"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread in mid-January 2017. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."
-As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whom 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.
+As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whom I'll call "Rebecca", 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.
------
I followed it up the next morning with a hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends".[^terf-allusion] As a transhumanist, I believed that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, "being a woman", but apparently I felt like being vague) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not _propagate backwards in time_. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a _goddamned moral responsibility_ to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by _crazy people who think they can edit the past_.
-[^terf-allusion]: An allusion to TERFs, "trans-exclusionary radical feminists."
+[^terf-allusion]: The initial letters were 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" (who I had _also_ had an exchange with 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 "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/).
(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.
+"Rebecca" 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 "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??"
-"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!"
+"Rebecca" 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!"
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.
-"Chaya" summed up something she had gotten out of my whole campaign:
+"Rebecca" summed up something she had gotten out of my whole campaign:
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
+> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
> I really _was_ getting to the point that I hated transwomen
> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
> I hate them, too!
> Fuck those guys!
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:27 AM
+> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:27 AM
> I hated what happened to my husband, I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was _getting_ to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy
> But you're actually changing that for me
> You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion
> It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore
> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
> the "suffering" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
+> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
> You've made me hate transwomen _less_ now
> Because I have a model
> I understand the problem
> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
> [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/)
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
+> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
> I understand why it's hard
> I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give
> This is a better thing for me
I don't want to say that I was having persecution _delusions_, exactly—just that persecution hypotheses were much more _salient_ than they usually were; I was a little bit fixated on the idea of scary men coming to kill me. Somehow, I developed the idea that an HSTS transsexual I had been corresponding with was actually AGP and in denial. I sent her an email trying to gently hint about it (Subject: "one last thing before I disappear for a while"), and then I felt scared—scared that she would she would track me down and take revenge? In a followup email, I disclaimed that I was kind of losing my mind right now, and disavowed the offensive hypothesis. ("But if you're sure, I believe you!") She replied, mentioning that she also questions people's self-reports of being HSTS. She said that her husband had a knack for spotting AGPs, and did not find them attractive, calling them "cross dressers on steroids." I said I was afraid that the husband wanted to kill me.
-"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I messaged "Chaya" late that night. Now that I no longer believed self-reports are true, I could see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're in the right. I had ostensibly known that was a thing, verbally, but now I was _seeing_ it.
+"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I messaged "Rebecca" late that night. Now that I no longer believed self-reports are true, I could see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're in the right. I had ostensibly known that was a thing, verbally, but now I was _seeing_ it.
She asked for an example. I mentioned the thread where I had asked "Noreen" on a date. When I had excused my sexist remark with "it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent", I thought I had some beautiful æsthetic reason for that being a witty thing to say ... but maybe a better description of my behavior was that I was beating up on Brent—openly insulting a male conspecific as a dominance play while engaging in courtship.
------
-The first time I went insane from sleep deprivation, in 2013, I remember having a distinct mental sensation where two words kept running through my head, over and over. That time, the words had been "science" and "female." Maybe a Society with a more advanced discipline of psychiatry would be able to pinpoint the nature and origin of this symptom more exactly, but I suspect it might be a real regularity, because around this time, it started happening to me again. This time, the words were "cooperate" and "defect".
+The first time I went insane from sleep deprivation, in 2013, I remember having a distinct mental sensation where two words kept running through my head, over and over. That time, the words had been "science" and "female." Maybe a Society with a more advanced discipline of psychiatry would be able to pinpoint the nature and origin of this symptom more exactly, but I suspect it might be a real regularity, because around this time, it started happening to me again. This time, [the words were "cooperate" and "defect"](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/).
-I wandered around downtown San Francisco, and used my phone to repeatedly message the word "Cooperate" to various people—to "Chaya" (six times), to Ben (five times), to "Noreen" (six times), to "Thomas" (twice), to my insufficiently requited love "Beatrice" (five times), to Ziz (six times), to Brent Dill (five times) ... a few other people. (I was imagining the act of saying or sending the word constituting an act of playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)
+I wandered around downtown San Francisco, and used my phone to repeatedly message the word "Cooperate" to various people—to "Rebecca" (six times), to Ben (five times), to "Noreen" (six times), to "Thomas" (twice), to my insufficiently requited love "Beatrice" (five times), to Ziz (six times), to Brent Dill (five times) ... a few other people. (I was imagining the act of saying or sending the word constituting an act of playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)
-"I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip", I told "Chaya" and Ben. "Chaya" asked me to clarify whether I meant I had taken acid, or gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said.
+"I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip", I told "Rebecca" and Ben. "Rebecca" asked me to clarify whether I meant I had taken acid, or gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said.
I remember being afraid that the thing which (I had decided) had happened to Eliezer Yudkowsky and to Scott Alexander that made them such good writers was now happening to me, a phenomenon that would bring indescribable suffering along with an awakening into genius. I messaged Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet".
I remember having a vision of seeing autogynephilia as a separate taxon in the configuration space of minds, and of negotiating with some celestial agency to _pry_ it apart in the world's shared ontology—it was real, and I saw it, but somehow it couldn't be _fully_ real until it was accepted as real.
-I sent some more messages from my phone in the afternoon. I couldn't sleep because I was scared, I told "Chaya". I had built up a distinction between social reality and physical reality, and I didn't know what to do now that it had been undermined.
+I sent some more messages from my phone in the afternoon. I couldn't sleep because I was scared, I told "Rebecca". I had built up a distinction between social reality and physical reality, and I didn't know what to do now that it had been undermined.
I was so sorry, I told Ben. I wanted to be part of the coalition, but I was so confused, and I said "defect" a bunch of times. I was scared that my boss (who, incidentally, was black) was going to come kill me.
After being released from psych prison, arrangements were made for made for me to attend the Intensive Outpatient Program at Kaiser Walnut Creek—more school-like group sessions where they talk about feelings and coping strategies. That was also anti-helpful, but it was much less of a problem. The outpatient psych authorities are of course just as stupid and overbearingly paternalistic as the inpatient psych prison authorities, with the crucial difference that they don't have any power. In psych prison, the doors are locked; you physically can't leave.
-The outpatient program has a few social-pressure sales tactics meant to persuade you that you have some underlying condition that requires their "care". They were unpersuaded by my cause-and-effect reasoning that I had gone crazy due to stress-induced sleep deprivation, and was now fine after having gotten sleep. Getting sleep _fixed the problem_.
+The outpatient program has a few social-pressure sales tactics meant to persuade you that you have some underlying condition that requires their "care". They were unpersuaded by my cause-and-effect reasoning that I had gone crazy due to stress-induced sleep deprivation, and was now fine after having gotten sleep, that getting sleep _fixed the problem_.
But the doors aren't locked; they don't actually have any power over you that you don't give them.
------
-On 2 March 2017, I wrote to Michael about how "the community" was performing (Subject: "rationalist community health check?? asking for one bit of advice"). Michael had claimed that it was obvious that AI was far away. (This wasn't obvious to me.) But in contrast, a lot of people in the rationalist community seemed to have very short AI timelines. "Chaya" had recently asked me, "What would you do differently if AI was 5 years off?"
+On 2 March 2017, I wrote to Michael about how "the community" was performing (Subject: "rationalist community health check?? asking for one bit of advice"). Michael had claimed that it was obvious that AI was far away. (This wasn't obvious to me.) But in contrast, a lot of people in the rationalist community seemed to have very short AI timelines. "Rebecca" had recently asked me, "What would you do differently if AI was 5 years off?"
(Remember, this was 2017. Five years later in March 2022, we were in fact still alive, but the short-timelines people were starting to look more prescient than Michael had given them credit for.)
If we—my sense of the general culture of "we"—were obviously getting gender wrong, plausibly got the election wrong, plausibly were getting AI timelines wrong, and I thought Moldbug and neoreactionary friends were pointing to some genuinely valuable Bayes-structure ... it seemed like we were doing a _really poor_ job of [pumping against cultishness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult). Was it maybe worth bidding for a cheerful price conversation with Yudkowsky again to discuss this? (I wasn't important enough for him to spontaneously answer my emails, and I was too submissive to just do it without asking Michael first.)
-Michael said there were better ways to turn dollars into opposition to cultishness. Then I realized that I had been asking Michael for permission, not advice. (Of _course_ Michael was going to say No, there's a better way to turn dollars into anti-cultishness, which would turn out to be apophenic Vassarian moonspeak that will maybe later turn out to be correct in ways that I wouldn't understand for eight years; I shouldn't have asked.) I went ahead an emailed Yudkowsky. (Again, I won't confirm or deny whether a conversation actually happened.)
+Michael said there were better ways to turn dollars into opposition to cultishness. Then I realized that I had been asking Michael for permission, not advice. (Of _course_ Michael was going to say No, there's a better way to turn dollars into anti-cultishness, which would turn out to be apophenic Vassarian moonspeak that will maybe later turn out to be correct in ways that I wouldn't understand for eight years; I shouldn't have asked.) I went ahead and emailed Yudkowsky. (Again, I won't confirm or deny whether a conversation actually happened.)
------
-------
-[TODO: correspondence with sex researchers
- * I had sent Blanchard fan mail on 10 August 2016
- * I had sent Bailey fan mail on 7 January 2017, and then followed up on 11 February with a link to the blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message")
- * "fan mail; and, self-promotion" to Alice Dreger on 2 March
- * Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160 (11 Feb), https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528 (3 Mar)
- * The world is not actually large; "famous" people (on the order of scientists or professors) often answer their email. (Although this probably stops being true for, like, Taylor Swift.)
- * I wrote to Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence/Cantor (Subject: "trans infovism against trans activism?? (was: Fwd: The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought)")
+You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an [h-index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) of 73" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
-> It gets worse! I think this absurd situation is illustrative of a flaw in democracy itself: activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
+In previous months, I had sent thanks-for-your-work fan mail to Blanchard and to Bailey, and later sent Bailey a link to this blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message"). That seemed to have gone over quite well (Bailey shared the link with Blanchard, who [tweeted a link and screenshot–quote](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160)), such that I felt relatively less presumptuous writing to to Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence (and Kevin Hsu and James Cantor for good measure) about my new political project, where I was in favor of the right to transition on morphological freedom grounds, but believed strongly that in order to help people make the best decisions, it was important to be realistic about the limitations of the existing technology and about what the underlying psychological condition actually is. To the extent that my attempts to be realistic put me in the minority of elite opinion in Berkeley, I feared for our collective epistemology.
- * I mean, you're already doing this with your work, obviously, but I want to know if there's any way I can help?
+A lot of intellectuals tried to avoid politics, and for good reason: if a polarized culture were forcing you to make a choice between a "minimize the number of trans people" faction and a "maximizer the number of trans people" faction, the only sane thing to do would be to ignore the noise and sit out the fight. But maybe there was some kind of role for some kind of very _narrowly scoped_ political behavior (making allies and enemies, trading favors and picking fights, _&c_.) with the goal of _just_ getting the correct theory in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but _not_ trying to dictate what the social norms around transitioning should be?—["infovism" rather than activism](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). The recipients of this email were implicitly already doing this through their scholarship, but ... was there any way I could help? (Subject: "trans infovism against trans activism?? (was: Fwd: The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought)")
-> If polarizing cultural forces force you to make a choice between joining the "Your gender is whatever you say it is! Maximize the number of trans people!" coalition, or the "Transitioning is against God's will! Minimize the number of trans people!" coalition, the only sane thing to do is ignore the noise and sit out the fight.
-
-> Maybe there's a role for some kind of very narrowly scoped political behavior (making friends and allies, trading favors, alienating people, &c.), with the goal of just getting the correct theory (sexual dimorphism is real, societies have gender roles, there are these two distinct classes of motivation for why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone) in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but not trying to dictate what the social norms
-
- * Bailey was tentatively working on a website ("Resources for Families with Gender Dysphoria" (RFGD.org).) (not sure what happened with that)
-
- * Lawrence—
-> I think it is a fool's errand to try to convince anyone to accept our ideas about "what the thing actually is." The best one can do, I feel, is to present the autogynephilia model as a potentially useful one and make it available, comprehensible, and perhaps somewhat palatable to those who might benefit from it.
-
-"I'd prefer to pick the fights I think I could win."
-
-]
+I got some friendly replies. Bailey was planning to start a website of resources for families of people with gender dysphoria, which I might be able to help with later. Lawrence was pessimistic about my stated ambition of taking the taxonomy mainstream (as contrasted to the more modest target of making the ideas available and somewhat palatable to those who might benefit from them). "I'd prefer to pick the fights I think I could win," she wrote.
-------
-Michael asked me what I thought of recently disgraced right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (Subject: "Milo"). I said I hadn't been following that drama, except that I was really annoyed at local effective-altruism priestess Kelsey Piper (then blogging as _The Unit of Caring_) [playing dumb about what was at issue](http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/156812598746/calling-milos-conduct-random-cruelty-to-people) when criticizing Yiannopoulos for calling out a trans student by name during a speech. ("The woman in question was not 'still choosing to present as a man', she was not passing for a cis woman [...] If my university weren't letting me use the women's restrooms I would absolutely file a title IX complaint," Piper wrote.)
+Michael Vassar asked me what I thought of recently disgraced right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (Subject: "Milo"). I said I hadn't been following that drama, except that I was really annoyed at local effective-altruism priestess Kelsey Piper (then blogging as _The Unit of Caring_) [playing dumb about what was at issue](http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/156812598746/calling-milos-conduct-random-cruelty-to-people) when criticizing Yiannopoulos for calling out a trans student by name during a speech. ("The woman in question was not 'still choosing to present as a man', she was not passing for a cis woman [...] If my university weren't letting me use the women's restrooms I would absolutely file a title IX complaint," Piper wrote.)
I agreed that ridiculing a named individual in a public speech is _mean_, and it's preferable to avoid mean things if there's any way to make the same point with the same force and quality; it would be better if we could just directly renegotiate social norms without being mean. In that sense, I was not pro-Milo. But if we couldn't peacefully coordinate and were doomed to do politics, the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus's strategy of gerrymandering categories seemed like a strategy of [asymmetrical warfare](http://devinhelton.com/afghanistan-fractally-stupid-war), less of a fair fight than just trading insults. I could respect Yiannopoulos as an ordinary soldier.
I could see a picture where the underlying bug in male sexual psychology that leads to AGP would be far less likely to progress to "gender dysphoria" (actually doing something about it) in a world where it was socially-acceptable for highly-verbal 13-year-old boys to seek out sex, instead of internalizing socially-desirable admonitions against trying (which were adapted to the norm of reaction of a largely dumber population), resulting in Comment 171 syndrome. Blanchard [had posited "developmental competition"](/papers/blanchard-nonmonotonic_relation_of_agp_and_heterosexual_attraction.pdf) between AGP and normal heterosexual attraction, the balance between the two being set early in psychosexual development. Maybe pre-autogynephilic boys who chase girls develop mostly normally, while those deprived of that outlet double down on their perversion?
-It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has very strong autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
+It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has some autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
-[^heinlein-agp]: There was that scene in _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where a man watching a woman perform on stage uses a telepathic link to share her experiences—but there was also an entire book, [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read it as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
+[^heinlein-agp]: [TODO] Some of this is circumstantial [...] The scenes in chapter XXIX of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where Michael Valentine Smith uses his telepathic powers [...] sex change in "All You Zombies" [...] _an entire book_, [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read _I Will Fear No Evil_ as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
So if the forces of political correctness won and "trans" became an entrenched cultural practice, that could be seen as genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues—and at the same time, from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, the efforts of people opposing gender identity ideology look like trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. And from inside the bubble of my own eclectic ideology, I wanted to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) a Julia Serano-like æsthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity—and that's just _not my style_.)
[^p-doom]: This is the quantity that, these days, we would call 1 − P(doom).
-In retrospect, I agree with the "useless garbage" verdict. I can reconstruct how the subjective sensation of cluefulness might arise from associative reasoning on the concepts I was preoccupied with at the time (Trump was the anti-political-correctness candidate, political correctness fostered bad epistemology, but humanity needed good epistemology to "win"), but that's not a story about how that kind of thinking connects numerical probabilities to reality.
+In retrospect, I agree with the "useless garbage" verdict. I can reconstruct a story about how the subjective sensation of cluefulness might arise from associative reasoning on the concepts I was preoccupied with at the time (Trump was the anti-political-correctness candidate, political correctness fostered bad epistemology, but humanity needed good epistemology to "win"), but that's _not_ a story about how that kind of thinking connects numerical probabilities to reality.
Michael wrote to me (Subject: "Sleep"), noting that while "I don't need to sleep" is classic mania, it fit the pattern of what might be a lie under the circumstances. I might have asked myself for evidence on both sides, and remembered having personally seen animals sleep, maybe even in the wild (sea lions on the beach?). On the other hand, if I had asked why "I don't need to sleep" was a salient hypothesis, I might have noticed that the claim that everyone needs to sleep is the kind of lie that would be told by a worldview of people having high status as objects (it being wrong to sadistically cause pain), but low status as agents (it being right to control them and irresponsible not to); an important fact about the modern world was that it was common to oppress people by pretending they're like babies.
> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
-I tagged Anna and Divia into the thread as cc's, because they seemed more grounded. "Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him", I said.
+I think that reply spooked me a bit; I tagged Anna and Divia into the thread as cc's, because they seemed more grounded. "Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him", I said.
-[TODO:
+Even if I _was_ getting a few things right in my paranoid/schizotypal state, the important thing was trying to do philosophy. The parts where I felt like a _very important person_ (in this simulation/Everett branch) receiving special simulator attention should be interpreted as standard manic-episode [delusions of reference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference); _lots_ of people feel just like that when they're agitated and haven't gotten enough sleep. Social reality may be crazy, but I should still be putting a lot more weight on the social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative was my intuition about the machines trying to kill me.
- * "Social reality may be crazy (hospitals are part of the state insofar as they serve the function of social-control in the service of stationary bandits, rather than actually being about trying to heal people), but I should still put a lot more weight on social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative is my intuition about the machines trying to kill me."
- * "I certainly put a lot less weight on 'nice people doing their jobs' [...]"
- * "Sure, I guess I meant that the "Machines trying to kill me" framing is scary, and"
- * Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage ...
+Michael wrote:
-]
+> I certainly put a lot less weight on 'nice people doing their jobs' then I do on 'six sigma processes homeostatically adjusting to dampen the variance in outputs that is their representation of me.', which is basically equivalent to 'these well documented machines, the ones they teach you about in business school, do the thing they do. 'Trying to kill' is what an anthropomorphized version of the process looks like from the inside. We have enough documentation to know about the nice people doing their jobs paradigm being untenable.
+
+I wrote:
+
+> Sure, I guess I meant that the "Machines trying to kill me" framing is scary, and I don't like being scared, so I want to focus on finding ways to cooperate with the nice people doing their jobs while defecting against the homeostatic system that they're embedded in (but not actually doing anything crazy like trying to destroy the system, because it's doing useful things for us and I don't have anything better to replace it with).
+
+The next day, I changed my mind (Subject: "slowly coming around to you"):
+
+> Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage in the war against the control system. Or, not a war. An endeavor to map what the control system is in detail, and publish the map on the internet.
------
I didn't need it (and didn't end up using it); my regular health care provider got me equipped to [re-start my HRT experiment](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/) (including the spiro this time). It was the principle: that I could just buy drugs of my own choice using money, without the pretense of an authority diagnosing me with "gender dysphoria".
-I had heard about AllDayChemist from Alice Monday, a local trans woman who wasn't very nice, but seemed to have some Vassar-like insights about penetrating the veil of social reality. It turned out that Alice was facing some bureaucratic obstacles to getting her own HRT refill, so I placed another AllDayChemist order on her behalf on 31 March, for five packs of E and two of spiro.
+I had heard about AllDayChemist from "Rose", a local trans woman who wasn't very nice, but seemed to have some Vassar-like insights about penetrating the veil of social reality. It turned out that "Rose" was facing some bureaucratic obstacles to getting her own HRT refill, so I placed another AllDayChemist order on her behalf on 31 March, for five packs of E and two of spiro.
------
-[TODO: drafting credit-assignment ritual 10 March
- * I wrote about my credit-assignment ritual on my real-name blog: http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
- * People know that institutions are flawed and like to perform gritty cynicism about it, but what if no one is gritty and cynical enough?
- * People are predatory animals; science, markets, and democracy sort of help because they mirror Bayes-structure (science is updating; microeconomics isn't about humans; democracy is counterfactual civil war)
- * We should be looking for more social technologies like that, but which also take into account that we're not agents, but animals that want to help our friends
- * In analogy to funding solutions with retrospectivbe prizes (rather than funding a team in advance that might solve the problem), what if you did that on a personal scale—rewarding and praising people who helped you through a major life crisis
- * In AI, the credit-assignment problem is about how you tell which of your actions helped under sparse rewards; similarly, here you want the people who resulted in the succesful navigation of the crisis to be strengthened
-]
+I [wrote about my credit-assignment ritual idea on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/). People know that institutions are flawed and like to perform gritty cynicism about it, but what if no one is gritty and cynical enough? People are _predatory animals_ built to _murder_ other forms of life for the benefit of ourselves, our family, and our friends.
+
+To the extent that we have this glorious technological civilization that keeps us safe and lies to us about there being higher ideals, it's because some of the predatory animals happen to stumbled upon behavioral patterns that mirror the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe: science approximates Bayesian updating; [markets allocate resources to where they are needed most in accordance with the laws of the microeconomic theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics); democracy is a counterfactual simulation of civil war amongst equals (where you just count how many people are on each side, and divide the spoils accordingly, without having to pay the costs of actually fighting).
+
+We should be looking for more social technologies like that, that tap into the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe, but which also take into account that we're not anything like agents at all, but rather animals that want to help our friends. In analogy to proposals to incentivize useful work with after-the-fact prizes for solving a problem, rather than upfront funding of a team you think might solve the problem, it might be worth trying the same thing on a smaller scale—a _personal_ scale, by giving praise and cash rewards to people who personally helped you through a major life crisis.
+
+In artificial intelligence, [the credit-assignment problem](https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/12908/what-is-the-credit-assignment-problem) refers to the difficulty of attributing success or failure to particular actions whose connection to the end result might be indirect and remote: if the outcome of an hour-long game might have ultimately hinged on your good or bad instincts during a critical moment in the 24th minute, you'd want to know that, so that you could re-train your instincts appropriately—but it's not trivial to figure out which moments were critical, which actions helped or hurt.
+
+Money and status are human civilization's credit-assignment tokens. It's not trivial to figure out what actions help or hurt, but to the extent that the economy works at all, it works because productive actions being appropriately rewarded: a Society in which it was more profitable to steal than to produce would soon have much less to steal.
+
+Similarly, it's not trivial to figure out what actions helped or hurt during a major life crisis, but to the extent that you _can_ figure it out, you want to dispense rewards appropriately, supplying a tiny gradient update to Society's instincts by allocating more resources to the people who have caused major life crises to be successfully navigated.
-------
------
-Also on 12 March, I asked Anna if she would be willing to promise not to contact the authorities even if she really did think I would successfully kill myself if she didn't (Subject: "trust establishment"). "I don't expect this scenario to come up," I said, "but I want to know who I can trust in scenarios where my will comes into conflict with social reality."
+Also on 12 March 2017, I asked Anna if she would be willing to promise not to contact the authorities even if she really did think I would successfully kill myself if she didn't (Subject: "trust establishment"). "I don't expect this scenario to come up," I said, "but I want to know who I can trust in scenarios where my will comes into conflict with social reality."
She said she'd want to have a more detailed conversation about it before offering any such promise, which I agreed was a more sensible answer than the Yes I was fantasizing about.
------
-[TODO: "Roberta" situation]
+At 5:08 _p.m._ on 2 April 2017, Michael wrote to me that someone else was in psych prison, and could use help along lines that matched my focus and experience (Subject: "Another autogynophilic [_sic_] rationalist is in a psych ward").
+
+"Thanks for telling me", I said, "What can I do to help?"
+
+He asked if I knew anyone in Pittsburgh (perhaps, effective altruists at Carnegie Mellon) who would be willing to help, if I could visit a hospital there if needed, and—
+
+> Do you feel that you can provide the sort of attentive, active listening that would emotionally support someone in a high integrity agitated state where their ideas may not be literally true, and also may be true but hard to justify, but the ideas are at least honest metaphorical pointers at something that they think is there and needs to be recognized for safety?
+
+I made a Facebook post asking if I knew anyone in Pittsburgh available for a "Azkaban[^azkaban] (psych ward) rescue mission", and waited for more information.
+
+[^azkaban]: A reference to the magical prison in Yudkowsky's [_Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_](https://www.hpmor.com/), where inmates are subjected to psychic torture.
+
+ (It seems right for the attribution here to go to Yudkowsky rather than J. K. Rowling, because while Rowling invented Azkaban, it was Yudkowsky's depiction that established it in our subculture as a metonym for a _bad place that shouldn't exist_, which is how I was using the allusion.)
+
+More information came in an email that night from Lex Gendel[^lex-name] to me, Michael, and a few other people. The person in distress was a trans woman of my acquaintance whom I'll call "Roberta". Apparently, "Roberta" had had a psychotic episode. Her parents bought her a plane ticket back to Europe, but when she attempted to board the plane, she was committed to an unknown psych ward in Pittsburgh. As far as Lex knew, "Roberta" was currently too psychotic to play nice with the authorities. Our contact point with the family was her brother, who wasn't that cooperative and was also in Europe. (I'm imagining he was the source of this information—that the authorities at least called the family?)
+
+[^lex-name]: The "From" header was still using Lex's deadname (he's transmasculine), but when I asked on 4 April 2017 which name was preferred, he said that he strongly preferred Alexander or variants thereof except where that would out him to his family.
+
+Our mission was to find out where "Roberta" was and how to contact her. "Stacy" (also on the email) was local to Pittsburgh. "Kyle" and I started looking up Pittsburgh-area psych wards on Google Maps and calling them.
+
+"Kyle" made much more progress than me at calling hospitals. (Maybe he had a smarter Maps query, but maybe he was just less inhibited than me and could get more things done per minute.) I added "Roberta"'s email address to the thread so that she could look at it later and judge our competence as friends.
+
+Sewickley Hospital, the closest to the airport, told "Kyle" that "Roberta" was not there, but that they wouldn't be able to tell him if she were, which wasn't information-theoretically smart of them—if you actually care about not leaking information, you're supposed to [refuse to confirm or deny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response), not agree to deny but refuse to confirm—but fortunate for us, insofar as it clued us in to what was probably going on when Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC said that they couldn't confirm whether "Roberta" was there.
+
+UPMC Presbyterian _did_ have a record of "Roberta" that they were willing to tell "Kyle" about: she was discharged—and probably taken to the aforementioned Western Psychiatric Institute.
+
+Western Psych continued to refuse to confirm—although they did take down my number (and "Kyle"'s, and Lex's) for "Roberta" to call _if_ she was there and wanted to.
+
+I kept calling, at intervals. I tried bluffing ("No, I _know_ she's there", I told Madeline at Western Psych). I tried prompting for advice ("I realize that you're just doing your job and that you can't help me, but as a person, can you tell me who I should send next?—a lawyer, or a psychiatrist?" I told Cathy). I tried asking for a manager. (The manager, Laura, had just left.) Cathy volunteered to forward me to Patient's Rights. (It went to voicemail.)
+
+I asked Scott Alexander (whom I had tagged into the thread earlier) if _he_ could call, following up on the "sending a psychiatrist" guess (Subject: "a plea to our inside man (was: Re: information centralizing thread for [roberta] situation)").
+
+Finally, on the evening of 3 April, inspiration struck: I asked Debbie when visiting hours were. Then I asked "Stacy" to just visit physically. ("Let me know if there's any way I can sweeten the deal for you if this is at all inconvenient. (Eternal gratitude? Cash bounty to be negotiated? Any programming work you need done?)" I added.) The theory here was that the psych prison employees had been programmed not to be helpful over the phone for fear that HIPAA demons would eat them, but that they're not afraid of a physical person on-site, especially a nonthreatening nonmale person (Subject: "a plea to our on-site woman (was: Re: a plea to our inside man)").
+
+I was not reassured by the staff's claims that "Roberta" could call us back if she was there. To be clear, I totally believed that they wrote down the number. (Someone read it back to me on my second call.) I was _not_ confident in "Roberta" actually getting the number and the opportunity to make a phone call.
-[TODO: overheating in April, staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase]
+Scott got back to me. His being a psychiatrist wasn't going to make any difference. All we could do was leave a message; if "Roberta" didn't call back, then either she wasn't there or "doesn't want you meddling".
+
+I harshly took exception to the notion that the only credible explanation for the lack of a return call was that "Roberta" _didn't want us meddling_. What if the bastards never gave her the message? What if she was too impaired from the psychotic break and the kidnapping to place a call herself, but would _really appreciate_ being handed a phone with someone she knows on the line?
+
+The "didn't want us meddling" explanation struck me as so absurd, that I immediately offered to bet $500 against it at 20:1 odds: when this was over, if "Roberta" was at Western Psychiatric and got my, "Kyle"'s, and Lex's messages and didn't call back because she _didn't want us meddling_, I would pay Scott $500; if she was there but didn't get the message, Scott would pay me $25; if she wasn't there, no bet (Subject: "in which gratitude and skepticism is expressed; and, a profit opportunity (was: Re: a plea to our on-site woman)").
+
+Scott agreed to the bet. It was illegal to keep patients incommunicado; whatever else I thought about psych hospitals, they were sticklers for obeying the rules.
+
+Just before Scott chimed in, I had written to the thread:
+
+> In this situation, I don't think we should be modeling ourselves as people having meaningful conversations with other people over the phone. We are _extracting our friend from the bowels of an unaligned AI_. The reason we're using words rather than force isn't because force would be wrong; it's because we'd lose. Don't be fooled by the fact that the AI happens to use humans as components.
+
+"Kyle" cautioned that black-arts methodology against hospital personnel was probably not going to help "Roberta", and might make life very unpleasant for people trying to do their absolute best in a difficult job—which might make it _exceedingly_ harder to do something helpful later. Most everyone he had talked to had been extremely polite and helpful (including explaining details about how the system worked, which lead him to UPMC Presbyterian, which had actually given us information).
+
+(Nice people doing their jobs!)
+
+Lex seemed to agree with my model, but also agree with "Kyle"'s action recommendations: the general model was that systems are corrupt and unFriendly, responding at every level to incentives for breaking things in order for someone to gain a little more personal power, while most individuals wanted to be good and were just going with the flow. If we could change the flow, they might help us, but they weren't going to see the error of their ways when even _Scott_ had [written about lacking the agency to not commit people who shouldn't be committed](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/05/the-right-to-waive-your-rights/).
+
+I said that I _didn't care_ about not making life unpleasant for people trying to do their absolute best in a difficult job. I wanted "Roberta" out of prison. If the best way of accomplishing that goal was to be nice and make sure a lot of receptionists and nurses feel good about themselves, great. If the best way of accomplishing that goal means meant making a lot of receptionists and nurses feel miserable and guilty to the point where they have their own psychotic break and get locked up by their employer, I was _okay with that outcome_.
+
+Of course, I did _instrumentally_ care about not doing anything that would motivate them to make _our_ lives unpleasant. I agreed that I shouldn't try to do any more dark-arts social engineering—not because it would be wrong, but because I wasn't talented enough to pull it off without making things worse.
+
+Ashley from Patient's Rights returned my call. Allegedly, patients had access to phones, and allegedly, if a patient complains, Patient's Rights would investigate the complaint.
+
+This was not reassuring. "Roberta" couldn't complain to patient's rights about not getting our messages, if she didn't know that the messages existed. I could believe that the receptionist was honestly trying to do her job and wrote a number down and told someone else about it. But if anything _else_ went wrong in the causal chain (which could involve more than one other person who had lots of other things to do) between "receptionist dutifully writes something down" and "'Roberta' actually gets the message and telephone access", _no one had an incentive to fix it_.
+
+As far as I was concerned, this was a kidnapping. The fact that the kidnappers didn't have any particular motive and were just doing their jobs and would probably release our friend in 3 or 14 days, made it _much less bad_ than if it were a kidnapping by criminals or terrorists with an actual motive—but I wanted to call a spade a spade (Subject: "Hijack Innocent People And Abscond").
+
+I impulsively called up Patient's Rights again and spoke to Ashley, divulging my own recent psych ward story. She eventually forwarded me to Karen Robinson, the Manager of Patient Relations, whose boss was the Director of Regulatory Affairs. She repeatedly told me that the policy was that they couldn't give out information, and I repeatedly told her that I understood the policy, but that I was trying to search for clever strategies that would give me more assurance that "Roberta" actually got the message: for example, Karen herself could physically deliver the message herself, and then not tell me about it.
+
+Karen told me that I needed to trust people. I said that after my recent experience getting kidnapped by the psychiatric authorities, that no, I didn't actually trust people anymore ... but that I was willing to trust _her_, Karen Robinson, the Manager of Patient Relations, and that I felt better being given assurance by someone with a four-word title.
+
+I asked her if she was religious. (Religion is a social technology for trust; I figured that people were less likely to mess with you if you reminded them that their deity was watching.) She said that she was a Christian. I admitted that I was an atheist, myself.
+
+At 8:14 _p.m._ on 4 April, "Stacy" reported in: she visited Western Psych and saw "Roberta", who reported not being unhappy. She wasn't interested in being rescued. "She has received messages (I didn't ask about specific people's), and is in touch with some people," the email specifically said.
+
+So, that was good news. (Good news about "Roberta"'s welfare, which was more important than my grudge against psych hospitals.) I conceded my bet with Scott and PayPal'd him $500. Scott pointed out that I had offered the bet while I was really angry and traumatized from my own recent psych ward experience; if I thought it wasn't representative of my best cognitive processes, he was happy to call it off and send back the money.
+
+I _absolutely_ insisted that he keep the money: whether it was my best cognition or not was for reality to judge, not me, and on the specific question of whether the psych prison staff relayed telephone messages, reality had judged.
+
+(At least, as far as I knew at the time! Keep reading!)
+
+We didn't want to hold people accountable for false confessions under duress or contracts to sell oneself into slavery, but surely we could handle a measly $500 bet!
+
+------
+
+[TODO: starting to overheat
+ * 1 April: "Study re: two-types hypothesis" (Bailey replies on the 10th)
+ * meanwhile, I had made arrangements with my dayjob to a 2 day/wk contracting on Portal (I had originally said 60/hr, Orion pointed out that was low and went to 75!!); I signed a contract!
+ * on 2 April, I had sent the wire transfer reciept to AllDayChemist, on 5 April they said, "Please send us the transfer receipt as we are missing that information from your email."
+ * I pick implicitly pick a fight with James, bring up the idea of hiring him as my music teacher
+ * I said that I don't want Michael and Anna to be fighting (Subject: "Anna-Michael realignment project"); I send "cooperate with James Cook (eom)" messages to Michael and Anna
+ * (14 April 2017 was a Friday, the 7th was also a Friday)
+ * I had a Friday–Sunday (14-16) hotel room for BABSCon
+ * Anna: "we are doing a thing I would normally call "fighting" (I can detail what I mean if desired; it has various asymmetries and non-typicalities in it, but nevertheless I would normally use that word)"
+ * 9 April: Alice–Anna realignment project
+ * care coordination thread started 11 April
+ * 12 April: NRx/LW peace treaty talks
+ * 12 April: Anna writes to me on "Staying Safe"
+]
+
+[TODO: staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase]
[TODO: BABSCon]
[TODO: "my call with Western Psychiatric's Manager of Patient Relations"]
-[TODO: chat transcript relevant to War on Optimization for Generalized Secrecy]
-
-[TODO: final $18200 credit-assignment ritual: $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Chaya", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Thomas", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi
+[TODO: final $18200 credit-assignment ritual: $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Rebecca", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Thomas", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
]
+
+------
+
+Anyway, that, briefly—I mean it—is the story of how the stress of confronting people on Facebook about the illogic of gender-identity ideology caused me to go insane from sleep deprivation, twice, shattering most of my remaining faith in Society and institutions along the way.
+
+It's probably not that interesting! If it weren't somewhat-informative backstory presaging my accidental instigation of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war two years later, I wouldn't have bothered to tell this substory of my Whole Dumb Story in this much detail—as evidenced by the fact that, later in 2017, I [started](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [telling it in considerably less detail, and didn't even end up finishing that](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).
+
+I think I learned a lot during this period, but I wish there could have been some way to learn it with less drama—to take the form I took, without the disastrously formative experience. I wonder how the rest of this Whole Dumb Story would have gone, if I had just _shrugged and logged off_ earlier in February 2017, rather than losing sleep—if I would have had the strength to fight, later, without the memory of fighting until it broke me. Sometimes, I worry that human psychology is built such that things couldn't have been too much otherwise—that the _realistic_ alternative to taking things too seriously (to the detriment of one's health, and severely inconveniencing others) is taking them lying down.
+
+But that's almost certainly giving me too much credit. To be continued.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff