Rather, psych wards make sense as being for the welfare of friends or family who are _sick of putting up with living with a crazy person_. It's a form of responsibility laundering: if there's a designated institution for taking care of crazy people, you can dump your loved ones there to be _someone else's problem_ (at least for a few days), with a clean conscience, because anything bad that happens inside of an officially sanctioned institution, isn't anyone fault.
-It's important not to be misled by the name, psychiatric "hospital". The word _hospital_ gives the impression of a place where medical procedures are performed, like how real hospitals do surgeries and set broken bones. We don't really have _procedures_ to treat mental illness—not ones that are held in high regard these days, anyway.
+It's important not to be misled by the name, psychiatric "hospital". The word _hospital_ gives the impression of a place where medical procedures are performed, like how real hospitals do surgeries and set broken bones. We don't really have _procedures_ to treat mental illness.
It's a jail—a place where you lock up undesirable people where they can't impose costs on anyone who isn't being paid to deal with them. And precisely _because_ I was modeling it as a jail, my social performance was a lot better this time around than in 2013.
This was _not at all_ obvious from the inside. I'm reminded of an article I once read in the racist[^racist-magazine] magazine _American Renaissance_, [by a public defender complaining about the behavior of his predominantly black clients](https://archive.is/HUkzY):
-[^racist]: I think they would prefer that I say _racialist_? But I also think that, when pressed, they would concede that _you know what I mean_.
+[^racist]: I think they would prefer that I say [_racialist_](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Racialism&oldid=968287916)? But I also think that, when pressed, they would concede that _you know what I mean_.
> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.
...
-I remember pacing the tiled halls of a the first facility where they took me—probably [Contra Costa Regional Medical Center](https://cchealth.org/medicalcenter/psychiatric.php) in Martínez.[^ccrmc] I was exhausted, but also feeling a sort of manic euphoria, pacing around, tapping demonstratively at the signs on the walls, thinking it was my duty to teach the other inmates how to read. Ziz's report of Vassar's comment about "Zack Davis _vs._ the world" stuck with me; I had of vision of myself as one of the seven most important people in the world in the lead-up to the intelligence explosion, as reckoned by future historians. Being a world–historically important genius wouldn't have _felt like_ being a genius at the time, most of the time. It must have felt like being pretty smart, and the rest of the world seeming dumb and crazy. (A young Albert Einstein working in the Swiss patent office wouldn't have had the mononymic aura of "Einstein" _to his contemporaries_.) Notwithstanding that I was having psychotic delusions of grandeur at the time, I do think it was legitimate for me to feel that I was pretty smart, and that the rest of the world was dumb and crazy.
+I remember pacing the tiled halls of a the first facility where they took me—probably [Contra Costa Regional Medical Center](https://cchealth.org/medicalcenter/psychiatric.php) in Martínez.[^ccrmc] I was exhausted, but also feeling a sort of manic euphoria, pacing around, tapping demonstratively at the signs on the walls, thinking it was my duty to teach the other inmates how to read. Ziz's report of Vassar's comment about "Zack Davis _vs._ the world" stuck with me; I had of vision of myself as one of the seven most important people in the world in the lead-up to the intelligence explosion, as reckoned by future historians. Being a world–historically important genius wouldn't have _felt like_ being a genius at the time, most of the time. It must have felt like being pretty smart, and the rest of the world seeming dumb and crazy. (A young Albert Einstein working in the Swiss patent office wouldn't have had [the mononymic aura of "Einstein"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5o4EZJyqmHY4XgRCY/einstein-s-superpowers) _to his contemporaries_.) Notwithstanding that I was having psychotic delusions of grandeur at the time, I do think it was legitimate for me to feel that I was pretty smart, and that the rest of the world was dumb and crazy.
[^ccrmc]: I only know this because, when consulting the doctor's notes available to me while writing this up more than six years after the fact, one of the notes mentions "CCRMC PES". "PES" is probably "Psychiatric Emergency Services".
...
-I remember having Anna on the phone, and asking if I was a political prisoner. (The Soviet Union had declared its dissidents sick with sluggish schizophrenia as a pretext for persecuting them; how could I be sure things worked all that differently here?) She answered in the negative. "Really?" I said. (If I _was_ a political prisoner, she might not be able to say so over a telephone line controlled by the authorities.)
+I remember having Anna on the phone, and asking if I was a political prisoner. (The Soviet Union had declared its dissidents sick with [sluggish schizophrenia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia) as [a pretext for persecuting them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union); how could I be sure things worked all that differently here?) She answered in the negative. "Really?" I said. (If I _was_ a political prisoner, she might not be able to say so over a telephone line controlled by the authorities.)
...
...
-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 was a very [genre-savvy](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy) 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 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.
+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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_Jesus), 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.
]
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.)
+(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.)
* 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 , https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528
+ * 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)")
-------
-[TODO: Vassar discourse II
+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.)
- * He asked me what I thought about Milo Y.
- * I replied: I hadn't been following, but I was annoyed at local EA priestess Kelsey Piper playing dumb: http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/156812598746/calling-milos-conduct-random-cruelty-to-people
- * I'm not pro-Milo because I agree that calling out individuals is mean; PC as asymmetrical warfare; I can respect Milo as a solider
- * "I think that the issue he was ultimately taken down by is actually as obvious as your issue, and it's striking and probably important that it was able to take him down while Trump being about sexual assault didn't stop him."
- * teen boys wanting sex is more obvious than AGP
- * "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]
+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.
-[^vassar-typos]: Bracket substitutions are where the original said "three" and "harness". I assume these were erroneous autocorrections.
+Michael said that [the issue that ultimately took down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Remarks_on_paedophilia_and_child_sexual_abuse) Yiannopoulos was actually as obvious as my issue, and that it was striking that it did so even while Trump [got away with being open about sexual assault](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/locker-room-talk/).
- * Julia Serano vs. Robert Heinlein
- * Apophenic numerology: in retrospect, I agree with my "useless garbage (lots of probabilities are ~30%)"
- * Disagreeing with Michael about violence terminology
- * Michael writes to me about sleep
+He wasn't specific about the issue or its obviousness, but I filled in the blanks: young teen boys who have just hit puberty want sex, and wouldn't obviously be harmed by getting it from adults if it weren't for the social consensus that this would somehow harm them? Yes, that _did_ seem more obvious to a far larger population than autogynephilia motivating transgenderism. (Obligate-AGP sexuality is probably hard to empathize with if you haven't experienced it—I didn't feel like Michael understood it when we had talked in Berkeley a few months before—but the vast majority of men remember what it was like to be a horny teenager.)
+
+Michael said that the most plausible anti-Trump consensus perspective was that free speech would be physically dangerous for a majority of people in the medium term. The Yiannopoulos case suggested that maybe Trump and Kanye (and perhaps some other rappers) could speak without fear.
+
+I wasn't sure what he meant about free speech being physically dangerous. Was it that most men would be thuggish rapists if they thought for themselves in the service of their own values, such that school/media/memetic social control was necessary to keep them in check?
+
+No, Michael clarified, selfish people are almost never a problem. The problem was with mobs, not individual bad people. In the absence of taboos against racism, mobs would form and coerce people to demand blood from the most convenient Schelling point: in practice, Jews or blacks.
+
+What made the ACLU important was that it credibly [made a reliable committment to defend people like Yiannopoulos](http://www.npr.org/2017/02/12/514785623/the-aclu-explains-why-theyre-supporting-the-rights-of-milo-yiannopoulos).[^aclu] But Michael didn't think that many of them understood how bad I saw the situation as being. The ACLU needed to address how plausible the arguments for censorship are. People accepting censorship needed to address arguments about how real the harms are. As far as he can tell, I was the maximally concrete and articulate case of a person harmed by political correctness in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide.
+
+[^aclu]: Remember, this was 2017. The reliability of the committment [seems to have frayed in the intervening few years](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html) as the [Great Awokening](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020) continued.
+
+I asked him to be more specific about the class of people he thought were being genocided (nerdy men?) and by what (the political-correctness memeplex that evolved as a social-control mechanism to prevent the United States from descending into racialized violence like Yugoslavia?).
+
+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.
+
+[^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_.
+
+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_.)
+
+"Much faster in person," replied Michael. "Notice that genocide, by conception, is about genes." (I don't remember if we followed up in person, but I agree that whatever genetic variants make one susceptible to transitioning in the current year, are not proving to be evolutionarily fit—and we know that's not inevitable; guys like me _used_ to get married and have children, even if we don't now.)
+
+-------
+
+Even though I was free and taking care of myself, I don't think my psychology was entirely back to baseline. I remembered that Michael or Anna had once given humanity an approximately 30% "win" probability.[^p-doom] Nate Silver had given Trump a 30% chance to win the 2016 presidential election. These facts felt _really related_ to me. I was aware that many people would dismiss this style of thinking as useless garbage—_lots_ of probabilities are close to 0.3—but somehow it still felt like a _clue_ to me (Subject: "apophenic numerology").
+
+[^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.
+
+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.
+
+I replied:
> 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.
> 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.
+
+[TODO:
+
* "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"
------
-[TODO: ordering DIY hormones, and ordering on Alice Monday's behalf
- * As part of my distrust for institutions, it made sense to get some DIY hormones, rather than solely being dependent on the legitimate system: I ordered a pack of Progynova - 1 mg (Estradiol) and a pack of ALDACTONE - 25mg (Spironolactone) for myself from AllDayChemist
- * found out about it from Alice Monday, a young trans woman who wasn't very nice
- * Alice said something about how every once in a while, someone runs off with the payments database
- * on 31 March, I ordered some more (5 packs E, 2 packs Spiro) for Alice
-]
-
-------
-
-[TODO asking Anna for promise
- * I ask Anna if she would promise not to contact the authorities; "I don't expect this scenario to come up, 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 before making such a promise
- * "that answer is probably more sensible than the "Yes" I was fantasizing about."
-
-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
-]
+As part of being less submissive to authorities in general and the medical establishment in particular, it felt appropriate to get some gray-market HRT, so on 6 March, I ordered a pack of Progynova 1mg (estradiol) and a pack of Aldactone 25mg (spironolactone) from AllDayChemist, an online pharmacy based out of India, which presumably has fewer laws about this sort of thing.
--------
+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".
-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.
+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.
------
* 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
]
+-------
+
+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.
+
+------
+
+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."
+
+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]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff