1 Title: People, Evolved Social-Control Mechanisms, and Rocks
5 Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, madness, sex differences, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy
9 > The man has only one look, for Christ's sake! Crossdresser, demigirl, trans woman? They're the _same people!_
11 > Doesn't anyone _notice_ this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
13 > —[_Zoolander_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbKBWtoH93Q) (paraphrased)
15 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 someone named 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](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), [separately from its not being remotely achieveable with forseeable technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions).
17 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?)
19 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.
21 [... Facebook meltdown moved back into "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea" ...]
23 This presents some difficulties for me as an author, about what and how much I should write.
25 Partially, I'm just not sure how interesting or relevant it is. The reason I've sunk so much time and wordcount into writing down this Whole Dumb Story is because I think it's actually of some public interest, despite the fact that I'm not an otherwise notable person whose autobiography people would want to read: I think my Story embeds some worthwhile insights—about the etiology of gender dysphoria in males and the hidden Bayesian structure of language and cognition, of course, but especially about how the "rationalist" community in general and Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular are less epistemically trustworthy then they would have you believe—without which, the navel-gazing effrontery of having wasted [more than a year](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) forcing out a six-figure-wordcount Diary entry would seem monstrously self-indulgent.
27 No one enjoys hearing about someone else's dreams—or more importantly, learns anything from them. So if sleep-deprivation psychosis is a lot like dreaming while awake, there's a case that I should wrap up this post as quickly as possible ("And then I went crazy, but then I got better, and then I went crazy again in April, but then I got better for real"), and pick up the Whole Dumb Story where it continues in the next post in November 2018.[^story-gap-accounting]
29 [^story-gap-accounting]: Where it's not that _I_ didn't do anything between April 2017 and November 2018, but you don't care about the minutiæ of my life; you (maybe) care about the Story.
31 Ultimately, however, the part where I went crazy twice is intrinsically part of the Story. As a writer, I can't just skip over it, although I'll try to stick to the highlights.
33 (As a _reader_, you can skip whatever you want.)
35 If nothing else, I have a duty to be fair to my psychotic past self, when no one else was. Without denying that I was crazy, one of the things I learned while being crazy, is that people are too quick (insanely quick?) to automatically dismiss anything said by anyone who has been socially labeled as "crazy". Despite my altered state, I was still a _person_—by which I don't mean, a person, as contrasted to an animal. I mean that _"sane" people are animals, too_. Whatever else I got wrong at the time, _that_ was suddenly (and correctly) very clear to me.
37 You might hope that people whose cognition is being degraded 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.
39 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?
43 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."
45 I said I was afraid that the husband wanted to kill me.
47 "I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I messaged "Rebecca" late that night of the fifteenth–sixteenth. Now that I no longer believed that 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.
49 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.
53 At 10:27 _a.m._ on 16 February 2017, I sent an email to Michael and Anna (Subject: "questions"):
55 > 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.
57 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 me from growing increasingly delusional.
59 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)")
61 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.
65 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's a real thing, because it started happening to me again. This time, [the words were "cooperate" and "defect"](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/).
67 I wandered around downtown San Francisco, and used my phone to repeatedly message the word "Cooperate" to various people—to "Rebecca" (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.)
69 "I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip", I told "Rebecca" and Ben. "Rebecca" 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 had told Sophia that I wouldn't be able to make it this weekend as planned.)
71 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".
73 At 1:47 _p.m._, I had messaged Ziz, "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu [_sic_]; 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_, with two _i_'s) 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.
75 [(I don't do policy.)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)
77 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]
79 [^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.
81 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 to choose at random whether to claim to have read or not-read something.
83 At this point, my memories aren't very clear or detailed. I said something that caused my coworkers to become very concerned for me, but I remember trying to be 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."
85 In retrospect, I don't think people pay attention to such distinctions.
87 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)").
89 We still owned the house. My coworker took an rideshare with me to the house in Walnut Creek, and talked to my mother.
91 (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.)
93 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, um, may have been a racial angle on this fear? (Maybe I _had_ been morally corrupted by my political reading, insofar as someone who had stuck to credible sources would have had a less racist psychotic episode.) "I thought that kidnap-and-torture-whitey-in-a-basement race war might actually be common/typical, and that I hadn't noticed before", I recounted in an email the next month.
95 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_. Or maybe my memories were better explained anthropically, in terms of Friendly simulator protection: most of my [measure](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/measure/) was inside of superintelligences simulating histories in which I hadn't yet suffered, but that didn't rule out the possibility of me needing to commit suicide before going to sleep in order to avoid having to experience "my share" of the kidnap-and-torturing.
99 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. It's significant that my hysterical emails to Anna and Michael the other day had said that I needed to sleep "to avoid being institutionalized", rather than to avoid going crazy: I was more scared of the alleged treatment than the disease.)
101 I don't think I was very articulate about expressing this 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!"
103 I ultimately compiled. I am [again grateful](/2023/Jun/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#gender-clinic-notes) 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.
105 The doctors' notes from that day describe my appearance as "somewhat disheveled, though clean, with long & unruly brown hair that he often twirls".
107 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."
109 "Patient does not meet criteria for California Welfare & Institutions Code 5150 (LPS) for involuntary detainment for inpatient psychiatric monitoring"—that's the loony bin.
111 "Patient has d/c'd the E2"—discontinued the estrogen patch—"& I agree with this."
113 (I assume there must be some fascinating sociological explanation for why the doctors have terse abbreviations for many 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" was written out in full, three times. Why not just say, "we're not 5150'ing him"?)
115 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 willfully walked 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!)
117 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 definitely taking its toll in the form of dreamlike delusions.
119 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.
121 I sent some more messages from my phone in the afternoon. I couldn't sleep because I was scared, I told "Rebecca". 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.
123 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.
125 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".)
127 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".
129 I was stopped by cops before entering the Walnut Creek BART station. (I hadn't told my mother I was leaving; apparently, 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.
131 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????"
135 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.
137 The problem is that _while having a psychotic break_ is _the worst possible time_ to be kidnapped by strangers.
139 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.
141 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.
143 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.
145 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.
147 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.
149 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".
152 [TODO psych ward scenes—
154 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.
156 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.
161 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_.
163 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.
165 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.)
167 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.
172 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?
174 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.")
176 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):
178 [^racist]: I think they would prefer that I say [_racialist_](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Racialism&oldid=968287916)? But I also think that, when pressed, they would concede that _you know what I mean_.
180 > 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.
182 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_.
184 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.
188 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.
192 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_.
194 In retrospect, my psychotic vision of a languageless world turned out to be false. Most people really _do_ know how to read.
196 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.
198 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.
200 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]
202 [^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").
204 I ended up with a "Rights for Individuals in Mental Health Facilities" handbook, which claims that:
206 > 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.
208 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_.
210 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.
212 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?
214 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/).
216 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?
218 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.
220 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!
224 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"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5o4EZJyqmHY4XgRCY/einstein-s-superpowers) _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.
226 [^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".
228 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.)
232 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" ...)
234 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).
236 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.)
240 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?
242 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.
244 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.
246 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.
250 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.
254 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia) as [a pretext for persecuting them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union); 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.)
258 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.)
260 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.
264 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.
268 I was a very [genre-savvy](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy) 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.
270 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_Jesus), 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.
276 After being released from psych prison, arrangements were 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.
278 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, that getting sleep _fixed the problem_.
280 But the doors aren't locked; they don't actually have any power over you that you don't give them.
282 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.)
286 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.
288 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'."
290 I replied, "I like helping people meet their needs! It's prosocial!"
292 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!")
294 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.)
296 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.
298 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.
302 > 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.
306 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. "Rebecca" had recently asked me, "What would you do differently if AI was 5 years off?"
308 (Remember, this was 2017. Five years later in March 2022, we were in fact still alive, but the short-timelines people were starting to look more prescient than Michael had given them credit for.)
310 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.)
312 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 and emailed Yudkowsky. (Again, I won't confirm or deny whether a conversation actually happened.)
316 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.)
318 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.
322 You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an [h-index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) of 73" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
324 In previous months, I had sent thanks-for-your-work fan mail to Blanchard and to Bailey, and later sent Bailey a link to this blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message"). That seemed to have gone over quite well (Bailey shared the link with Blanchard, who [tweeted a link and screenshot–quote](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160)), such that I felt relatively less presumptuous writing to to Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence (and Kevin Hsu and James Cantor for good measure) about my new political project, where I was in favor of the right to transition on morphological freedom grounds, but believed strongly that in order to help people make the best decisions, it was important to be realistic about the limitations of the existing technology and about what the underlying psychological condition actually is. To the extent that my attempts to be realistic put me in the minority of elite opinion in Berkeley, I feared for our collective epistemology.
326 A lot of intellectuals tried to avoid politics, and for good reason: if a polarized culture were forcing you to make a choice between a "minimize the number of trans people" faction and a "maximizer the number of trans people" faction, the only sane thing to do would be to ignore the noise and sit out the fight. But maybe there was some kind of role for some kind of very _narrowly scoped_ political behavior (making allies and enemies, trading favors and picking fights, _&c_.) with the goal of _just_ getting the correct theory in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but _not_ trying to dictate what the social norms around transitioning should be?—["infovism" rather than activism](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). The recipients of this email were implicitly already doing this through their scholarship, but ... was there any way I could help? (Subject: "trans infovism against trans activism?? (was: Fwd: The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought)")
328 I got some friendly replies. Bailey was planning to start a website of resources for families of people with gender dysphoria, which I might be able to help with later. Lawrence was pessimistic about my stated ambition of taking the taxonomy mainstream (as contrasted to the more modest target of making the ideas available and somewhat palatable to those who might benefit from them). "I'd prefer to pick the fights I think I could win," she wrote.
332 Michael Vassar 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.)
334 I agreed 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.
336 Michael said that [the issue that ultimately took down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Remarks_on_paedophilia_and_child_sexual_abuse) Yiannopoulos was actually as obvious as my issue, and that it was striking that it did so even while Trump [got away with being open about sexual assault](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/locker-room-talk/).
338 He wasn't specific about the issue or its obviousness, but I filled in the blanks: young teen boys who have just hit puberty want sex, and wouldn't obviously be harmed by getting it from adults if it weren't for the social consensus that this would somehow harm them? Yes, that _did_ seem more obvious to a far larger population than autogynephilia motivating transgenderism. (Obligate-AGP sexuality is probably hard to empathize with if you haven't experienced it—I didn't feel like Michael understood it when we had talked in Berkeley a few months before—but the vast majority of men remember what it was like to be a horny teenager.)
340 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.
342 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?
344 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.
346 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).[^aclu] 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.
348 [^aclu]: Remember, this was 2017. The reliability of the committment [seems to have frayed in the intervening few years](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html) as the [Great Awokening](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020) continued.
350 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?).
352 I could see a picture where the underlying bug in male sexual psychology that leads to AGP would be far less likely to progress to "gender dysphoria" (actually doing something about it) in a world where it was socially-acceptable for highly-verbal 13-year-old boys to seek out sex, instead of internalizing socially-desirable admonitions against trying (which were adapted to the norm of reaction of a largely dumber population), resulting in Comment 171 syndrome. Blanchard [had posited "developmental competition"](/papers/blanchard-nonmonotonic_relation_of_agp_and_heterosexual_attraction.pdf) between AGP and normal heterosexual attraction, the balance between the two being set early in psychosexual development. Maybe pre-autogynephilic boys who chase girls develop mostly normally, while those deprived of that outlet double down on their perversion?
354 It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has 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.
356 [^heinlein-agp]: Most tellingly, in [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. (I read it as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.) This is inherently an AGP wish-fulfillment plot and it's hard to imagine a non-AGP man writing a book about it.
358 More circumstantially, the sex change in "All You Zombies", and the scenes in chapter XXIX of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where Mike uses his telepathy powers to share the "male gaze" experience with Jill, seem like the kind of plot details an AGP male author is more likely to come up with (having more reason than an ordinary man to have a lingering fascination with the idea of sex changes and cross-sex experience-sharing).
360 So if the forces of political correctness won and "trans" became an entrenched cultural practice, that could be seen as genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues—and at the same time, from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, the efforts of people opposing gender identity ideology look like trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. And from inside the bubble of my own eclectic ideology, I wanted to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) a Julia Serano-like æsthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity—and that's just _not my style_.)
362 "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.)
366 Even though I was free and taking care of myself, I don't think my psychology was entirely back to baseline. I remembered that Michael or Anna had once given humanity an approximately 30% "win" probability.[^p-doom] Nate Silver had given Trump a 30% chance to win the 2016 presidential election. These facts felt _really related_ to me. I was aware that many people would dismiss this style of thinking as useless garbage—_lots_ of probabilities are close to 0.3—but somehow it still felt like a _clue_ to me (Subject: "apophenic numerology").
368 [^p-doom]: This is the quantity that, these days, we would call 1 − P(doom).
370 In retrospect, I agree with the "useless garbage" verdict. I can reconstruct a story about how the subjective sensation of cluefulness might arise from associative reasoning on the concepts I was preoccupied with at the time (Trump was the anti-political-correctness candidate, political correctness fostered bad epistemology, but humanity needed good epistemology to "win"), but that's _not_ a story about how that kind of thinking connects numerical probabilities to reality.
372 Michael wrote to me (Subject: "Sleep"), noting that while "I don't need to sleep" is classic mania, it fit the pattern of what might be a lie under the circumstances. I might have asked myself for evidence on both sides, and remembered having personally seen animals sleep, maybe even in the wild (sea lions on the beach?). On the other hand, if I had asked why "I don't need to sleep" was a salient hypothesis, I might have noticed that the claim that everyone needs to sleep is the kind of lie that would be told by a worldview of people having high status as objects (it being wrong to sadistically cause pain), but low status as agents (it being right to control them and irresponsible not to); an important fact about the modern world was that it was common to oppress people by pretending they're like babies.
376 > 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.
380 > What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
382 I think that reply spooked me a bit; I tagged Anna and Divia into the thread as cc's, because they seemed more grounded. "Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him", I said.
384 Even if I _was_ getting a few things right in my paranoid/schizotypal state, the important thing was trying to do philosophy. The parts where I felt like a _very important person_ (in this simulation/Everett branch) receiving special simulator attention should be interpreted as standard manic-episode [delusions of reference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference); _lots_ of people feel just like that when they're agitated and haven't gotten enough sleep. Social reality may be crazy, but I should still be putting a lot more weight on the social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative was my intuition about the machines trying to kill me.
388 > I certainly put a lot less weight on 'nice people doing their jobs' then I do on 'six sigma processes homeostatically adjusting to dampen the variance in outputs that is their representation of me.', which is basically equivalent to 'these well documented machines, the ones they teach you about in business school, do the thing they do. 'Trying to kill' is what an anthropomorphized version of the process looks like from the inside. We have enough documentation to know about the nice people doing their jobs paradigm being untenable.
392 > Sure, I guess I meant that the "Machines trying to kill me" framing is scary, and I don't like being scared, so I want to focus on finding ways to cooperate with the nice people doing their jobs while defecting against the homeostatic system that they're embedded in (but not actually doing anything crazy like trying to destroy the system, because it's doing useful things for us and I don't have anything better to replace it with).
394 The next day, I changed my mind (Subject: "slowly coming around to you"):
396 > Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage in the war against the control system. Or, not a war. An endeavor to map what the control system is in detail, and publish the map on the internet.
400 As part of being less submissive to authorities in general and the medical establishment in particular, it felt appropriate to get some gray-market HRT, so on 6 March, I ordered a pack of Progynova 1mg (estradiol) and a pack of Aldactone 25mg (spironolactone) from AllDayChemist, an online pharmacy based out of India, which presumably has fewer laws about this sort of thing.
402 I didn't need it (and didn't end up using it); my regular health care provider got me equipped to [re-start my HRT experiment](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/) (including the spiro this time). It was the principle: that I could just buy drugs of my own choice using money, without the pretense of an authority diagnosing me with "gender dysphoria".
404 I had heard about AllDayChemist from "Rose", a local trans woman who wasn't very nice, but seemed to have some Vassar-like insights about penetrating the veil of social reality. It turned out that "Rose" was facing some bureaucratic obstacles to getting her own HRT refill, so I placed another AllDayChemist order on her behalf on 31 March, for five packs of E and two of spiro.
408 I [wrote about my credit-assignment ritual idea 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_ built to _murder_ other forms of life for the benefit of ourselves, our family, and our friends.
410 To the extent that we have this glorious technological civilization that keeps us safe and lies to us about there being higher ideals, it's because some of the predatory animals happen to stumbled upon behavioral patterns that mirror the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe: science approximates Bayesian updating; [markets allocate resources to where they are needed most in accordance with the laws of the microeconomic theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics); democracy is a counterfactual simulation of civil war amongst equals (where you just count how many people are on each side, and divide the spoils accordingly, without having to pay the costs of actually fighting).
412 We should be looking for more social technologies like that, that tap into the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe, but which also take into account that we're not anything like agents at all, but rather animals that want to help our friends. In analogy to proposals to incentivize useful work with after-the-fact prizes for solving a problem, rather than upfront funding of a team you think might solve the problem, it might be worth trying the same thing on a smaller scale—a _personal_ scale, by giving praise and cash rewards to people who personally helped you through a major life crisis.
414 In artificial intelligence, [the credit-assignment problem](https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/12908/what-is-the-credit-assignment-problem) refers to the difficulty of attributing success or failure to particular actions whose connection to the end result might be indirect and remote: if the outcome of an hour-long game might have ultimately hinged on your good or bad instincts during a critical moment in the 24th minute, you'd want to know that, so that you could re-train your instincts appropriately—but it's not trivial to figure out which moments were critical, which actions helped or hurt.
416 Money and status are human civilization's credit-assignment tokens. It's not trivial to figure out what actions help or hurt, but to the extent that the economy works at all, it works because productive actions being appropriately rewarded: a Society in which it was more profitable to steal than to produce would soon have much less to steal.
418 Similarly, it's not trivial to figure out what actions helped or hurt during a major life crisis, but to the extent that you _can_ figure it out, you want to dispense rewards appropriately, supplying a tiny gradient update to Society's instincts by allocating more resources to the people who have caused major life crises to be successfully navigated.
422 On 12 March 2017, I made a Facebook post trying to explain my new outlook:
424 > 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.
428 Also on 12 March 2017, I asked Anna if she would be willing to promise not to contact the authorities even if she really did think I would successfully kill myself if she didn't (Subject: "trust establishment"). "I don't expect this scenario to come up," I said, "but I want to know who I can trust in scenarios where my will comes into conflict with social reality."
430 She said she'd want to have a more detailed conversation about it before offering any such promise, which I agreed was a more sensible answer than the Yes I was fantasizing about.
434 In the evening of 2 April 2017, Michael wrote to me that someone else was in psych prison, and could use help along lines that matched my focus and experience (Subject: "Another autogynophilic [_sic_] rationalist is in a psych ward"). He asked if I knew anyone in Pittsburgh (perhaps, effective altruists at Carnegie Mellon) who would be willing to help, if I could visit a hospital there if needed, and—
436 > Do you feel that you can provide the sort of attentive, active listening that would emotionally support someone in a high integrity agitated state where their ideas may not be literally true, and also may be true but hard to justify, but the ideas are at least honest metaphorical pointers at something that they think is there and needs to be recognized for safety?
438 I made a Facebook post asking if I knew anyone in Pittsburgh available for a "Azkaban[^azkaban] (psych ward) rescue mission", and waited for more information.
440 [^azkaban]: A reference to the magical prison in Yudkowsky's [_Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_](https://www.hpmor.com/), where inmates are subjected to psychic torture.
442 (It seems right for the attribution here to go to Yudkowsky rather than J. K. Rowling, because while Rowling invented Azkaban, it was Yudkowsky's depiction that established it in our subculture as a metonym for a _bad place that shouldn't exist_, which is how I was using the allusion.)
444 More information came in an email that night from Lex Gendel[^lex-name] to me, Michael, and a few other people. The person in distress was a trans woman of my acquaintance whom I'll call "Roberta". Apparently, "Roberta" had had a psychotic episode. Her parents bought her a plane ticket back to Europe, but when she attempted to board the plane, she was committed to an unknown psych ward in Pittsburgh. As far as Lex knew, "Roberta" was currently too psychotic to play nice with the authorities. Our contact point with the family was her brother, who wasn't that cooperative and was also in Europe. (I'm imagining he was the source of this information—that the authorities at least called the family?)
446 [^lex-name]: The "From" header was still using Lex's deadname (he's transmasculine), but when I asked which name was preferred, he said that he strongly preferred Alexander or variants thereof except where that would out him to his family.
448 Our mission was to find out where "Roberta" was and how to contact her. "Stacy" (also on the email) was local to Pittsburgh. "Kyle" and I started looking up Pittsburgh-area psych wards on Google Maps and calling them.
450 "Kyle" made much more progress than me at calling hospitals. (Maybe he had a smarter Maps query, but maybe he was just less inhibited than me and could get more things done per minute.) I added "Roberta"'s email address to the thread so that she could look at it later and judge our competence as friends.
452 Sewickley Hospital, the closest to the airport, told "Kyle" that "Roberta" was not there, but that they wouldn't be able to tell him if she were, which wasn't information-theoretically smart of them—if you actually care about not leaking information, you're supposed to [refuse to confirm or deny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response), not agree to deny but refuse to confirm—but fortunate for us, insofar as it clued us in to what was probably going on when Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC said that they couldn't confirm whether "Roberta" was there.
454 UPMC Presbyterian _did_ have a record of "Roberta" that they were willing to tell "Kyle" about: she was discharged—and probably taken to the aforementioned Western Psychiatric Institute.
456 Western Psych continued to refuse to confirm—although they did take down my number (and "Kyle"'s, and Lex's) for "Roberta" to call _if_ she was there and wanted to.
458 I kept calling, at intervals. I tried bluffing ("No, I _know_ she's there", I told Madeline at Western Psych). I tried prompting for advice ("I realize that you're just doing your job and that you can't help me, but as a person, can you tell me who I should send next?—a lawyer, or a psychiatrist?" I told Cathy). I tried asking for a manager. (The manager, Laura, had just left.) Cathy volunteered to forward me to Patients' Rights. (It went to voicemail.)
460 I asked Scott Alexander (whom I had tagged into the thread earlier) if _he_ could call, following up on the "sending a psychiatrist" guess (Subject: "a plea to our inside man (was: Re: information centralizing thread for [roberta] situation)").
462 Finally, on the evening of 3 April, inspiration struck: I asked Debbie when visiting hours were. Then I asked "Stacy" to just visit physically. ("Let me know if there's any way I can sweeten the deal for you if this is at all inconvenient. (Eternal gratitude? Cash bounty to be negotiated? Any programming work you need done?)" I added.) The theory here was that the psych prison employees had been programmed not to be helpful over the phone for fear that HIPAA demons would eat them, but that they're not afraid of a physical person on-site, especially a nonthreatening nonmale person (Subject: "a plea to our on-site woman (was: Re: a plea to our inside man)").
464 I was not reassured by the staff's claims that "Roberta" could call us back if she was there. To be clear, I totally believed that they wrote down the number. (Someone read it back to me on my second call.) I was _not_ confident in "Roberta" actually getting the number and the opportunity to make a phone call.
466 Scott got back to me. His being a psychiatrist wasn't going to make any difference. All we could do was leave a message; if "Roberta" didn't call back, then either she wasn't there or "doesn't want you meddling".
468 I harshly took exception to the notion that the only credible explanation for the lack of a return call was that "Roberta" _didn't want us meddling_. What if the bastards never gave her the message? What if she was too impaired from the psychotic break and the kidnapping to place a call herself, but would _really appreciate_ being handed a phone with someone she knows on the line?
470 The "didn't want us meddling" explanation struck me as so absurd, that I immediately offered to bet $500 against it at 20:1 odds: when this was over, if "Roberta" was at Western Psychiatric and got my, "Kyle"'s, and Lex's messages and didn't call back because she _didn't want us meddling_, I would pay Scott $500; if she was there but didn't get the message, Scott would pay me $25; if she wasn't there, no bet (Subject: "in which gratitude and skepticism is expressed; and, a profit opportunity (was: Re: a plea to our on-site woman)").
472 Scott agreed to the bet. It was illegal to keep patients incommunicado; whatever else I thought about psych hospitals, they were sticklers for obeying the rules.
474 Just before Scott chimed in, I had written to the thread:
476 > In this situation, I don't think we should be modeling ourselves as people having meaningful conversations with other people over the phone. We are _extracting our friend from the bowels of an unaligned AI_. The reason we're using words rather than force isn't because force would be wrong; it's because we'd lose. Don't be fooled by the fact that the AI happens to use humans as components.
478 "Kyle" cautioned that black-arts methodology against hospital personnel was probably not going to help "Roberta", and might make life very unpleasant for people trying to do their absolute best in a difficult job—which might make it _exceedingly_ harder to do something helpful later. Most everyone he had talked to had been extremely polite and helpful (including explaining details about how the system worked, which lead him to UPMC Presbyterian, which had actually given us information).
480 (Nice people doing their jobs!)
482 Lex seemed to agree with my model, but also agree with "Kyle"'s action recommendations: the general model was that systems are corrupt and unFriendly, responding at every level to incentives for breaking things in order for someone to gain a little more personal power, while most individuals wanted to be good and were just going with the flow. If we could change the flow, they might help us, but they weren't going to see the error of their ways when even _Scott_ had [written about lacking the agency to not commit people who shouldn't be committed](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/05/the-right-to-waive-your-rights/).
484 I said that I _didn't care_ about not making life unpleasant for people trying to do their absolute best in a difficult job. I wanted "Roberta" out of prison. If the best way of accomplishing that goal was to be nice and make sure a lot of receptionists and nurses feel good about themselves, great. If the best way of accomplishing that goal means meant making a lot of receptionists and nurses feel miserable and guilty to the point where they have their own psychotic break and get locked up by their employer, I was _okay with that outcome_.
486 Of course, I did _instrumentally_ care about not doing anything that would motivate them to make _our_ lives unpleasant. I agreed that I shouldn't try to do any more dark-arts social engineering—not because it would be wrong, but because I wasn't talented enough to pull it off without making things worse.
488 Ashley from Patients' Rights returned my call. Allegedly, patients had access to phones, and allegedly, if a patient complains, Patients' Rights would investigate the complaint.
490 This was not reassuring. "Roberta" couldn't complain to patient's rights about not getting our messages, if she didn't know that the messages existed. I could believe that the receptionist was honestly trying to do her job and wrote a number down and told someone else about it. But if anything _else_ went wrong in the causal chain (which could involve more than one other person who had lots of other things to do) between "receptionist dutifully writes something down" and "'Roberta' actually gets the message and telephone access", _no one had an incentive to fix it_.
492 As far as I was concerned, this was a kidnapping. The fact that the kidnappers didn't have any particular motive and were just doing their jobs and would probably release our friend in 3 or 14 days, made it _much less bad_ than if it were a kidnapping by criminals or terrorists with an actual motive—but I wanted to call a spade a spade (Subject: "Hijack Innocent People And Abscond").
494 I impulsively called up Patients' Rights again and spoke to Ashley, divulging my own recent psych ward story. She eventually forwarded me to Karen Robinson, the Manager of Patient Relations, whose boss was the Director of Regulatory Affairs. She repeatedly told me that the policy was that they couldn't give out information, and I repeatedly told her that I understood the policy, but that I was trying to search for clever strategies that would give me more assurance that "Roberta" actually got the message: for example, Karen herself could physically deliver the message herself, and then not tell me about it.
496 Karen told me that I needed to trust people. I said that after my recent experience getting kidnapped by the psychiatric authorities, that no, I didn't actually trust people anymore ... but that I was willing to trust _her_, Karen Robinson, the Manager of Patient Relations, and that I felt better being given assurance by someone with a four-word title.
498 I asked her if she was religious. (Religion is a social technology for trust; I figured that people were less likely to mess with you if you reminded them that their deity was watching.) She said that she was a Christian. I admitted that I was an atheist, myself.
500 At 8:14 _p.m._ on 4 April, "Stacy" reported in: she visited Western Psych and saw "Roberta", who reported not being unhappy. She wasn't interested in being rescued. "She has received messages (I didn't ask about specific people's), and is in touch with some people," the email specifically said.
502 So, that was good news. (Good news about "Roberta"'s welfare, which was more important than my grudge against psych hospitals.) I conceded my bet with Scott and PayPal'd him $500. Scott pointed out that I had offered the bet while I was really angry and traumatized from my own recent psych ward experience; if I thought it wasn't representative of my best cognitive processes, he was happy to call it off and send back the money.
504 I _absolutely_ insisted that he keep the money: whether it was my best cognition or not was for reality to judge, not me, and on the specific question of whether the Western Psychiatric staff relayed telephone messages, reality had judged.
506 (At least, as far as I knew at the time—keep reading for a surprising reversal!)
508 We didn't want to hold people accountable for false confessions under duress or contracts to sell oneself into slavery, but surely we could handle a measly $500 bet!
512 This is the part where I started to go crazy a second time.
514 I worry that some readers will take this as vindication of the authorities' position: that I should have submitted to "treatment" in February, that I was wrong to have thought that my only problems were stress and sleep deprivation.
516 The reader is entitled to their opinion, but I still think my theory stands up after you take into account that the "Roberta" crisis was a _new stressor_ (and that I ended up being fine despite this April relapse).
518 [TODO: staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase]
524 [TODO: bet resolution and "my call with Western Psychiatric's Manager of Patient Relations"]
528 [TODO: final $18200 credit-assignment ritual: $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Rebecca", 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
529 http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
534 Anyway, that, briefly—I mean it—is the story of how the stress of confronting people on Facebook about the illogic of gender-identity ideology caused me to go insane from sleep deprivation, twice, shattering most of my remaining faith in Society and institutions along the way.
536 It's probably not that interesting! If it weren't somewhat-informative backstory presaging my accidental instigation of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war two years later, I wouldn't have bothered to tell this substory of my Whole Dumb Story in this much detail—as evidenced by the fact that, later in 2017, I [started](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [telling it in considerably less detail](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), and didn't even end up finishing that.
538 I think I learned a lot during this period, but I wish there could have been some way to learn it with less drama—to take the form I took, without the disastrously formative experience. I wonder how the rest of this Whole Dumb Story would have gone, if I had just _shrugged and logged off_ earlier in February 2017, rather than losing sleep—if I would have had the strength to fight, later, without the memory of fighting until it broke me. Sometimes, I worry that human psychology is built such that things couldn't have been too much otherwise—that the _realistic_ alternative to taking things too seriously (to the detriment of one's health, and severely inconveniencing others) is taking them lying down.
540 But that's almost certainly giving me too much credit. To be continued.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob