Among many works which I had previously skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet was Mencius Moldbug's anti-democratic (!) political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), which caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
-Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients; the Republicans, representing the white majority and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite, can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long. The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to _control the public mind_; if you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a _de facto_ state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality" in order to sidestep the [Establishment Clause](TODO linky). Moldbug contends that all of this is Bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance; it's not a coincidence that all functional _non_-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO (possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader but not meddle in day-to-day operations) with the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions, rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with _democracy_). [TODO: linky UR refs]
+Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients; the Republicans, representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite, can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long. The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to try to _control the public mind_; if you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a _de facto_ state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality" in order to sidestep the [Establishment Clause](TODO linky). Moldbug contends that all of this is Bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance; it's not a coincidence that all functional _non_-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO (possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader but not meddle in day-to-day operations) with the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions, rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with _democracy_). [TODO: linky UR refs]
(Some of Moldbug's claims about the nature of the American order that seemed outlandish or crazy when _Unqualified Reservations_ was being written in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, now seem much more obvious after Trump and Brexit and the summer of George Floyd. I remember that in senior year of high school back in 'aught-five, on [Coming Out Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day), my physics teacher said that she was coming out as a Republican. Even then, I got the joke, but I didn't realize the implications.)
I wasn't, like, _friends_ with Yudkowsky, obviously; I didn't have a natural social affordance to _just_ ask him the way you would ask a work buddy or a college friend something. But ... he _had_ posted about how he was willing to accept money to do things he otherwise wouldn't in exchange for enough money to feel happy about he trade—a Happy Price, or [Cheerful Price, as the custom was later termed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price)—and his [schedule of happy prices](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228) listed $1,000 as the price for a 2 hour conversation, and I had his email address from previous contract work I had done for MIRI back in '12, so I wrote him offering $1,000 to talk about sometime between [January 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and [March of the current year](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) what kind of _massive_ update he made on the topics of human psychological sex differences and MtF transsexuality, mentioning that I had been "feeling baffled and disappointed (although I shouldn't be) that the rationality community is getting this _really easy_ scientific question wrong."
-At this point, any _normal people_ who are (somehow?) reading this might be thinking, isn't that weird and a little cultish?—some blogger you follow posted something you thought was strange earlier this year, and you want to pay him _one grand_ to talk about it?
+At this point, any _normal people_ who are (somehow?) reading this might be thinking, isn't that weird and kind of cultish?—some blogger you follow posted something you thought was strange earlier this year, and you want to pay him _one grand_ to talk about it? To the normal person I would explain thusly—
-To the normal person I would explain thusly. First, in our subculture, we don't have your weird hangups about money: people's time is valuable, and paying people money in exchange for them using their time differently from how they otherwise would is a perfectly ordinary thing for microeconomic agents to do. Upper-middle class normal people don't blink at paying a licensed therapist $100 to talk for an hour, because their culture designates that as a special ritualized context in which paying money to talk to someone isn't weird. In my culture, we don't need the special ritualized context; Yudkowsky just had a higher rate than most therapists.
+First, in our subculture, we don't have your weird hangups about money: people's time is valuable, and paying people money in exchange for them using their time differently from how they otherwise would is a perfectly ordinary thing for microeconomic agents to do. Upper-middle–class normal people don't blink at paying a licensed therapist $100 to talk for an hour, because their culture designates that as a special ritualized context in which paying money to talk to someone isn't weird. In my culture, we don't need the special ritualized context; Yudkowsky just had a somewhat higher rate than most therapists.
Second, $1000 isn't actually real money to a San Francisco software engineer.
-Third—yes. Yes, it _absolutely_ was a little cultish. There's a sense in which, _sociologically and psychologically speaking_, Yudkowsky is a religious leader, and I was—am—a devout adherent of the religion he made up.
+Third—yes. Yes, it _absolutely_ was kind of cultish. There's a sense in which, _sociologically and psychologically speaking_, Yudkowsky is a religious leader, and I was—am—a devout adherent of the religion he made up.
-[TODO: explain religion]
+By this I don't mean that the _content_ of Yudkowskian rationalism is much comparable to Christianity or Buddhism. But whether or not there is a God or a Divine (there is not), the _features of human psychology_ that make Christianity or Buddhism adaptive memeplexes are still going to be active; the God-shaped whole in my head can't not be filled by _something_, and Yudkowsky's writings on the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe were a potent way to fill that whole.
-One of my emails included the sentence, "I feel awful writing _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ about this, because my interactions with you probably have disproportionately more simulation-measure than the rest of my life, and do I _really_ want to spend that on _this topic_?"
+It seems fair to compare my tendency to write in Sequences links to a devout Christian's tendency to quote Scripture by chapter and verse; the underlying mental motion of "appeal to the holy text" is probably pretty similar. My only defense is that _my_ religion is _actually true_ (and that my religion says you should read the texts and think it through for yourself, rather than taking anything on "faith").
-(Referring to the idea that, in a sufficiently large universe where many subjectively-indistinguishable copies of everyone exists, including inside of future superintelligences running simulations of the past, there would plausibly be _more_ copies of my interactions with Yudkowsky than of other moments of my life, on account of that information being of greater decision-relevance to those superintelligences.)
+That's the context in which my happy-price email thread ended up including the sentence, "I feel awful writing _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ about this, because my interactions with you probably have disproportionately more simulation-measure than the rest of my life, and do I _really_ want to spend that on _this topic_?" (Referring to the idea that, in a sufficiently large universe where many subjectively-indistinguishable copies of everyone exists, including inside of future superintelligences running simulations of the past, there would plausibly be _more_ copies of my interactions with Yudkowsky than of other moments of my life, on account of that information being of greater decision-relevance to those superintelligences.)
[TODO: I can't actually confirm or deny whether he accepted the happy price offer because if we did talk, it would have been a private conversation]
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(It was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
Gatekeeping sessions finished, I finally started HRT at the end of December 2016. In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I promised myself (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199)) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017—_that_ was what my new pseudonymous blog was for.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff