I remember (and [the Diary entry](/ancillary/diary/296/) helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
-I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of redeemed manufacturer's coupons at store #936 (what the company did with them after that, I was never told—perhaps they weighed them), bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked near the library construction site; I had some time to kill before I was scheduled to rendezvous at University and Shattuck at 1745 with a local genetics blogger with whom I had arranged to give a ride to the party. I walked to Ming Quong and bought a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with buttons I had bought from a site I found because the proprietor occasionally commented on the blog (_the_ blog). My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it _before_ taking the geneticist to the social. I have a weakness for what you might call _narrative optimization_: doing things not for any real-world utility, but rather because they would seem thematically appropriate if this were a story rather than real life.
+I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of redeemed manufacturer's coupons at store #936 (what the company did with them after that, I was never told—perhaps they weighed them), bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked near the library construction site; I had some time to kill before I was scheduled to rendezvous at University and Shattuck at 1745 with a local genetics blogger with whom I had arranged to give a ride to the party. I walked to Ming Quong and bought a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with buttons I had bought from a site I found because the proprietor occasionally commented on the blog (_the_ blog). My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it _before_ taking the geneticist to the social. <a id="narrative-optimization"></a>I have a weakness for what you might call _narrative optimization_: doing things not for any real-world utility, but rather because they would seem thematically appropriate if this were a story rather than real life.
(I still have the "radical notion" pin, but it's no longer proudly pinned to my backpack. Ideology—in the general case—is not my style anymore.)
Indeed—here we are seven years later, and _I am panicking_.[^panic] (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic _really_ interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [sideways](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
-[^panic]: Or rather, I _did_ panic from 2016–2021, and this memoir is the retrospective accounting of that panic, written in the ashes of my defeat.
+[^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 ...
-[TODO: "Wilhelm"]
+[TODO: conversation with "Wilhelm"]
-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.
+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.
(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/
+https://archive.is/kDO75
+
+https://github.com/ZoeyWolfe/have-you-read-nevada
+
+http://web.archive.org/web/20171013145452/http://haveyoureadnevada.com/nevada.pdf
+
[...]
-------
[Steph is reminiscing about her relationship with Maria.]
+> But it turns out that <u>using your partner basically as a sex toy to get yourself off</u>—suspending disbelief and convincing yourself that she's hot for you, that she's into it—is even lonelier than never getting off.
+
+<u>usually</u> it's the trans woman in the relationship doing this—author projection??
+
+> <u>Who knows what Maria is hot for, what kind of kinks she has</u>. <u>Maria herself probably doesn't know</u>.
+
+yes, who knows??
+
+> No matter how clear Steph has been about <u>the fact that no kink could possibly be too shameful to admit</u>, even something horrifying you'd never actually want to do in real life, Maria won't fess up to anything.
+
+well, I can think of <u>one</u> ...
+
+> One time Steph observed that Maria tends not to be very performy, and <u>when she is performy, it's almost always for herself</u>, not for anyone else.
+
+★ ♡ [[I'm like this](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/#narrative-optimization), too.]
+
+[A description of James H.'s girlfriend, Nicole.]
+
+> When she was fourteen or fifteen she bought a copy of Bitch magazine at Thanks Books at the base of the mountain on the east side and it was all downhill: classic feminist awakening stuff. Dots started connecting. The righteous fury about having to wear a dress to chruch when she was little and not being allowed to climb trees with the boys came back with the fury of a thousand suns. Turned out she was right to be mad about the way every grown man in town looked at her starting when she was twelve.
+>
+> She was the sixteen-year-old talking about Andrea Dworkin at the lunch table. Suddenly it made sense to fantasize about making out with Jason Sanger, the floppy-haired second-string kicker on the football team, and then knocking him over instead of marrying him. Basically she could see through misogynist rape culture and didn't want anything to do with it. She tried to be a lesbian, but it didn't work. She would try to think about Kathleen Hanna or Princess Leia or Scarlett Johanson when she jacked off, but no luck. At the last second they'd turn into Jason Sanger and his arms, his legs, his smirk and his tiny little butt.
+
+a novel about Nicole would be better than this one, but Imogen Binnie couldn't write it
+
+> It was a major dilemma until one day, at the lunch table, humorless feminist nonfiction tome on the table in front of her, she noticed James for the first time. Like, noticed noticed. <u>Hair to his shoulders</u>, probably too skinny, almost pretty but carrying himself like a boy, sitting at a table with Mark Richardson, probably talking about weed.
+
+check
+
+[Part 2, Chapter 5 describes James's autogynephilia.]
+
+this chapter is <u>so real</u>
+
+> <u>It's not like James is proud</u> of the pron that he looks at, but what are you supposed to do? Will yourself not to be a pervert? He's tried. He's still trying. He tries most nights.
+
+try being proud?
+
+
+
+
+
-------
Michael 19 April 2019—
> Intellectualism to survive, has to distinguish between having been betrayed and having been defeated. The difference is frequently known as "courage". It's absence causes people like Aaronson, without ever becoming complicit, to nonetheless transition directly from denial of a crisis to advocacy of "The Kolmagorov Option".
-during the dispute with James, Jonah said it seemed like the future beyond a year wasn't real to me (this also explains my behavior in college)
\ No newline at end of file
+during the dispute with James, Jonah said it seemed like the future beyond a year wasn't real to me (this also explains my behavior in college)
+
+you can't trust his behavior, even if you can trust his "conscious intent" which conveniently doesn't do anything
+
+https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1608191251991662592
+> Keeping a secret is like casting the killing curse—it might be the best option available in a conflict, but even when it's the least bad option it tears your soul a bit regardless.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1599889168234336257
+> One of the retrospective less-obvious lessons of the #FTX blowup: We should have been more worried about the early split in Alameda where half the people left with @Tara_MacAulay to run a less wild trading company. In retrospect that probably evaporated off everyone sane!
+
+Likewise, we should have been more worried about the Vassar split; in retrospect that probably evaporated off everyone principled
+
+The thing that makes Earth bad is that everyone is lying about everything all the time, and when you challenge them on it, they have some clever rationalization for why it isn't really bad.
+
+https://manifold.markets/Alicorn/will-my-son-successfully-get-a-bath#
+I'm not allowed to say, "Which one?"—it's known that I'm the sort of person who believes that, but I'm not allowed to puncture the shared reality
+
+I said I perceived a nearest-unblocked-strategy pattern, where I'm trying to optimize my goals subject to the constraint of maintaining good diplomatic relations. But Anna points out that if I internalized "good diplomatic relations" as my own goal
+
+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
\ No newline at end of file
_ Janet Mock on Late Transitioners
Minor—
+_ Nevada Annotations
_ Beyond the Binary
+_ Book Review: Johnny the Walrus
_ Happy Meal
_ Elision _vs_. Choice
_ Multi-Product Review: Various AGP Erotic Aids
-_ Book Review: Johnny the Walrus
-_ Comments on the Conspiracies of dath ilan
_ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/
_ Link: "On Transitions, Freedom of Form, [...]"
-_ Biological Sex Actually Exists
+-------
+_ Biological Sex Actually Exists
_ Racial Pseudoscience on the Faculty https://archive.ph/ZxVYk
_ Never Going to Find You Faking
_ Body Anxiety Posting, Month Year
_ Karnofsky's presentism
_ motivation for positing meta-attraction
_ Joint Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls and Kathryn Paige Harden's The Genetic Lottery
+_ Comments on the Conspiracies of dath ilan
Minor queue—
_ FaceApp tips
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff