Title: Zevi's Choice
Author: Zack M. Davis
-Date: 2023-07-01 11:00
+Date: 2023-12-30 11:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
Status: draft
A 950-comment mega-trainwreck erupted, sparked by a comment by Scott Alexander [claiming to add important context](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=4j2GS4yWu6stGvZWs), essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, to the point of describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!).
-I explained [why I thought Scott was being unfair](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=GzqsWxEp8uLcZinTy). Scott [contended](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=XpEpzvHPLkCH7W7jS) that my joining the "Vassarites"[^vassarite-scare-quotes] had been harmful to me, and revealed a new-to-me detail about [the dramatic events of March 2019](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#overheating). He said he had emailed my posse at the time:
+I explained [why I thought Scott was being unfair](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=GzqsWxEp8uLcZinTy). Scott [contended](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=XpEpzvHPLkCH7W7jS) that my joining the "Vassarites"[^vassarite-scare-quotes] had been harmful to me, and revealed a new-to-me detail about [the dramatic events of March 2019](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#overheating). He had emailed my posse at the time:
> accusing them of making your situation worse and asking them to maybe lay off you until you were maybe feeling slightly better, and obviously they just responded with their "it's correct to be freaking about learning your entire society is corrupt and gaslighting" shtick.
I did, I admitted, have some specific, nuanced concerns—especially since [the December 2020 psychiatric disaster](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#a-dramatic-episode-that-would-fit-here-chronologically), with some nagging doubts beforehand—about ways in which being an inner-circle "Vassarite" might be bad for someone, but at the moment, I was focused on rebutting Scott's story, which was _silly_. A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes that the incompetent prosecution can't prove.
-[TODO— straighten this out—
+Scott expressed concern that the "Vassarites" were exerting psychological pressure on me to identify with my sense of betrayal, citing accounts from [from Ziz](https://sinceriously.fyi/punching-evil/#comment-2345) ("They spent 8 hours shouting at me, gaslighting me") [and Yudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494768960798720) ("When MichaelV and co. try to run a 'multiple people yelling at you' operation on me, I experience that as 'lol, look at all that pressure' instead _feeling pressured_").
-Scott expressed concern about reports of
+I thought I recognized the purported everyone-yelling behavior pattern from the ugly conflict during [the December 2020 psychiatric crisis](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#a-dramatic-episode-that-would-fit-here-chronologically). (Jessica called me transphobic scum; Michael said that I should have never been born, that I should be contemplating suicide, that I could barely begin to make it up to the person in my care if I gave them everything I own; Jack Gallagher said that I'm only useful as an example of how bad other people should feel, if they knew what I knew.) I told Scott that the everyone-yelling thing seemed like a new innovation (that I didn't like) that they wielded as a psychological weapon only against people who they thought were operating in bad faith? That wasn't what it was like to actually be friends with them.
- [Ziz had described in a blog comment](https://sinceriously.fyi/punching-evil/#comment-2345) ("They spent 8 hours shouting at me, gaslighting me") and [Yudkowsky had described on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494768960798720) ("When MichaelV and co. try to run a 'multiple people yelling at you' operation on me, I experience that as 'lol, look at all that pressure' instead _feeling pressured_")
+(When I shared an earlier version of this post with Michael, Ben, and Jessica, it was pointed out that "yelling" is often in the eye of the beholder: if Kimberly is acting in bad faith, and Lucas insists on pointing it out, Kimberly might motivatedly misperceive Lucas as "yelling" even if he hadn't raised his voice. I agree that this is a critical grain of salt with which such reports should be taken.)
- * I thought I recognized the behavior being described that thing was very different from what it was like to actually be friends with them.
+In the present conversation with Scott, I had been focusing on rebutting the claim that my February–April 2017 (major) and March 2019 (minor) psych problems were caused by the "Vassarites", because with regard to those _specific_ incidents, the charge was absurd and false. But, well ... my January 2021 (minor) psych problems actually _were_ the result of being on the receiving end of (what I perceived as) "the everyone-yelling thing". (Around midnight 18–19 December 2020, I was near psychosis—there's this very distinct fear-of-Hell sensation—but because I had been there before and knew what was happening to me, and because I already knew not to take Michael literally, I was able to force myself to lie down and get some sleep and not immediately go crazy, although I did struggle for the next month: I ended up taking a week of leave off of my dayjob and got a Seroquel perscription.)
- * However, when I ran an earlier draft of this post by them, they pointed out that "arguing passionately" can be adversarially interpreted as "yelling" by someone who doesn't want to hear it
-
-The everyone-yelling operation seemed like a new innovation (that I didn't like) that they wield as a psychological weapon only against people who they think are operating in bad faith?
-
-> Jessica called me transphobic scum; Michael said that I should have never been born, that I should be contemplating suicide, that I could barely begin to make up what I owe to Sasha if I gave her everything I own; Jack said that I'm only useful as an example of how bad other people should feel, if they knew what I knew. At midnight, I actually was on the edge of psychosis—there's this very distinct fear-of-Hell sensation—but because I had been there before and knew what was happening to me, and because I already knew not to take Michael literally, I was able to force myself to lie down and get some sleep and not immediately go crazy, although I did struggle for the next month. (I ended up taking a week off of my dayjob and got a Seroquel perscription from Kaiser.)
-
-In the present conversation with Scott, I had been focusing on rebutting the claim that my February–April 2017 (major) and March 2019 (minor) psych problems were caused by the "Vassarites", because with regard to those _specific_ incidents, the charge was absurd and false. But, well ... my January 2021 (minor) psych problems actually _were_ the result of being on the receiving end of the everyone-yelling thing. I briefly described the December 2020 disaster, and in particular the part where Michael/Jessica/Jack yelled at me.
-
-]
-
-Scott said that based on my and others' testimony, he was updating away from Vassar being as involved in psychotic breaks than he thought, but towards thinking Vassar was worse in other ways than he thought. He felt sorry for my bad December 2020/January 2021 experience—so much that he could feel it through the triumphant vindication at getting conifrmation that the Vassarites were behaving badly in ways he couldn't previously prove.
+Scott said that based on my and others' testimony, he was updating away from Vassar being as involved in psychotic breaks than he thought, but towards thinking Vassar was worse in other ways than he thought. He felt sorry for my bad December 2020/January 2021 experience—so much that he could feel it through the triumphant vindication at getting conifrmation that the "Vassarites" were behaving badly in ways he couldn't previously prove.
Great, I said, I was happy to provide information to help hold people (including Michael as a particular instance of "people") accountable for the specific bad things that they're actually guilty of, rather than scapegoated as a Bad Man with mysterious witch powers.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff