memoir: Vassar on censorship; Heinlein vs. Serano

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / people-evolved-social-control-mechanisms-and-rocks.md

Title: People, Evolved Social-Control Mechanisms, and Rocks
Author: Zack M. Davis
Date: 2023-07-01 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft

> MUGATU  
> The man has only one look, for Christ's sake! Crossdresser, demigirl, trans woman? They're the _same people!_
>
> Doesn't anyone _notice_ this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
>
> —[_Zoolander_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbKBWtoH93Q) (paraphrased)

Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told you about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which, at the time, I thought of as a weird private quirk about me that was clearly not the same thing as "actually" being transgender, and which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about—and also about how I used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these great Sequences of blog posts about normatively correct reasoning by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which explained how beliefs are for making predictions about reality (such that it's immoral to _not_ believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are a real thing), and (incidentally) why my obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman was philosophically fraught if not outright delusional, separately from its not being remotely achieveable with forseeable technology.

In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", I told you about how, in 2016, everyone of significance in my normatively-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly decided that guys like me actually are women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, prompting me to do some reading and interviews that led me to the belief that my weird obsessive erotic fantasy _was_ the same thing (rather, the more common of at least two such things) as actually being transgender, after all—prompting me to start this then-pseudonymous secret blog to write about how the entire educated world had been systematically lying to me about the most important thing in my life for the last twelve years. (I also made arrangements to start feminizing hormone replacement therapy. Everyone else was doing it. Why should I miss out on account of being more self-aware?)

But, you know, I didn't want to be a _fanatic_ about it. The previous post leaves off with me promising myself not to talk about this stuff under my real name through June 2017. That was what my pseudonymous secret blog was for.

... the promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed; I _had_ to push back on some of it, at least a little, at least subtly.

"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread in mid-January 2017. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."

As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whom 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.

------

As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Thomas", who provided a refreshing contrary perspective to the things I was hearing from everyone else. When the rationalists were anxious that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended an increased risk of nuclear war, "Thomas" pointed out that Clinton was actually much more hawkish towards Russia.

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.

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://web.archive.org/web/20160319033509/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, 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.)

I supposed I was sort of modeling "Thomas" as being possessed by the neoreaction egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist egregore.

He was a useful sounding board when I was frustrated with my so-far-mostly private trans discussions. 

"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.

In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Frantz (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of [_Thing of Things_](https://thingofthings.substack.com/)) had been cited as a local authority figure on gender issues—someone asked what Ozy thought about the two-types theory, or wasn't persuaded because they were partially deferring to Ozy.[^ozy-authority] I remarked to "Thomas" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (who I otherwise liked) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.

[^ozy-authority]: Although the fact that Ozy had [commented](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/) [on](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/) the theory at all—which was plausibly causally downstream from me yelling at everyone in private—was probably net-positive for the cause; there's no bad publicity for new ("new") ideas. I got a couple of [reply](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) [pieces](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/) out of their engagement in the early months of this blog.

"Thomas" didn't think this was feasible. The problem, he explained, was that "hypomasculine men are often broken people who idolize feminists, and worship the first one who throws a few bones of sympathy towards men". (He had been in this category, so he could make fun of them.) Thus, in feminist communities, the female person would win a priestly battle, regardless of quality of arguments. It wasn't Ozy's fault, really. She[^ozy-pronouns] wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.

[^ozy-pronouns]: The feminine pronoun in this paragraph reflects the fact that "Thomas" and I used feminine pronouns for Ozy in our private messages. I don't misgender people _in public!_ But I do argue that public summaries of private conversations are not, technically, the same thing.

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.

"Thomas" 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).

"Thomas" said that exceptions could be made for intellectually eminent women at the discretion of the authorities, but that the vast majority of young women didn't have the temperment to participate in male communities, instead having incentives to behave like busybodies, cause drama, and test males for mates. This wasn't something "Thomas" had previously wanted to believe, even in his anti-feminist (but not yet fully reactionary) days. But once you understood how past generations would have seen certain behavior, upon seeing it in the wild, among people who claim to be "above" gender roles—it was hard to unsee.

I said that I was done pretending to be stupid; I didn't want to not see the pattern if the pattern was there, even if I wasn't going to adopt the solutions of our ancestors.

("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!")

When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Thomas" 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 "Thomas", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)

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.

------

In a Facebook thread in January 2017 about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, "Helen" said something about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria.

I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back out of security fastidiousness, but really (I soon let slip) because I was angry about the deceptively pompous Facebook comment: _maybe_ it wouldn't take so much _metacognition_ if someone would just mention the _other_ diagnostic criterion!

She sent me a photo of the key with half of the blade snapped off (next to set of pliers, which had presumably done the snapping), sent me $8 (presumably for the cost of the key), and told me to go away.

On my next bank statement, her deadname appeared in the memo line for the $8 transaction.

------

I made plans to visit Portland for the weekend of 18 February 2017, for the purpose of meeting Sophia, and two other excuses. There was [a fandom convention](https://web.archive.org/web/20170126112449/http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) in town, and I wanted to try [playing Pearl from _Steven Universe_ again](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)—but this time with makeup and breastforms and a [realistic gem](https://web.archive.org/web/20190407185943/https://www.etsy.com/listing/236067567/pearl-gem-cosplay). Also, I had been thinking of obfuscating my location as being part of the thing to do for keeping my secret blog secret, and had correspondingly adopted the conceit of setting my little [fictional](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) [vignettes](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) in the Portland metropolitan area, as if I lived there.[^portland-vignettes] I thought it would be nice to get some original photographs of local landmarks (like TriMet trains, or one of the bridges over the Willamette River[^river-fka]) to lend versimilitude to the charade.

[^portland-vignettes]: Beaverton, referenced in ["The Counter"](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) is a suburb of Portland; the Q Center referenced in ["Title Sequence"](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) [does exist in Portland](https://www.pdxqcenter.org/) and [did have a Gender Queery support group](https://web.archive.org/web/20160507101938/http://www.pdxqcenter.org/gender-queery/), but the vignette was inspired by my attendance of a similar group at the [Pacific Center](https://www.pacificcenter.org/) in Berkeley.

    I would later get to attend a support group at the Q Center on a future visit to Portland (and got photos, although I never ended up using them on the blog). I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into their library.

[^river-fka]: Formerly known as William River??

At the close of a 4 February 2017 email confirming the plans with Sophia (Subject: "Re: February??"), I wrote:

> (Thanks very much for your promise not to be offended by things that I might say, which I am interpreting literally, and without which I wouldn't _dare_ meet you; unfortunately, I kind of feel motivated to generally avoid trans women now, because the conjunction of validate-everyone's-identity social norms and my continuing obsession with last year's shocking mega-update make me feel like I'm made out of social antimatter: better to quietly (except for pseudonymous internet yelling) stay out of everyone's way rather than risk the temptation to say the wrong thing, mutually annihilating me and my interlocutor and killing everyone in the room in a shower of gamma rays.)

------

... the pretense of "quietly stay[ing] out of everyone's way" lasted about three days.

In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Director of Communications Rob Bensinger, someone named Amelia[^amelia-rip] said something about closeted trans women (linking to the ["I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42) piece).

[^amelia-rip]: Clicking on Amelia's profile years later, it's a memorial page, which is ominous.

I objected that surely closeted trans women _are_ cis: "To say that someone _already_ is a woman simply by virtue of having the same underlying psychological condition that motivates people to actually take the steps of transitioning (and thereby _become_ a trans woman) kind of makes it hard to have a balanced discussion of the costs and benefits of transitioning."

(That is, I was assuming "cis" meant "not transitioned", whereas Amelia seemed to be assuming a gender-identity model, such that guys like me aren't cis.)

Bensinger [replied](/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png):

> Zack, "woman" doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at, even if no one were socially punishing you for using the term that way, and even if we were ignoring any psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage, there'd be the problem regardless that these terms are already used in lots of different ways by different groups. The most common existing gender terms are a semantic minefield at the same time they're a dysphoric and political minefield, and everyone adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all.

Bensinger followed up with another comment offering constructive suggestions: XX-cluster for when you want to talk about things that correlate with XX chromosomes, _&c._

So, this definitely wasn't the _worst_ obfuscation attempt I'd face during this Whole Dumb Story; I of course agree that words can be used in many ways, and are used in different ways by different groups. It's just—given the context of my comments to Amelia, I think it should have already been clear that I understood that words can be used in many ways; my objection to Amelia's usage was backed by a specific _argument_ about the expressive power of language; Bensinger didn't acknowledge my argument. (Amelia, to her credit, did.)

To be fair to Bensinger, it's certainly possible that he was criticizing me specifically because I was the "aggressor" objecting to someone else's word usage, and that he would have stuck up for me just the same if someone had "aggressed" against me using the word _woman_ in a sense that excluded non-socially-transitioned gender-dysphoric males, for the same reason ("adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all"). 

But ... in the social context of Berkeley 2016, I think I was perhaps justified in my suspicions that that wasn't actually his algorithm? If socially-liberal people in the current year selectively drag out the "It's pointless to object to someone else's terminology" argument _specifically_ when someone wants to talk about biological sex (or even socially perceived sex!) rather than self-identified gender identity—but objecting on the grounds of "psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage" (!!) is implied to be potentially kosher, that seems like a pretty stark distortionary effect on our discussions.

Someone named Ben Hoffman, who I hadn't previously known or thought much about, put a Like on one of my comments. I messaged him to say hi. "I guess I didn't really have a compelling reason to message you except that having a messaging app creates an affordance to say hi to ppl", I explained, then elaborated, "well, maybe part of me wants to say, thanks for the Like in Robby/Amelia's thread, but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes".

Having already started to argue with people in my community under my real name (in violation of my previous intent to save it for the blog), the logic of "in for a lamb, in for a sheep"/"may as well be hung for a pound as a penny" started to kick in. On the evening of Saturday 11 February 2019, I posted to my own wall:

> Some of you may have noticed that I've recently decided to wage a suicidally aggressive one-person culture war campaign with the aim of liberating mindshare from the delusional victimhood identity politics mind-virus and bringing it under the control of our familiar "compete for status by signaling cynical self-awareness" egregore! The latter is actually probably not as Friendly as we like to think, as some unknown fraction of its output is counterfeit utility in the form of seemingly cynically self-aware insights that are, in fact, not true. Even if the fraction of counterfeit insights is near unity, the competition to generate seemingly cynically self-aware insights is so obviously much healthier than the competition for designated victimhood status, that I feel good about this campaign being morally correct, even the amount of mindshare liberated is small and I personally don't survive.

I followed it up the next morning with a hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends".[^terf-allusion] As a transhumanist, I believed that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, "being a woman", but apparently I felt like being vague) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not _propagate backwards in time_. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a _goddamned moral responsibility_ to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by _crazy people who think they can edit the past_.

[^terf-allusion]: An allusion to TERFs, "trans-exclusionary radical feminists."

It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman whom I'll call "Noreen" (who I had _also_ had an exchange with in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).

"_[O]ne_ of the things trans women want is to be referred to as women," she said. "This is not actually difficult, we can just _do_ it." She was pretty sure I must have read the relevant _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/).

I replied that I had an unfinished draft [post about this](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), but briefly, faced with a demand to alter one's language in order to spare someone's feelings, one possible response might be to submit to the demand. But another possible response might be, "_I don't negotiate with terrorists_. People have been using this word to refer to a particular thing for the last 200,000 years since the invention of language, and if that hurts your feelings, that's not my problem." The second response was certainly not very nice. But maybe there were other values than being nice?—sometimes?

In this case, the value being served had to do with there being an empirical statistical structure of bodies and minds in the world that became a lot harder to talk about if you insisted that everyone gets to define how others perceive them. I didn't _like_ the structure that I was seeing, because (like many people in my age cohort, and many people who shared my paraphilic sexual orientation) I had this ideological obsession with androgyny as a moral ideal. The cost of making it harder to talk about the structure might outweigh the benefit of letting everyone dictate how other people should perceive them!

Nick Tarleton asked me to clarify: was I saying that people who claim that "trans women are women" were sneaking in connotations or denotations that were false in light of so many trans women being (I claimed) autogynephilic?—even when those people also claimed that they didn't mean anything predictive by "women".

Yes! I replied. People seemed to be talking as if there was some intrinsic gender-identity switch in the brain, and if a physiological male had the switch in the female position, that meant they Are Trans and need to transition, and I thought that was a really bad model of what the underlying psychological condition was. I thought we should be talking about clever strategies to maximize the quantity "gender euphoria minus gender dysphoria", and it wasn't at all obvious that full-time transition was the uniquely best solution.

"Noreen" said that what she thought was going on was that I was defining _woman_ as someone who has a female-typical brain or body, but _she_ was defining _woman_ as someone who thinks of themselves as a woman or is happier being categorized that way; on the latter definition, the only way someone could be "wrong" about whether or not they were a woman is by trying it and finding out that they were less happy that way.

I replied, but was circular, right?—that women are people who are happier being categorized as women. However you verbally chose to define it, your mental associations with the word _woman_ were going to be anchored on your experiences with adult human females. I wasn't saying people couldn't transition! You can transition if you want! I just thought the details were really important!

-------

In another post, from 4:25 _p.m._ that afternoon, I acknowledged my right-wing influences. You know, you spend nine years reading a lot of ideologically-inconvenient science, all the while thinking, "Oh, this is just interesting science, you know, I'm not going to let myself get _morally corrupted_ by it or anything." And for the last couple years you add in some ideologically-inconvenient political thinkers, too.

But I was still a nice good socially-liberal [Free-to-Be-You-and-Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_to_Be..._You_and_Me) gender-egalitarian individualist person. Because I understood the is–ought distinction—unlike _some_ people—I knew that I could learn from people's _models_ of the world without necessarily agreeing with their _goals_. So I had been trying to learn from the models of these bad people saying the bad things, until one day _the model clicked_. And the model was _terrifying_. And the model had _decision-relevant implications for the people who valued the things that I valued_—

The thing was, I actually _didn't_ think I had been morally corrupted after all! I thought I was actually _really good_ at maintaining the is–ought distinction in my mind. But more people who hadn't followed by exact intellectual trajectory, the mere fact that I was saying, "Wait! Stop! The things that you're doing may not in fact be the optimal things!" made it _look_ like I'd been morally corrupted, and there was no easy way for me to prove otherwise.

So, people probably shouldn't believe me. This was just a little manic episode with no serious implications. Right?

-------

Somewhat awkwardly, I actually had a date scheduled with "Noreen" that evening. The way that happened was, elsewhere on Facebook, earlier, on 7 February, Brent Dill had said that he didn't see the value in the community matchmaking site _reciprocity.io_, and I disagreed, saying that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.

"Noreen" had complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I had said that she shouldn't apologize; I usually didn't make that genre of comment, but it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent (who often espoused cynical views about status and social reality).

Incidentally, I added, I was thinking of seeing seeing that new [_Hidden Figures_ movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures) if I could find someone to go with? It turned out that she had already seen it, but we made plans to see _West Side Story_ at the [Castro Theatre](https://www.castrotheatre.com/) instead.

The date was pretty terrible. (Or, maybe I was the only one who categorized it as a "date"? Maybe in her ontology, we were just seeing a movie.) We walked around the Castro for a bit continuing to debate the gender thing, then saw the movie. I was very distracted and couldn't pay attention to the movie at all.

------

I continued to be very distracted the next day, Monday 13 February 2017. I went to my office, but definitely didn't get any dayjob work done.

I made another seven Facebook posts. I'm proud of this one:

> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
 
That is, when factorizing a joint probability distribution into a Bayesian network, you can do it with respect to any variable ordering you want: [a graph with a "wet-streets → rain" edge can represent a set of static observations just as well as a graph with a "rain → wet-streets" edge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qPrPNakJBq23muf4n/bayesian-networks-aren-t-necessarily-causal),[^koller-and-friedman-i] but "unnatural" variable orderings generate a more complicated graph that will give crazy predictions if you interpret it as a _causal_ Bayesian network and use it to predict the results of interventions. Algorithms for learning a network from data prefer graphs with fewer edges as a consequence of Occamian [minimum-message-length epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length):[^koller-and-friedman-ii] every edge is a [burdensome detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ/burdensome-details) that requires a corresponding [amount of evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nj8JKFoLSMEmD3RGp/how-much-evidence-does-it-take) just to [locate it in the space of possibilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis).

[^koller-and-friedman-i]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §3.4.1, "Minimal I-Maps".

[^koller-and-friedman-ii]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §18.3.5: "Understanding the Bayesian Score".

I thought this shed some light on my recent frustrations. People are pretty observant about what other people are like. If prompted appropriately, they know how to anticipate the ways in which trans women are different from cis women. The part of them that talked just didn't see the problem with trying to represent this knowledge (about physiological males with male-typical interests and personalities whose female gender identities seem closely intertwined with their gynephilic sexuality) using a variable ordering that put "biological sex" closer to last than first. And I just didn't think that was what the causal graph looked like.

-----

In another post, I acknowledged my problematic tone:

> I know the arrogance is off-putting! But the arrogance is a really fun part of the æsthetic that I'm really enjoying! Can I get away with it if I mark it as a form of performance art? Like, be really arrogant while exploring ideas, and then later go back and write up the sober serious non-arrogant version?

Someone came to my defense: it was common to have mental blocks about criticizing trans ideology because of the fear that saying anything would hurt one's trans friends and make one an outcast. One way to overcome that block was to get _really angry_ and _visibly having an outburst_, because then people ascribe less agency and culpability to you; it would be clear that you'd cooped up these feelings for a long time because you do understand that they're taboo and unpopular.

The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you _ever_ want to know what genitals someone has for _any reason_, you are an _evil transphobe_ who should _die_", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are _invading_ my female spaces for _nefarious purposes_ and we should burn them all".

I added that the worst part is that "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically _correct_. It was _phrased_ in a really dismissive manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!

-----

The thread on the "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends" post continued. Someone whom I'll call "Kevin" (whom I had never interacted with before or since; my post visibility settings were set to Public) said that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. Correlations with gender were weak enough to be irrelevant after talking with someone for half an hour.

I replied, but this was circular, right?—that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. If gender didn't have any (probabilistic!) implications, why did getting gendered correctly matter so much to people?

"Kevin" said that the distinction was between modeling someone as their gender, and addressing people in a way that respects their agency and identity, and it seemed reasonable to care much more about the second thing.

I said I didn't know what the second thing meant. I liked the words "agency" and "identity", too! But the reason I liked the words, is because they were associated with agentic and identificatory things that people do in the world, that my brain could make predictions about. Regarding the predictive value of gender, human psychology was a very high-dimensional vector space! If you'd bought into an ideology that says everyone is equal and that sex differences must therefore be small-to-nonexistent, then you can choose to selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, and when you're locked into that worldview, it does indeed genuinely look to you like individual personality differences swamp sex differences! And when you're locked into that worldview, looking at the dimensions along which the differences are relatively large is genuinely painful! Once you notice this, maybe you can think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that makes psychological-sex-differences denialism so appealing, while making use of the additional power you gain by letting yourself look at the whole configuration space!

"Kevin" asked for some examples where gender-category membership was really important. He wasn't saying that sex differences didn't exist (for example, when doing statistical research), just that they were irrelevant in direct interpersonal situations.

I replied, "Really important" was part of the map, not the territory! From the standpoint of someone who had never bought into the everyone-is-equal ideology in the first place, my desperate search for clever strategies to serve the androgyny-as-moral-ideal religion probably looked crazy and immoral. If my ancestors could see me, they'd probably be like, "Why are you making so many goddamned paperclips?! This wasn't supposed to be about paperclips!" And I was like, "But I want _moar paperclips._"

After one more back-and-forth between me and "Kevin", "Noreen" expressed frustration with some apparent inconsistencies in my excited presentation. I saw what she was getting at, and expressed my sympathies, tagging Michael Vassar (who was then using "Arc" as a married name):

> I'm sorry that I'm being confusing! I know I'm being confusing and it must be really frustrating to understand what I'm trying to say because I'm trying to explore this conceptspace that we don't already have standard language for! You probably want to slap me and say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Talk like a goddamned normal person!" But I forgot hoooooooow!
>
> **Michael Arc** is this how you feel all the time??
>
> help

-----

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/)  

I got some nice emails from Michael Vassar. "I think that you are doing VERY good work right now!!!" he wrote. "The sort that shifts history! Only the personal is political" (Subject: "Talk like a normal person").

I aptly summed up my mental state with a post that evening:

> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state.[^avatar-state]

[^avatar-state]: A reference to _Avatar: The Last Airbender_/_The Legend of Korra_, in which our hero can enter the ["Avatar state"](https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Avatar#Avatar_State) to become much more powerful—and also much more vulnerable (not being reincarnated if killed in the Avatar state).

I made plans to visit a friend's house that evening, but before I left the office, I spent some time drafting an email to Eliezer Yudkowsky. I remarked via PM to the person whose house I was to visit, "oh, maybe I shouldn't send this email to someone as important as Eliezer". Then, "oh, I guess that means the manic state is fading". Then: "I guess that feeling is the exact thing I'm supposed to be fighting". (Avoiding "crazy" actions like emailing a high-status person _wasn't safe_ in a world where all the high-status people where committed to believing that _men could be women by means of saying so_.) I did eventually decide to hold off on the email, and make my way to the friend's house. "Not good at navigation right now", I remarked.

------

I stayed up late that night of 13–14 February 2017, continuing to post, comment, message, _&c._. I'm proud of this post from 12:48 _a.m._:

> Of course, Lawrence couldn't assume Korzybski as a prerequisite. The reality is (wait for it ...) even worse! We're actually men who love their model of what we wish women were, and want to become that.[^model-of]

[^model-of]: Although Ben Hoffman pointed out that the words "their model of" don't belong here; it's one too many layers of indirection.

That is, realistically, the AGP fantasy _about_ "being a woman" wouldn't—[_couldn't_ actually be fulfilled by magically being transformed to match the female distribution](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). (At a minimum, because women aren't autogynephilic! The _male_ sex fantasy of, "Ooh, what if I inhabited a female body with my own breasts, vagina, _&c._", has no reason to match anything in the experience of women who always have just been female.)

In ["Interpersonal Entanglement"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement) (in the Fun Theory Sequence back in 'aught-nine), Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships than straights, since gays don't have to deal with the mismatch in desires across sexes.

The noted real-life tendency for AGP trans women to pair up with each other was probably partially due to this effect[^transcel]: the appeal of getting along with someone _like you_, of having an appropriately-sexed romantic partner who behaved like a same-sex friend. The [T4T phenomenon](https://sexuality.fandom.com/wiki/T4T) is a real-life analogue of ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2).

[^transcel]: Of course, a lot of the effect is going to be due to the paucity of cis women who are willing to date trans women.

The comment thread under the "nice/mean versions" post would eventually end 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 (at 1:14 _a.m._), she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.

I replied (at 1:25 _a.m._): 

>> why you believe what you believe
>
> The OP has four cites. What else do you want?
>
>> what consequences you think this has for people
>
> Consequences for me: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/)
>
> Consequences for other people: I don't know! That's for those other people to decide, not me! But whatever they decide, they'll probably get more of what they want if they have more accurate beliefs! Rationality, motherfuckers! Do you speak it!

(Looking back on the thread six years later, I'm surprised by the timestamps. What were we all _doing_, having a heated political discussion past midnight? We should have all been asleep! I guess I didn't yet fully appreciate the importance of sleep at this point in my life.)

"Chaya" explained why she was holding "Noreen" to a different standard of discourse than me: I was walking into this after years of personal, excruciating suffering, and was willing to sacrifice social connections to present a model. My brash tone should have been more forgivable in light of that—that I was ultimately coming from a place of compassion and hope for people, not hate.

I messaged "Chaya": "I wouldn't call it 'personal, excruciating suffering', but way to play the victim card on my behalf". She offered to edit it. I declined: "if she can play politics, we can play politics??"

"Chaya" speculated that "Noreen" might not be reacting as vehemently had I not recently asked her out in public, that she was now distancing herself from me as part of a signaling game—as if to say, "See? See, everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake, too!"

I said that I probably wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I was going through a "well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things" phase, like trying to spin a complaint ("again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates") into a date.

"Chaya" summed up something she had gotten out of my whole campaign:

> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM  
> I really _was_ getting to the point that I hated transwomen  
> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM  
> I hate them, too!  
> Fuck those guys!  
> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:27 AM  
> I hated what happened to my husband, I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was _getting_ to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy  
> But you're actually changing that for me  
> You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion  
> To people who are struggling and have things that are hard  
> It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore  
> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM  
> the "suffering" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture  
> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM  
> You've made me hate transwomen _less_ now  
> Because I have a model  
> I understand the problem  
> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM  
> [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/)  
> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM  
> I understand why it's hard  
> I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give  
> This is a better thing for me  
> I did not _want_ to be a hateful person  
> I did not want to take seeming good people as an enemy in my head, while trying to be friends with them in public  
> I think now I can do it more honestly  
> They might not want _me_ as a friend  
> But now I feel less threatened and confused and insulted  
> And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root  
> I'm very grateful for that  

... in retrospect, I wish I had taken that as a cue to try to get some sleep. I had already been to the psych ward for sleep-deprivation-induced madness once, in early 2013. That was a very bad time which I didn't want to repeat. But I was so amped up from my war, that I continued to stay up and post—and email.

At 3:30 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott Alexander: 

> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: ["The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories."](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) That thing is a _fucking_ Absolute Denial Macro!

At 4:18 _a.m._, I pulled the trigger on the email I had started drafting to Yudkowsky earlier (Subject: "the spirit of intervention"), arguing that neoreaction was onto something really important. It wasn't about politics _per se_; it was about reflectivity and moral progress skepticism. Instead of _assuming_ that we know better than people in the past, we should look at the _causal processes_ that produced our current morality, and reevaluate whether it makes sense (in light of our current morality, which was itself created those same causal processes). Insofar as we could see that the egalitarian strain of our current morality was shaped by political forces rather than anything more fundamental, it was worth reëvaluating. It wasn't that right-wing politics are good as such. More like, being smart is more important than being good (for humans), so if you abandon your claim to goodness, you can think more clearly.

A couple hours later, I was starting to realize I had made a mistake, as reflected to emails sent to Anna Salamon at 6:16 _a.m._ (Subject: "I love you and I'm scared and I should sleep to aboid [_sic_] being institutionalized") and to Michael Vassar 6:32 _a.m._ (Subject: "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)").

Michael got back to me at 10:37 _a.m._:

> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. [...] I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret ["Noreen"] and ["Kevin"], in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.

Records suggest that I may have gotten as much as an hour and a half of sleep that afternoon: in an email to Anna at 2:22 _p.m._, I wrote, "I don't know what's real. I should lie down? I'm sorry", and in a message to Ben at 4:09 _p.m._, I wrote, "I just woke up". According to my records, I hung out with Ben; I have no clear memories of this day.

That night, I emailed Michael and Anna about sleep at 12:17 _a.m._ 15 February 2017 (Subject: "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS") and about philosophy and the nature and amount of suffering in the universe at 1:55 _a.m._ and 2:01 _a.m._ (Subjects: "I think I'm starting to understand a lot of the stuff you used to say that I didn't understand!" and "none of my goddamned business").

I presumably eventually got some sleep that night. In the morning, 15 February 2017, I concluded my public Facebook meltdown with three final posts. "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!" said the first. Then: "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!" In the third post, I promised to leave Facebook for a week. (The complete Facebook meltdown had ended up comprising 31 posts between Saturday 11 February 2017 and 15 February 2017.)

In retrospect, I was not, entirely, feeling like a normal human. The world was starting to seem much more mysterious—and threatening—than it previously had. I told Sophia I wouldn't actually be able to make it to Portland that weekend (Subject: "I don't think I can make it to Portland/Wizardworld after all, sorry (eom)"). I presumably told my work I wouldn't be in at all anymore this week.

I want to be fair to my past self. In retrospect, it's clear that I was having a paranoid nervous breakdown due to stress and sleep deprivation. Looking back at a lot of the things I was thinking at the time, I no longer think those thoughts were correct. Actually, they were pretty crazy. You might hope that people who are going crazy for largely "biological" reasons (like stress and sleep deprivation) would notice this, and correct for it by trusting their own thoughts less, deferring more to ordinary social reality when it disagreed with their own altered perceptions.

But in a world where all the _sane_ people were insisting that men could be women by means of saying so, can you blame me for finding it hard to tell? If the paranoid hypotheses I was starting to generate didn't match ordinary social reality, how much reason did I really have to believe that ordinary social reality was actually in the right?

I don't want to say that I was having persecution _delusions_, exactly—just that persecution hypotheses were much more _salient_ than they usually were; I was a little bit fixated on the idea of scary men coming to kill me. Somehow, I developed the idea that an HSTS transsexual I had been corresponding with was actually AGP and in denial. I sent her an email trying to gently hint about it (Subject: "one last thing before I disappear for a while"), and then I felt scared—scared that she would she would track me down and take revenge? In a followup email, I disclaimed that I was kind of losing my mind right now, and disavowed the offensive hypothesis. ("But if you're sure, I believe you!") She replied, mentioning that she also questions people's self-reports of being HSTS. She said that her husband had a knack for spotting AGPs, and did not find them attractive, calling them "cross dressers on steroids." I said I was afraid that the husband wanted to kill me.

"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I messaged "Chaya" late that night. Now that I no longer believed self-reports are true, I could see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're in the right. I had ostensibly known that was a thing, verbally, but now I was _seeing_ it.

She asked for an example. I mentioned the thread where I had asked "Noreen" on a date. When I had excused my sexist remark with "it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent", I thought I had some beautiful æsthetic reason for that being a witty thing to say ... but maybe a better description of my behavior was that I was beating up on Brent—openly insulting a male conspecific as a dominance play while engaging in courtship.

------

At 10:27 _a.m._ on 16 February 2017, I sent an email to Michael and Anna (Subject: "questions"):

> Do humans actually need sleep, or sleep just a coping mechanism for dealing with civilization? Don't tell me if you don't think I'm ready to hear it.

In that thread, I claimed that I did get some sleep that night ("but only by means of lying down in the dark with my eyes closed; I didn't actually want to"), but apparently it hadn't been enough to keep my from growing increasingly delusional.

I sent some delusional emails to Eliezer Yudkowsky (Subjects: "positive reinforcement! But, updating away from you and towards Paul Christiano and Michael Vassar (eom)" and "You and Greg Egan had [that public fight on Baez's blog](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/what-to-do/#comment-5515)! Was that staged on purpose? If not, you should update towards Egan (eom)"), and some probably nice and non-concerning emails to each of my parents (Subjects: "You've been a good [mother/father] to me in ways that I didn't always understand at the time (eom)")

At 1:17 _p.m._, I sent my boss an email saying that I was thinking of taking a sabbatical, leaving the company to persue another project (_i.e._, this blog), but that I'd like to talk to him as soon as possible to think about the decision together. Without waiting too long for a reply, I soon got on a train to San Francisco.

------

The first time I went insane from sleep deprivation, in 2013, I remember having a distinct mental sensation where two words kept running through my head, over and over. That time, the words had been "science" and "female." Maybe a Society with a more advanced discipline of psychiatry would be able to pinpoint the nature and origin of this symptom more exactly, but I suspect it might be a real regularity, because around this time, it started happening to me again. This time, the words were "cooperate" and "defect".

I wandered around downtown San Francisco, and used my phone to repeatedly message the word "Cooperate" to various people—to "Chaya" (six times), to Ben (five times), to "Noreen" (six times), to "Thomas" (twice), to my insufficiently requited love "Beatrice" (five times), to Ziz (six times), to Brent Dill (five times) ... a few other people. (I was imagining the act of saying or sending the word constituting an act of playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)

"I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip", I told "Chaya" and Ben. "Chaya" asked me to clarify whether I meant I had taken acid, or gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said.

I remember being afraid that the thing which (I had decided) had happened to Eliezer Yudkowsky and to Scott Alexander that made them such good writers was now happening to me, a phenomenon that would bring indescribable suffering along with an awakening into genius. I messaged Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet".

At 1:47 _p.m._, I had messaged Ziz, "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu [_sic_][^kiritsugu-spelling]; that's why I've chosen the confessor route"—a reference to Yudkowsky's story ["Three Worlds Collide"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT), in which an alien rationalist trained for command (the _Kiritsugu_) is contrasted with her human counterpart (the Confessor), who is tasked only with telling the truth, for others to decide what to do about it.

[^kiritsugu-spelling]: The spelling [used in the story is _Kiritsugu_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8).

[(I don't do policy.)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)

After I asked for "positive reinforcement" and sent some "Cooperate" messages at 3:15 _p.m._, Ziz responded with some heartwarming anecdotes about how others thought of me. She said that Michael Vassar had been talking approvingly about me, in the context of a war between gaslighting _vs._ having the ability to think, that I was one of the three fronts in "the community" that the war was playing out on: Sarah _vs._ Ben, Rob _vs._ Ben Todd, and Zack Davis _vs._ the world.[^war-fronts]

[^war-fronts]: I'm not sure if "Rob" was referring to Rob Wiblin or Rob Bensinger. When I asked Michael later how Sarah and Ben were in conflict (Subject: "request for clarification re war fronts"), he said that Sarah and Ben were allies and that he wasn't sure how the misunderstanding happened.

Eventually I made it to my office. My boss said he hadn't seen my email about wanting to meet. I wasn't sure I believed him—not particularly because I thought he had read it and had reason to lie about that, but because I wasn't sure I believed self-reports were meaningful in general. Maybe everyone was just bluffing, playing improv, all the time: maybe it was common for people to not actually know how to read, and chose at random whether to claim to have read or not-read something.

At this point, my memories aren't very clear or detailed. I think I said something that caused my coworkers to be very concerned for me, but I remember being very careful about the wording, to make sure I _wasn't_ saying one of the things that would give people cause to lock me up. I think it was something like, "I think I'm in the mental state that causes people to perform the verbal behavior of saying they want to commit suicide."

In retrospect, I don't think people pay attention to such distinctions.

A coworker volunteered to secure me a ride home. There was some question about whether the relevant "home" was my apartment in Berkeley, or the house in Walnut Creek where my mother lived, and where I had lived until just ten months before. As a newly awakened-social conservative, I intuited that staying with family was the right choice. (I was wrong.) At 6:22 _p.m._, I sent an email from my work computer to my parents, Anna, and Michael (Subject: "I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)").

We still owned the house. My coworker took an Uber with me to the house in Walnut Creek, and talked to my mother.

(Meanwhile, Ziz had made her way to my apartment. "Brought chocolate, allegedly good against dementors," she messaged at 5:43 _p.m._. "Believe I can cooperate better if I can see your face." I was apparently in no state to appreciate the gesture; I messaged back "OK" a couple times when she asked to be let in, and confirmed which address she was at, even though I wasn't there. My flatmate eventually arrived and let her in.)

I tried to sleep that night, at my mom's house. It wasn't very effective. I was scared of being attacked by criminals. (There may have been a racial angle on this fear? I don't think I can remember, and if I could, I'm not sure I would be able to type it.) Sure, I _remembered_ feeling physically secure at almost all times in my life; I _remembered_ Walnut Creek being a safe place. But how trustworthy were memories from life inside an ideological bubble? Maybe people like me got assaulted and brutalized all the time, but our culture had trained us to block out all the evidence and even memories that good smart nice liberals _prefered not to see_.

------

The next morning, 17 February 2017, my mother took me to the hospital to be evaluated. I didn't want to go. (I had had a very bad time in the psych ward in 2013.) I don't think I was very articulate about expressing this—at least, not in a way my mother could understand. "People are better at taking care of each other than institutions," I said, over and over. "People are better at taking care of each other than institutions!"

I ultimately compiled. I am again grateful that the doctors' notes were made available to me online after the fact. I am very conscious of the unreliability of human memory; I owe much of my ability to tell this Whole Dumb Story to the fact that most of it took place on the internet, giving me chatlogs and emails to look back on. Even in the places where I talk about my remembered thoughts and feelings (that I didn't write down at the time), the documents have been helpful in pinning down exactly when they happened chronologically.

The doctors' notes from that day describe my appearance as "somewhat disheveled, though clean, with long & unruly brown hair that he often twirls".

The notes go into more detail on the reasons for my visit: "Patient states he 'thought the world was made of words' and he 'hurt people with words' [...] mom reports he is not thinking as lucidly as normal, seems to have blocking of thoughts, gets caught up on 'being wrong' or talking about transgender community 'being wrong' [...] Initially states that he doesn't want any mental health treatment, just wants to be cared for by his mom & work out his issues with his friends' help. Mom believes that he needs mental health treatment, and asserts this as a condition of him staying with her, then Patient is agreeable to take Rx"—medication, they prescribed 5 mg of Zyprexa—"& return to Psychiatry Intensive Outpatient Program."

"Patient does not meet criteria for California Welfare & Institutions Code 5150 (LPS) for involuntary detainment for inpatient psychiatric monitoring"—that's the loony bin.

"Patient has d/c'd the E2"—discontinued the estrogen patch—"& I agree with this."

(I assume there must be some fascinating sociological explanation for why the doctors have terse abbreviations for common terms and phrases—_Rx_, medication; _d/c_, discontinued; _disc r/b/a_, discussed risks/benefits/alternatives—and yet the phrase "does not meet criteria for California Welfare & Institutions Code 5150 (LPS) for involuntary detainment for inpatient psychiatric monitoring" is written out in full, three times. Why not just say, "we're not 5150'ing him"?)

I was glad not to get 5150'd. I have a memory-fragment of resisting—having a sense that the doctors wanted to institutionalize me, but that I insisted on walking out, and got away with it. I think I trust the doctors' notes more than my memory on this _particular_ count. (Although in general, the doctor's notes contain a striking density of outright falsehoods. Humans are not very good reporters!)

To be clear, I still think I was correct to want to avoid the psych hospital, but that's _not at all_ the same thing as thinking that I was sane; the sleep deprivation was still taking its toll in the form of dreamlike delusions.

I remember having a vision of seeing autogynephilia as a separate taxon in the configuration space of minds, and of negotiating with some celestial agency to _pry_ it apart in the world's shared ontology—it was real, and I saw it, but somehow it couldn't be _fully_ real until it was accepted as real.

I sent some more messages from my phone in the afternoon. I couldn't sleep because I was scared, I told "Chaya". I had built up a distinction between social reality and physical reality, and I didn't know what to do now that it had been undermined.

I was so sorry, I told Ben. I wanted to be part of the coalition, but I was so confused, and I said "defect" a bunch of times. I was scared that my boss (who, incidentally, was black) was going to come kill me.

Ben said he wouldn't ask a trading partner to not _consider_ defecting; that would be silly. He pointed out that saying the word "defect" is like wearing black robes; it's not the same as the thing it represents. My boss was not personally coming to kill me. ("There's probably some symbolic truth to the worry but it might not resemble the literal content at all and is almost certainly not urgent on the order of hours".)

I got the idea to go to my apartment in Berkeley, and started walking to the Walnut Creek BART station. On my way, I felt a surge of energy, a second wind despite my exhaustion. "I just realized that you're allowed to not be submissive all the time", I told Ben. "I didn't know this before and it feels like an impossible superpower".

I was stopped by cops before entering the Walnut Creek BART station. (I hadn't told my mother I was leaving; when she noticed my absence, she panicked and called 911. I'm impressed that they found me so quickly: contrary to my night terrors, Walnut Creek was evidently _so_ safe that the cops didn't have anything better to do.) Questioned by the cops, I explained the situation: that I was a software engineer going through a stressful time, that I had stayed at my mother's house here in Walnut Creek last night, but that now I was trying to get a train to go to my apartment in Berkeley. I said that I had been awake for a couple days. (That's not _normal_, they said.) I said, truthfully, that I wasn't on drugs, but I didn't expect them to believe me—and, somehow, felt as if I were optimizing for them not to believe me.

I tried to talk the cops into taking me back to my mom's house, which was clearly the best thing for me, given that my plan of going to my own apartment was apparently not on the table. Apparently I didn't realize that the cops had a procedure, and their procedure did not admit of that kind of personal discretion. In my last message to Ben before getting locked up, at 3:19 _p.m._, I said, "You can use police cars as Ubers????"

--------

The thing about being psychiatrically institutionalized, is that it wouldn't be such an ordeal if it happened while you were sane. Getting kidnapped by strangers and having to spend three days in a bad hotel doing kindergarten-like activities would definitely be an inconvenience, but it wouldn't be traumatizing, if you were psychologically stable and knew that this was just a thing your Society did to people sometimes—worse than jury duty, but not _qualitatively_ worse than jury duty.

The problem is that _while having a psychotic break_ is _the worst possible time_ to be kidnapped by strangers.

The authorities will claim that psychiatric hospitals are for the benefit of the patients. I'll concede that this is possible in some cases: maybe some people have such dysfunctional home lives, or would otherwise be living on the streets, such that the psych ward is actually a better place for them.

For most people of my social class, I don't think this is plausible; if the welfare of the crazy person were the primary criterion, almost everyone would be better off with their friends or family, in a familiar environment with people you know.

Rather, psych wards make sense as being for the welfare of friends or family who are _sick of putting up with living with a crazy person_. It's a form of responsibility laundering: if there's a designated institution for taking care of crazy people, you can dump your loved ones there to be _someone else's problem_ (at least for a few days), with a clean conscience, because anything bad that happens inside of an officially sanctioned institution, isn't anyone fault.

It's important not to be misled by the name, psychiatric "hospital". The word _hospital_ gives the impression of a place where medical procedures are performed, like how real hospitals do surgeries and set broken bones. We don't really have _procedures_ to treat mental illness—not ones that are held in high regard these days, anyway.

It's a jail—a place where you lock up undesirable people where they can't impose costs on anyone who isn't being paid to deal with them. And precisely _because_ I was modeling it as a jail, my social performance was a lot better this time around than in 2013.

I unironically suspect it would be kinder and less confusing if the authorities would just explicitly label it a jail: to just say, Society or your loved ones are _sick of your antics_, so we're going to lock you up in this place and drug you until you obey us and act "normal". An honest punishment of force applied to change behavior is so much less cruel than the psychological abuse of a punishment that coerces its recipients into affirming it as "care".


[TODO psych ward scenes—

A nice thing about being a free citizen that you don't notice until you've lost it by being kidnapped and thrown in jail, is having a sense of where you are in the world. When visiting an unfamiliar place, I at least know _how_ I got there, how this place _connects_ to everything else in my model of the world: I may not be familiar with this building or these streets, but I know the train or highway that I took to get here from places that I do know—at worst, if I brought my phone, I can pull up Google Maps to see where I am.

In psych jail, this sense of connection is suddenly absent. You don't know what route the ambulance took. You're locked in a building with strangers. There is no Google Maps. You could be anywhere.

...


Even things that are more-or-less genuinely intended to be for your benefit, are harder to recognize as such when you're _insane from sleep deprivation_ and rattled from just having been _kidnapped by armed men_.

When being checked in, they confiscate any belongings you have on you. I remember one of the psych ward employees counting the money from my wallet in front of me.

In retrospect, I can appreciate this practice as the system trying to offer evidence of its trustworthiness: they don't just steal your stuff; they _document_ the items they're confiscating, and give it back to you afterwards. (I have in my possession a yellow carbon copy of my "Patient Valuables Record", form A7026, which lists what they took.)

At the time and in context, I wasn't prepared to appreciate it; the employee counting my bills in front of me seemed like an Orwellian ["There are five lights"](/2018/Aug/interlude-xii/) dominance display, intended to undermine my connection to reality—and maybe, I didn't trust that _she_ knew how to count.

...


When I tried to complain about the injustice of my confinement to staff, I was once told that I could call "patient's rights". I didn't bother. If the staff weren't going to listen, what was the designated complaint line going to do?

About a year later, Scott Alexander published a _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["Navigating And/Or Avoiding The Inpatient Mental Health System"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/22/navigating-and-or-avoiding-the-inpatient-mental-health-system/), which claimed that patient rights advocates _do_ advocate for patients in opposition to the rest of the system. ("Usually the doctors hate them, which I take as a pretty good sign that they are actually independent and do their job.")

This was _not at all_ obvious from the inside. I'm reminded of an article I once read in the racist[^racist-magazine] magazine _American Renaissance_, [by a public defender complaining about the behavior of his predominantly black clients](https://archive.is/HUkzY):

[^racist]: I think they would prefer that I say _racialist_? But I also think that, when pressed, they would concede that _you know what I mean_.

> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.

After my psych ward experiences, I deeply empathize with the clients here. In the defense attorney's worldview, he's working to protect his clients' interests, and is frustrated that they don't appreciate that. What the defense attorney doesn't see is that his work only benefits the clients from _within_ the terms set by a system of power that looks arbitrary and unjust to those on the other end of it. From the perspective of a client who doesn't think he did anything particularly wrong (whether or not the law agrees), the defense attorney is _part of the system_.

So I think my intuition was correct to dismiss patient's rights as useless. I'm sure _they_ believe that they're working to protect patients' interests within the system, and would have been frustrated that I didn't appreciate that. But what I wanted was not redress of any particular mistreatment that the system recognized as mistreatment, but to be _let out of psych jail_—and on that count, I'm sure patient's rights would have told me that the evidence was harmful to my case. They weren't working for me.

...

After I was released and got my belongings back, I couldn't find my Driver License. For a few days, I assumed that one of the psych ward employees had stolen it out of my wallet. I was wrong: actually, there was a separate license-holder compartment inside the wallet. I had forgotten.

...

This was a theme in my thoughts at the time: I was scared that the world was a much less orderly place than I knew. I used to believe the world was "made out of words": that the things people said were mostly true, that the world protrayed in books and maps mostly _was_ the real world. Suddenly, I had been granted a different view of reality, a world of animals in which _words don't matter_.

In retrospect, my psychotic vision of a languageless world turned out to be false. Most people really _do_ know how to read.

I fear that some readers will take this as an admission that the authorities were right, that conventional social reality is right—that I was _just_ crazy, and everything I thought while I was crazy can be costlessly discarded.

I don't think that's right. I _was_ crazy, but _that doesn't mean ordinary social reality is sane_—and it doesn't mean that some of the things I thought I saw from my altered perspective weren't _directionally_ correct, as I can evaluate them from a more standard frame of mind now.

Sometimes, the words written down in official documents really are just lies. I have in my possession an "Involuntary Patient Advisement" form, which claims that I "self presented due to [my] suicidal thoughts". This isn't true. Getting accosted by cops while trying to go into the train station to get back to my apartment is not the same thing as "self presenting"![^telephone-game]

[^telephone-game]: Reading the doctor's notes six years later, it seems likely that this false description was copied from the beginning of a note ("WHO WAS SELF PRESENTED TO CCRMC PES VOLUNTARILY DUE TO SUICIDAL THOUGHTS") that _also_ contains a more accurate description of events later in the same note, except for the substitution of Oakland for Walnut Creek ("PT SEEN EARLIER TODAY IN THE KAISER OAKLAND ED BUT WAS RELEASED WITH THE CONTRACT MOTHER WOULD TAKE HIM HOME AND MONITOR HIM. AFTER THEY GOT HOME PT LEFT WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE. MOTHER REPORTED HIM A DTS"—danger to self—"AND POLICE EVENTUALLY FOUND HIM AT THE BART STATION").

I ended up with a "Rights for Individuals in Mental Health Facilities" handbook, which claims that:

> You have the right to refuse medical treatment or treatment with medications (except in an emergency) unless a capacity hearing is held and a hearing officer or a judge finds that you do not have the capacity to consent to or refuse treatment. The advocate or public defender can assist you with this matter.

Naïvely, one might expect that having the right to refuse medication means that when someone tries to give you medication, you can just say that you don't want to take it, and they'll respect that. This did not seem to be true: I was reluctant to take medication, but the behavior of the staff made it clear that they weren't going to take no for an answer, and I folded, _because they were holding me prisoner_.

I remember trying to deceive a staff member, putting on a "show" with magician-like hand flourishes (to which she dutifully pretended to be impressed, as one would to a toddler) before taking the pill—hoping to palm it before swallowing it without her noticing. It didn't work. I swallowed.

Maybe if I had had the presence of mind at the time to read the rights handbook, and point to the specific line where it says, "You have the right to refuse [...] treatment with medications", they would have accepted that? But it seems likely that that would have been punished by a longer stay. A "right" that you get punished for exercising is ... not much of a right?

As it happens, I _now_ think that taking the medication was a good idea. The reason I think this is because when I sought psychiatric help for insomnia in early 2021—intending very dearly not to go insane from sleep deprivation again, very much not wanting to be institutionalized again—the doctor told me that my records from my 2017 institutionalization said they had me on Zyprexa 5mg and Trazadone 50mg. Trazadone!—that was on [Scott Alexander's insomnia page](https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/).

I worry, again, that some readers will take this as vindication that the authorities were right: they forced me to take drugs, and now that I'm sane and have a little more information, I agree that the drugs were a good idea. Why, the contemptuous normie reader asks, does this not demonstrate that they were right to force me, when I was crazy and therefore couldn't make decisions for myself?

Because submission to authority isn't the same thing as sanity. In the psych ward in February 2017, I _knew_ that I needed sleep. If someone I trusted to have my best interests at heart had _told me_, "This is 50mg Trazadone; I strongly recommend you take it, because it will help you sleep; I also have this Trazadone fact sheet you can read if you want more information," I would have taken it.

But a system that actually had my best interests at heart would not have _kidnapped me and locked me in a building with strangers_, which is _not a good environment for getting rest_. Serious antipsychotic medication is scary stuff. When I was institutionalized in 2013, I got tardive dyskensia—an involuntary lip-smacking compulsion—from the Haldol that they gave me. Tardive dyskensia can be permanent in some cases. Given that experience, and given the information I had at the time in 2017, I do not think I had good reason not to just trust the system!

...

I remember pacing the tiled halls of a the first facility where they took me—probably [Contra Costa Regional Medical Center](https://cchealth.org/medicalcenter/psychiatric.php) in Martínez.[^ccrmc] I was exhausted, but also feeling a sort of manic euphoria, pacing around, tapping demonstratively at the signs on the walls, thinking it was my duty to teach the other inmates how to read. Ziz's report of Vassar's comment about "Zack Davis _vs._ the world" stuck with me; I had of vision of myself as one of the seven most important people in the world in the lead-up to the intelligence explosion, as reckoned by future historians. Being a world–historically important genius wouldn't have _felt like_ being a genius at the time, most of the time. It must have felt like being pretty smart, and the rest of the world seeming dumb and crazy. (A young Albert Einstein working in the Swiss patent office wouldn't have had the mononymic aura of "Einstein" _to his contemporaries_.) Notwithstanding that I was having psychotic delusions of grandeur at the time, I do think it was legitimate for me to feel that I was pretty smart, and that the rest of the world was dumb and crazy.

[^ccrmc]: I only know this because, when consulting the doctor's notes available to me while writing this up more than six years after the fact, one of the notes mentions "CCRMC PES". "PES" is probably "Psychiatric Emergency Services".

There were two rooms with beds, in that first facility: one for women, and one for men. I didn't end up sleeping there that I recall. Before long, I was taken to a separate facility, [Fremont Hospital](https://fremonthospital.com/), which had individual rooms. (Or was I incredibly lucky to not have been assigned a roommate? Having to sleep by someone else at night would have been very bad for me, given my fear of the other inmates and my desperate need for sleep.)

...

My memories of life in psych prison aren't very clear, partially because of how out-of-it I was, and partially because it's been more than six years since then, and memories decay if you don't _write them down_ (within hours, days, weeks—not _six years_). I wrote a [little](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [bit](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/) about my experiences in 2017. I think I would have written more if I had remembered that the consequence of not confronting [the challenge of](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/) recording painful memories is that you lose them. I retain some access to my psychotic [sense of life](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sense_of_life.html), but only episodic fragments of specific events. ("Now memories are blurred, and their faces are obscured, but I still know the words to this song" ...)

My beliefs about game theory and evolutionary psychology—the theory and practice of making friends and avoiding enemies as a animal—seemed much more salient and actionable than anything about the world that was made of words, or the right way to behave as a person in civilization (as contrasted to an animal). 

It seemed important to avoid the gaze of males, particularly males physically larger than me. (If they noticed me noticing them, they would try to threaten me.)

...

An Asian woman named Joy seemed to hurt herself on the hinges of the cart used to bring us meals, in a way that plausibly looked like my fault—maybe I had opened the door on the cart while her fingers were in the wrong place? A football-coach-like orderly took my side (in the manner of a grown-up intervening in a squabble amongst kindergarteners), saying that I was only trying to help. When the orderly was out of earshot, Joy looked at me and whispered, "This never happened." I was never sure what that was about. Had she only been pretending to be hurt, and was telling me to keep quiet?

A young black woman named Tone asked me what we had for breakfast—as if the Orwellian dominance rituals we were forced to undergo, had her doubting her senses and her memory, and she was looking to me (a fellow inmate, not an authority) to keep her sane, to verify her connection to reality.

A black man in the hallway was saying something about how his mother didn't love him. This seemed unlikely to me, so I tried to explain to him that his mother probably did love him. He got angry. I hid behind a door.

I shared a moment of solidarity with a black man who was physically smaller than me, and therefore seemed safe to interact with. Society locked us up here because they don't want to deal with people like us, I said, but we need to stay strong.

...

I got the idea that it ought to be helpful to prove my agency to the staff. I'd say something like: I'm going to take a shower now, and then be ready for bed at this-and-such time, and then point out at the aforementioned time that I was actually ready, just like I said I would. My ability to make correct predictions about my future behavior showed that I was an approximately coherent agent, therefore sane, and therefore that I should be released.

...

I remember having Anna on the phone, and asking if I was a political prisoner. (The Soviet Union had declared its dissidents sick with sluggish schizophrenia as a pretext for persecuting them; how could I be sure things worked all that differently here?) She answered in the negative. "Really?" I said. (If I _was_ a political prisoner, she might not be able to say so over a telephone line controlled by the authorities.)

...

My mother visited. Her presence was actively anti-helpful. She was very cranky, acting like being here was my fault, my punishment. I had a vision of pulling the fire alarm, and being held back by the knowledge that it would only make my punishment worse. (I'm not confident there was actually an alarm for me to pull; I would have expected other inmates to have had the same idea.)

Michael Vassar visited, overlapping with my mother. Michael was extremely helpful, including in de-escalating my mother's hostility. (I would later describe him as "pretend[ing] to be a doctor for my mom", but on reflection, I don't think that's what happened; More likely, he had mentioned MetaMed, and I misinterpreted it.) I talked to him in a side room, saying that I was scared to sleep because I was afraid that this was the part of the simulation where I would get anally raped. Michael said that that didn't really happen in this kind of facility. Crucially, _I believed him_. (I wouldn't have believed any assurances from the "hospital" authorities.) I handed him some folded papers on which I had jotted down some notes (inmates were allowed dull golf pencils), thinking that I needed to be covert to escape the attention of the authorities.

...

I remember seeing another male pacing the hallways, the way that I pace sometimes. I hadn't particularly thought of that as a "gendered" (sexually dimorphic) trait, but seeing another man do it (and not particularly remembering seeing a woman do it) made the hypothesis salient, that it was the spandrell of some hunter (not gatherer) behavioral program.

...

I was a very genre-savvy psych prisoner. I was distrustful of the other inmates, and distrustful of the authorities, but in different ways; the optimal strategy to protect myself against each was different.

I feared violence from the other inmates. I thought I could subtly leave clues that (as a Jewish male with long hair), I was an incarnation of Jesus, which would discourage them from attacking me (because many of them would have already been programmed by the Christianity memeplex to believe that killing Jesus was the worst sin). I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my three-day evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one, even though I no longer agree with the threat model.) My father actually did pick me up in three days.

]

-----

After being released from psych prison, arrangements were made for made for me to attend the Intensive Outpatient Program at Kaiser Walnut Creek—more school-like group sessions where they talk about feelings and coping strategies. That was also anti-helpful, but it was much less of a problem. The outpatient psych authorities are of course just as stupid and overbearingly paternalistic as the inpatient psych prison authorities, with the crucial difference that they don't have any power. In psych prison, the doors are locked; you physically can't leave.

The outpatient program has a few social-pressure sales tactics meant to persuade you that you have some underlying condition that requires their "care". They were unpersuaded by my cause-and-effect reasoning that I had gone crazy due to stress-induced sleep deprivation, and was now fine after having gotten sleep. Getting sleep _fixed the problem_.

But the doors aren't locked; they don't actually have any power over you that you don't give them.

The intake assessment describes me as "retreat[ing] into highly intellectualized, incomprehensible philosophy as a defense against disorganization/psychotic thought process". (Well, all philosophy looks incomprehensible when you, personally, don't comprehend it.) Another note describes me as "hostile, belligerent, and condescending throughout the program" on the morning of 24 February. (They deserved it.)

-----

I started talking more with Michael Vassar. I don't think I've ever really understood Michael well enough to summarize him. Everyone else writes blog posts. If you want to know what someone's intellectual agenda is about, you can point to the blog posts. Michael never writes anything. He just has these free-wheeling conversations where he makes all sorts of crazy-sounding assertions ... which were suddenly starting to make sense to me now.

On 22 February 2017 (two days after my release from the psych ward), he asked for my phone number (Subject: "Can I have your phone number?"). "I'd really like to talk soon," he wrote. "Thinking much more about how you can help me to meet my needs than about how I can help you though, and feel guilty about it given the situation, so feel free to tell me 'no, not now'."

I replied, "I like helping people meet their needs! It's prosocial!"

When I asked how I could help him meet his needs. He said that he thought my fight was ground zero in a war against words. If I had the mental composure to hold up, knowing that I had allies, he really thought that full documentation of my experiences would be the maximum leverage of my time. Otherwise, he was all but unable to ask for money for himself, even if he honestly thought he was the best use of it, but he was able to ask for nonprofit funding. What about starting a nonprofit, with me as executive director and him as fundraiser?—the Society for the Preservation of Generative Grammar and for Defense Against Structural Violence, providing legal defense for people whose rights or livelihood are threatened by political correctness. (Subject: "Re: You're really bad at communicating!")

Regarding the suggestion to document my experiences, I replied, "Too narcissistic!" This is incredibly ironic in hindsight, given the absurd amount of effort I've ended up spending since 2019 writing up this Whole Dumb Story. But you see, I had to try making object-level arguments _first_. It was only after that conclusively failed, that I've gone to the narcissistic extreme of full documentation of my experiences as a last resort. (Or as therapy.)

I didn't want to start a nonprofit, either. I thought our kind of people were smart enough to function without the taboo against giving money to individuals instead of faceless institutions. I had $97,000 saved up from being a San Francisco software engineer who doesn't live in San Francisco. Besides keeping most of it as savings, and spending some of it to take a sabbatical from my career, I was thinking it made sense to spend some of it just giving unconditional gifts to Michael and others who had helped me as a kind of credit-assignment ritual, although I wanted to think carefully about the details before doing anything rash.

On a separate email thread, I ended up mentioning something to Michael that I shouldn't have, due to a previous confidentiality promise I had made. (I can tell you _that_ I screwed up on a secrecy obligation, without revealing what it was.) I felt particularly bad about this given that I had been told that Michael was notoriously bad at keeping secrets, and asked him to keep this one secret as a favor to me.

Michael replied:

> Happy to not talk about it. Just freaking ask. I can easily honor commitments, just not optimize for general secrecy. The latter thing is always wrong. I'm not being sloppy and accidentally defecting against the generalized optimization for secrecy, I'm actively at war with it. We need to discuss this soon. 

------

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.)

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 there were better ways to turn dollars into opposition to cultishness. Then I realized that I had been asking Michael for permission, not advice. (Of _course_ Michael was going to say No, there's a better way to turn dollars into anti-cultishness, which would turn out to be apophenic Vassarian moonspeak that will maybe later turn out to be correct in ways that I wouldn't understand for eight years; I shouldn't have asked.) I went ahead an emailed Yudkowsky. (Again, I won't confirm or deny whether a conversation actually happened.)

------

I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)

At standup meeting on my last day (3 March 2017), I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.

-------

[TODO: correspondence with sex researchers
 * I had sent Blanchard fan mail on 10 August 2016
 * I had sent Bailey fan mail on 7 January 2017, and then followed up on 11 February with a link to the blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message")
 * "fan mail; and, self-promotion" to Alice Dreger on 2 March
 * Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160 , https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528
 * The world is not actually large; "famous" people (on the order of scientists or professors) often answer their email. (Although this probably stops being true for, like, Taylor Swift.)
 * I wrote to Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence/Cantor (Subject: "trans infovism against trans activism?? (was: Fwd: The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought)")

> It gets worse! I think this absurd situation is illustrative of a flaw in democracy itself: activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.

 * I mean, you're already doing this with your work, obviously, but I want to know if there's any way I can help?

> If polarizing cultural forces force you to make a choice between joining the "Your gender is whatever you say it is! Maximize the number of trans people!" coalition, or the "Transitioning is against God's will! Minimize the number of trans people!" coalition, the only sane thing to do is ignore the noise and sit out the fight.

> Maybe there's a role for some kind of very narrowly scoped political behavior (making friends and allies, trading favors, alienating people, &c.), with the goal of just getting the correct theory (sexual dimorphism is real, societies have gender roles, there are these two distinct classes of motivation for why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone) in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but not trying to dictate what the social norms

 * Bailey was tentatively working on a website ("Resources for Families with Gender Dysphoria" (RFGD.org).) (not sure what happened with that)

 * Lawrence—
> I think it is a fool's errand to try to convince anyone to accept our ideas about "what the thing actually is." The best one can do, I feel, is to present the autogynephilia model as a potentially useful one and make it available, comprehensible, and perhaps somewhat palatable to those who might benefit from it.

"I'd prefer to pick the fights I think I could win."

]

-------

Michael asked me what I thought of recently disgraced right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (Subject: "Milo"). I said I hadn't been following that drama, except that I was really annoyed at local effective-altruism priestess Kelsey Piper (then blogging as _The Unit of Caring_) [playing dumb about what was at issue](http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/156812598746/calling-milos-conduct-random-cruelty-to-people) when criticizing Yiannopoulos for calling out a trans student by name during a speech. ("The woman in question was not 'still choosing to present as a man', she was not passing for a cis woman [...] If my university weren't letting me use the women's restrooms I would absolutely file a title IX complaint," Piper wrote.)

I agreed with Piper that ridiculing a named individual in a public speech is _mean_, and it's preferable to avoid mean things if there's any way to make the same point with the same force and quality; it would be better if we could just directly renegotiate social norms without being mean. In that sense, I was not pro-Milo. But if we couldn't peacefully coordinate and were doomed to do politics, the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus's strategy of gerrymandering categories seemed like a strategy of [asymmetrical warfare](http://devinhelton.com/afghanistan-fractally-stupid-war), less of a fair fight than just trading insults. I could respect Yiannopoulos as an ordinary soldier.

Michael said that the issue that ultimately took down 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.

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.)

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 wasn't sure what he meant about free speech being physically dangerous. Was it that most men would be thuggish rapists if they thought for themselves in the service of their own values, such that school/media/memetic social control was necessary to keep them in check?

No, Michael clarified, selfish people are almost never a problem. The problem was with mobs, not individual bad people. In the absence of taboos against racism, mobs would form and coerce people to demand blood from the most convenient Schelling point: in practice, Jews or blacks. 

What made the ACLU important was that it credibly [made a reliable committment to defend people like Yiannopoulos](http://www.npr.org/2017/02/12/514785623/the-aclu-explains-why-theyre-supporting-the-rights-of-milo-yiannopoulos). But Michael didn't think that many of them understood how bad I saw the situation as being. The ACLU needed to address how plausible the arguments for censorship are. People accepting censorship needed to address arguments about how real the harms are. As far as he can tell, I was the maximally concrete and articulate case of a person harmed by political correctness in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide.

I asked him to be more specific about the class of people he thought were being genocided (nerdy men?) and by what (the political-correctness memeplex that evolved as a social-control mechanism to prevent the United States from descending into racialized violence like Yugoslavia?).

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" between AGP and normal heterosexual attraction, the balance between the two being set early in psycho-sexual 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.

[^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_, 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_.

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_.)

"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%)"
 
 * Disagreeing with Michael about violence terminology
 * Michael writes to me about sleep 

> 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.

Michael replied:

> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.

 * "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"
 * Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage ...

]

------

[TODO: ordering DIY hormones, and ordering on Alice Monday's behalf
 * As part of my distrust for institutions, it made sense to get some DIY hormones, rather than solely being dependent on the legitimate system: I ordered a pack of Progynova - 1 mg (Estradiol) and a pack of ALDACTONE - 25mg (Spironolactone) for myself from AllDayChemist
 * 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
]

------

[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
]

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On 12 March 2017, I made a Facebook post trying to explain my new outlook:

> The core of the update is that it turns out to be surprisingly useful to model the world as being made out of three things: people (who can be friends, enemies, or strangers), evolved social-control mechanisms (which use people as components as well as trains, pieces of paper, credit cards, web forms, _&c_.), and rocks. Instead of taking the things that people say about the evolved social-control mechanisms literally with respect to what _you_ think the words mean, you should constantly be making predictions (preferably predictions that you can get feedback about on the timescale of seconds or minutes) about what will happen if you interact with the social-control mechanisms in a particular way, and then noticing if the predictions come true or not. It turns out that non-nerds—you know, those people we disdain for being stupid or sexist or voting for Donald Trump or whatever your favorite excuse is—already knew this; they just didn't tell you because they were—correctly—modeling you as a component in the evolved social-control mechanisms rather than as a person.

------

[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
]

------

[TODO: "Roberta" situation]

[TODO: overheating in April, staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase]

[TODO: BABSCon]

[TODO: "my call with Western Psychiatric's Manager of Patient Relations"]

[TODO: chat transcript relevant to War on Optimization for Generalized Secrecy]

[TODO: final $18200 credit-assignment ritual: $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Chaya", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Thomas", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
]