[^internship]: "Internship" is in scare quotes, because 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 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 the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2013.
[^twenty-sixth]: Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see from the dates (26 March 2016) 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 "Wilhelm"). 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.
As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman who I'll call "Chaya", whose marriage had fallen apart after (among other things) her husband transitioned. She told me about the parts of her husband's story that had never quite made sense to her (but which sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, the husband was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just a weird and insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on ["Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/), her response was, "Holy shit, this is _exactly_ what happened with me." It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy.
------
+------
+
+[TODO SECTION: conversations with "Wilhelm" late 2016, early 2017]
+
+As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend.
+
+I kept in touch with "Wilhelm".
+
+[TODO: election thoughts; Clinton vs. Trump on Russia hawkishness]
+
+I shared with him an early draft of ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), which fleshed out his idea from back in March about political forces optimizing for people to adopt an identity as a persecuted trans person.
+
+[TODO: egregore theory; negotiating with egregores and Aumann agreement; coalition of the fringes burning down organic structure
+
+I've heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this is ridiculous.
+
+I said I was modeling him as possessed by the NRx egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist diaspora.
+]
+
+[TODO: NRx the nice parts, Brazil vs. South Africa]
+
+[TODO: comics and 72 virgins: https://tapas.io/episode/308349]
+
+"If people with fragile identities weren't useful as a proxy weapon for certain political coalitions, then they would have no incentive to try to play language police and twist people's arms into accepting their identities," he said.
+
+"OK, but I still want my own breasts," I said.
+
+"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.
+
+[TODO: hypomasculine men, more paperclips]
+
+[TODO: Susan Fenimore Cooper]
+
+I mentioned that there was a woman who had been hanging around the "rationalist"[^scare-quotes] community despite being mildly contemptuous of our disrespect for academic philosophy, who was very trigger-happy with sexism accusations, who I privately thought would be _less_ respected if she were a man making similar-quality arguments—but there was no way to give her feedback on the matter without alienating her. I supposed that in a NRx (_i.e._, evil) space, they would probably say, "who cares if you alienate the bitch". But she was a _woman paying attention to us_.
+
+[^scare-quotes]: I mentioned that these days, I just used scare quotes rather than tacking the word _aspiring_ in front.
+
+"Wilhelm" summarized the NRx response:
+
+> 1. Women should never have been weaponiz[ed] by democracy into being cultural/corporate commissars
+> 2. Why is an unmarried woman making a nuisance of herself in a mostly male community? Where is her family? Why is she not married yet?
+
+I said that #2 still seemed monstrously unfair to the non-nuisance woman contributing to the community's endeavor; even if biology had something to do with their rarity, not giving them a chance was way worse than the problem thereby solved (with respect to my historically aberrant pro-androgyny utility function that I would defend to the death).
+
+[TODO: further counter-replies, eminence]
+
+[TODO: egalitarian relationships don't work]
+
+Even if I didn't like the theory and didn't trust the theory, I admitted that it was refreshing that someone _actually had a theory_, which was more than you could say for the blank slate.
+
+------
"Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she said, "just find talking vaguely aversive." In a Facebook thread in January 2017 about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, she said something about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria.
------
-... the pretense of "quietly stay[ing] out of everyone's way" lasted about 3 days.
+... the pretense of "quietly stay[ing] out of everyone's way" lasted about three days.
In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Director of Communications Rob Bensinger, someone named Amelia[^amelia-rip] said something about closeted trans women (linking to the ["I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42) piece).
[^terf-allusion]: An allusion to TERFs, "trans-exclusionary radical feminists."
-It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman who I'll call "Noreen." "_[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/).
+It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman who I'll call "Noreen" (who I had _also_ had an exchange with 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/).
I replied that I had an unfinished draft [post about this](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), but briefly, faced with a demand to alter one's language in order to spare someone's feelings, one possible response might be to submit to the demand. But another possible response might be, "_I don't negotiate with terrorists_. People have been using this word to refer to a particular thing for the last 200,000 years since the invention of language, and if that hurts your feelings, that's not my problem." The second response was certainly not very nice. But maybe there were other values than being nice?—sometimes?
-----
-The thread on the "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends" post continued. Someone who I'll call "Kevin" (whom I had never interacted with before or since; my post-visibility settings were set to Public) said that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. Correlations with gender were weak enough to be irrelevant after talking with someone for half an hour.
+In another post, I acknowledged my problematic tone:
+
+> I know the arrogance is off-putting! But the arrogance is a really fun part of the æsthetic that I'm really enjoying! Can I get away with it if I mark it as a form of performance art? Like, be really arrogant while exploring ideas, and then later go back and write up the sober serious non-arrogant version?
+
+Someone came to my defense: it was common to have mental blocks about criticizing trans ideology because of the fear that saying anything would hurt one's trans friends and make one an outcast. One way to overcome that block was to get _really angry_ and _visibly having an outburst_, because then people ascribe less agency and culpability to you; it would be clear that you'd cooped up these feelings for a long time because you do understand that they're taboo and unpopular.
+
+The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you _ever_ want to know what genitals someone has for _any reason_, you are an _evil transphobe_ who should _die_", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are _invading_ my female spaces for _nefarious purposes_ and we should burn them all".
+
+I added that the worst part is that "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view is basically _correct_. It was _phrased_ in a really dismissive manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!
+
+-----
+
+The thread on the "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends" post continued. Someone who I'll call "Kevin" (whom I had never interacted with before or since; my post visibility settings were set to Public) said that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. Correlations with gender were weak enough to be irrelevant after talking with someone for half an hour.
I replied, but this was circular, right?—that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. If gender didn't have any (probabilistic!) implications, why did getting gendered correctly matter so much to people?
> Of course, Lawrence couldn't assume Korzybski as a prerequisite. The reality is (wait for it ...) even worse! We're actually men who love their model of what we wish women were, and want to become that.[^model-of]
-[^model-of]: Although Ben Hoffman pointed out that the words "their model of" don't belong here; that would be one too many layers of indirection.
+[^model-of]: Although Ben Hoffman pointed out that the words "their model of" don't belong here; it's one too many layers of indirection.
That is, realistically, the AGP fantasy _about_ "being a woman" wouldn't—[_couldn't_ actually be fulfilled by magically being transformed to match the female distribution](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). (At a minimum, because women aren't autogynephilic! The _male_ sex fantasy of, "Ooh, what if I inhabited a female body with my own breasts, vagina, _&c._", has no reason to match anything in the experience of women who always have just been female.)
[^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 "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.
-I replied (at 1:25 _a.m._ on 14 February 2017):
+I replied (at 1:25 _a.m._):
>> why you believe what you believe
>
>
> Consequences for other people: I don't know! That's for those other people to decide, not me! But whatever they decide, they'll probably get more of what they want if they have more accurate beliefs! Rationality, motherfuckers! Do you speak it!
-(Looking back on the thread six years later, I'm surprised by the timestamps. What were we all _doing_ having a heated political discussion past midnight! We should have all been asleep! Sleep is really important ... but I guess I didn't yet fully appreciate that at this point in my life.)
+(Looking back on the thread six years later, I'm surprised by the timestamps. What were we all _doing_, having a heated political discussion past midnight? We should have all been asleep! I guess I didn't yet fully appreciate the importance of sleep at this point in my life.)
"Chaya" 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 sacrifice social connections 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 "Chaya", "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??"
+I messaged "Chaya": "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??"
"Chaya" speculated 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!"
> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: ["The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories."](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) That thing is a _fucking_ Absolute Denial Macro!
-At 4:18 _a.m._, I pulled the trigger on the email I had started drafting to Yudkowsky earlier (Subject: "the spirit of intervention").
-
-A couple hours later, I was starting to realize I had made a mistake, as reflected to emails sent to Anna Salamon at 6:16 _a.m._ (Subject: "I love you and I'm scared and I should sleep to aboid being institutionalized") and to Michael Vassar 6:32 _a.m._ (Subject: "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)").
+At 4:18 _a.m._, I pulled the trigger on the email I had started drafting to Yudkowsky earlier (Subject: "the spirit of intervention"), arguing that neoreaction was onto something really important. It wasn't about politics _per se_; it was about reflectivity and moral progress skepticism. Instead of _assuming_ that we know better than people in the past, we should look at the _causal processes_ that produced our current morality, and reevaluate whether it makes sense (in light of our current morality, which was itself created those same causal processes). Insofar as we could see that the egalitarian strain of our current morality was shaped by political forces rather than anything more fundamental, it was worth reëvaluating. It wasn't that right-wing politics are good as such. More like, being smart is more important than being good (for humans), so if you abandon your claim to goodness, you can think more clearly.
+A couple hours later, I was starting to realize I had made a mistake, as reflected to emails sent to Anna Salamon at 6:16 _a.m._ (Subject: "I love you and I'm scared and I should sleep to aboid [_sic_] being institutionalized") and to Michael Vassar 6:32 _a.m._ (Subject: "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)").
+Michael got back to me at 10:37 _a.m._:
-Michael's reply 1037—
> 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 said in an email to Anna on 14 February 14:22, "I don't know what's real. I should lie down? I'm sorry", and messaged Ben at 16:09 with "I just woke up", which suggests that I may have gotten an hour and a half of sleep in between
+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 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.
-]
+That night, I emailed Michael and Anna about sleep at 12:17 _a.m._ 15 February 2017 (Subject: "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS") and about philosophy and the nature and amount of suffering in the universe at 1:55 _a.m._ and 2:01 _a.m._ (Subjects: "I think I'm starting to understand a lot of the stuff you used to say that I didn't understand!" and "none of my goddamned business").
---------
+[TODO: going off the rails—
+ * morning 15 February Facebook posts, "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!", "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!", and promising to leave Facebook for a week
+ * total meltdown encompassed 31 posts between Saturday 11 February and promising to leave Facebook for a week 0844 15 February
+ * I was not, actually, a normal human
+ * some delusional emails to Kay Brown
+ * I told Sophia I couldn't make it (Subject: "I don't think I can make it to Portland/Wizardworld after all, sorry (eom)")
-email Michael and Anna "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS" Wed 15 Feb 0017
+ * what else happened on 15 February??
- * total meltdown encompassed 31 posts between Saturday 11 February and promising to leave Facebook for a week 0844 15 February
+]
15 Feb 0803
> I'm taking the week off work; today I'm trying to stay grounded and then I'm going to Portland later; I wanna talk to you but not now
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff