Title: Memoirs of My Recent Madness, Part II: Friendship Survived Date: 2017-06-06 21:00 Category: other Tags: personal Status: draft > _This is our big night > We're getting ready and we're doing it up right > This is our big night > Friendship survived, now we'll start it out right_ > > —"This Is Our Big Night", _My Little Pony: Equestria Girls_ Anyway. One _more_ thing that had been disappointing about my February ordeal is that I had originally been scheduled to fly to Portland on 17–19 February for a brief vacation in order to [crossplay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossplay) at the [WizardWorld](http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) comic convention there and visit friend of the blog "Jerrica", who— Ah. A brief digression is needed here. I invented the pseudonym "Mark Taylor Saotome-Westlake" for this blog because when I privately told people that I wanted to write about my autogynephilia and to advocate for AGP's causal role in the development of MtF transgenderedness being public knowledge, everyone said it would be smarter to use a pseudonym, and possibly to obfuscate my physical location as well, and I listened to them. Thus all the references to "Portland" (scare-quoted in the first appearance in each post) or [its metro area](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) in the blog so far, suggesting that I should be thought of as living there (and thus, that it wouldn't make sense for me to write of flying there on vacation, as in the previous paragraph). But after the events recounted in this post, that cautious, prudent advice to keep my identity and location secret is starting to seem unduly _cowardly_. The meta-level phenomenon that I'm so upset about (distinct from the object-level issue of how transness works) is _precisely_ that people are _far_ more reasonable in private than in public, that there are things that are knowable and known that almost no one is willing to _say out loud in public_ because they're _afraid_. (Whether of being harrassed by social-media mobs, or losing their job, or getting eaten by HIPAA-demons, no one ever seems to specify, but that's not surprising: if we knew how to reduce our fear to a probability distribution over outcomes conditional on actions, then our spirits would be one with the Bayes-structure, and the fear would not control us.) But protecting the social freedom to say true things out loud is _really important_ for the quality of our collective epistemology, which seems like the kind of social issue worth caring about, if anything is. So while I like my pretty pseudonym as a branding and market-segmentation device (gender blogging is something I have to do, but maybe not the _first_ thing I want associated with my real name), if I want to be serious about reversing the stranglehold that the forces of political correctness have on our collective epistemology, the _least_ I can do is stop being a coward and say that it shouldn't be a _secret_ that my real name is Zack M. Davis and that I live in Berkeley, California. (If you like _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, check out my real-name mostly-not-gender-related blog, [_An Algorithmic Lucidity_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/)!) (Of course, to protect _their_ privacy, I'm still going to obfuscate and scare-quote-on-first-appearance the names of _other_ people who haven't consented to be part of my story.) Right. So I was annoyed that I had missed out on my trip to Portland (the _real_ Portland, and not a cowardly obfuscation) and getting to meet Jerrica, who I was now _especially_ grateful towards for taking my "side" as an out autogynephilic trans woman during my 11–14 February public Facebook meltdown (highlights: [1](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154807871200199) [2](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154808888680199) [3](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154810042700199) [4](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812225235199) [5](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812673305199) [6](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812970895199) [7](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154813104220199) [8](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154813788715199) [9](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814383695199) [10](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814409220199) [11](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814492195199) [12](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814496385199) [13](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814640265199) [14](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154815302975199) [15](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154815789735199) [16](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154816160405199)). ---- in the ruins—thinking that internet-courier food was literally scraped from garbage stealing Elcenia books science/female cooperate/defect I'm proud of myself for using probability thereby being anchored on normal behavior, but I'm disappointed that I didn't notice "Believing that the normal function of cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices are sending secret and significant messages that only they can understand or believe" as a standard symptom, or that my godshatter intuition in prison was the standard thought-insertion delusion constantly trying to make little bets and predictions and threats to make sure which parts of social reality I could trust bitter about not getting to visit a friend of the blog in Portland green blinky light at Vagabond Inn, thought it was serving a social control function, and that it was a CGI capture for people constructing blackmail material I thought my friends trying to help me and give me cigarettes were constructing counterblackmail hot chocolate, poison me; afraid of being locked in; not trusting Google Maps (I thought it might be giving me bad data as a test case) trying to make a puzzle for Watson out of the Soylent bottles, thinking he was on a longer "Cookie Monster" cycle than me my "power play" status update was only Liked by men everyone is being posioned all the time, and there's Jem Uber, denouncing my social class; Hamilton tickets thought I was in multiple worlds, multiple futures I gave away my books (Luminous, The Fountainhead, A Deepness in the Sky) those are some nice books do you want the books? (He didn't actually want the books; he was lying asking about the property next door afraid of being posioned, afraid of theft thought that people messing up my room evolved function of capture the flag pseudonymity is kind of cowardly, but I guess it's a cheap and useful hedge, and "Saotome-Westlake is more interesting than my truename" copy of the brand-new Caitlyn Jenner memoir _The Secrets of My Life_. (Despite the title, I have this sinking feeling that it's not going to spill _all_ the secrets that people in Jenner's reference class know. Oh, well—I guess that's what this blog is for.) different versions of me in Vagabond Inn, in different rooms that couldn't be distinguished because they had the same number, maybe the Inn had been designed that way to hide people from the cops because we live in a police state and I never noticed; couldn't tell if the air conditioner might be a siren, and I thought it might actually _depend_ on my interpretation (whereas in the physical world, it was always an air conditioner, and I was misinterpreting it as a siren; compare how I thought the crosswalk beeping was like a premonition of my hospital death) BABSCon someone might die because of the conservation law, but it probably wouldn't be me "Someone is going to die, and it's not going to be me!" there might be _separate_ An Algorithmic Lucidity and Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought meetups, and one of them, someone who had been gaslit into thinking they were me would attend, and maybe he would get killed instead, if the party; or maybe there would be a scandal in the newspapers about a confrontation in the bathroom, and there would be a trial, and the trial would consume some subset of my crowd is in harmony with human nature getting out of dodge, being tempted to write a cryptic email introducing my rationality friends to Blanchard et al., needing a vacation tempted to make a collage of papers of the bad parts of the world, like a CAPTChA misinterpreting the interpretation of my makeup, hairpiece &c. layout, and the blog summary clipped photo, as like a task that humans completing little comptuation tasks to avoid starvation several hundred years hence (with some measure), but also my followers bidding with Facebook Likes on my status update for the right to go to the party, and return something they had stolen from me, in exchange for a concession; maybe that was what had happened to Michael O. Church; people threatened him to take the posts down misinterpreting text as from the future wasn't sure if I smelled shit on the MAX train, but later Anna smelled it too, in a different place Dap and the headphones, tell her you're from Frisco; where I come from MAX Yellow light buying an extra phone charger, not wanting to get caught Wells Fargo courtesy call, wanting to give the man a gift for his daughter, modeling myself as a packet, leaving notes for myself, &c. narrative optimization—doing things for the sake of writing a Diary entry about them later _Your Name_ (thanks to friend of the blog [@KatanaOfLogic](https://twitter.com/KatanaOfLogic) for the recommendation). special enrollment period my fox in the playpen empathizing with the old man in _Rainbows End_; everything falling apart at the end of life; positive and negative surprises something about decisionmaking is about making bad outcomes inconsistent; thinking that with some measure, there's a Greg Egan novel about me and my friends, and we're deriving some of our measure from simulations of that story it's important to keep documents because that's how our simulation bootstraps itself into knowing which nootropics work conscious social engineering angle; wanting to run away and not tell people where I am, and have that be a _credible_ threat "CHOOSE LIFE", street lamp in front of billboard; turd/cork Uber bidding algorithm, infering that Uber had subcontracted everything out and it only just barely worked worried that this feeling of being afraid all the time _was_ what women feel like—that women are terrified of men all the time "realignment" politically—books on top "Dawn" and hormones simple program with three interpretations— conservation law, armies of lawyers and missing trails _Rainbows End_ I thought a cork was dogshit when the lamppost passed in front of a billboard, I thought it was a spermatazoan courtesy call from Wells Fargo after going in there and yelling one birth, one death Helo no use his words / self-present vaguely hint that you're going to be at a place running around the bad part of town, placing "unremediategender.space" people as robots, paying attention to facial mirco-expressions if people's verbal self-reports are false and feminism is a shit test, and I've had a _huge_ impact on my social graph (as judged within my social-media bubble, FaceApp being popular, the SEXNET questions) I had done better than average; most people were starving "[...] hasn't accepted my request yet"; he literally meant Facebook friend request, not bizarre ambiguity-leveraging favor-trading evolution of traditions, trying to create a Schelling point everyone going to bed at the same time, as an example of everyone being synchronized predictive text driving more of the world; right angles and the aesthetic discernment dimension and the vampires people only respond to coalitions, imagining people running around in defensive coalitions not trusting Google directions truth and anti-truth systems aren't real: https://meaningness.com/metablog/post-apocalyptic-health-care Bayesomasochism notebooks that I don't have anymore http://lesswrong.com/lw/km6/why_the_tails_come_apart/ an irony: in my psychosis, I was scared that the world was far less legible than I had imagined, but that wasn't why my ordeal's and "Roberta"'s were so traumatic at all: the psych ward is very much governed by legible rules, rules that I had no control over notes from Messenger— and then the second post to explain all the entertaining delusions I had at Onward, and Volterra, and the night I spent at the Vagabond Inn, and getting tripsat in the hotel ... and possibly (I don't know if this warrants a Part III) mention things that happened in Portland in Sophia (which also involved another night of no sleep, and Sophia tripsitting me the entire next day, with a nap before my flight in the evening) Part II is harder, because, in addition to having to relive painful memories, some of those memories are things that I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to talk about on the internet, even with my recent monomanical obsession with opposing secrecy ... I think I'll eventually mostly do the right thing, but it's hard but as long as Part II would be published later anyway, that provides a slot to finish and publish (in between Parts I and II) another almost-done-except-for-reliving-painful-memories draft, which is a prerequisite for understanding my Portland sleeplessness—explaining the "game theory says I can't afford to give in to people who say my writing hurts them, because that creates an incentive to be hurt" thing oh, I'm also planning on self-doxxing at the beginning of Part II https://github.com/zackmdavis/Ultimately_Untrue_Thought/blob/b63295d1/content/drafts/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-ii-friendship-survived.md off-topic: at the bagel place I went to after the gym, there was a toddler behind the counter, enclosed in a kiddie-fence, and there was an iPad mounted on the fridge playing one of those awful toddler shows ("Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns!" it chanted), and I thought that this was emblematic of the tragedy where the rules that are written down are different from the rules that are actually enforced or sane or enforceable, which has disastrous effects on meaning in language (I would be much less angry about February if they had just said, "We're physically detaining you because we don't trust you not to do anything crazy; we don't expect you to regard this as 'care'") there's no way the health code lets you keep your toddler behind the counter, but I don't mind, and I presumably know more about it than the health inspectors do i.e., that it's happening; at the coffee kiosk in the supermarket where I used to work, we would change practices when we knew the inspector would come, and I would have expected the inspectors to know this: everyone is lying to each other ... the thing Part II is about (so maybe this isn't off-topic) is what it feels like for this sense to be tuned up to 11 taking things that people I respected had said, interpreting them far more literally than they were intended, and inferring what lies everyone would have to be telling, for the world to really be like that, and for no one to have told me (this is especially bad when one of the trusted authorities [...] is known to speak in metaphors and use the word "literally" non-literally) [] had once told me that we might be living in the ruins of a dying civilization, and she meant that as a metaphor for some big-picture Great Stagnation thesis about how competence in most fields has been going down rather than up since 1973 and I took it literally, thinking that maybe things were much more broken than I had previously dared imagine that night while I was at Onward, someone ordered phone takeout, and I had a couple french fries, which were cold, and I thought that maybe that was because you had gotten the food from dumpster-diving, but didn't tell me to spare yourself the embarrassment, to protect me and Andromeda from the knowledge of the harsh conditions of our world or that the delivery driver was late because the economy didn't work in general like, you think that people have service-sector jobs, but maybe it's also extremely common for people to just put on stolen service-sector uniforms and pretend to be Uber drives or FedEx men or whatever so that they can steal stuff to protect their families and for the most part, no one notices this mismatches between the written reality (of addresses and money and laws) and the physical primate reality (of people being animals that manipulate each other by making noises), because most people can't actually read; they're just faking it; rare smart people pick it up from books, but most people are just automata I started testing the hypotheses by, e.g., running off to get coffee even though (you claim) I had promised at Voltrra not to, to go to Wells Fargo and complain about the "KAISER" charge on my bill, and trying to use evopsych games on everyone I met which sometimes had less-than-reassuring results; when I asked a hotel clerk his name, and then I said that my name is Zack Davis, what's your last name? He said that he doesn't have a last name I think Sarah pointed out that the true meaning of "I don't have a last name" was "I'm a service-sector employee and I'm afraid you'll write me up" but I was like, either HE'S LYING STOP LYING WHY IS EVERYONE LYING TO ME; or, maybe he really doesn't have a last name; maybe he's an illegal immigrant from a community in Mexico where they really don't give people last names---which wouldn't fly for getting a legal job in the USA (where you need an SSN and the Social Security Administration assumes they have last names), but maybe he just puts on a suit and plays the part of a hotel clerk without anyone's permission, or other employees who have an in with the boss have faked the paperwork for him maybe the real hotel manager is tied up in the back, screaming for her life (A lot of these delusions were pretty racist in a non-reflectively-endorsed way; I had been scared of the social consequences of it being known that I believe in enpvny VD qvssreraprf (I already got a lot of pushback for AGP, and I have intimate personal credibility on that one, and thus the most free-speech latitude you could imagine except for people like Sophia or Anne Lawrence who have actually transitioned) and thinking about being animals that protect their family, their people