(As it happens, Andrea James's Transgender Map website [mis-doxxed me as someone else](https://archive.is/Vg8CK), so I guess the charade worked?)
+------
+
Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another obvious consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy. Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?
Sarah Constantin, a friend who once worked for [our local defunct medical research company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed) still offered lit-reviews as a service, so I paid her $5,000 to do [a post about the effects of feminizing hormone replacement therapy on males](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html), in case the depths of the literature had any medical insight to offer that wasn't already on the informed-constent paperwork. Meanwhile, I made the requisite gatekeeping appointments with [my healthcare provider](http://kp.org/) to get approved for HRT, first with a psychologist that I had seen before, then with a couple of licensed clinical social workers (LCSW) before finally getting approved for an HRT perscription.
In another post, I collected links to Bailey, Lawrence, Vitale, and Brown's separate explanations of the two-type taxonomy:
-> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
-> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
-> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
-> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
+> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
That one ended up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, a thread mostly of me arguing with "Noreen." At the top of the thread, she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.
And ask them, "Have you read _Nevada_?"
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/nevada-imogen-binnie-transgender/
+
+Even the reviews of Nevada don't reveal the secret!!—okay, the New Yorker one sort of does ("erotic transvestite scenarios", "liking girls just in a totally impossible way")
+https://www.vulture.com/article/profile-imogen-binnie-nevada.html
+https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/27/the-invention-of-the-trans-novel-imogen-binnie-nevada
+
+> it doesn't feature nonbinary characters, and a similar novel written today would require them, not least for accuracy.
+(2013 was less than a decade ago!!)
[TODO: State of Steven]
+-------
+
I still wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constrained; I was still bound by internal silencing-chains. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise the "rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy blogging!
In August 2019's ["Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), I explained a nuance that had only merited a passion mention in "... Boundaries?": sometimes you might want categories for different agents to _coordinate_ on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was of course generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occured to me, [that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).)
(This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if that word _ever_ meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important way in which things were messed up, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that this usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between vastly different senses of _fraud_; I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a _more precise theory_ of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things are messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.)
-[TODO: Ziz's protest;
+[TODO: Ziz's protest]
[TODO: Somni? ("peek behind the fog of war" 6 Feb)]
-[TODO: rude maps]
-
[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver]
[TODO: complicity and friendship]
Michael asks for me to acknowledge that my sense of opportunity is driven by politics
discussion of what is "political"
mention to Anna that I was postponing in order to make it non-salesy
-
+January 2020 "my state"?
]
------
Okay, being scared was entirely appropriate, but what I mean is that I was scared, and concluded that shaping the Singularity was _not my problem_, as contrasted to being scared, then facing up to the responsibility anyway. After a 2013 sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic episode which [featured](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) [futurist](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/)-[themed](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relativity/) [delusions](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relevance/), I wrote to Anna, Michael, and some MIRI employees who had been in my contacts for occasional contract work, that "my current plan [was] to just try to forget about _Less Wrong_/MIRI for a long while, maybe at least a year, not because it isn't technically the most important thing in the world, but because I'm not emotionally stable enough think about this stuff anymore" (Subject: "to whom it may concern"). When I got a real programming job and established an income for myself, I [donated to CfAR rather than MIRI](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/), because public rationality was something I could be unambiguously enthusiastic about, and doing anything about AI was not.
-At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally-stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl[ing] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to [his] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI specifically, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
+At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally-stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl\[ing\] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to \[his\] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI specifically, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
But fighting for public epistemology is a long battle; it makes more sense if you have _time_ for it to pay off. Back in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, it looked like we had time. We had these abstract philosophical arguments for worrying about AI, but no one really talked about _timelines_. I believed the Singularity was going to happen in the 21st century, but it felt like something to expect in the _second_ half of the 21st century.
(I asked Anna how Yudkowsky could stand the Glowfic people. She said she thought Eliezer could barely stand anyone. That makes sense, I said.)
-Everyone in dath ilan receives rationality training from childhood, but knowledge and training deemed psychologically hazardous to the general population is safeguarded by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). AGI research takes place in a secret underground city; some unspecified form of social engineering steers the _hoi polloi_ away from thinking about the possibility of AI.
+Everyone in dath ilan receives rationality training from childhood,[^category-vindication] but knowledge and training deemed psychologically hazardous to the general population is safeguarded by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). AGI research takes place in a secret underground city; some unspecified form of social engineering steers the _hoi polloi_ away from thinking about the possibility of AI.
+
+[^category-vindication]: On the topic of dath ilan's rationality training, I did appreciate [this passage about the cognitive function of categorization](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5785?page=4):
+
+ > Dath ilani kids get told to not get fascinated with the fact that, in principle, 'bounded-agents' with finite memories and finite thinking speeds, have any considerations about mapping that depend on what they want. It doesn't mean that you get to draw in whatever you like on your map, because it's what you want. It doesn't make reality be what you want.
+
+ Vindication! (This showed that Yudkowsky _does_ understand what was at issue in the "... Not Man for the Categories" dispute, even if I can't be credited with winning the argument for political reasons.)
Something that annoyed me about the portrayal of dath ilan was their incredibly casual attitude towards hiding information for some alleged greater good, seemingly without considering that [there are benefits and not just costs to people knowing things](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/).
✓ Daphne Koller and the Methods post
✓ comments on nice, mean versions [pt. 2]
✓ mental state and visiting Divia [pt. 2]
+✓ Sept. 2016 back-and-forth to explain the concept [pt. 2]
+✓ "Lesswrong.com is dead to me" [pt. 4]
- sleepless Valentine's Day [pt. 2]
-_ Sept. 2016 conversation with S.C. [pt. 2]
_ fully off the rails 15–17 February [pt. 2]
- Eliezerfic fight: Big Yud tests me [pt. 6]
_ Eliezerfic fight: derail with lintamande [pt. 6]
_ Eliezerfic fight: knives, and showing myself out [pt. 6]
+_ "Casual vs. Social Reality" [pt. 4]
+_ secret thread with Ruby [pt. 4]
+_ progress towards discussing the real thing [pt. 4]
+_ epistemic defense meeting [pt. 4]
+
_ Jan. discussion with "Wilhelm" (should also include Sep. discussion?) [pt. 2]
_ "model clicked"/Feb. discussion with "Wilhelm" [pt. 2]
- regrets, wasted time, conclusion [pt. 6]
-- "Lesswrong.com is dead to me" [pt. 4]
-_ secret thread with Ruby [pt. 4]
-_ progress towards discussing the real thing [pt. 4]
-_ epistemic defense meeting [pt. 4]
- December 2019 winter blogging vacation [pt. 4]
_ plan to reach out to Rick [pt. 4]
it was actually "wander onto the AGI mailing list wanting to build a really big semantic net" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9HGR5qatMGoz4GhKj/above-average-ai-scientists)
With internet available—
+_ Which Tweet motivated the "out of patience" explosion?
+_ Ruby still doesn't get it: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BgEG9RZBtQMLGuqm7/%5BError%20communicating%20with%20LW2%20server%5D/comment/LgLx6AD94c2odFxs4
+_ vindication footnote should look to the specific tag, not the page
+_ Motta-Mena and Puts has the awesome probability-of-gynephilia-by-intersex-condition graph, "Endocrinology of human female sexuality, mating, and reproductive behavior"
_ T4T
_ recent EY tweet about not talking about Pivotal acts for fear of being misinterpreted
_ someone's (Accelia's?) comment about needing a crisis in order to speak
_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
far editing tier—
+_ what exactly goes in the December 2019 blogging spree §?
_ "Noreen" discussion needs to cover the part where I'd cause less disruption if I transitioned
_ "Noreen"'s girlfriend definitely needs to be mentioned
_ get exact dates and correct Sequencing on late 2016 conversations
_ secret posse member
_ "Chaya" (pseudonym choice)
_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
-_ hostile prereader (April, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
+_ hostile prereader (April—if not, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
_ Kelsey
_ NRx Twitter bro
_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
_ afford various medical procedures
_ Buck? (get the story about Michael being escorted from events)
_ A/a alumna??
+_ Sarah (name mention, whether to name conversation)
marketing—
_ Twitter
----
He doesn't want to talk about pivotal acts because because anything he says in public might be misinterpreted—but, how does the disutility of being misinterpreted plausibly outweigh the utility of someone having something useful to say?? I feel like his modern answer is some variation of "Everyone but me is retarded", but—that's not what he thought about decision theory back in 2010, when he validated/honored Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov's contributions! (find cite) And now, he says he wish he hadn't talked about decision theory ...
+
+ * my comment on emotive conjugation (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare#GaoyhEbzPJvv6sfZX)
+
+> I'm also not sure if I'm sufficiently clued in to what Ben and Jessica are modeling as Blight, a coherent problem, as opposed to two or six individual incidents that seem really egregious in a vaguely similar way that seems like it would have been less likely in 2009??
+
+ * Vassar: "Literally nothing Ben is doing is as aggressive as the basic 101 pitch for EA."
+
+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/
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Wil-"Lia"-m Thomas got her girl name using the same methodology as me (Za-"Carrie" Davis), at the suggestion of Mom (https://www.si.com/college/2022/03/03/lia-thomas-penn-swimmer-transgender-woman-daily-cover) like mine was suggested by Alicorn
-vindication
-> "Dath ilani kids get told to not get fascinated with the fact that, in principle, 'bounded-agents' with finite memories and finite thinking speeds, have any considerations about mapping that depend on what they want. It doesn't mean that you get to draw in whatever you like on your map, because it's what you want. It doesn't make reality be what you want."
-https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5785?page=4
-
explicit AGP with surgery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhawkcuDl_o
> Lia Thomas as the anti-Rosa Parks. Least sympathetic case imaginable, single-handedly turned public opinion against the cause.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1538651344361246720
-Even the reviews of Nevada don't reveal the secret!!—okay, the New Yorker one sort of does ("erotic transvestite scenarios", "liking girls just in a totally impossible way")
-https://www.vulture.com/article/profile-imogen-binnie-nevada.html
-https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/27/the-invention-of-the-trans-novel-imogen-binnie-nevada
-
-> it doesn't feature nonbinary characters, and a similar novel written today would require them, not least for accuracy.
-(2013 was less than a decade ago!!)
-
preference cascade is starting ...
https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1538541182975877120
_ (pt. 2) Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer (March 2016–April 2017)
_ (pt. 3) A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning (November 2018–April 2019)
-
_ Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress (time permitting)
_ (pt. 4) If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them (April 2019–January 2021)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff