(I assume there must be some fascinating sociological explanation for why the doctors have terse abbreviations for common terms and phrases—_Rx_, medication; _d/c_, discontinued; _disc r/b/a_, discussed risks/benefits/alternatives—and yet the phrase "does not meet criteria for California Welfare & Institutions Code 5150 (LPS) for involuntary detainment for inpatient psychiatric monitoring" is written out in full, three times. Why not just say, "we're not 5150'ing him"?)
-I was glad not to get 5150'd. I have a memory-fragment of resisting—having a sense that the doctors wanted to institutionalize me, but that I insisted on walking out, and got away with it. I think I trust the doctors' notes more than my memory on this count. To be clear, I still think I was correct to want to avoid the psych hospital, but that's _not at all_ the same thing as thinking that I was sane; the sleep deprivation was still taking its toll in the form of dreamlike delusions.
+I was glad not to get 5150'd. I have a memory-fragment of resisting—having a sense that the doctors wanted to institutionalize me, but that I insisted on walking out, and got away with it. I think I trust the doctors' notes more than my memory on this _particular_ count. (Although in general, the doctor's notes contain a striking density of outright falsehoods. Humans are not very good reporters!)
-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 our shared ontology—it was real, and I saw it, but somehow it couldn't be _fully_ real until it was accepted as real.
+To be clear, I still think I was correct to want to avoid the psych hospital, but that's _not at all_ the same thing as thinking that I was sane; the sleep deprivation was still taking its toll in the form of dreamlike delusions.
+
+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 was a very genre-savvy psych prisoner. I was distrustful of the other inmates, and distrustful of the authorities, but in different ways; the optimal strategy to protect myself against each was different.
-I feared violence from the other inmates. I thought I could subtly leave clues that (as a Jewish male with long hair), I was an incarnation of Jesus, which would discourage them from attacking me (because many of them would have already been programmed by Christianity meme to believe that killing Jesus was the worst sin). I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my three-day evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one, even though I no longer agree with the threat model.) My father actually did pick me up in three days.
+I feared violence from the other inmates. I thought I could subtly leave clues that (as a Jewish male with long hair), I was an incarnation of Jesus, which would discourage them from attacking me (because many of them would have already been programmed by the Christianity memeplex to believe that killing Jesus was the worst sin). I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my three-day evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one, even though I no longer agree with the threat model.) My father actually did pick me up in three days.
]
-----
-After being released from psych prison, arrangements were made for made for me to attend outpatient group therapy at Kaiser Walnut Creek. That also wasn't helpful, but it was much less of a problem.
+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_.
+
+But the doors aren't locked; they don't actually have any power over you that you don't give them.
+
+The intake assessment describes me as "retreat[ing] into highly intellectualized, incomprehensible philosophy as a defense against disorganization/psychotic thought process". (Well, all philosophy looks incomprehensible when you, personally, don't comprehend it.) Another note describes me as "hostile, belligerent, and condescending throughout the program" on the morning of 24 February. (They deserved it.)
+
+-----
+
+I started talking more with Michael Vassar. I don't think I've ever really understood Michael well enough to summarize him. Everyone else writes blog posts. If you want to know what someone's intellectual agenda is about, you can point to the blog posts. Michael never writes anything. He just has these free-wheeling conversations where he makes all sorts of crazy-sounding assertions ... which were suddenly starting to make sense to me now.
+
+On 22 February 2017 (two days after my release from the psych ward), he asked for my phone number (Subject: "Can I have your phone number?"). "I'd really like to talk soon," he wrote. "Thinking much more about how you can help me to meet my needs than about how I can help you though, and feel guilty about it given the situation, so feel free to tell me 'no, not now'."
+
+I replied, "I like helping people meet their needs! It's prosocial!"
+
+When I asked how I could help him meet his needs. He said that he thought my fight was ground zero in a war against words. If I had the mental composure to hold up, knowing that I had allies, he really thought that full documentation of my experiences would be the maximum leverage of my time. Otherwise, he was all but unable to ask for money for himself, even if he honestly thought he was the best use of it, but he was able to ask for nonprofit funding. What about starting a nonprofit, with me as executive director and him as fundraiser?—the Society for the Preservation of Generative Grammar and for Defense Against Structural Violence, providing legal defense for people whose rights or livelihood are threatened by political correctness. (Subject: "Re: You're really bad at communicating!")
+
+Regarding the suggestion to document my experiences, I replied, "Too narcissistic!" This is incredibly ironic in hindsight, given the absurd amount of effort I've ended up spending since 2019 writing up this Whole Dumb Story. But you see, I had to try making object-level arguments _first_. It was only after that conclusively failed, that I've gone to the narcissistic extreme of full documentation of my experiences as a last resort. (Or as therapy.)
-The outpatient psych authorities are just as stupid and paternalistic as the
+I didn't want to start a nonprofit, either. I thought our kind of people were smart enough to function without the taboo against giving money to individuals instead of faceless institutions. I had $97,000 saved up from being a San Francisco software engineer who doesn't live in San Francisco. Besides keeping most of it as savings, and spending some of it to take a sabbatical from my career, I was thinking it made sense to spend some of it just giving unconditional gifts to Michael and others who had helped me as a kind of credit-assignment ritual, although I wanted to think carefully about the details before doing anything rash.
+On a separate email thread, I ended up mentioning something to Michael that I shouldn't have, due to a previous confidentiality promise I had made. (I can tell you _that_ I screwed up on a secrecy obligation, without revealing what it was.) I felt particularly bad about this given that I had been told that Michael was notoriously bad at keeping secrets, and asked him to keep this one secret as a favor to me.
-[TODO: interacting with the outpatient program]
+Michael replied:
+> Happy to not talk about it. Just freaking ask. I can easily honor commitments, just not optimize for general secrecy. The latter thing is always wrong. I'm not being sloppy and accidentally defecting against the generalized optimization for secrecy, I'm actively at war with it. We need to discuss this soon.
+
+------
+
+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?"
+
+(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 gave 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.)
-----
-[TODO I interact more with Vassar
- * 22–23 February—
- * he asks for my phone number
- * I messed up by revealing secret info to Michael (I can say _that_ I messed up a secret, without revealing what the secret was)
- * Michael says that he can easily keep committments; "I'm not being sloppy and accidentally defecting against the generalized optimization for secrecy, I'm actively at war with it."
- * 28 February "Re: You're really bad at communicating!", nonprofit suggestion
- * "I really think that fill documentation of your experience would be maximum leverage for your time"— my reply, "Too narcissitic!" (oops!)
- * Between my checking and brokerage account, I have ~$97K to play with
- * "rationalist community health check?? asking for one bit of advice"
- * going through a "Having a nervous breakdown, suddenly understanding all the things Michael has been trying to tell me for eight years that I didn't understand at the time, and subsequently panicking and running around yelling at everyone because I'm terrified of the rationalist community degenerating into just another arbitrary Bay Area humanist cult when we were supposed to be the Second Scientific Revolution" phase of my intellectual development
- * nice people doing their jobs
-
+"As far as I can tell, you are [the] maximally concrete and articulate case of a person [harmed] by PC in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide"[^vassar-typos]
+
+[^vassar-typos]: Bracket substitutions are where the original said "three" and "harness". I assume these were erroneous autocorrections.
+
+
+ * my Julia Serano vs. Robert Heinlein story
+ * nice people doing their jobs
+]
+
7 March—
-> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (e.g., from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
-reply—
+
+> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (_e.g._, from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
+
+Michael replied:
+
> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
]
+-------
+
+[TODO: 28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence, and Alice Dreger
+Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March
]
-[TODO: 28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
+------
+
+I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)
+
+At standup meeting on my last day (3 March 2017), I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.
-[emailed Gunni on 26 Feb (still haven't gotten that inteview, 5 years later?!)]
+-------
-[Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March]
+[TODO: ordering DIY hormones, and ordering on Alice Monday's behalf]
+-------
+
+[TODO asking Anna for promise
12 March—
> You can tell that recent life events have made me more worried than I used to be about unFriendly/unaligned possibly-AI-assisted institutions being a threat to humane values long before an actual AI takeoff in however many decades
+]
-------
On 12 March 2017, I made a Facebook post trying to explain my new outlook:
-> The core of the update is that it turns out to be surprisingly useful to model the world as being made out of three things: people (who can be friends, enemies, or strangers), evolved social-control mechanisms (which use people as components as well as trains, pieces of paper, credit cards, web forms, &c.), and rocks. Instead of taking the things that people say about the evolved social-control mechanisms literally with respect to what _you_ think the words mean, you should constantly be making predictions (preferably predictions that you can get feedback about on the timescale of seconds or minutes) about what will happen if you interact with the social-control mechanisms in a particular way, and then noticing if the predictions come true or not. It turns out that non-nerds—you know, those people we disdain for being stupid or sexist or voting for Donald Trump or whatever your favorite excuse is—already knew this; they just didn't tell you because they were—correctly—modeling you as a component in the evolved social-control mechanisms rather than as a person.
+> The core of the update is that it turns out to be surprisingly useful to model the world as being made out of three things: people (who can be friends, enemies, or strangers), evolved social-control mechanisms (which use people as components as well as trains, pieces of paper, credit cards, web forms, _&c_.), and rocks. Instead of taking the things that people say about the evolved social-control mechanisms literally with respect to what _you_ think the words mean, you should constantly be making predictions (preferably predictions that you can get feedback about on the timescale of seconds or minutes) about what will happen if you interact with the social-control mechanisms in a particular way, and then noticing if the predictions come true or not. It turns out that non-nerds—you know, those people we disdain for being stupid or sexist or voting for Donald Trump or whatever your favorite excuse is—already knew this; they just didn't tell you because they were—correctly—modeling you as a component in the evolved social-control mechanisms rather than as a person.
------
+------
+[TODO: drafting credit-assignment ritual]
-I met Jessica in March
+------
+[TODO: "Roberta" situation]
-I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)
+[TODO: overheating in April, staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase]
+
+[TODO: BABSCon]
-At standup meeting on my last day, I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.
+[TODO: "my call with Western Psychiatric's Manager of Patient Relations"]
+[TODO: chat transcript relevant to War on Optimization for Generalized Secrecy]
-[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($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 "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
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff