As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman who I'll call "Chaya", whose marriage had fallen apart after (among other things) her husband transitioned. She told me about the parts of her husband's story that had never quite made sense to her (but which sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, the husband was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just a weird and insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on ["Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/), her response was, "Holy shit, this is _exactly_ what happened with me." It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy.
------
+------
+
+[TODO SECTION: conversations with "Wilhelm" late 2016, early 2017]
+
+As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend.
+
+[TODO: election thoughts; Clinton vs. Trump on Russia hawkishness]
+
+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.
+
+[TODO: egregore theory; negotiating with egregores and Aumann agreement; coalition of the fringes burning down organic structure
+
+I've heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this is ridiculous.
+
+I said I was modeling him as possessed by the NRx egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist diaspora.
+]
+
+[TODO: NRx the nice parts, Brazil vs. South Africa]
+
+[TODO: comics and 72 virgins]
+
+"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.
+
+"OK, but I still want my own breasts," I said.
+
+"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.
+
+[TODO: hypomasculine men, more paperclips]
+
+[TODO: Susan Fenimore Cooper]
+
+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_.
+
+[^scare-quotes]: I mentioned that these days, I just used scare quotes rather than tacking the word _aspiring_ in front.
+
+"Wilhelm" summarized the NRx 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).
+
+[TODO: further counter-replies, eminence]
+
+[TODO: egalitarian relationships don't work]
+
+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.
+
+------
"Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she said, "just find talking vaguely aversive." In a Facebook thread in January 2017 about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, she said something about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria.
_ progress towards discussing the real thing [pt. 4]
_ epistemic defense meeting [pt. 4]
-_ Jan. discussion with "Wilhelm" (should also include Sep. discussion?) [pt. 2]
+- Jan. discussion with "Wilhelm" (should also include Sep. discussion?) [pt. 2]
_ "model clicked"/Feb. discussion with "Wilhelm" [pt. 2]
_ psych ward [pt. 2]
If I had done more marketing, I could have been a name in the GC community, and made Nina Paley's playing card list: https://www.heterodorx.com/gender-wars-cards/
-
https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1940992#reply-1940992
> (The children's-books of dath ilan are not visibly author-signed, and never attested-to by any specific grownup, nor gifted to you by specific adults; they're just there in your bedroom, when you grow up. And if you ask your parents they'll truthfully tell you that they didn't put the books there. And your parents never speak to you of anything that you read in a children's-book; for those are children's books, and only children speak of them to each other.
>
>
> And furthermore - as is so obvious as to hardly need stating after the original proverb - having all the true books be written in a nonfiction voice, while all the untrue books are written in a fiction voice, would be introducing an oversimplified hyperplanar separator that would prevent a simple statistical algorithm from learning subtler features.)
-https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff