memoir: NRx education on women

diff --git a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
index af9393d..12ea610 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
+++ b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
@@ -501,7 +501,7 @@ I shared with him an early draft of ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"
 
 He identified the "talking like like an AI" phenomenon as possession by an egegore, a group-mind that held sway over the beliefs of the humans comprising it. The function of the traditional wisdom of having kings and priests was about putting an individual human with judgement in the position of being able to tame, control, or at least negotiate with egregores. Individualism was flawed because [individual humans couldn't be rational on their own](http://sett.com/aesop/memes-are-people-humans-arent). Being an individualist in an environment full of egregores was like being an attractive woman alone at a bar, yelling, "I'm single!"—practically calling out for unaligned entities to wear down your psychological defenses and subvert your will. 
 
-Rationalists implicitly seek [Aumann-like agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem) with perceived peers: when the other person is visibly unmoved by one's argument, there's a tendency to think "hm, they must know something I don't" and update towards the other's position. Without an understanding of egregoric possession, this is disastrous: the possessed person never budges on anything significant, and the rationalist slowly gets eaten by their egregore.
+Rationalists implicitly seek [Aumann-like agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem) with perceived peers, he explained: when the other person is visibly unmoved by one's argument, there's a tendency to think "hm, they must know something I don't" and update towards the other's position. Without an understanding of egregoric possession, this is disastrous: the possessed person never budges on anything significant, and the rationalist slowly gets eaten by their egregore.
 
 I was nonplussed: I had heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this was ridiculous. The "egregore" framing was an interesting alternative way of looking at things, but it seemed kind of—nonlocal. There were inhuman patterns in human agency that we wanted to build models of, but it seemed like he was attributing too much agency to the patterns. In contrast, "This idea creates incentives to propogate itself" was [a mechanism I understood](https://devinhelton.com/meme-theory.html). (Or was I being like one of those dumb Dawkins critics who protests that genes aren't _actually_ selfish? We know that, but the anthropomorphic language is convenient.)
 
@@ -536,19 +536,13 @@ I said that I was done pretending to be stupid; I didn't want to not see the pat
 
 ("Restore patriarchy!" "_Never!_ I mean, I see the point you're trying to make, but the real solution is embryo selection for more nerd girls!")
 
-[TODO:
- * (check the date break between this part and the previous)
- * I mentioned re-reading the part of the "Gentle Introduction" about ignoble privilege
- * "Wilhelm" mentions this as a reason not to seek the approval of women; they have not be ennobled by being used as a proxy weapon
- * androgynous women (the kind of women I particularly like!!) have the "chip on their shoulder" effect particularly amplified
- * mention "Beatrice" somewhere in here? (99% OKCupid match; "nowhere to go but down")
- * actionable advice: if I find an androgynous women I'm into; don't feel the need to seek her approval or treat her as a moral authority; she will have plenty of flaws of her own due to the ignobling forces she's been exposed to
- * if your goal is to have an egalitarian relationship, and do what most sensitive men think of as equality, it degenerates into female moral superiority which wrecks the relationship (women want to win arguments in the moment, but they don't actually want to lead the relationship)
- * a strange conclusion: the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a "dab" of patriarchy
- * what I wanted was to have the kind of meta-psychological engineering conversation we were having now, with the woman herself; but the few hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were out of my league
-]
+When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Wilhelm" mentioned it as a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the evolutionarily stable strategies of relating had been re-labeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
+
+He advised me that if I did find an androgynous women I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a small "dab" of patriarchy worked better than none.
+
+(What I really wanted was to have the kind of meta psychological engineering conversation I was having with "Wilhelm", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)
 
-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.
+I wasn't immediately sold on all these heresies—but I was _listening_. 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.
 
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