[^internship]: The Singularity Institute at the time was not the kind of organization that offered formal _internships_; what I mean is that there was a house in Santa Clara where a handful of people were trying to do Singularity-relevant work, and I was allowed to sleep in the garage and also try to do work, without being paid.
-[^siai]: The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover from the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky [decided that AI would kill everyone by default (and that this was a bad thing)](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG). People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually rebranded as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2013.
+[^siai]: The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover from the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky [decided that AI would kill everyone by default (and that this was a bad thing)](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG). People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually [rebranded as](https://intelligence.org/2013/01/30/we-are-now-the-machine-intelligence-research-institute-miri/) the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](https://intelligence.org/) (MIRI) in 2013.
[^twenty-sixth]: Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see that my date with the escort was the same day as the "20% of the ones with penises" post (and my comment thereon and following conversation with "Thomas"), 26 March 2016. They hadn't been stored in my long-term episodic memory as "the same day", likely because the Facebook post only seems overwhelmingly significant in retrospect; at the time, I did not realize what I would be spending the next seven years of my life on.
(Bolding mine.)
-Or consider Anne Vitale's ["The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm), which makes the _same_ observations as Blanchard and friends, and arrives at the _same_ two-type taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language—
+Or consider Anne Vitale's ["The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"](https://www.avitale.com/essays-details/?name=the-gender-variant-phenomenon--a-developmental-review-5), which makes the _same_ observations as Blanchard and friends, and arrives at the _same_ two-type taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language—
> As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety.
-------
-I talked about my autogynephilia to a (cis) female friend over Messenger. It took some back-and-forth to explain the concept.
+<a id="explaining-agp"></a>I talked about my autogynephilia to a (cis) female friend over Messenger. It took some back-and-forth to explain the concept.
I had mentioned "misdirected heterosexuality"; she said, "Hm, so, like, you could date girls better if you were a girl?"
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.
-By this I don't mean that the _content_ of Yudkowskian rationalism is much comparable to (say) 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. [If the God-shaped hole in my head can't not be filled by _something_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/), it's better to fill it with a "religion" _about good epistemology_, one that can _reflect_ on the fact that beliefs that are adaptive memeplexes are often false. 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").
+By this I don't mean that the _content_ of Yudkowskian rationalism is much comparable to (say) 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. [If the God-shaped hole in my head can't not be filled by _something_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/), it's better to fill it with a "religion" _about good epistemology_, one that can _reflect_ on the fact that beliefs that are adaptive memeplexes are often false. 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 canonical 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").
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](https://www.simulation-argument.com/), 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.)
Anyway, I don't think I should talk about the results of my cheerful price inquiry (whether he accepted the offer and a conversation occured, or what was said if it did occur), because any conversation that _did_ occur would be protected by the privacy-norm-adherence rules that I'm holding myself to in telling this Whole Dumb Story.
-(Incidentally, 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.)
+(Incidentally, it was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the MIRI 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.)
------
> Happy Coming Out Day! I'm a male with mild gender dysphoria which is almost certainly causally related to my autogynephilic sexual/romantic orientation, which I am genuinely proud of! This has no particular implications for how other people should interact with me!
>
-> I believe that late-onset gender dysphoria in males is almost certainly not an intersex condition. (Here "late-onset" is a term of art meant to distinguish people like me from those with early-onset gender dysphoria, which is characterized by lifelong feminine behavior and a predominantly androphilic sexual orientation. Anne Vitale writes about these as "Group Three" and "Group One" in "The Gender Variant Phenomenon": [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) ) I think it's important to not let the political struggle to secure people's rights to self-modification interfere with the pursuit of scientific knowledge, because having a realistic understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying one's feelings is often useful in helping individuals make better decisions about their own lives in accordance with the actual costs and benefits of available interventions (rather than on the basis of some hypothesized innate identity). Even if the mechanisms turn out to not be what one thought they were—ultimately, people can stand what is true.
+> I believe that late-onset gender dysphoria in males is almost certainly not an intersex condition. (Here "late-onset" is a term of art meant to distinguish people like me from those with early-onset gender dysphoria, which is characterized by lifelong feminine behavior and a predominantly androphilic sexual orientation. Anne Vitale writes about these as "Group Three" and "Group One" in "The Gender Variant Phenomenon": [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](https://web.archive.org/web/20210216080024/http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) ) I think it's important to not let the political struggle to secure people's rights to self-modification interfere with the pursuit of scientific knowledge, because having a realistic understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying one's feelings is often useful in helping individuals make better decisions about their own lives in accordance with the actual costs and benefits of available interventions (rather than on the basis of some hypothesized innate identity). Even if the mechanisms turn out to not be what one thought they were—ultimately, people can stand what is true.
>
> Because we are already enduring it.
[^terf-allusion]: The initial letters being a [deliberate allusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism).
-It got 170 comments (!), a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman whom I'll call "Noreen" (with whom I had also had an exchange in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).
+It got 170 comments (!), a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman whom I'll call "Margaret" (with whom I had also had an exchange in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).
"_[O]ne_ of the things trans women want is to be referred to as women," she said. "This is not actually difficult, we can just _do_ it." She was pretty sure I must have read the relevant _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/).
Yes! I replied. People seemed to be talking as if there were some intrinsic gender-identity switch in the brain, and if a physiological male had the switch in the female position, that meant they Are Trans and need to transition, and I thought that was a terrible model of what the underlying psychological condition was. I thought we should be talking about clever strategies to maximize the quantity "gender euphoria minus gender dysphoria", and it wasn't at all obvious that full-time transition was the uniquely best solution.
-"Noreen" said that what she thought was going on was that I was defining _woman_ as someone who has a female-typical brain or body, but _she_ was defining _woman_ as someone who thinks of themselves as a woman or is happier being categorized that way; on the latter definition, the only way someone could be "wrong" about whether or not they were a woman is by trying it and finding out that they were less happy that way.
+"Margaret" said that what she thought was going on was that I was defining _woman_ as someone who has a female-typical brain or body, but _she_ was defining _woman_ as someone who thinks of themselves as a woman or is happier being categorized that way; on the latter definition, the only way someone could be "wrong" about whether or not they were a woman is by trying it and finding out that they were less happy that way.
I replied, but was circular, right?—that women are people who are happier being categorized as women. However you verbally chose to define it, your mental associations with the word _woman_ were going to be anchored on your experiences with adult human females. I wasn't saying people couldn't transition! You can transition if you want! I just thought the details were really important!
-------
-Somewhat awkwardly, I actually had a date scheduled with "Noreen" that evening. The way that happened was, elsewhere on Facebook, earlier, on 7 February, Brent Dill had said that he didn't see the value in the community matchmaking site _reciprocity.io_, and I disagreed, saying that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
+Somewhat awkwardly, I actually had a date scheduled with "Margaret" that evening. The way that happened was, elsewhere on Facebook, earlier, on 7 February, Brent Dill had said that he didn't see the value in the community matchmaking site _reciprocity.io_, and I disagreed, saying that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
-"Noreen" had complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I had said that she shouldn't apologize; I usually didn't make that genre of comment, but it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent (who, at the time, was locally infamous for espousing cynical views about status and social reality, and [not yet locally infamous for anything worse than that](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/brent-dill-is-an-abuser/)).
+"Margaret" had complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I had said that she shouldn't apologize; I usually didn't make that genre of comment, but it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent (who, at the time, was locally infamous for espousing cynical views about status and social reality, and [not yet locally infamous for anything worse than that](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/brent-dill-is-an-abuser/)).
_Incidentally_, I added, I was thinking of seeing seeing that new [_Hidden Figures_ movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures) if I could find someone to go with? It turned out that she had already seen it, but we made plans to see _West Side Story_ at the [Castro Theatre](https://www.castrotheatre.com/) instead.
Human psychology was a very high-dimensional vector space. If you'd bought into an ideology that says everyone is equal and that sex differences must therefore be small-to-nonexistent, then you can choose to selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, focusing your attention on a subspace in which individual personality differences really did swamp sex differences. But once you _noticed_ you were doing this, maybe it was possible to think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that made psychological-sex-differences denialism so appealing, while making use of the additional power gained by looking at the whole configuration space?
-After some more back-and-forth between me and "Kevin", "Noreen" expressed frustration with some inconsistencies in my high-energy presentation. I expressed my sympathies, tagging Michael Vassar (who was then sometimes using "Arc" as a married name):
+After some more back-and-forth between me and "Kevin", "Margaret" expressed frustration with some inconsistencies in my high-energy presentation. I expressed my sympathies, tagging Michael Vassar (who was then sometimes using "Arc" as a married name):
> I'm sorry that I'm being confusing! I know I'm being confusing and it must be really frustrating to understand what I'm trying to say because I'm trying to explore this conceptspace that we don't already have standard language for! You probably want to slap me and say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Talk like a goddamned normal person!" But I forgot hoooooooow!
>
> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
-> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](https://web.archive.org/web/20210216080024/http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
I got some nice emails from Michael Vassar. "I think that you are doing VERY good work right now!!!" he wrote. "The sort that shifts history! Only the personal is political" (Subject: "Talk like a normal person").
[^transcel]: Of course, a lot of the effect is going to be due to the paucity of (cis) women who are willing to date trans women.
-The comment thread under the "nice/mean versions" post would eventually end up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, a thread mostly of me arguing with "Noreen." At the top of the thread (at 1:14 _a.m._), she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.
+The comment thread under the "nice/mean versions" post would eventually end up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, a thread mostly of me arguing with "Margaret". At the top of the thread (at 1:14 _a.m._), she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.
I replied (at 1:25 _a.m._):
(Looking back on the thread over six years later, I'm surprised by the timestamps. What were we all _doing_, having a heated political discussion half past one in the morning? We should have all been asleep! If I didn't yet appreciate the importance of sleep at this point in my life, I would soon learn very soon.)
-"Rebecca" took my side in the thread, explained why she was holding "Noreen" to a different standard of discourse than me: I was walking into this after years of personal, excruciating suffering, and was willing to pay the social costs to present a model. My brash tone should have been more forgivable in light of that—that I was ultimately coming from a place of compassion and hope for people, not hate.
+"Rebecca" took my side in the thread, explained why she was holding "Margaret" to a different standard of discourse than me: I was walking into this after years of personal, excruciating suffering, and was willing to pay the social costs to present a model. My brash tone should have been more forgivable in light of that—that I was ultimately coming from a place of compassion and hope for people, not hate.
I messaged "Rebecca": "I wouldn't call it 'personal, excruciating suffering', but way to play the victim card on my behalf". She offered to edit it. I declined: "if she can play politics, we can play politics??"
-"Rebecca" speculated to me that "Noreen" might not be reacting as vehemently had I not recently asked her out in public, that she was now distancing herself from me as part of a signaling game—as if to say, "See? See, everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake, too!"
+"Rebecca" speculated to me that "Margaret" might not be reacting as vehemently had I not recently asked her out in public, that she was now distancing herself from me as part of a signaling game—as if to say, "See? See, everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake, too!"
I said that I probably wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I was going through a "well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things" phase, like trying to spin a complaint ("again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates") into a date.
Michael got back to me at 10:37 _a.m._:
-> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. [...] I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret ["Noreen"] and ["Kevin"], in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
+> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. [...] I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret ["Margaret"] and ["Kevin"], in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
Records suggest that I may have gotten as much as an hour and a half of sleep that afternoon: in an email to Anna at 2:22 _p.m._, I wrote, "I don't know what's real. I should lie down? I'm sorry", and in a message to Ben Hoffman at 4:09 _p.m._, I wrote, "I just woke up". According to my records, I hung out with Ben; I have no clear memories of this day.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff