(With the caveated understanding that psychology is complicated and there's [a lot to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/), but I need a few paragraphs to first talk about the _simple_ version of the theory that makes _pretty good_ predictions on _average_, as a prerequisite for more complicated theories that might make even better predictions including on cases that diverge from average.)
-The idea is that male-to-female transsexualism isn't actually one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't actually have anything to do with each other, except for the (perhaps) indicated treatments of hormone therapy, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
+The theory was put forth by Blanchard in a series of journal articles in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, but notably popularized [(to some controversy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen#Negative_reactions) by J. Michael Bailey in the popular-level book _The Man Who Would be Queen_ in 'aught-three. The idea is that male-to-female transsexualism isn't actually one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't actually have anything to do with each other, except for the (perhaps) indicated treatments of hormone therapy, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have just been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, _&c._) their entire lives going back to early childhood, in a way that's salient to other people and causes big social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. _That's_ where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. [This one probably _is_ a brain-intersex condition.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/)
The privately-sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one trans woman told me. "That's not new. Compare with transubstantiation and how much scholarly work went in to trying to square it with natural materialism. As for causality, I think it's likely that the true explanation will not take the shape of an easily understood narrative."
-Later, she told me, "It's kind of funny how the part where you're being annoying isn't where you're being all [TERFy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Trans-exclusionary_radical_feminists_(TERFs)) and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."
+Later, she told me, "It's kind of funny how the part where you're being annoying isn't where you're being all [TERFy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism) and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."
Someone else I talked to was less philosophical. "I'm an AGP trans girl who really likes anime, 4chan memes, and the like, and who hangs around a lot with ... AGP trans girls who like anime, 4chan memes, and the like," she said. "It doesn't matter to me all that much if some specific group doesn't take me seriously. As long as trans women are pretty OK at respectability politics and cis people in general don't hate us, then it's probably not something I have to worry about."
------
-Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another obvious consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy. Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?
+Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?
Sarah Constantin, a friend who once worked for [our local defunct medical research company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed) still offered lit-reviews as a service, so I paid her $5,000 to do [a post about the effects of feminizing hormone replacement therapy on males](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html), in case the depths of the literature had any medical insight to offer that wasn't already on the informed-constent paperwork. Meanwhile, I made the requisite gatekeeping appointments with [my healthcare provider](http://kp.org/) to get approved for HRT, first with a psychologist that I had seen before, then with a couple of licensed clinical social workers (LCSW) before finally getting approved for an HRT perscription.
-I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. Years after the fact, I was grateful to discover that the notes from the appointments were later made available to me via the provider's website [(despite this practice introducing questionable incentives for the shrinks going forward)](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jia4ox/has_scott_written_about_this_im_curious_what_his/ga6vhke/); it's very amusing to read about (for example) one of the LCSWs discussing my case with the department director and "explor[ing] ways in which pt's [patient's] neurodiversity may be impacting his ability to think about desired gender changes and communicate to therapists".
-
I was happy to sit through the sessions as standard procedure rather than [going DIY](https://diytrans.wiki/How_to_Begin_HRT), but I was very preoccupied with the thing about how [_everyone had been lying to me about the most important thing in my life for fourteen years_](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) and the professionals were _in on it_, and spent a lot of the sessions ranting about that. I gave the psychologist and one of the LCSWs a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_. (The psychologist said she wasn't allowed to accept gifts with a monetary value of over $25, so I didn't tell her that it actually cost $40.)
-Actually, it's worse than if they were in on it; [in some ways, it would be _better_](/2016/new-clothes/) if the professionals secretly agreed with me about the typology and were cynically lying in order to rake in that sweet pharma cash. But they're not—lying. They just, have this whole paradigm of providing ["equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"](https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/) which is transparently garbage-tier epistemology ([for a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)), but is so pervasive within its adherents' milieu, that they don't know how to interpret observations of someone not buying it, even when you state your objections very clearly. Before one of my appointments with the LCSW, I wrote to the psychologist expressing frustration about the culture of lying, while noting that I needed to chill out and get to a point of emotional stability before starting the HRT experiment. (It's important to have all of one's ducks in a row before doing biochemistry experiments on the ducks.) She wrote back:
+I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. Years after the fact, I was grateful to discover that the notes from the appointments were later made available to me via the provider's website [(despite this practice introducing questionable incentives for the shrinks going forward)](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jia4ox/has_scott_written_about_this_im_curious_what_his/ga6vhke/); it's very amusing to read about (for example) one of the LCSWs discussing my case with the department director and "explor[ing] ways in which pt's [patient's] neurodiversity may be impacting his ability to think about desired gender changes and communicate to therapists".
+
+The reality was actually worse than my hostile summary that everyone was lying, and the professionals were in on it. [In some ways, it would be _better_](/2016/new-clothes/) if the professionals secretly agreed with me about the typology and were cynically lying in order to rake in that sweet pharma cash. But they're not—lying. They just, have this whole paradigm of providing ["equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"](https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/) which is transparently garbage-tier epistemology ([for a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)), but is so pervasive within its adherents' milieu, that they're incapable of seeing someone not buying it, even when you state your objections very clearly.
+
+Before one of my appointments with the LCSW, I wrote to the psychologist expressing frustration about the culture of lying, while noting that I needed to chill out and get to a point of emotional stability before starting the HRT experiment. (It's important to have all of one's ducks in a row before doing biochemistry experiments on the ducks.) She wrote back:
> I agree with you entirely, both about your frustration with people wanting to dictate to you what you are and how you feel, and with the importance of your being emotionally stable prior to starting hormones. Please explain to those who argue with you that it is only YOUR truth that matter when it comes to you, your body and what makes you feel whole. No one else has the right to dictate this.
Similarly, the notes from my first call to the gender department claim that I was "exploring gender identity" and that I was "interested in trying [hormones] for a few months to see if they fit with his gender identity". That's not how I remember that conversation! _I_ distinctly remember asking if the department would help me if I wanted to experiment with HRT _without_ socially transitioning: that is, I was asking if they would provide medical services _not_ on the basis of "gender identity". Apparently my existence is so far out-of-distribution that the nurse on the phone wasn't capable of writing down what I actually said.
-However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I _wanted to_, I could cherry-pick pieces of evidence from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever that means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) As a very small child, I remember asking for (and receiving, because I had good '90s liberal parents) [Polly Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket), and a pink-and-purple girl's scooter with hearts; I could talk about how [sensitive](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) I am; I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) that emerged shortly after puberty ...
+However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I _wanted to_, I could cherry-pick pieces of evidence from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever that means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) As a very small child, I remember asking for (and receiving, because I had good '90s liberal parents) [Polly Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket), and a pink-and-purple girl's scooter with heart decals; I could talk about how [sensitive](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) I am; I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) ...
But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effiminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. I don't think it's the same thing, and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it's plausibly the same thing.
Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Watson affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment. With some prompting from "Thomas", I was starting to question it now.
-Among many works which I had previously skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet was the anti-democratic political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
+Among many works which I had previously skimmed (in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet) was the anti-democratic political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives 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](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/); the Republicans, [representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/), 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause).
-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](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/); the Republicans, [representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/), 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause). 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[^ceo-supervision] who has 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_).
+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[^ceo-supervision] who has 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_).
[^ceo-supervision]: Albeit possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader, but not meddle in day-to-day operations.
-(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 credible 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.)
+(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 credible after Trump and [Brexit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit) and [the summer of George Floyd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests). 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.)
In one part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
> applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
-This is the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without really putting any serious weight on it.
+This was the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without putting any serious weight on it.
It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, I didn't think of myself as having standing to seriously doubt the story.
Until suddenly, in what was then the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wished they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/).
-When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies. The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some _other_ group is easy to dimiss as bigotry, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to _people like you_. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the trevails of Latinos, blacks, and women, I _know_ that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we _weren't_ that fragile, if anyone still remembered the world of 'aught-six, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that the fantasy wasn't real, and didn't think the world owed us deference for our perversion. And this experience _did_ raise additional questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I noticed that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)
+When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies. The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some _other_ group is easy to dimiss as bigotry, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to _people like you_. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the trevails of Latinos, blacks, and women, I _know_ that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we _weren't_ that fragile, if anyone still remembered the world of 'aught-six, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that the fantasy wasn't real, and didn't think the world owed us deference for our perversion. This _did_ raise additional questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I noticed that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)
------
-While I was in this flurry of excitement about my recent updates and the insanity around me, I thought back to that "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" Yudkowsky post from back in March that had been my wake-up call to all this. What _was_ going on with that?
+While I was in this flurry of excitement about my recent updates and the insanity around me, I thought back to that Yudkowsky post from back in March that had been my wake-up call to all this. ("I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"!!) What _was_ going on with that?
-<a id="cheerful-price"></a>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 dayjob or college acquaintance 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 on 29 September 2016, I wrote him offering $1,000 to talk about what kind of _massive_ update he made on the topics of human psychological sex differences and MtF transsexuality 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), 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."
+<a id="cheerful-price"></a>I wasn't _friends_ with Yudkowsky, obviously; I didn't have a natural social affordance to _just_ ask him the way you would ask a dayjob or college acquaintance 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 the 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. I had his email address from previous contract work I had done for MIRI back in 'twelve, so on 29 September 2016, I wrote him offering $1,000 to talk about what kind of _massive_ update he made on the topics of human psychological sex differences and MtF transsexuality 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), 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."
<a id="cheerful-price-reasons"></a>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—
-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.
+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.
Second, $1000 isn't actually real money to a San Francisco software engineer.
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 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 whole in my head can't not be filled by _something_, 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 not therefore true, and Yudkowsky's writings on the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe were a potent way to do that. 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 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").
-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.)
+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.)
-I say all this to emphasize just how much Yudkowsky's opinion meant to me. If you were a devout Catholic, and something in the Pope's latest encyclical seemed wrong according to your understanding of Scripture, and you had the opportunity to talk it over with the Pope for a measly $1000, wouldn't you take it? Of course you would!
+I say all this to emphasize just how much Yudkowsky's opinion meant to me. If you were a devout Catholic, and something in the Pope's latest [encyclical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclical) seemed wrong according to your understanding of Scripture, and you had the opportunity to talk it over with the Pope for a measly $1000, wouldn't you take it? Of course you would!
-<a id="cheerful-price-privacy-constraint"></a>Anyway, I can't 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 I think the rule I should follow for telling this Whole Dumb Story is that while I have complete freedom to talk about _my_ actions and things that happened in public, I'm not allowed to divulge information about what Yudkowsky may or may not have said in private conversations that may or may not have occured, because even without an explicit secrecy promise, people might be less forthcoming in private conversations if they knew that you might blog about them later.Personally, I think most people are _way_ too paranoid about this; I often wish I could just say what relevant things I know without worrying about whether it might infringe on someone's "privacy". (This secrecy-hating trait probably correlates with the autogynephilia blogging; someone otherwise like me who believed in privacy wouldn't be telling you this Whole Dumb Story.) But I feel morally obligated to cooperate with widely-held norms even if I personally think they're dumb.
+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.)
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-If I had to pick a _date_ for my break with progressive morality, it would be 7 October 2017. Over the past couple days, I had been having a frustrating Messenger conversation with some guy, which I would [later describe as feeling like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
+If I had to pick a _date_ for my break with progressive morality, it would be 7 October 2017. Over the past couple days, I had been having a frustrating Messenger conversation with some guy, which I would [later describe as feeling like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). He didn't even bother making his denials cohere with each other, insisting with no or minimal argument that my ideas were wrong _and_ overconfident _and_ irrelevant _and_ harmful to talk about.
-Over the previous week and months, I had been frustrated with the _Zeitgeist_, but I was trying to not to be loud or obnoxious about it, because I wanted to be a good person and not hurt anyone's feelings and not lose any more friends. ("Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she had said, "just find talking vaguely aversive.")
+Over the previous weeks and months, I had been frustrated with the _Zeitgeist_, but I was trying to not to be loud or obnoxious about it, because I wanted to be a good person and not hurt anyone's feelings and not lose any more friends. ("Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she had said, "just find talking vaguely aversive.")
-The conversation made it very clear to me that I could have no peace with the _Zeitgeist_. It wasn't the mere fact that some guy in my social circle was being dumb and gaslighty about it. It was that fact that his gaslighting was an unusually pure distillation of _socially normative_ behavior in Berkeley 2016. There were more copies of him than there were of me.
+This conversation made it very clear to me that I could have no peace with the _Zeitgeist_. It wasn't the mere fact that some guy in my social circle was being dumb and gaslighty about it. It was the fact that his performance was an unusually pure distillation of _socially normative_ behavior in Berkeley 2016; there were more copies of him than there were of me.
-It was a Huckleberry Finn moment for me: opposing this was worth losing friends, worth hurting feelings, and, actually, worth the other thing. I posted on Facebook in the morning and [on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/) in the evening:
+Opposing this was worth losing friends, worth hurting feelings—and, actually, worth the other thing. I posted on Facebook in the morning and [on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/) in the evening:
> the moment of liberating clarity when you resolve the tension between being a good person and the requirement to pretend to be stupid by deciding not to be a good person anymore 💖
-Former MIRI president Michael Vassar emailed me about it, and we ended up meeting once. (I had also emailed him back in August, when I had heard from my friend Anna Salamon that he was also skeptical of the transgender movement (Subject: "I've heard of fake geek girls, but this is ridiculous").)
+Former MIRI president Michael Vassar emailed me about the Facebook post, and we ended up meeting once. (I had also emailed him back in August, when I had heard from my friend Anna Salamon that he was also skeptical of the transgender movement (Subject: "I've heard of fake geek girls, but this is ridiculous").)
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-I wrote about my frustrations to Scott Alexander of _Slate Star Codex_ fame (Subject: "J. Michael Bailey did nothing wrong"). The immediate result of this is that he ended up including a link to one of Kay Brown's study summaries (and expressing surprise at the claim that non-androphilic trans woman have very high IQs) in his [November links post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/), and he [got some pushback even for that](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i).
+I wrote about my frustrations to Scott Alexander of _Slate Star Codex_ fame (Subject: "J. Michael Bailey did nothing wrong"). The immediate result of this is that he ended up including a link to one of Kay Brown's study summaries (and expressing surprise at the claim that non-androphilic trans woman have very high IQs) in his [November 2016 links post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/). He [got some pushback even for that](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i).
------
-A trans woman named Sophia [commented on one of my real-name blog posts](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/), thanking me for the recommendation of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_. "It strongly spoke to many of my experiences as a trans woman that I've been treating as unmentionable. (Especially among my many trans friends!)" she wrote. "I think I'm going to start treating them as mentionable."
+A trans woman named Sophia [commented on one of my real-name blog posts](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/#comment-250406), thanking me for the recommendation of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_. "It strongly spoke to many of my experiences as a trans woman that I've been treating as unmentionable. (Especially among my many trans friends!)" she wrote. "I think I'm going to start treating them as mentionable."
We struck up an email correspondence (Subject: "Re: [An Algorithmic Lucidity] Please moderate: 'Wicked Transcendence II'"). She had found my blog from the _Slate Star Codex_ blogroll. She had transitioned in July of the previous year at age 35, to universal support. (In Portland, which was perhaps uniquely good in this way.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff