>
> —[_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 ("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. That was what my pseudonymous secret ("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."
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
- * 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
+...
+
+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
- * 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
+
+
+ * black man saying something about his mother, I explained that his mother probably did love him,
+
+He got angry. I hid behind my door.
- * a moment of solidarity with a black male smaller than me?
+
+I shared a moment of solidarity with a black man who was physically smaller than me, and therefore seemed safe to talk to.
...
...
-I remember having Anna on the phone, and asking if I was a political prisoner. (The Soviet Union had declared its dissidents sick from sluggish schizophrenia as a pretext for locking them away.)
-
-She answered in the negative. "Really?" I said. (If I _was_ a political prisoner, she might not be able to say so over )
+I remember having Anna on the phone, and asking if I was a political prisoner. (The Soviet Union had declared its dissidents sick with sluggish schizophrenia as a pretext for persecuting them; how could I be sure things worked all that differently here?)
-She repeated her answer. "Really–really?"
+She answered in the negative. "Really?" I said. (If I _was_ a political prisoner, she might not be able to say so over
-
-* 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)
+She repeated her answer. "Really–really?" I said.
...
-----
-[TODO Vassar
- * 22–23 February —
+[TODO: interacting with the outpatient program]
+
+[TODO I interact more with Vassar
+ * 22–23 February—
* he asks for my phone number
* I messed up by revealing secret info to Michael (I can say _that_ I messed up a secret, without revealing what the secret was)
* Michael says that he can easily keep committments; "I'm not being sloppy and accidentally defecting against the generalized optimization for secrecy, I'm actively at war with it."
* 28 February "Re: You're really bad at communicating!", nonprofit suggestion
* "I really think that fill documentation of your experience would be maximum leverage for your time"— my reply, "Too narcissitic!" (oops!)
* Between my checking and brokerage account, I have ~$97K to play with
-
+ * "rationalist community health check?? asking for one bit of advice"
+ * going through a "Having a nervous breakdown, suddenly understanding all the things Michael has been trying to tell me for eight years that I didn't understand at the time, and subsequently panicking and running around yelling at everyone because I'm terrified of the rationalist community degenerating into just another arbitrary Bay Area humanist cult when we were supposed to be the Second Scientific Revolution" phase of my intellectual development
+ * nice people doing their jobs
+
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.
-[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??
]
]
-[28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
-
-
+[TODO: 28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
[emailed Gunni on 26 Feb (still haven't gotten that inteview, 5 years later?!)]
-
[Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March]
-
12 March—
> You can tell that recent life events have made me more worried than I used to be about unFriendly/unaligned possibly-AI-assisted institutions being a threat to humane values long before an actual AI takeoff in however many decades
-
-------
On 12 March 2017, I made a Facebook post trying to explain my new outlook:
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/
-[TODO: ... continue harvesting email to see what happened in April]
-
-[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Chaya", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Thomas", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi]
+[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Chaya", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Thomas", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi
+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