>
> —[_Zoolander_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbKBWtoH93Q) (paraphrased)
+Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told you about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which, at the time, I thought of as a weird private quirk about me that was clearly not the same thing as "actually" being transgender, and which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about—and also about how I used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these great Sequences of blog posts about normatively correct reasoning by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which explained how beliefs are for making predictions about reality (such that it's immoral to _not_ believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are a real thing), and (incidentally) why my obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman was philosophically fraught if not outright delusional, separately from its not being remotely achieveable with forseeable technology.
+
+In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", I told you about how, in 2016, everyone of significance in my normatively-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly decided that guys like me actually are women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, prompting me to do some reading and interviews that led me to the belief that my weird obsessive erotic fantasy _was_ the same thing (rather, the more common of at least two such things) as actually being transgender, after all—prompting me to start this then-pseudonymous secret blog to write about how the entire educated world had been systematically lying to me about the most important thing in my life for the last twelve years. (I also made arrangements to start feminizing hormone replacement therapy. Everyone else was doing it. Why should I miss out on account of being more self-aware?)
+
+But, you know, I didn't want to be a _fanatic_ about it. The previous post leaves off with me promising myself not to talk about this stuff under my real name through June 2017. That was what my pseudonymous secret blog was for.
+
... the promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed; I _had_ to push back on some of it, at least a little, at least subtly.
-"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. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."
+"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 mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Wilhelm", who provided a refreshing contrary perspective to the things I was hearing from everyone else. When the rationalists were anxious that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended an increased risk of nuclear war, "Wilhelm" pointed out that Clinton was actually much more hawkish towards Russia.
+As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Thomas", who provided a refreshing contrary perspective to the things I was hearing from everyone else. When the rationalists were anxious that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended an increased risk of nuclear war, "Thomas" pointed out that Clinton was actually much more hawkish towards Russia.
I shared with him an early draft of ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), which fleshed out his idea from back in March about political forces optimizing for people to adopt an identity as a persecuted trans person.
I was nonplussed: I had heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this was ridiculous. The "egregore" framing was an interesting alternative way of looking at things, but it seemed kind of—nonlocal. There were inhuman patterns in human agency that we wanted to build models of, but it seemed like he was attributing too much agency to the patterns. In contrast, "This idea creates incentives to propogate itself" was [a mechanism I understood](https://devinhelton.com/meme-theory.html). (Or was I being like one of those dumb Dawkins critics who protests that genes aren't _actually_ selfish? We know that, but the anthropomorphic language is convenient.)
-I supposed I was sort of modeling "Wilhelm" as being possessed by the neoreaction egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist egregore.
+I supposed I was sort of modeling "Thomas" as being possessed by the neoreaction egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist egregore.
He was a useful sounding board when I was frustrated with my so-far-mostly private trans discussions.
"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.
-In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Frantz (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of [_Thing of Things_](https://thingofthings.substack.com/)) had been cited as a local authority figure on gender issues—someone asked what Ozy thought about the two-types theory, or wasn't persuaded because they were partially deferring to Ozy.[^ozy-authority] I remarked to "Wilhelm" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (who I otherwise liked) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
+In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Frantz (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of [_Thing of Things_](https://thingofthings.substack.com/)) had been cited as a local authority figure on gender issues—someone asked what Ozy thought about the two-types theory, or wasn't persuaded because they were partially deferring to Ozy.[^ozy-authority] I remarked to "Thomas" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (who I otherwise liked) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
[^ozy-authority]: Although the fact that Ozy had [commented](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/) [on](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/) the theory at all—which was plausibly causally downstream from me yelling at everyone in private—was probably net-positive for the cause; there's no bad publicity for new ("new") ideas. I got a couple of [reply](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) [pieces](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/) out of their engagement in the early months of this blog.
-"Wilhelm" didn't think this was feasible. The problem, he explained, was that "hypomasculine men are often broken people who idolize feminists, and worship the first one who throws a few bones of sympathy towards men". (He had been in this category, so he could make fun of them.) Thus, in feminist communities, the female person would win a priestly battle, regardless of quality of arguments. It wasn't Ozy's fault, really. She[^ozy-pronouns] wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.
+"Thomas" didn't think this was feasible. The problem, he explained, was that "hypomasculine men are often broken people who idolize feminists, and worship the first one who throws a few bones of sympathy towards men". (He had been in this category, so he could make fun of them.) Thus, in feminist communities, the female person would win a priestly battle, regardless of quality of arguments. It wasn't Ozy's fault, really. She[^ozy-pronouns] wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.
-[^ozy-pronouns]: The feminine pronoun in this paragraph reflects the fact that "Wilhelm" and I used feminine pronouns for Ozy in our private messages. I don't misgender people _in public!_ But I do argue that public summaries of private conversations are not, technically, the same thing.
+[^ozy-pronouns]: The feminine pronoun in this paragraph reflects the fact that "Thomas" and I used feminine pronouns for Ozy in our private messages. I don't misgender people _in public!_ But I do argue that public summaries of private conversations are not, technically, the same thing.
I mentioned that there was a woman who had been hanging around the "rationalist"[^scare-quotes] community despite being mildly contemptuous of our disrespect for academic philosophy, who was very trigger-happy with sexism accusations, who I privately thought would be _less_ respected if she were a man making similar-quality arguments—but there was no way to give her feedback on the matter without alienating her. I supposed that in a NRx (_i.e._, evil) space, they would probably say, "who cares if you alienate the bitch". But she was a _woman paying attention to us_.
[^scare-quotes]: I mentioned that these days, I just used scare quotes rather than tacking the word _aspiring_ in front.
-"Wilhelm" summarized the NRx response:
+"Thomas" summarized the NRx response:
> 1. Women should never have been weaponiz[ed] by democracy into being cultural/corporate commissars
> 2. Why is an unmarried woman making a nuisance of herself in a mostly male community? Where is her family? Why is she not married yet?
I said that #2 still seemed monstrously unfair to the non-nuisance woman contributing to the community's endeavor; even if biology had something to do with their rarity, not giving them a chance was way worse than the problem thereby solved (with respect to my historically aberrant pro-androgyny utility function that I would defend to the death).
-"Wilhelm" said that exceptions could be made for intellectually eminent women at the discretion of the authorities, but that the vast majority of young women didn't have the temperment to participate in male communities, instead having incentives to behave like busybodies, cause drama, and test males for mates. This wasn't something "Wilhelm" had previously wanted to believe, even in his anti-feminist (but not yet fully reactionary) days. But once you understood how past generations would have seen certain behavior, upon seeing it in the wild, among people who claim to be "above" gender roles—it was hard to unsee.
+"Thomas" said that exceptions could be made for intellectually eminent women at the discretion of the authorities, but that the vast majority of young women didn't have the temperment to participate in male communities, instead having incentives to behave like busybodies, cause drama, and test males for mates. This wasn't something "Thomas" had previously wanted to believe, even in his anti-feminist (but not yet fully reactionary) days. But once you understood how past generations would have seen certain behavior, upon seeing it in the wild, among people who claim to be "above" gender roles—it was hard to unsee.
I said that I was done pretending to be stupid; I didn't want to not see the pattern if the pattern was there, even if I wasn't going to adopt the solutions of our ancestors.
("Restore patriarchy!" "_Never!_ I mean, I see the point you're trying to make, but the real solution is embryo selection for more nerd girls!")
-When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Wilhelm" mentioned it as a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the evolutionarily stable strategies of relating had been re-labeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
+When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Thomas" mentioned it as a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the evolutionarily stable strategies of relating had been re-labeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
He advised me that if I did find an androgynous women I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a small "dab" of patriarchy worked better than none.
-(What I really wanted was to have the kind of meta psychological engineering conversation I was having with "Wilhelm", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)
+(What I really wanted was to have the kind of meta psychological engineering conversation I was having with "Thomas", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)
I wasn't immediately sold on all these heresies—but I was _listening_. Even if I didn't like the theory and didn't trust the theory, I admitted that it was refreshing that someone _actually had a theory_, which was more than you could say for the blank slate.
-------
-In another post from 4:25 _p.m._ that afternoon, I acknowledged my right-wing influences. You know, you spend nine years reading a lot of ideologically-inconvenient science, all the while thinking, "Oh, this is just interesting science, you know, I'm not going to let myself get _morally corrupted_ by it or anything." And for the last couple years you add in some ideologically-inconvenient political thinkers, too.
+In another post, from 4:25 _p.m._ that afternoon, I acknowledged my right-wing influences. You know, you spend nine years reading a lot of ideologically-inconvenient science, all the while thinking, "Oh, this is just interesting science, you know, I'm not going to let myself get _morally corrupted_ by it or anything." And for the last couple years you add in some ideologically-inconvenient political thinkers, too.
But I was still a nice good socially-liberal [Free-to-Be-You-and-Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_to_Be..._You_and_Me) gender-egalitarian individualist person. Because I understood the is–ought distinction—unlike _some_ people—I knew that I could learn from people's _models_ of the world without necessarily agreeing with their _goals_. So I had been trying to learn from the models of these bad people saying the bad things, until one day _the model clicked_. And the model was _terrifying_. And the model had _decision-relevant implications for the people who valued the things that I valued_—
> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
-That is, when factorizing a joint probability distribution into a Bayesian network, you can do it with respect to any variable ordering you want: a graph with a "wet-streets → rain" edge can represent a set of static observations just as well as a graph with a "rain → wet-streets" edge,[^koller-and-friedman-i] but "unnatural" variable orderings generate a more complicated graph that will give crazy predictions if you interpret it as a _causal_ Bayesian network and use it to predict the results of interventions. Algorithms for learning a network from data prefer graphs with fewer edges as a consequence of Occamian [minimum-message-length epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length):[^koller-and-friedman-ii] every edge is a [burdensome detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ/burdensome-details) that requires a corresponding [amount of evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nj8JKFoLSMEmD3RGp/how-much-evidence-does-it-take) just to [locate it in the space of possibilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis).
+That is, when factorizing a joint probability distribution into a Bayesian network, you can do it with respect to any variable ordering you want: [a graph with a "wet-streets → rain" edge can represent a set of static observations just as well as a graph with a "rain → wet-streets" edge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qPrPNakJBq23muf4n/bayesian-networks-aren-t-necessarily-causal),[^koller-and-friedman-i] but "unnatural" variable orderings generate a more complicated graph that will give crazy predictions if you interpret it as a _causal_ Bayesian network and use it to predict the results of interventions. Algorithms for learning a network from data prefer graphs with fewer edges as a consequence of Occamian [minimum-message-length epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length):[^koller-and-friedman-ii] every edge is a [burdensome detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ/burdensome-details) that requires a corresponding [amount of evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nj8JKFoLSMEmD3RGp/how-much-evidence-does-it-take) just to [locate it in the space of possibilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis).
[^koller-and-friedman-i]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §3.4.1, "Minimal I-Maps".
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".
-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 "Wilhelm" (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 "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'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.
The next morning, 17 February 2017, my mother took me to the hospital to be evaluated. I didn't want to go. (I had had a very bad time in the psych ward in 2013.) I don't think I was very articulate about expressing this—at least, not in a way my mother could understand. "People are better at taking care of each other than institutions," I said, over and over. "People are better at taking care of each other than institutions!"
-I ultimately compiled. I am again grateful that the doctors' notes were made available to me after the fact. I am very conscious of the unreliability of human memory; I owe much of my ability to tell this Whole Dumb Story to the fact that most of it took place on the internet, giving me chatlogs and emails to look back on. Even in the places where I talk about my remembered thoughts and feelings (that I didn't write down at the time), the documents have been helpful in pinning down exactly when they happened chronologically.
+I ultimately compiled. I am again grateful that the doctors' notes were made available to me online after the fact. I am very conscious of the unreliability of human memory; I owe much of my ability to tell this Whole Dumb Story to the fact that most of it took place on the internet, giving me chatlogs and emails to look back on. Even in the places where I talk about my remembered thoughts and feelings (that I didn't write down at the time), the documents have been helpful in pinning down exactly when they happened chronologically.
The doctors' notes from that day describe my appearance as "somewhat disheveled, though clean, with long & unruly brown hair that he often twirls".
(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.
The authorities will claim that psychiatric hospitals are for the benefit of the patients. I'll concede that this is possible in some cases: maybe some people have such dysfunctional home lives, or would otherwise be living on the streets, such that the psych ward is actually a better place for them.
-For most people of my social class, I don't think this is plausible; if the welfare of the crazy person were the primary criterion, almost everyone would be better off with their friends or family, in a familiar environment with people you know. 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. Anything bad that happens inside of an institution, isn't anyone fault.
+For most people of my social class, I don't think this is plausible; if the welfare of the crazy person were the primary criterion, almost everyone would be better off with their friends or family, in a familiar environment with people you know.
+
+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.
+I unironically suspect it would be kinder and less confusing if the authorities would just explicitly label it a jail: to just say, Society or your loved ones are _sick of your antics_, so we're going to lock you up in this place and drug you until you obey us and act "normal". An honest punishment of force applied to change behavior is so much less cruel than the psychological abuse of a punishment that coerces its recipients into affirming it as "care".
+
+
+[TODO psych ward scenes—
+
+A nice thing about being a free citizen that you don't notice until you've lost it by being kidnapped and thrown in jail, is having a sense of where you are in the world. When visiting an unfamiliar place, I at least know _how_ I got there, how this place _connects_ to everything else in my model of the world: I may not be familiar with this building or these streets, but I know the train or highway that I took to get here from places that I do know—at worst, if I brought my phone, I can pull up Google Maps to see where I am.
+
+In psych jail, this sense of connection is suddenly absent. You don't know what route the ambulance took. You're locked in a building with strangers. There is no Google Maps. You could be anywhere.
+
+...
+
+
+Even things that are more-or-less genuinely intended to be for your benefit, are harder to recognize as such when you're _insane from sleep deprivation_ and rattled from just having been _kidnapped by armed men_.
+
+When being checked in, they confiscate any belongings you have on you. I remember one of the psych ward employees counting the money from my wallet in front of me.
+
+In retrospect, I can appreciate this practice as the system trying to offer evidence of its trustworthiness: they don't just steal your stuff; they _document_ the items they're confiscating, and give it back to you afterwards. (I have in my possession a yellow carbon copy of my "Patient Valuables Record", form A7026, which lists what they took.)
+
+At the time and in context, I wasn't prepared to appreciate it; the employee counting my bills in front of me seemed like an Orwellian ["There are five lights"](/2018/Aug/interlude-xii/) dominance display, intended to undermine my connection to reality—and maybe, I didn't trust that _she_ knew how to count.
+
+...
+
+
+When I tried to complain about the injustice of my confinement to staff, I was once told that I could call "patient's rights". I didn't bother. If the staff weren't going to listen, what was the designated complaint line going to do?
+
+About a year later, Scott Alexander published a _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["Navigating And/Or Avoiding The Inpatient Mental Health System"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/22/navigating-and-or-avoiding-the-inpatient-mental-health-system/), which claimed that patient rights advocates _do_ advocate for patients in opposition to the rest of the system. ("Usually the doctors hate them, which I take as a pretty good sign that they are actually independent and do their job.")
+
+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_](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.
+
+After my psych ward experiences, I deeply empathize with the clients here. In the defense attorney's worldview, he's working to protect his clients' interests, and is frustrated that they don't appreciate that. What the defense attorney doesn't see is that his work only benefits the clients from _within_ the terms set by a system of power that looks arbitrary and unjust to those on the other end of it. From the perspective of a client who doesn't think he did anything particularly wrong (whether or not the law agrees), the defense attorney is _part of the system_.
+
+So I think my intuition was correct to dismiss patient's rights as useless. I'm sure _they_ believe that they're working to protect patients' interests within the system, and would have been frustrated that I didn't appreciate that. But what I wanted was not redress of any particular mistreatment that the system recognized as mistreatment, but to be _let out of psych jail_—and on that count, I'm sure patient's rights would have told me that the evidence was harmful to my case. They weren't working for me.
+
+...
+
+After I was released and got my belongings back, I couldn't find my Driver License. For a few days, I assumed that one of the psych ward employees had stolen it out of my wallet. I was wrong: actually, there was a separate license-holder compartment inside the wallet. I had forgotten.
+
+...
+
+This was a theme in my thoughts at the time: I was scared that the world was a much less orderly place than I knew. I used to believe the world was "made out of words": that the things people said were mostly true, that the world protrayed in books and maps mostly _was_ the real world. Suddenly, I had been granted a different view of reality, a world of animals in which _words don't matter_.
+
+In retrospect, my psychotic vision of a languageless world turned out to be false. Most people really _do_ know how to read.
+
+I fear that some readers will take this as an admission that the authorities were right, that conventional social reality is right—that I was _just_ crazy, and everything I thought while I was crazy can be costlessly discarded.
+
+I don't think that's right. I _was_ crazy, but _that doesn't mean ordinary social reality is sane_—and it doesn't mean that some of the things I thought I saw from my altered perspective weren't _directionally_ correct, as I can evaluate them from a more standard frame of mind now.
+
+Sometimes, the words written down in official documents really are just lies. I have in my possession an "Involuntary Patient Advisement" form, which claims that I "self presented due to [my] suicidal thoughts". This isn't true. Getting accosted by cops while trying to go into the train station to get back to my apartment is not the same thing as "self presenting"![^telephone-game]
+
+[^telephone-game]: Reading the doctor's notes six years later, it seems likely that this false description was copied from the beginning of a note ("WHO WAS SELF PRESENTED TO CCRMC PES VOLUNTARILY DUE TO SUICIDAL THOUGHTS") that _also_ contains a more accurate description of events later in the same note, except for the substitution of Oakland for Walnut Creek ("PT SEEN EARLIER TODAY IN THE KAISER OAKLAND ED BUT WAS RELEASED WITH THE CONTRACT MOTHER WOULD TAKE HIM HOME AND MONITOR HIM. AFTER THEY GOT HOME PT LEFT WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE. MOTHER REPORTED HIM A DTS"—danger to self—"AND POLICE EVENTUALLY FOUND HIM AT THE BART STATION").
+
+I ended up with a "Rights for Individuals in Mental Health Facilities" handbook, which claims that:
+
+> You have the right to refuse medical treatment or treatment with medications (except in an emergency) unless a capacity hearing is held and a hearing officer or a judge finds that you do not have the capacity to consent to or refuse treatment. The advocate or public defender can assist you with this matter.
+
+Naïvely, one might expect that having the right to refuse medication means that when someone tries to give you medication, you can just say that you don't want to take it, and they'll respect that. This did not seem to be true: I was reluctant to take medication, but the behavior of the staff made it clear that they weren't going to take no for an answer, and I folded, _because they were holding me prisoner_.
+I remember trying to deceive a staff member, putting on a "show" with magician-like hand flourishes (to which she dutifully pretended to be impressed, as one would to a toddler) before taking the pill—hoping to palm it before swallowing it without her noticing. It didn't work. I swallowed.
-[TODO psych ward—
- * I often have a sense of "where I am" geographically (not just my immediate surroundings, but also knowing how my surroundings relate to the world, what city I'm in; what freeways connect to that city; doesn't exist when kidnapped)
+Maybe if I had had the presence of mind at the time to read the rights handbook, and point to the specific line where it says, "You have the right to refuse [...] treatment with medications", they would have accepted that? But it seems likely that that would have been punished by a longer stay. A "right" that you get punished for exercising is ... not much of a right?
+As it happens, I _now_ think that taking the medication was a good idea. The reason I think this is because when I sought psychiatric help for insomnia in early 2021—intending very dearly not to go insane from sleep deprivation again, very much not wanting to be institutionalized again—the doctor told me that my records from my 2017 institutionalization said they had me on Zyprexa 5mg and Trazadone 50mg. Trazadone!—that was on [Scott Alexander's insomnia page](https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/).
- * Even things that are for your benefit during the check-in process are hard to appreciate as such—I remember them counting my money in front of me, and feeling like it was an Orwellian exericse to undermine my connection to reality; maybe, I didn't trust that _she_ knew how to count?
+I worry, again, that some readers will take this as vindication that the authorities were right: they forced me to take drugs, and now that I'm sane and have a little more information, I agree that the drugs were a good idea. Why, the contemptuous normie reader asks, does this not demonstrate that they were right to force me, when I was crazy and therefore couldn't make decisions for myself?
- * trying to complain to the staff—got told to speak to patient's rights; I didn't even bother, because I didn't think that was real; a later SSC claims that patient's rights is supposed to be adversarial, but that wasn't clear from the inside; I'm reminded of that AmRen article [article by a public defender](https://archive.is/HUkzY); I empathize with the defendant https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/22/navigating-and-or-avoiding-the-inpatient-mental-health-system/ "Usually the doctors hate them, which I take as a pretty good sign that they are actually independent and do their job"
+Because submission to authority isn't the same thing as sanity. In the psych ward in February 2017, I _knew_ that I needed sleep. If someone I trusted to have my best interests at heart had _told me_, "This is 50mg Trazadone; I strongly recommend you take it, because it will help you sleep; I also have this Trazadone fact sheet you can read if you want more information," I would have taken it.
- * First facility—separate rooms with beds for men and women; me tapping at the walls trying to teach; pacing, thinking I was one of the most important people in the world
- * Taken to a separate facility; _very_ lucky to get my own room
+But a system that actually had my best interests at heart would not have _kidnapped me and locked me in a building with strangers_, which is _not a good environment for getting rest_. Serious antipsychotic medication is scary stuff. When I was institutionalized in 2013, I got tardive dyskensia—an involuntary lip-smacking compulsion—from the Haldol that they gave me. Tardive dyskensia can be permanent in some cases. Given that experience, and given the information I had at the time in 2017, I do not think I had good reason not to just trust the system!
- * paper claims that I "self presented due to your suicidal thoughts"; this isn't true; getting stopped by the cops while trying to
+...
- * "Now memories are blurred, and their faces are obscured"
- * racist/sexist intuitions: avoid the gaze of males; males physically smaller than me are OK
- * a moment of solidarity with a black male smaller than me?
- * beliefs about evolutionary psychology (make friends, avoid enemies) very salient
- * fragmented memory: Joy intentionally hurt herself while I was trying to help her, football coach-like orderly said he was only trying to help; Joy says, this never happened
- * black woman named "Tone" asked what we had for breakfast
- * black man saying something about his mother, I explained that his mother probably did love him, he got angry, and I hid behind my door
- * doing better than in 2013 precisely because I was modeling the place as a prison
- * wanted to avoid taking medication, put on a magician-like "show" to nurse to try to trick her, it didn't work
- * I ended up with a booklet that claims I have the right to refuse medication, but this isn't actually true in practice
- * asking Anna on the phone whether I was a political prisoner "Really?" "Really really?" followups (if I were a political prisoner; she might not be able to say so)
- * mother visited, mother was cranky, Michael Vassar visited; Michael said that rape doesn't really happen in this kind of facility, and I believed him; I handed him papers (which I thought was necessary to escape the powers that be)
- * vision of needing to pull the fire alarm?
- * other males pacing the way I pace
- * my reports were not reliable; I thought Vassar pretended to be a doctor; I thought one of the other inmates had a security code
- * trope-awareness of being a psych patient; distrustful of other psych patient; thought I could subtly leave clues that I was a Jesus-analogue (as a Jewish male with long hair) to discourage people from murdering me (because the Christianity meme says you're not supposed to do that); I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my 72-hour (== 3 days) evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one.)
- * my father actually did pick me up three days later!
+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".
+
+There were two rooms with beds, in that first facility: one for women, and one for men. I didn't end up sleeping there that I recall. Before long, I was taken to a separate facility, [Fremont Hospital](https://fremonthospital.com/), which had individual rooms. (Or was I incredibly lucky to not have been assigned a roommate? Having to sleep by someone else at night would have been very bad for me, given my fear of the other inmates and my desperate need for sleep.)
+
+...
+
+My memories of life in psych prison aren't very clear, partially because of how out-of-it I was, and partially because it's been more than six years since then, and memories decay if you don't _write them down_ (within hours, days, weeks—not _six years_). I wrote a [little](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [bit](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/) about my experiences in 2017. I think I would have written more if I had remembered that the consequence of not confronting [the challenge of](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/) recording painful memories is that you lose them. I retain some access to my psychotic [sense of life](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sense_of_life.html), but only episodic fragments of specific events. ("Now memories are blurred, and their faces are obscured, but I still know the words to this song" ...)
+
+My beliefs about game theory and evolutionary psychology—the theory and practice of making friends and avoiding enemies as a animal—seemed much more salient and actionable than anything about the world that was made of words, or the right way to behave as a person in civilization (as contrasted to an animal).
+
+It seemed important to avoid the gaze of males, particularly males physically larger than me. (If they noticed me noticing them, they would try to threaten me.)
+
+...
+
+An Asian woman named Joy seemed to hurt herself on the hinges of the cart used to bring us meals, in a way that plausibly looked like my fault—maybe I had opened the door on the cart while her fingers were in the wrong place? A football-coach-like orderly took my side (in the manner of a grown-up intervening in a squabble amongst kindergarteners), saying that I was only trying to help. When the orderly was out of earshot, Joy looked at me and whispered, "This never happened." I was never sure what that was about. Had she only been pretending to be hurt, and was telling me to keep quiet?
+
+A young black woman named Tone asked me what we had for breakfast—as if the Orwellian dominance rituals we were forced to undergo, had her doubting her senses and her memory, and she was looking to me (a fellow inmate, not an authority) to keep her sane, to verify her connection to reality.
+
+A black man in the hallway was saying something about how his mother didn't love him. This seemed unlikely to me, so I tried to explain to him that his mother probably did love him. He got angry. I hid behind a door.
+
+I shared a moment of solidarity with a black man who was physically smaller than me, and therefore seemed safe to interact with. Society locked us up here because they don't want to deal with people like us, I said, but we need to stay strong.
+
+...
+
+I got the idea that it ought to be helpful to prove my agency to the staff. I'd say something like: I'm going to take a shower now, and then be ready for bed at this-and-such time, and then point out at the aforementioned time that I was actually ready, just like I said I would. My ability to make correct predictions about my future behavior showed that I was an approximately coherent agent, therefore sane, and therefore that I should be released.
+
+...
+
+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.)
+
+...
+
+My mother visited. Her presence was actively anti-helpful. She was very cranky, acting like being here was my fault, my punishment. I had a vision of pulling the fire alarm, and being held back by the knowledge that it would only make my punishment worse. (I'm not confident there was actually an alarm for me to pull; I would have expected other inmates to have had the same idea.)
+
+Michael Vassar visited, overlapping with my mother. Michael was extremely helpful, including in de-escalating my mother's hostility. (I would later describe him as "pretend[ing] to be a doctor for my mom", but on reflection, I don't think that's what happened; More likely, he had mentioned MetaMed, and I misinterpreted it.) I talked to him in a side room, saying that I was scared to sleep because I was afraid that this was the part of the simulation where I would get anally raped. Michael said that that didn't really happen in this kind of facility. Crucially, _I believed him_. (I wouldn't have believed any assurances from the "hospital" authorities.) I handed him some folded papers on which I had jotted down some notes (inmates were allowed dull golf pencils), thinking that I needed to be covert to escape the attention of the authorities.
+
+...
+
+I remember seeing another male pacing the hallways, the way that I pace sometimes. I hadn't particularly thought of that as a "gendered" (sexually dimorphic) trait, but seeing another man do it (and not particularly remembering seeing a woman do it) made the hypothesis salient, that it was the spandrell of some hunter (not gatherer) behavioral program.
+
+...
+
+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](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.
]
-----
-/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/
+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.)
+
+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.
-[28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
+Michael replied:
-[emailed Gunni on 26 Feb (still haven't gotten that inteview, 5 years later?!)]
+> 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 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.)
+
+------
+
+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.
+
+-------
+
+[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)")
+
+> 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.
+
+ * I mean, you're already doing this with your work, obviously, but I want to know if there's any way I can help?
+
+> 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."
-[another happy price offer to Yudkowsky on 2 March
-> That makes sense. Sorry for being boring; I'm kind of 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. Hopefully this is not too socially-disruptive! Michael said he thinks I'm doing good work??
]
-[Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March]
+-------
+
+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.)
+
+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.
+
+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/).
+
+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.
+
+Michael replied:
-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—
> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
-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
+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 met Jessica in March
+[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"
+ * Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage ...
-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, 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.
+------
-/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
+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.
-[TODO: ... continue harvesting email to see what happened in April]
+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".
-[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, "Wilhelm", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi]
+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.
+
+------
+
+[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
+]
+
+-------
+
+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]
+
+[TODO: overheating in April, 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
+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