On 2 March 2017, I wrote to Michael about how "the community" was performing (Subject: "rationalist community health check?? asking for one bit of advice"). Michael had claimed that it was obvious that AI was far away. (This wasn't obvious to me.) But in contrast, a lot of people in the rationalist community seemed to have very short AI timelines. "Chaya" had recently asked me, "What would you do differently if AI was 5 years off?"
-(Remember, this was 2017. Five years later in March 2022, we were in fact still alive, but the short-timelines people were starting to look more prescient than Michael gave them credit for.)
+(Remember, this was 2017. Five years later in March 2022, we were in fact still alive, but the short-timelines people were starting to look more prescient than Michael had given them credit for.)
If we—my sense of the general culture of "we"—were obviously getting gender wrong, plausibly got the election wrong, plausibly were getting AI timelines wrong, and I thought Moldbug and neoreactionary friends were pointing to some genuinely valuable Bayes-structure ... it seemed like we were doing a _really poor_ job of [pumping against cultishness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult). Was it maybe worth bidding for a cheerful price conversation with Yudkowsky again to discuss this? (I wasn't important enough for him to spontaneously answer my emails, and I was too submissive to just do it without asking Michael first.)
Michael said that [the issue that ultimately took down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Remarks_on_paedophilia_and_child_sexual_abuse) Yiannopoulos was actually as obvious as my issue, and that it was striking that it did so even while Trump [got away with being open about sexual assault](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/locker-room-talk/).
-He wasn't specific about the obvious issue, but I filled in the blanks: young teen boys who have just hit puberty want sex, and wouldn't obviously be harmed by getting it from adults if it weren't for the social consensus that this would somehow harm them? Yes, that _did_ seem more obvious to a far larger population than autogynephilia motivating transgenderism. (Obligate-AGP sexuality is probably hard to empathize with if you haven't experienced it—I didn't feel like Michael understood it when we had talked in Berkeley a few months before—but the vast majority of men remember what it was like to be a horny teenager.)
+He wasn't specific about the issue or its obviousness, but I filled in the blanks: young teen boys who have just hit puberty want sex, and wouldn't obviously be harmed by getting it from adults if it weren't for the social consensus that this would somehow harm them? Yes, that _did_ seem more obvious to a far larger population than autogynephilia motivating transgenderism. (Obligate-AGP sexuality is probably hard to empathize with if you haven't experienced it—I didn't feel like Michael understood it when we had talked in Berkeley a few months before—but the vast majority of men remember what it was like to be a horny teenager.)
Michael said that the most plausible anti-Trump consensus perspective was that free speech would be physically dangerous for a majority of people in the medium term. The Yiannopoulos case suggested that maybe Trump and Kanye (and perhaps some other rappers) could speak without fear.
I could see a picture where the underlying bug in male sexual psychology that leads to AGP would be far less likely to progress to "gender dysphoria" (actually doing something about it) in a world where it was socially-acceptable for highly-verbal 13-year-old boys to seek out sex, instead of internalizing socially-desirable admonitions against trying (which were adapted to the norm of reaction of a largely dumber population), resulting in Comment 171 syndrome. Blanchard [had posited "developmental competition"](/papers/blanchard-nonmonotonic_relation_of_agp_and_heterosexual_attraction.pdf) between AGP and normal heterosexual attraction, the balance between the two being set early in psychosexual development. Maybe pre-autogynephilic boys who chase girls develop mostly normally, while those deprived of that outlet double down on their perversion?
-It's notable that some of Robert Heinlein's fiction has very strong autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
+It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has very strong autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
-[^heinlein-agp]: There was that scene in _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where a man watching a woman perform on stage uses a telepathic link to share her experiences—but there was also an entire book, [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read it as a teenager, and described it to one of my notebooks as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
+[^heinlein-agp]: There was that scene in _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where a man watching a woman perform on stage uses a telepathic link to share her experiences—but there was also an entire book, [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read it as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
-So if the forces of political correctness won and "trans" became an entrenched cultural practice, that could be seen as genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues—and at the same time, from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, the efforts of people opposing gender identity ideology look like trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. And from inside the bubble of my own eclectic ideology, I wanted to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) a Julia Serano-like aesthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity—and that's just _not my style_.)
+So if the forces of political correctness won and "trans" became an entrenched cultural practice, that could be seen as genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues—and at the same time, from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, the efforts of people opposing gender identity ideology look like trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. And from inside the bubble of my own eclectic ideology, I wanted to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) a Julia Serano-like æsthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity—and that's just _not my style_.)
"Much faster in person," replied Michael. "Notice that genocide, by conception, is about genes." (I don't remember if we followed up in person, but I agree that whatever genetic variants make one susceptible to transitioning in the current year, are not proving to be evolutionarily fit—and we know that's not inevitable; guys like me _used_ to get married and have children, even if we don't now.)
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-[TODO: apophenia, Vassar discourse III
-
- * Apophenic numerology: in retrospect, I agree with my "useless garbage (lots of probabilities are ~30%)"
-
+Even though I was free and taking care of myself, I don't think my psychology was entirely back to baseline. I remembered that Michael or Anna had once given humanity an approximately 30% "win" probability.[^p-doom] Nate Silver had given Trump a 30% chance to win the 2016 presidential election. These facts felt _really related_ to me. I was aware that many people would dismiss this style of thinking as useless garbage—_lots_ of probabilities are close to 0.3—but somehow it still felt like a _clue_ to me (Subject: "apophenic numerology").
+
+[^p-doom]: This is the quantity that, these days, we would call 1 − P(doom).
+
+In retrospect, I agree with the "useless garbage" verdict. I can reconstruct how the subjective sensation of cluefulness might arise from associative reasoning on the concepts I was preoccupied with at the time (Trump was the anti-political-correctness candidate, political correctness fostered bad epistemology, but humanity needed good epistemology to "win"), but that's not a story about how that kind of thinking connects numerical probabilities to reality.
- * Michael writes to me about sleep
+Michael wrote to me (Subject: "Sleep"), noting that while "I don't need to sleep" is classic mania, it fit the pattern of what might be a lie under the circumstances. I might have asked myself for evidence on both sides, and remembered having personally seen animals sleep, maybe even in the wild (sea lions on the beach?). On the other hand, if I had asked why "I don't need to sleep" was a salient hypothesis, I might have noticed that the claim that everyone needs to sleep is the kind of lie that would be told by a worldview of people having high status as objects (it being wrong to sadistically cause pain), but low status as agents (it being right to control them and irresponsible not to); an important fact about the modern world was that it was common to oppress people by pretending they're like babies.
+
+I replied:
> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (_e.g._, from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
+I tagged Anna and Divia into the thread as cc's, because they seemed more grounded. "Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him", I said.
+
+[TODO:
+
* "Social reality may be crazy (hospitals are part of the state insofar as they serve the function of social-control in the service of stationary bandits, rather than actually being about trying to heal people), but I should still put a lot more weight on social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative is my intuition about the machines trying to kill me."
* "I certainly put a lot less weight on 'nice people doing their jobs' [...]"
* "Sure, I guess I meant that the "Machines trying to kill me" framing is scary, and"
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-As part of being less submissive to authorities in general and the medical establishment in particular, it felt appropriate to get some gray-market HRT, so I ordered a pack of Progynova 1mg (estradiol) and a pack of Aldactone 25mg (spironolactone) from AllDayChemist, an online pharmacy based out of India, which presumably has fewer laws about this sort of thing.
+As part of being less submissive to authorities in general and the medical establishment in particular, it felt appropriate to get some gray-market HRT, so on 6 March, I ordered a pack of Progynova 1mg (estradiol) and a pack of Aldactone 25mg (spironolactone) from AllDayChemist, an online pharmacy based out of India, which presumably has fewer laws about this sort of thing.
I didn't need it (and didn't end up using it); my regular health care provider got me equipped to [re-start my HRT experiment](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/) (including the spiro this time). It was the principle: that I could just buy drugs of my own choice using money, without the pretense of an authority diagnosing me with "gender dysphoria".
-[TODO: ordering DIY hormones, and ordering on Alice Monday's behalf
- * found out about it from Alice Monday, a young trans woman who wasn't very nice
- * Alice said something about how every once in a while, someone runs off with the payments database
- * on 31 March, I ordered some more (5 packs E, 2 packs Spiro) for Alice
-]
+I had heard about AllDayChemist from Alice Monday, a local trans woman who wasn't very nice, but seemed to have some Vassar-like insights about penetrating the veil of social reality. It turned out that Alice was facing some bureaucratic obstacles to getting her own HRT refill, so I placed another AllDayChemist order on her behalf on 31 March, for five packs of E and two of spiro.
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-[TODO asking Anna for promise
- * I ask Anna if she would promise not to contact the authorities; "I don't expect this scenario to come up, but I want to know who I can trust in scenarios where my will comes into conflict with social reality"
- * she said she'd want to have a more detailed conversation before making such a promise
- * "that answer is probably more sensible than the "Yes" I was fantasizing about."
-
-12 March—
-> You can tell that recent life events have made me more worried than I used to be about unFriendly/unaligned possibly-AI-assisted institutions being a threat to humane values long before an actual AI takeoff in however many decades
+[TODO: drafting credit-assignment ritual 10 March
+ * I wrote about my credit-assignment ritual on my real-name blog: http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
+ * People know that institutions are flawed and like to perform gritty cynicism about it, but what if no one is gritty and cynical enough?
+ * People are predatory animals; science, markets, and democracy sort of help because they mirror Bayes-structure (science is updating; microeconomics isn't about humans; democracy is counterfactual civil war)
+ * We should be looking for more social technologies like that, but which also take into account that we're not agents, but animals that want to help our friends
+ * In analogy to funding solutions with retrospectivbe prizes (rather than funding a team in advance that might solve the problem), what if you did that on a personal scale—rewarding and praising people who helped you through a major life crisis
+ * In AI, the credit-assignment problem is about how you tell which of your actions helped under sparse rewards; similarly, here you want the people who resulted in the succesful navigation of the crisis to be strengthened
]
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-[TODO: drafting credit-assignment ritual 10 March
- * I wrote about my credit-assignment ritual on my real-name blog: http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
- * People know that institutions are flawed and like to perform gritty cynicism about it, but what if no one is gritty and cynical enough?
- * People are predatory animals; science, markets, and democracy sort of help because they mirror Bayes-structure (science is updating; microeconomics isn't about humans; democracy is counterfactual civil war)
- * We should be looking for more social technologies like that, but which also take into account that we're not agents, but animals that want to help our friends
- * In analogy to funding solutions with retrospectivbe prizes (rather than funding a team in advance that might solve the problem), what if you did that on a personal scale—rewarding and praising people who helped you through a major life crisis
- * In AI, the credit-assignment problem is about how you tell which of your actions helped under sparse rewards; similarly, here you want the people who resulted in the succesful navigation of the crisis to be strengthened
-]
+Also on 12 March, I asked Anna if she would be willing to promise not to contact the authorities even if she really did think I would successfully kill myself if she didn't (Subject: "trust establishment"). "I don't expect this scenario to come up," I said, "but I want to know who I can trust in scenarios where my will comes into conflict with social reality."
+
+She said she'd want to have a more detailed conversation about it before offering any such promise, which I agreed was a more sensible answer than the Yes I was fantasizing about.
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff