-Title: Friendship Survived
-Date: 2017-05-15 21:00
+Title: Memoirs of My Recent Madness, Part I: The Unanswerable Words
+Date: 2017-06-05 21:00
Category: other
Tags: personal
Status: draft
-> _This is our big night
-> We're getting ready and we're doing it up right
-> This is our big night
-> Friendship survived, now we'll start it out right_
->
-> —"This Is Our Big Night", _My Little Pony: Equestria Girls_
+> "Listen, what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me—it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who's had some disease that's eaten his brain out. You'd have nothing but your voice—your voice and your thought. You'd scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you'd have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you'd become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you'd see living eyes watching you and you'd know that the thing can't hear you, that it can't be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it's breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That's horror. Well, that's what's hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don't think I'm a coward, but I'm afraid of it. And that's all I know—only that it exists. I don't know its purpose, I don't know its nature."
+>
+> —_The Fountainhead_ by Ayn Rand
So, right. I _thought_ I was done recovering from my delusional nervous breakdown and 17–20 February wrongful imprisonment (I continue to refuse to use the word _hospitalization_)—which I didn't even [get around to blogging](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) for a month—but then it turned out that I wasn't done. Or maybe I _was_ done, but then quickly ran into _another_ series of stressors which once again pushed me over the edge into sleep deprivation and impaired sanity (in the form of [damaged priors](http://lesswrong.com/lw/13b/dreams_with_damaged_priors/); I think my fluid reasoning was still pretty good throughout). _Now_ I think I'm back to normal ("normal").
-This kind of thing tends to happen to me every few years or so. (This "if it looks like [everyone is lying](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) about late-onset gender dysphoria in males, maybe [self- and other-reports and -perceptions are wrong in general](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)" breakdown was preceded by my December 2007 "school is actually bad" breakdown, my December 2010 "I feel guilty about not doing a very good job at my quasi-internship for [this cult that's trying to prevent the coming robot apocalypse](http://intelligence.org/)" breakdown, and my February 2013 "school is actually still bad—no, really; also, I'm scared of the [Tegmark IV multiverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis) containing large amounts of suffering" breakdown.)
+This kind of thing tends to happen to me every few years or so. (This "if it looks like [everyone is lying](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) about late-onset gender dysphoria in males, maybe [self- and other-reports and -perceptions are wrong in general](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)" breakdown was preceded by my December 2007 "school is actually bad" breakdown, my December 2010 "I feel guilty about not doing a very good job at my live-in internship for this cult [or whatever](http://lesswrong.com/lw/md/cultish_countercultishness/) that's [trying to prevent the coming robot apocalypse](http://intelligence.org/)" breakdown, and my February 2013 "school is actually still bad—no, really; also, I'm scared of the [Tegmark IV multiverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis) containing large amounts of suffering" breakdown.)
I concede that it's plausible that my psychology falls into a reference class that could receive a bipolar I or paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis if I were to seek out a diagnosis, but right now, I'm modeling the field of psychiatry as an evolved social-control mechanism rather than a genuine attempt to help people, and I correspondingly decline to use its language and categories. (You sometimes hear people talk about psychiatric conditions being "underdiagnosed" at higher IQs, but that's backwards: the underlying psychological variations were [here first](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/); people only bother bucketing them into a "diagnosis" when people with the relevant traits cause problems in Society. But the evolutionarily-novel way that Society happens to be structured isn't necessarily optimized to be _good_ for humans except insofar as humans following their individual incentive gradients usually don't screw up things too badly for themselves. Existing Society is just the thing the forces of memetic evolution happened to cough up in the disruptive wake of the industrial revolution; it doesn't necessarily _make sense_. And _I_ don't cause problems.)
So, a horrifying thing that I didn't realize while I was _in_ psychiatric prison in February, that I learned during this April attempt trying to help bust someone else _out_, is that these places have a _policy_ of [refusing to confirm or deny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response) whether they're holding someone (because ["privacy"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_and_Accountability_Act)). They will take down your phone number and say, _If_ we have a patient with such a name, then we'll give her your message and she can choose to call you back, but we can neither confirm nor deny whether we have a patient by that name. I didn't consider this acceptable: after having observed psychiatric prison employees _blatantly lie_ in my own case (the paperwork said I "self presented", but getting accosted by cops while trying to enter the train station to get to my apartment to sleep because trying to sleep at my mother's house didn't work so well, and not resisting as they led me into an ambulance after interviewing me for a few minutes, is _not_ the same thing as "self presenting"!), I didn't trust them to reliably deliver a phone message: I could easily imagine scenarios in which, for example, the receptionist would dutifully take down the message, leave it to _someone else_ to actually deliver it to Roberta, and then that someone else would get distracted, never deliver the message, and _get away with it_. Roberta wouldn't be able to complain about not receiving a message she never knew existed, and I wouldn't be able to complain if I wasn't allowed to even know whether Roberta was even there.
-[report on bet]
+[bet]
To sum up, not _only_ is it the case that you can get arbitrarily kidnapped by the authorities and forced to take unknown drugs, it's _also_ the case that when your friends who _actually_ care about you start calling around to find out where you are, the bastards will _refuse to admit whether they've kidnapped you_ and _claim that it's for your benefit_, and if you complain about this (Subject: Hijack Innocent People And Abscond), most ordinary good nice smart law-abiding people will implicitly or explicitly take the authorities' side, because once you've been placed in the _social role_ of "crazy person", _no one will listen to anything you say_, even if you have surprisingly cogent arguments for why the casual processes that placed you in the social role of "crazy person" were mistaken to have done so.
So, yes, I went crazy again in April. But only because I had _tried_ being sane and _that didn't work_.
-It would be difficult and tedious to recount the exact sequence of what I thought and did during this period; the general theme was _extreme confusion and uncertainty_ about, um, everything, including the nature of reality, but particularly about people's true motivations and what ubiquitous threats might lurk behind everyone's [socially-desirable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias) lies about how the world works, which I had spent my entire life being duped by.
+It would be difficult and tedious—not to mention somewhat emotionally painful—to reconstruct the exact sequence of what I thought and did during this period; the general theme was _extreme confusion and uncertainty_ about, um, everything, including the nature of reality, but particularly about people's true motivations and what ubiquitous threats might lurk behind everyone's [socially-desirable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias) lies about how the world works, which I had spent my entire life being duped by.
-Maybe people get kidnapped and thrown in prisons (mostly prisons-masquerading-as-hospitals if they're of my social class) _all the time_. Maybe they often _die_ in there. Maybe sometimes they escape, perhaps with the help of friends who are willing to pretend to be family members, the authorities being more likely to release someone into the care of family rather than mere friends. (And then no one talks about it, fearing stigma and loss of credibility.) Maybe sometimes the prison authorities mistake someone's identity and manage to successfully use social pressure to brainwash them into accepting that identity—the authorities reasoning that if the paperwork says the patient's name is, say, Michael Jones, that _must_ be his name, and he mustn't be released until he truly accepts this, even if the patient currently insists that his name is Mark Saotome-Westlake (the testimony of crazy people being assigned zero evidential weight, and the possibility of a paperwork mixup being assigned prior probability zero). Maybe people who talk about reincarnation and past lives are actually talking about things that really happened to them before a traumatic event after which they ended up in a new social environment that forcibly brainwashed them into adopting a new identity. (Stockholm syndrome has every reason to be _adaptive_; as a just-so story, imagine a surviving woman on the losing side of tribal warfare during the endless æons of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness doing better for her genes by starting a new life under the bondage of her captors rather than going down with a fight like her brothers.) Maybe, _&c_. (I was also entertaining some much weirder hypotheses that I'll get to some of briefly.)
-
-Anyway. One _more_ thing that had been disappointing about my February ordeal is that I had originally been scheduled to fly to Portland on 17–19 February for a brief vacation in order to crossplay at [a comic convention there](http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) and visit friend of the blog "Jerrica", who—
-
-Ah. A brief digression is needed here. I invented the pseudonym "Mark Taylor Saotome-Westlake" for this blog because when I privately told people that I wanted to write about my autogynephilia and to advocate for autogynephilia's causal role in the development of non-exclusively-androphilic MtF transgenderedness being publicly recognized, everyone said it would be smarter to use a pseudonym, and possibly to obfuscate my physical location as well, and I listened to them. Thus all the references to "Portland" (scare-quoted in the first appearance in each post to indicate that it's an obfuscation) or [its metro area](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-counter/) in the blog so far.
-
-But after the events being discussed in this post, that cautious, prudent advice to keep my identity secret is starting to seem unduly _cowardly_. The meta-level phenomenon that I'm so upset about is _precisely_ that people are far more reasonable in private than in public. I still like my pretty pseudonym as a branding/market-segmentation device (gender blogging is _something I have to do_, but maybe not the _first_ thing I want associated with my name), but it shouldn't be a _secret_ that my real name is Zack M. Davis (if you like _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, check out my real-name mostly-not-gender-related blog, [_An Algorithmic Lucidity_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/)!) and that I currently live in Berkeley, California.
-
-(Of course, to protect _their_ privacy, I'm still going to obfuscate and scare-quote-on-first-appearance the names of _other_ people who haven't consented to be part of my story.)
-
-Right. So I was annoyed that I had missed out on my trip to Portland (the _real_ Portland, and not a corwardly obfuscation) and getting meet to Jerrica, who I was now _especially_ grateful towards for taking my "side" as an "out" autogynephilic trans woman during my 11–14 February public Facebook meltdown (highlights: [1](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154807871200199) [2](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154808888680199) [3](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154810042700199) [4](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812225235199) [5](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812673305199) [6](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812970895199) [7](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154813104220199) [8](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154813788715199) [9](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814383695199) [10](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814409220199) [11](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814492195199) [12](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814496385199) [13](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814640265199) [14](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154815302975199) [15](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154815789735199) [16](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154816160405199)).
-
-----
-
-in the ruins
-
-science/female cooperate/defect
-
-I'm proud of myself for using probability thereby being anchored on normal behavior, but I'm disappointed that I didn't notice "Believing that the normal function of cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices are sending secret and significant messages that only they can understand or believe" as a standard symptom, or that my godshatter intuition in prison was the standard thought-insertion delusion
-
-constantly trying to make little bets and predictions and threats to make sure which parts of social reality I could trust
-
-bitter about not getting to visit a friend of the blog in Portland
-
-green blinky light at Vagabond Inn, thought it was serving a social control function, and that it was a CGI capture for people constructing blackmail material
-
-I thought my friends trying to help me and give me cigarettes were constructing counterblackmail
-
-hot chocolate, poison me; afraid of being locked in; not trusting Google Maps (I thought it might be giving me bad data as a test case)
-
-everyone is being posioned all the time, and there's
-
-Jem Uber, denouncing my social class; Hamilton tickets
-
-thought I was in multiple worlds, multiple futures
-
-I gave away my books (Luminous, The Fountainhead, A Deepness in the Sky)
-those are some nice books
-do you want the books?
-(He didn't actually want the books; he was lying
-
-asking about the property next door
-
-afraid of being posioned, afraid of theft
-
-thought that people messing up my room evolved function of capture the flag
-
-pseudonymity is kind of cowardly, but I guess it's a cheap and useful hedge, and "Saotome-Westlake is more interesting than my truename"
-
-copy of the brand-new Caitlyn Jenner memoir _The Secrets of My Life_. (Despite the title, I have this sinking feeling that it's not going to spill _all_ the secrets that people in Jenner's reference class know. Oh, well—I guess that's what this blog is for.)
-
-different versions of me in Vagabond Inn, in different rooms that couldn't be distinguished because they had the same number, maybe the Inn had been designed that way to hide people from the cops because we live in a police state and I never noticed; couldn't tell if the air conditioner might be a siren, and I thought it might actually _depend_ on my interpretation (whereas in the physical world, it was always an air conditioner, and I was misinterpreting it as a siren; compare how I thought the crosswalk beeping was like a premonition of my hospital death)
-
-BABSCon someone might die because of the conservation law, but it probably wouldn't be me
-
-"Someone is going to die, and it's not going to be me!"
-
-there might be _separate_ An Algorithmic Lucidity and Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought meetups, and one of them, someone who had been gaslit into thinking they were me would attend, and maybe he would get killed instead, if the party; or maybe there would be a scandal in the newspapers about a confrontation in the bathroom, and there would be a trial
-
-some subset of my crowd is in harmony with human nature
-
-getting out of dodge, being tempted to write a cryptic email introducing my rationality friends to Blanchard et al.
-
-tempted to make a collage of papers of the bad parts of the world, like a CAPTChA
-
-misinterpreting the interpretation of my makeup, hairpiece &c. layout, and the blog summary clipped photo, as like a task that humans completing little comptuation tasks to avoid starvation several hundred years hence (with some measure), but also
-
-my followers bidding with Facebook Likes on my status update for the right to go to the party, and return something they had stolen from me, in exchange for a concession; maybe that was what had happened to Michael O. Church; people threatened him to take the posts down
-
-misinterpreting Arina's text as from the future
-
-wasn't sure if I smelled shit on the MAX train, but later Anna smelled it too, in a different place
-
-Dap and the headphones, tell her you're from Frisco; where I come from
-MAX Yellow light
-
-buying an extra phone charger, not wanting to get caught
-
-Wells Fargo courtesy call, wanting to give the man a gift for his daughter, modeling myself as a packet, leaving notes for myself, &c.
-
-narrative optimization—doing things for the sake of writing a Diary entry about them later
-
-_Your Name_ (thanks to friend of the blog [@KatanaOfLogic](https://twitter.com/KatanaOfLogic) for the recommendation).
-
-special enrollment period
-
-my fox in the playpen
-
-empathizing with the old man in _Rainbows End_; everything falling apart at the end of life; positive and negative surprises
-
-something about decisionmaking is about making bad outcomes inconsistent; thinking that with some measure, there's a Greg Egan novel about me and my friends, and we're deriving some of our measure from simulations of that story
-
-it's important to keep documents because that's how our simulation bootstraps itself into knowing which nootropics work
-
-conscious social engineering angle; wanting to run away and not tell people where I am, and have that be a _credible_ threat
-
-"CHOOSE LIFE", street lamp in front of billboard; turd/cork
-
-Uber bidding algorithm, infering that Uber had subcontracted everything out and it only just barely worked
\ No newline at end of file
+Maybe people get kidnapped and thrown in prisons (mostly prisons-masquerading-as-hospitals if they're of my social class) _all the time_. Maybe they often _die_ in there. Maybe sometimes they escape, perhaps with the help of friends who are willing to pretend to be family members, the authorities being more likely to release someone into the care of family rather than mere friends. (And then no one talks about it, fearing stigma and loss of credibility.) Maybe sometimes the prison authorities mistake someone's identity and manage to successfully use social pressure to brainwash them into accepting that identity—the authorities reasoning that if the paperwork says the patient's name is, say, Michael Jones, that _must_ be his name, and he mustn't be released until he truly accepts this, even if the patient currently insists that his name is Mark Saotome-Westlake (the testimony of crazy people being assigned zero evidential weight, and the possibility of a paperwork mixup being assigned prior probability zero). Maybe people who talk about reincarnation and past lives are actually talking about things that really happened to them before a traumatic event after which they ended up in a new social environment that forcibly brainwashed them into adopting a new identity. (Stockholm syndrome has every reason to be _adaptive_; as a just-so story, imagine a surviving woman on the losing side of tribal warfare during the endless æons of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness doing better for her genes by starting a new life under the bondage of her captors rather than going down with a fight like her brothers.) Maybe—_&c_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff