people from being destroyed by the truth as a form of "recognizing independent agency" with something like—
[TODO: regrets and wasted time
* Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surely—it's been a lot of wasted time. But it's also hard to say what I should have done differently; I could have listened to Ben more and lost faith Yudkowsky earlier, but he had earned a lot of benefit of the doubt?
+ * less drama (in my youth, I would have been proud that at least this vice was a feminine trait; now, I prefer to be good even if that means being a good man)
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff