That night, I emailed Michael and Anna about sleep at 12:17 _a.m._ 15 February 2017 (Subject: "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS") and about philosophy and the nature and amount of suffering in the universe at 1:55 _a.m._ and 2:01 _a.m._ (Subjects: "I think I'm starting to understand a lot of the stuff you used to say that I didn't understand!" and "none of my goddamned business").
-I presumably eventually got some sleep that night. In the morning, I concluded my public Facebook meltdown with three final posts. "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!" said the first. Then: "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!" In the third post, I promised to leave Facebook for a week. (The complete Facebook meltdown had ended up comprising 31 posts between Saturday 11 February 2017 and Wednesday 15 February 2017.)
+I presumably eventually got some sleep that night. In the morning, I concluded my public Facebook meltdown with three final posts. "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!" [said the first](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154817202665199). [Then](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154817329655199): "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!" In [the third post](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154817359255199), I promised to leave Facebook for a week. The complete Facebook meltdown had ended up comprising 31 posts between Saturday 11 February 2017 and Wednesday 15 February 2017.
------
-In retrospect, I was not, entirely, feeling like a normal human. The world was starting to seem much more mysterious—and threatening—than it previously had. I told Sophia I wouldn't actually be able to make it to Portland that weekend (Subject: "I don't think I can make it to Portland/Wizardworld after all, sorry (eom)"). I presumably told my work I wouldn't be in at all anymore this week.
+In retrospect, I was not, entirely, feeling like a normal human.
-I want to be fair to my past self. In retrospect, it's clear that I was having a paranoid nervous breakdown due to stress and sleep deprivation. Looking back at a lot of the things I was thinking at the time, I no longer think those thoughts were correct. Actually, they were pretty crazy. You might hope that people who are going crazy for largely "biological" reasons (like stress and sleep deprivation) would notice this, and correct for it by trusting their own thoughts less, deferring more to ordinary social reality when it disagreed with their own altered perceptions.
+Specifically, this is the part where I started to go crazy—when the internet-argument-induced hypomania (which was still basically in touch with reality) went over the edge into stress- and sleep-deprivation–induced mania (which basically wasn't).
+
+This presents some difficulties for me as an author, about what and how much I should write.
+
+Partially, I'm just not sure how interesting or relevant it is. The reason I've sunk so much time and wordcount into writing down this Whole Dumb Story is because I think it's actually of some public interest, despite the fact that I'm not an otherwise notable person whose autobiography people would want to read: I think my Story embeds some worthwhile insights—about the etiology of gender dysphoria in males and the hidden Bayesian structure of language and cognition, of course, but especially about how the "rationalist" community in general and Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular are less epistemically trustworthy then they would have you believe—without which, the navel-gazing effrontery of having wasted [more than a year](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) forcing out a six-figure-wordcount Diary entry would seem monstrously self-indulgent.
+
+No one enjoys hearing about someone else's dreams—or more importantly, learns anything from them. So if sleep-deprivation psychosis is a lot like dreaming while awake, there's a case that I should wrap up this post as quickly as possible ("And then I went crazy, but then I got better, and then I went crazy again in April, but then I got better for real"), and pick up the Whole Dumb Story where it continues in the next post in November 2018.[^story-gap-accounting]
+
+[^story-gap-accounting]: Where it's not that _I_ didn't do anything between April 2017 and November 2018, but you don't care about the minutiæ of my life; you (maybe) care about the Story.
+
+Ultimately, however, the part where I went crazy twice is intrinsically part of the Story. As a writer, I can't just skip over it, although I'll try to stick to the highlights.
+
+(As a _reader_, you can skip whatever you want.)
+
+If nothing else, I have a duty to be fair to my psychotic past self, when no one else was. Without denying that I was crazy, one of the things I learned while being crazy, is that people are too quick (insanely quick?) to automatically dismiss anything said by anyone who has been socially labeled as "crazy". Despite my altered state, I was still a _person_—by which I don't mean, a person, as contrasted to an animal. I mean that _"sane" people are animals, too_. Whatever else I got wrong at the time, _that_ was suddenly (and correctly) very clear to me.
+
+You might hope that people whose cognition is being degraded for largely "biological" reasons (like stress and sleep deprivation) would notice this, and correct for it by trusting their own thoughts less, deferring more to ordinary social reality when it disagreed with their own altered perceptions.
But in a world where all the _sane_ people were insisting that men could be women by means of saying so, can you blame me for finding it hard to tell? If the paranoid hypotheses I was starting to generate didn't match ordinary social reality, how much reason did I really have to believe that ordinary social reality was actually in the right?
-I don't want to say that I was having persecution _delusions_, exactly—just that persecution hypotheses were much more _salient_ than they usually were; I was a little bit fixated on the idea of scary men coming to kill me. Somehow, I developed the idea that an HSTS transsexual I had been corresponding with was actually AGP and in denial. I sent her an email trying to gently hint about it (Subject: "one last thing before I disappear for a while"), and then I felt scared—scared that she would she would track me down and take revenge? In a followup email, I disclaimed that I was kind of losing my mind right now, and disavowed the offensive hypothesis. ("But if you're sure, I believe you!") She replied, mentioning that she also questions people's self-reports of being HSTS. She said that her husband had a knack for spotting AGPs, and did not find them attractive, calling them "cross dressers on steroids." I said I was afraid that the husband wanted to kill me.
+------
+
+I don't want to say that I was having persecution _delusions_, exactly—just that persecution hypotheses were much more _salient_ than they usually were; I was a little bit fixated on the idea of scary men coming to kill me. Somehow, I developed the idea that an HSTS transsexual I had been corresponding with was actually AGP and in denial. I sent her an email trying to gently hint about it (Subject: "one last thing before I disappear for a while"), and then I felt scared—scared that she would she would track me down and take revenge? In a followup email, I disclaimed that I was kind of losing my mind right now, and disavowed the offensive hypothesis. ("But if you're sure, I believe you!") She replied, mentioning that she also questions people's self-reports of being HSTS. She said that her husband had a knack for spotting AGPs, and did not find them attractive, calling them "cross dressers on steroids."
+
+I said I was afraid that the husband wanted to kill me.
-"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I messaged "Rebecca" late that night. Now that I no longer believed self-reports are true, I could see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're in the right. I had ostensibly known that was a thing, verbally, but now I was _seeing_ it.
+"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I messaged "Rebecca" late that night of the fifteenth–sixteenth. Now that I no longer believed that self-reports are true, I could see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're in the right. I had ostensibly known that was a thing, verbally, but now I was _seeing_ it.
She asked for an example. I mentioned the thread where I had asked "Noreen" on a date. When I had excused my sexist remark with "it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent", I thought I had some beautiful æsthetic reason for that being a witty thing to say ... but maybe a better description of my behavior was that I was beating up on Brent—openly insulting a male conspecific as a dominance play while engaging in courtship.
> Do humans actually need sleep, or sleep just a coping mechanism for dealing with civilization? Don't tell me if you don't think I'm ready to hear it.
-In that thread, I claimed that I did get some sleep that night ("but only by means of lying down in the dark with my eyes closed; I didn't actually want to"), but apparently it hadn't been enough to keep my from growing increasingly delusional.
+In that thread, I claimed that I did get some sleep that night ("but only by means of lying down in the dark with my eyes closed; I didn't actually want to"), but apparently it hadn't been enough to keep me from growing increasingly delusional.
I sent some delusional emails to Eliezer Yudkowsky (Subjects: "positive reinforcement! But, updating away from you and towards Paul Christiano and Michael Vassar (eom)" and "You and Greg Egan had [that public fight on Baez's blog](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/what-to-do/#comment-5515)! Was that staged on purpose? If not, you should update towards Egan (eom)"), and some probably nice and non-concerning emails to each of my parents (Subjects: "You've been a good [mother/father] to me in ways that I didn't always understand at the time (eom)")
------
-The first time I went insane from sleep deprivation, in 2013, I remember having a distinct mental sensation where two words kept running through my head, over and over. That time, the words had been "science" and "female." Maybe a Society with a more advanced discipline of psychiatry would be able to pinpoint the nature and origin of this symptom more exactly, but I suspect it might be a real regularity, because around this time, it started happening to me again. This time, [the words were "cooperate" and "defect"](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/).
+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's a real thing, because it started happening to me again. This time, [the words were "cooperate" and "defect"](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/).
I wandered around downtown San Francisco, and used my phone to repeatedly message the word "Cooperate" to various people—to "Rebecca" (six times), to Ben (five times), to "Noreen" (six times), to "Thomas" (twice), to my insufficiently requited love "Beatrice" (five times), to Ziz (six times), to Brent Dill (five times) ... a few other people. (I was imagining the act of saying or sending the word constituting an act of playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)
-"I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip", I told "Rebecca" and Ben. "Rebecca" asked me to clarify whether I meant I had taken acid, or gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said.
+"I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip", I told "Rebecca" and Ben. "Rebecca" asked me to clarify whether I meant I had taken acid, or gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said. (I had told Sophia that I wouldn't be able to make it this weekend as planned.)
I remember being afraid that the thing which (I had decided) had happened to Eliezer Yudkowsky and to Scott Alexander that made them such good writers was now happening to me, a phenomenon that would bring indescribable suffering along with an awakening into genius. I messaged Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet".
-At 1:47 _p.m._, I had messaged Ziz, "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu [_sic_][^kiritsugu-spelling]; that's why I've chosen the confessor route"—a reference to Yudkowsky's story ["Three Worlds Collide"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT), in which an alien rationalist trained for command (the _Kiritsugu_) is contrasted with her human counterpart (the Confessor), who is tasked only with telling the truth, for others to decide what to do about it.
-
-[^kiritsugu-spelling]: The spelling [used in the story is _Kiritsugu_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8).
+At 1:47 _p.m._, I had messaged Ziz, "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu [_sic_]; that's why I've chosen the confessor route"—a reference to Yudkowsky's story ["Three Worlds Collide"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT), in which an alien rationalist trained for command (the _Kiritsugu_, with two _i_'s) is contrasted with her human counterpart (the Confessor), who is tasked only with telling the truth, for others to decide what to do about it.
[(I don't do policy.)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)
[^war-fronts]: I'm not sure if "Rob" was referring to Rob Wiblin or Rob Bensinger. When I asked Michael later how Sarah and Ben were in conflict (Subject: "request for clarification re war fronts"), he said that Sarah and Ben were allies and that he wasn't sure how the misunderstanding happened.
-Eventually I made it to my office. My boss said he hadn't seen my email about wanting to meet. I wasn't sure I believed him—not particularly because I thought he had read it and had reason to lie about that, but because I wasn't sure I believed self-reports were meaningful in general. Maybe everyone was just bluffing, playing improv, all the time: maybe it was common for people to not actually know how to read, and chose at random whether to claim to have read or not-read something.
+Eventually I made it to my office. My boss said he hadn't seen my email about wanting to meet. I wasn't sure I believed him—not particularly because I thought he had read it and had reason to lie about that, but because I wasn't sure I believed self-reports were meaningful in general. Maybe everyone was just bluffing, playing improv, all the time: maybe it was common for people to not actually know how to read, and to choose at random whether to claim to have read or not-read something.
-At this point, my memories aren't very clear or detailed. I think I said something that caused my coworkers to be very concerned for me, but I remember being very careful about the wording, to make sure I _wasn't_ saying one of the things that would give people cause to lock me up. I think it was something like, "I think I'm in the mental state that causes people to perform the verbal behavior of saying they want to commit suicide."
+At this point, my memories aren't very clear or detailed. I said something that caused my coworkers to become very concerned for me, but I remember trying to be very careful about the wording, to make sure I _wasn't_ saying one of the things that would give people cause to lock me up. I think it was something like, "I think I'm in the mental state that causes people to perform the verbal behavior of saying they want to commit suicide."
In retrospect, I don't think people pay attention to such distinctions.
-A coworker volunteered to secure me a ride home. There was some question about whether the relevant "home" was my apartment in Berkeley, or the house in Walnut Creek where my mother lived, and where I had lived until just ten months before. As a newly awakened-social conservative, I intuited that staying with family was the right choice. (I was wrong.) At 6:22 _p.m._, I sent an email from my work computer to my parents, Anna, and Michael (Subject: "I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)").
+A coworker volunteered to secure me a ride home. There was some question about whether the relevant "home" was my apartment in Berkeley, or the house in Walnut Creek where my mother lived, and where I had lived until just ten months before. As a newly-awakened social conservative, I intuited that staying with family was the right choice. (I was wrong.) At 6:22 _p.m._, I sent an email from my work computer to my parents, Anna, and Michael (Subject: "I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)").
-We still owned the house. My coworker took an Uber with me to the house in Walnut Creek, and talked to my mother.
+We still owned the house. My coworker took an rideshare with me to the house in Walnut Creek, and talked to my mother.
(Meanwhile, Ziz had made her way to my apartment. "Brought chocolate, allegedly good against dementors," she messaged at 5:43 _p.m._. "Believe I can cooperate better if I can see your face." I was apparently in no state to appreciate the gesture; I messaged back "OK" a couple times when she asked to be let in, and confirmed which address she was at, even though I wasn't there. My flatmate eventually arrived and let her in.)
-I tried to sleep that night, at my mom's house. It wasn't very effective. I was scared of being attacked by criminals. (There may have been a racial angle on this fear? I don't think I can remember, and if I could, I'm not sure I would be able to type it.) Sure, I _remembered_ feeling physically secure at almost all times in my life; I _remembered_ Walnut Creek being a safe place. But how trustworthy were memories from life inside an ideological bubble? Maybe people like me got assaulted and brutalized all the time, but our culture had trained us to block out all the evidence and even memories that good smart nice liberals _prefered not to see_.
+I tried to sleep that night, at my mom's house. It wasn't very effective. I was scared of being attacked by criminals. There, um, may have been a racial angle on this fear? (Maybe I _had_ been morally corrupted by my political reading, insofar as someone who had stuck to credible sources would have had a less racist psychotic episode.) "I thought that kidnap-and-torture-whitey-in-a-basement race war might actually be common/typical, and that I hadn't noticed before", I recounted in an email the next month.
+
+Sure, I _remembered_ feeling physically secure at almost all times in my life; I _remembered_ Walnut Creek being a safe place. But how trustworthy were memories from life inside an ideological bubble? Maybe people like me got assaulted and brutalized all the time, but our culture had trained us to block out all the evidence and even memories that good smart nice liberals _prefered not to see_. Or maybe my memories were better explained anthropically, in terms of Friendly simulator protection: most of my [measure](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/measure/) was inside of superintelligences simulating histories in which I hadn't yet suffered, but that didn't rule out the possibility of me needing to commit suicide before going to sleep in order to avoid having to experience "my share" of the kidnap-and-torturing.
------
-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!"
+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. It's significant that my hysterical emails to Anna and Michael the other day had said that I needed to sleep "to avoid being institutionalized", rather than to avoid going crazy: I was more scared of the alleged treatment than the disease.)
+
+I don't think I was very articulate about expressing this 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 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.
+I ultimately compiled. I am [again grateful](/2023/Jun/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#gender-clinic-notes) 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".
"Patient has d/c'd the E2"—discontinued the estrogen patch—"& I agree with this."
-(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 assume there must be some fascinating sociological explanation for why the doctors have terse abbreviations for many 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" was 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 _particular_ count. (Although in general, the doctor's notes contain a striking density of outright falsehoods. Humans are not very good reporters!)
+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 willfully walked 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!)
-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.
+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 definitely 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 got the idea to go to my apartment in Berkeley, and started walking to the Walnut Creek BART station. On my way, I felt a surge of energy, a second wind despite my exhaustion. "I just realized that you're allowed to not be submissive all the time", I told Ben. "I didn't know this before and it feels like an impossible superpower".
-I was stopped by cops before entering the Walnut Creek BART station. (I hadn't told my mother I was leaving; when she noticed my absence, she panicked and called 911. I'm impressed that they found me so quickly: contrary to my night terrors, Walnut Creek was evidently _so_ safe that the cops didn't have anything better to do.) Questioned by the cops, I explained the situation: that I was a software engineer going through a stressful time, that I had stayed at my mother's house here in Walnut Creek last night, but that now I was trying to get a train to go to my apartment in Berkeley. I said that I had been awake for a couple days. (That's not _normal_, they said.) I said, truthfully, that I wasn't on drugs, but I didn't expect them to believe me—and, somehow, felt as if I were optimizing for them not to believe me.
+I was stopped by cops before entering the Walnut Creek BART station. (I hadn't told my mother I was leaving; apparently, when she noticed my absence, she panicked and called 911. I'm impressed that they found me so quickly: contrary to my night terrors, Walnut Creek was evidently _so_ safe that the cops didn't have anything better to do.) Questioned by the cops, I explained the situation: that I was a software engineer going through a stressful time, that I had stayed at my mother's house here in Walnut Creek last night, but that now I was trying to get a train to go to my apartment in Berkeley. I said that I had been awake for a couple days. (That's not _normal_, they said.) I said, truthfully, that I wasn't on drugs, but I didn't expect them to believe me—and, somehow, felt as if I were optimizing for them not to believe me.
I tried to talk the cops into taking me back to my mom's house, which was clearly the best thing for me, given that my plan of going to my own apartment was apparently not on the table. Apparently I didn't realize that the cops had a procedure, and their procedure did not admit of that kind of personal discretion. In my last message to Ben before getting locked up, at 3:19 _p.m._, I said, "You can use police cars as Ubers????"
-----
-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.
+After being released from psych prison, arrangements were 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, that getting sleep _fixed the problem_.
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 some autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
+It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has 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]: Most tellingly, in [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), 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_.) This is inherently an AGP wish-fulfillment plot and it's hard to imagine a non-AGP man writing a book about it.
-[^heinlein-agp]: [TODO] Some of this is circumstantial [...] The scenes in chapter XXIX of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where Michael Valentine Smith uses his telepathic powers [...] sex change in "All You Zombies" [...] _an entire book_, [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read _I Will Fear No Evil_ as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
+ More circumstantially, the sex change in "All You Zombies", and the scenes in chapter XXIX of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where Mike uses his telepathy powers to share the "male gaze" experience with Jill, seem like the kind of plot details an AGP male author is more likely to come up with (having more reason than an ordinary man to have a lingering fascination with the idea of sex changes and cross-sex experience-sharing).
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_.)
------
-At 5:08 _p.m._ on 2 April 2017, Michael wrote to me that someone else was in psych prison, and could use help along lines that matched my focus and experience (Subject: "Another autogynophilic [_sic_] rationalist is in a psych ward").
-
-"Thanks for telling me", I said, "What can I do to help?"
-
-He asked if I knew anyone in Pittsburgh (perhaps, effective altruists at Carnegie Mellon) who would be willing to help, if I could visit a hospital there if needed, and—
+In the evening of 2 April 2017, Michael wrote to me that someone else was in psych prison, and could use help along lines that matched my focus and experience (Subject: "Another autogynophilic [_sic_] rationalist is in a psych ward"). He asked if I knew anyone in Pittsburgh (perhaps, effective altruists at Carnegie Mellon) who would be willing to help, if I could visit a hospital there if needed, and—
> Do you feel that you can provide the sort of attentive, active listening that would emotionally support someone in a high integrity agitated state where their ideas may not be literally true, and also may be true but hard to justify, but the ideas are at least honest metaphorical pointers at something that they think is there and needs to be recognized for safety?
More information came in an email that night from Lex Gendel[^lex-name] to me, Michael, and a few other people. The person in distress was a trans woman of my acquaintance whom I'll call "Roberta". Apparently, "Roberta" had had a psychotic episode. Her parents bought her a plane ticket back to Europe, but when she attempted to board the plane, she was committed to an unknown psych ward in Pittsburgh. As far as Lex knew, "Roberta" was currently too psychotic to play nice with the authorities. Our contact point with the family was her brother, who wasn't that cooperative and was also in Europe. (I'm imagining he was the source of this information—that the authorities at least called the family?)
-[^lex-name]: The "From" header was still using Lex's deadname (he's transmasculine), but when I asked on 4 April 2017 which name was preferred, he said that he strongly preferred Alexander or variants thereof except where that would out him to his family.
+[^lex-name]: The "From" header was still using Lex's deadname (he's transmasculine), but when I asked which name was preferred, he said that he strongly preferred Alexander or variants thereof except where that would out him to his family.
Our mission was to find out where "Roberta" was and how to contact her. "Stacy" (also on the email) was local to Pittsburgh. "Kyle" and I started looking up Pittsburgh-area psych wards on Google Maps and calling them.
Western Psych continued to refuse to confirm—although they did take down my number (and "Kyle"'s, and Lex's) for "Roberta" to call _if_ she was there and wanted to.
-I kept calling, at intervals. I tried bluffing ("No, I _know_ she's there", I told Madeline at Western Psych). I tried prompting for advice ("I realize that you're just doing your job and that you can't help me, but as a person, can you tell me who I should send next?—a lawyer, or a psychiatrist?" I told Cathy). I tried asking for a manager. (The manager, Laura, had just left.) Cathy volunteered to forward me to Patient's Rights. (It went to voicemail.)
+I kept calling, at intervals. I tried bluffing ("No, I _know_ she's there", I told Madeline at Western Psych). I tried prompting for advice ("I realize that you're just doing your job and that you can't help me, but as a person, can you tell me who I should send next?—a lawyer, or a psychiatrist?" I told Cathy). I tried asking for a manager. (The manager, Laura, had just left.) Cathy volunteered to forward me to Patients' Rights. (It went to voicemail.)
I asked Scott Alexander (whom I had tagged into the thread earlier) if _he_ could call, following up on the "sending a psychiatrist" guess (Subject: "a plea to our inside man (was: Re: information centralizing thread for [roberta] situation)").
Of course, I did _instrumentally_ care about not doing anything that would motivate them to make _our_ lives unpleasant. I agreed that I shouldn't try to do any more dark-arts social engineering—not because it would be wrong, but because I wasn't talented enough to pull it off without making things worse.
-Ashley from Patient's Rights returned my call. Allegedly, patients had access to phones, and allegedly, if a patient complains, Patient's Rights would investigate the complaint.
+Ashley from Patients' Rights returned my call. Allegedly, patients had access to phones, and allegedly, if a patient complains, Patients' Rights would investigate the complaint.
This was not reassuring. "Roberta" couldn't complain to patient's rights about not getting our messages, if she didn't know that the messages existed. I could believe that the receptionist was honestly trying to do her job and wrote a number down and told someone else about it. But if anything _else_ went wrong in the causal chain (which could involve more than one other person who had lots of other things to do) between "receptionist dutifully writes something down" and "'Roberta' actually gets the message and telephone access", _no one had an incentive to fix it_.
As far as I was concerned, this was a kidnapping. The fact that the kidnappers didn't have any particular motive and were just doing their jobs and would probably release our friend in 3 or 14 days, made it _much less bad_ than if it were a kidnapping by criminals or terrorists with an actual motive—but I wanted to call a spade a spade (Subject: "Hijack Innocent People And Abscond").
-I impulsively called up Patient's Rights again and spoke to Ashley, divulging my own recent psych ward story. She eventually forwarded me to Karen Robinson, the Manager of Patient Relations, whose boss was the Director of Regulatory Affairs. She repeatedly told me that the policy was that they couldn't give out information, and I repeatedly told her that I understood the policy, but that I was trying to search for clever strategies that would give me more assurance that "Roberta" actually got the message: for example, Karen herself could physically deliver the message herself, and then not tell me about it.
+I impulsively called up Patients' Rights again and spoke to Ashley, divulging my own recent psych ward story. She eventually forwarded me to Karen Robinson, the Manager of Patient Relations, whose boss was the Director of Regulatory Affairs. She repeatedly told me that the policy was that they couldn't give out information, and I repeatedly told her that I understood the policy, but that I was trying to search for clever strategies that would give me more assurance that "Roberta" actually got the message: for example, Karen herself could physically deliver the message herself, and then not tell me about it.
Karen told me that I needed to trust people. I said that after my recent experience getting kidnapped by the psychiatric authorities, that no, I didn't actually trust people anymore ... but that I was willing to trust _her_, Karen Robinson, the Manager of Patient Relations, and that I felt better being given assurance by someone with a four-word title.
So, that was good news. (Good news about "Roberta"'s welfare, which was more important than my grudge against psych hospitals.) I conceded my bet with Scott and PayPal'd him $500. Scott pointed out that I had offered the bet while I was really angry and traumatized from my own recent psych ward experience; if I thought it wasn't representative of my best cognitive processes, he was happy to call it off and send back the money.
-I _absolutely_ insisted that he keep the money: whether it was my best cognition or not was for reality to judge, not me, and on the specific question of whether the psych prison staff relayed telephone messages, reality had judged.
+I _absolutely_ insisted that he keep the money: whether it was my best cognition or not was for reality to judge, not me, and on the specific question of whether the Western Psychiatric staff relayed telephone messages, reality had judged.
-(At least, as far as I knew at the time! Keep reading!)
+(At least, as far as I knew at the time—keep reading for a surprising reversal!)
We didn't want to hold people accountable for false confessions under duress or contracts to sell oneself into slavery, but surely we could handle a measly $500 bet!
------
-[TODO: starting to overheat
- * 1 April: "Study re: two-types hypothesis" (Bailey replies on the 10th)
- * meanwhile, I had made arrangements with my dayjob to a 2 day/wk contracting on Portal (I had originally said 60/hr, Orion pointed out that was low and went to 75!!); I signed a contract!
- * on 2 April, I had sent the wire transfer reciept to AllDayChemist, on 5 April they said, "Please send us the transfer receipt as we are missing that information from your email."
- * I pick implicitly pick a fight with James, bring up the idea of hiring him as my music teacher
- * I said that I don't want Michael and Anna to be fighting (Subject: "Anna-Michael realignment project"); I send "cooperate with James Cook (eom)" messages to Michael and Anna
- * (14 April 2017 was a Friday, the 7th was also a Friday)
- * I had a Friday–Sunday (14-16) hotel room for BABSCon
- * Anna: "we are doing a thing I would normally call "fighting" (I can detail what I mean if desired; it has various asymmetries and non-typicalities in it, but nevertheless I would normally use that word)"
- * 9 April: Alice–Anna realignment project
- * care coordination thread started 11 April
- * 12 April: NRx/LW peace treaty talks
- * 12 April: Anna writes to me on "Staying Safe"
-]
+This is the part where I started to go crazy a second time.
+
+I worry that some readers will take this as vindication of the authorities' position: that I should have submitted to "treatment" in February, that I was wrong to have thought that my only problems were stress and sleep deprivation.
+
+The reader is entitled to their opinion, but I still think my theory stands up after you take into account that the "Roberta" crisis was a _new stressor_ (and that I ended up being fine despite this April relapse).
[TODO: staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase]
[TODO: BABSCon]
+-------
+
[TODO: "my call with Western Psychiatric's Manager of Patient Relations"]
+-------
+
[TODO: final $18200 credit-assignment ritual: $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Rebecca", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Thomas", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
]
Anyway, that, briefly—I mean it—is the story of how the stress of confronting people on Facebook about the illogic of gender-identity ideology caused me to go insane from sleep deprivation, twice, shattering most of my remaining faith in Society and institutions along the way.
-It's probably not that interesting! If it weren't somewhat-informative backstory presaging my accidental instigation of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war two years later, I wouldn't have bothered to tell this substory of my Whole Dumb Story in this much detail—as evidenced by the fact that, later in 2017, I [started](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [telling it in considerably less detail, and didn't even end up finishing that](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).
+It's probably not that interesting! If it weren't somewhat-informative backstory presaging my accidental instigation of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war two years later, I wouldn't have bothered to tell this substory of my Whole Dumb Story in this much detail—as evidenced by the fact that, later in 2017, I [started](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [telling it in considerably less detail](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), and didn't even end up finishing that.
I think I learned a lot during this period, but I wish there could have been some way to learn it with less drama—to take the form I took, without the disastrously formative experience. I wonder how the rest of this Whole Dumb Story would have gone, if I had just _shrugged and logged off_ earlier in February 2017, rather than losing sleep—if I would have had the strength to fight, later, without the memory of fighting until it broke me. Sometimes, I worry that human psychology is built such that things couldn't have been too much otherwise—that the _realistic_ alternative to taking things too seriously (to the detriment of one's health, and severely inconveniencing others) is taking them lying down.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff