I mean, it is bad, but the fact that it's bad, isn't what's bad about it.
-What's bad is the—deficit of self-awareness? There are views according to which my work is bad. I can imagine various types of critic forcing themselves to read this blog with horror and disappointment, muttering, "Doesn't he" [(or "Doesn't she", depending on the critic)](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) "know how that _looks?_" And if nothing else, I aspire to _know how it looks_.
+<a id="knowing-how-that-looks"></a>What's bad is the—deficit of self-awareness? There are views according to which my work is bad. I can imagine various types of critic forcing themselves to read this blog with horror and disappointment, muttering, "Doesn't he" [(or "Doesn't she", depending on the critic)](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) "know how that _looks?_" And if nothing else, I aspire to _know how it looks_.
I don't get the sense that _TransCat_ knows how it looks. Our hero is a teenage boy named Knave (the same first name as our author) in Mountain View, California in the year 200X, who discovers a cat-ears hat that magically transforms him into a girl when worn. While transformed, he—she—fights evildoers, like a pervy guy at Fanime who was covertly taking upskirt photos, or a busybody cop who suddenly turns out to be a lizard person. Knave develops a crush on a lesbian at school named "Chloie" (which I guess is a way you could spell _Chloë_ if you don't know how to type a [diaeresis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic))), and starts wearing the cat hat more often (taking on "Cat" as a girl-mode name), hoping to get closer to Chloie. Cat and Chloie find they enjoy spending time together, until one day, when Cat makes some physical advances—and discovers, to her surprise, that Chloie has a penis. Chloie punches her and runs off.
And just—what does any of that _mean?_ What is an "identity"? How can you "be trans" _without hormone replacement therapy?_ I was pretty social-justicey as a teenager, too, but somehow my indoctrination never included this _nonsense_: when I was a teenage boy fantasizing about being a teenage girl, I'm pretty sure _I knew I was pretending_.
-Is is an East Bay _vs._ South Bay thing? Is it of critical importance whether the _X_ in the year 200X equals '4' or '8'? Or, as a friend of the blog suggests, is the relevant difference not when you grew up, but whether you _left_ social justice, or continued to be [shaped by the egregore](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) through the 2010s?—the author anachronistically projecting elements of the current year's ideology onto the 200Xs that we both experienced.
+Is it an East Bay _vs._ South Bay thing? Is it of critical importance whether the _X_ in the year 200X equals '4' or '8'? Or, as a friend of the blog suggests, is the relevant difference not when you grew up, but whether you _left_ social justice, or continued to be [shaped by the egregore](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) through the 2010s?—the author anachronistically projecting elements of the current year's ideology onto the 200Xs that we both experienced.
And just—there are _so_ many interesting things you could do with this premise, that you can only do if you admit that biological sex is real and "identity" is not. (Otherwise, why would you need the magic hat?) The situation where Knave-as-Cat is pursuing Chloie as a lesbian, but Chloie doesn't know that Cat is Knave—that's interesting! I want to know how the story would have gone, if Chloie (cis) found out that her girlfriend was actually a boy wearing a magic hat: would she accept it, or would she feel betrayed? Why would you throw away that story, but for the ethnic narcissism of an ["everyone is [our sexual minority]"](/2021/Sep/there-should-be-a-closetspace-lease-bound-crossover-fic/) dynamic?
[^panic]: Or rather, I _did_ panic from mid-2016 to mid-2021, and this and the next three posts are the retrospective accounting of that panic, a memoir written in the ashes of my defeat.
-But at the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left [a careful comment in the Facebook thread](/images/facebook_etle_comment.png) (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
+But at the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left [a careful comment in the Facebook thread](/images/facebook_etle_comment.png) (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking.
-[TODO: conversation with "Wilhelm"]
+A casual friend who I'll call "Wilhelm" messaged me, complementing me on my comment.
+
+For background, "Wilhelm" was a fellow old-time _Less Wrong_-er who I had met in the South Bay back in 'aught-nine, while I was doing an "internship"[^internship] in Santa Clara for what was then still the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[^siai] Relevantly, "Wilhelm" was also autogynephilic (and aware of it under that name). The first time I had ever gone crossdressing in public was at a drag event with him in 2010.
+
+As it happened, I had just messaged him a few days earlier, on 22 March 2016, for the first time in four and a half years. (My opening message: "Ray Blanchard's Twitter feed is kind of disappointing, but I'm not sure what I was expecting".) I confided to him that I was seeing an escort on Saturday the twenty-sixth[^twenty-sixth] because the dating market was looking pretty hopeless, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and three female friends agreed that it was not unethical.[^unethical]
+
+[^internship]: "Internship" is in scare quotes, because the Singularity Institute at the time was not the kind of organization that offered formal _internships_; what I mean is that there was a house in Santa Clara where a handful of people were trying to do Singularity-relevant work, and I was allowed to sleep in the garage and also try to do work, without being paid.
+
+[^siai]: The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky [decided that AI would kill everyone by default (and that this was a bad thing)](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG). People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually rebranded as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
+
+[^twenty-sixth]: Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see from the dates (26 March 2016) that my date with the escort was the same day as the "20% of the ones with penises" post (and my comment thereon and following conversation with "Wilhelm"). They hadn't been stored in my long-term episodic memory as "the same day", likely because the Facebook post only seems overwhelmingly significant in retrospect; at the time, I did not realize that I would spend the
+
+[^unethical]: Another ethically mitigating factor is that the escort had a blog where she wrote in detail about how much she liked her job. The blog posts seemed like credible evidence that she wasn't being morally-relevantly coerced into it. Of course all escorts have to put up marketing copy that makes it sound like they enjoy their time with their clients even if they privately hate it, but the blog seemed "real", not part of the role.
+
+ (I didn't _have sex_ with her, obviously. _That_ would be unethical.)
+
+[TODO: Wilhelm's "sharp right turn", and ETLE/Moloch comment]
A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California), closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
_ psychiatric disaster
With internet available—
-✓ record of Yudkowsky citing TDT as part of decision to prosecute Emerson?
-✓ Scott vs. Ben on Drowning
-✓ Ray and D. Xu's comments on "The Incentives"
-✓ comments on "Self-Consciousness wants to make"
-✓ tussle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality"
-✓ The End (of Sequences)
+_ "Tiresias" comment
+_ year of MIRI rebrand; think it was 2013; check before inserting (for ^siai footnote)
+_ stats of SIAI vs. SingInst hits (for ^siai footnote)
_ retrieve own-blog links for "futurist-themed delusions"
_ double-check that "Changing Emotions" was in January
_ No such thing as a tree
_ hostile prereader (April, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
_ maybe Kelsey (very briefly, just about her name)?
_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
-_ maybe Big Yud (ask #drama about the politics/ettiquitte)
marketing—
_ Twitter
_ I think it's OK to copy my friends' language from emails; plagiarism instincts
--------
-
-4 November progress assessment: My 113 word TODO bullets on "discrediting to the community" bloated up into 563 words of prose, a decompression ratio of 5. Taking this at face value—
-
-My remaining TODO notes in the pt. 3 ms. are about 1400 words—does that mean they become 7000 words, with the finished pt. 3 weighing in at 46K words??
-
-For pt. 2, does 970 words of TODO inflate into 5K words of prose, for a finished pt. 2 at 16K words? Feels more likely to be an underestimate due to these notes being sparser on average? An additional 7K words, to finish at 18K??
-
-For pt. 4, I have 617 words of TODO notes, but those also feel pretty sparse and should expand at a higher ratio than 5. An additional 5K words, to finish at 19K??
-
-Projected post lengths: 18K + 46K + 19K = 83K??
-Projected additional words: 17K??
-Projected additional drafting: 17K / 750 K/day = 23 days??
-cross-referenced with my dayjob schedule implies ... finished draft ms. on 15 December?
-
-------
The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP
Speaking of coordination: you know what's useful for coordination? Principles! Common knowledge!
the post introducing the litany of Gendlin was literally titled "You _Can_ Face Reality"
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality
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+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality
+
+Re: "it's deception aimed at crazy people"—but if you're so casual about deceiving crazy people, you probably don't care much about sane non-Keepers, either. (Same energy: if your date is rude to the waiter, he won't be a good partner, either.)—and in fact, empathy towards crazy people _is_ shown in the section on Thellim's mother in "but hurting people is wrong"
+
+"Criticism not welcome, it's just a story; if you don't like it, don't read it" works for normal glowfic, but it doesn't work when you're earnestly spreading memes about how your fictional Society is superior to our Earth; if you're going to make _that_ claim in earnest, you should expect people to subject your fictional Society to scrutiny to check whether it holds together
+
+Clara says to just roll your eyes and ignore him, but in a way, that seems _more_ disrespectful—to just _write someone off_, rather than having faith that they can be reached by argument
+
+There's a difference between jokes where the audience is supposed to "get the joke" (and you're willing to accept collateral damage to people who didn't get the joke), and political moves where
+
+When he says "no one but Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it", I regard that as an abject failure of the community, but he regards it has "working as intended"?
+
+Vassar had once praised me as "Zack is pretty much always right" (when I express an opinion; he still thought I was dumb/unperceptive), and I accepted the praise that it wasn't meant literally—but if someone had a longstanding dispute with me and objected to the praise, I would fundamentally "get" why they were objecting (they don't want Vassar encouraging people to defer to me), rather than assuming _they_ thought it was meant literally
+
+I did "get what I needed" out of the Eliezerfic fight (before, I still had anxiety about whether I should email him before publishing this memoir; and now, I don't)
+
+He could have saved, like, six years of my life, if the March 2016 post had said, "I think 30% of males are gender-dysphoric and might benefit from transitioning"
+
+Fri 14 Jul 2017
+(03:54:42 PM) alicorn24: holy fuck that is a lot of money
+(03:54:53 PM) alicorn24: when I read that blog post I was imagining you'd like, throw fifty bucks at some people
+(03:55:06 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: what? that would be insulting
+(03:57:46 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: there's a calibration thing about being a San Francisco software engineer; and, April could have been really really much worse if I didn't have friends
+
+"probably won't understand" self-comments—
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me/comment/gYSsBbZ6xvaf2b3Eh
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/pK9JHSTTnnpjbbqZp
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WijMw9WkcafmCFgj4/do-scientists-already-know-this-stuff/comment/EFg4p7KRbthgH3SnR
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/r5H6YCmnn8DMtBtxt/you-are-a-brain/comment/CsqYAeCPnsAsdQb7d
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QB9eXzzQWBhq9YuB8/rationalizing-and-sitting-bolt-upright-in-alarm/comment/2FfTFrA7iKK6kxqMq
+
+I should have said: _You_ are a product of your time. _Eliezer_ has no integrity. Or rather, he's forgotten that you can't define the word "integrity" any way you want.
+
+I talked in #drama _about_ talking in Eliezerfic because it seemed like a free action, but the fact that I felt crummy/depressed afterwards suggests that it wasn't actually a free action (but still a substantial discount compared to screwing up in a Yudkowsky-hosted space)
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