Author: Zack M. Davis
Date: 2023-07-01 05:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, madness, sex differences, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
> MUGATU
>
> —[_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.
+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 someone named 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](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), [separately from its not being remotely achieveable with forseeable technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions).
-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?)
+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.
+[... Facebook meltdown moved back into "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea" ...]
-"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."
+This presents some difficulties for me as an author, about what and how much I should write.
-As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whom I'll call "Rebecca", 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.
+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.
-------
-
-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.
-
-He identified the "talking like like an AI" phenomenon as possession by an egegore, a group-mind that held sway over the beliefs of the humans comprising it. The function of the traditional wisdom of having kings and priests was about putting an individual human with judgement in the position of being able to tame, control, or at least negotiate with egregores. Individualism was flawed because [individual humans couldn't be rational on their own](http://web.archive.org/web/20160319033509/http://sett.com/aesop/memes-are-people-humans-arent). Being an individualist in an environment full of egregores was like being an attractive woman alone at a bar, yelling, "I'm single!"—practically calling out for unaligned entities to wear down your psychological defenses and subvert your will.
-
-Rationalists implicitly seek [Aumann-like agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem) with perceived peers, he explained: when the other person is visibly unmoved by one's argument, there's a tendency to think "hm, they must know something I don't" and update towards the other's position. Without an understanding of egregoric possession, this is disastrous: the possessed person never budges on anything significant, and the rationalist slowly gets eaten by their egregore.
-
-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 "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.
-
-"If people with fragile identities weren't useful as a proxy weapon for certain political coalitions, then they would have no incentive to try to play language police and twist people's arms into accepting their identities," he said.
-
-"OK, but I still want my own breasts," I said.
-
-"[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 "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.
-
-"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 "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.
-
-"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).
-
-"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", "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 "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 a Facebook thread in January 2017 about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, "Helen" said something about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria.
-
-I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back out of security fastidiousness, but really (I soon let slip) because I was angry about the deceptively pompous Facebook comment: _maybe_ it wouldn't take so much _metacognition_ if someone would just mention the _other_ diagnostic criterion!
-
-She sent me a photo of the key with half of the blade snapped off (next to set of pliers, which had presumably done the snapping), sent me $8 (presumably for the cost of the key), and told me to go away.
-
-On my next bank statement, her deadname appeared in the memo line for the $8 transaction.
-
-------
-
-I made plans to visit Portland for the weekend of 18 February 2017, for the purpose of meeting Sophia, and two other excuses. There was [a fandom convention](https://web.archive.org/web/20170126112449/http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) in town, and I wanted to try [playing Pearl from _Steven Universe_ again](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)—but this time with makeup and breastforms and a [realistic gem](https://web.archive.org/web/20190407185943/https://www.etsy.com/listing/236067567/pearl-gem-cosplay). Also, I had been thinking of obfuscating my location as being part of the thing to do for keeping my secret blog secret, and had correspondingly adopted the conceit of setting my little [fictional](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) [vignettes](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) in the Portland metropolitan area, as if I lived there.[^portland-vignettes] I thought it would be nice to get some original photographs of local landmarks (like TriMet trains, or one of the bridges over the Willamette River[^river-fka]) to lend versimilitude to the charade.
-
-[^portland-vignettes]: Beaverton, referenced in ["The Counter"](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) is a suburb of Portland; the Q Center referenced in ["Title Sequence"](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) [does exist in Portland](https://www.pdxqcenter.org/) and [did have a Gender Queery support group](https://web.archive.org/web/20160507101938/http://www.pdxqcenter.org/gender-queery/), but the vignette was inspired by my attendance of a similar group at the [Pacific Center](https://www.pacificcenter.org/) in Berkeley.
-
- I would later get to attend a support group at the Q Center on a future visit to Portland (and got photos, although I never ended up using them on the blog). I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into their library.
-
-[^river-fka]: Formerly known as William River??
-
-At the close of a 4 February 2017 email confirming the plans with Sophia (Subject: "Re: February??"), I wrote:
+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]
-> (Thanks very much for your promise not to be offended by things that I might say, which I am interpreting literally, and without which I wouldn't _dare_ meet you; unfortunately, I kind of feel motivated to generally avoid trans women now, because the conjunction of validate-everyone's-identity social norms and my continuing obsession with last year's shocking mega-update make me feel like I'm made out of social antimatter: better to quietly (except for pseudonymous internet yelling) stay out of everyone's way rather than risk the temptation to say the wrong thing, mutually annihilating me and my interlocutor and killing everyone in the room in a shower of gamma rays.)
+[^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.
-------
-
-... the pretense of "quietly stay[ing] out of everyone's way" lasted about three days.
-
-In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Director of Communications Rob Bensinger, someone named Amelia[^amelia-rip] said something about closeted trans women (linking to the ["I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42) piece).
-
-[^amelia-rip]: Clicking on Amelia's profile years later, it's a memorial page, which is ominous.
-
-I objected that surely closeted trans women _are_ cis: "To say that someone _already_ is a woman simply by virtue of having the same underlying psychological condition that motivates people to actually take the steps of transitioning (and thereby _become_ a trans woman) kind of makes it hard to have a balanced discussion of the costs and benefits of transitioning."
-
-(That is, I was assuming "cis" meant "not transitioned", whereas Amelia seemed to be assuming a gender-identity model, such that guys like me aren't cis.)
-
-Bensinger [replied](/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png):
-
-> Zack, "woman" doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at, even if no one were socially punishing you for using the term that way, and even if we were ignoring any psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage, there'd be the problem regardless that these terms are already used in lots of different ways by different groups. The most common existing gender terms are a semantic minefield at the same time they're a dysphoric and political minefield, and everyone adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all.
-
-Bensinger followed up with another comment offering constructive suggestions: XX-cluster for when you want to talk about things that correlate with XX chromosomes, _&c._
-
-So, this definitely wasn't the _worst_ obfuscation attempt I'd face during this Whole Dumb Story; I of course agree that words can be used in many ways, and are used in different ways by different groups. It's just—given the context of my comments to Amelia, I think it should have already been clear that I understood that words can be used in many ways; my objection to Amelia's usage was backed by a specific _argument_ about the expressive power of language; Bensinger didn't acknowledge my argument. (Amelia, to her credit, did.)
-
-To be fair to Bensinger, it's certainly possible that he was criticizing me specifically because I was the "aggressor" objecting to someone else's word usage, and that he would have stuck up for me just the same if someone had "aggressed" against me using the word _woman_ in a sense that excluded non-socially-transitioned gender-dysphoric males, for the same reason ("adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all").
-
-But ... in the social context of Berkeley 2016, I think I was perhaps justified in my suspicions that that wasn't actually his algorithm? If socially-liberal people in the current year selectively drag out the "It's pointless to object to someone else's terminology" argument _specifically_ when someone wants to talk about biological sex (or even socially perceived sex!) rather than self-identified gender identity—but objecting on the grounds of "psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage" (!!) is implied to be potentially kosher, that seems like a pretty stark distortionary effect on our discussions.
-
-Someone named Ben Hoffman, who I hadn't previously known or thought much about, put a Like on one of my comments. I messaged him to say hi. "I guess I didn't really have a compelling reason to message you except that having a messaging app creates an affordance to say hi to ppl", I explained, then elaborated, "well, maybe part of me wants to say, thanks for the Like in Robby/Amelia's thread, but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes".
-
-Having already started to argue with people in my community under my real name (in violation of my previous intent to save it for the blog), the logic of "in for a lamb, in for a sheep"/"may as well be hung for a pound as a penny" started to kick in. On the evening of Saturday 11 February 2019, I posted to my own wall:
-
-> Some of you may have noticed that I've recently decided to wage a suicidally aggressive one-person culture war campaign with the aim of liberating mindshare from the delusional victimhood identity politics mind-virus and bringing it under the control of our familiar "compete for status by signaling cynical self-awareness" egregore! The latter is actually probably not as Friendly as we like to think, as some unknown fraction of its output is counterfeit utility in the form of seemingly cynically self-aware insights that are, in fact, not true. Even if the fraction of counterfeit insights is near unity, the competition to generate seemingly cynically self-aware insights is so obviously much healthier than the competition for designated victimhood status, that I feel good about this campaign being morally correct, even the amount of mindshare liberated is small and I personally don't survive.
-
-I followed it up the next morning with a hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends".[^terf-allusion] As a transhumanist, I believed that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, "being a woman", but apparently I felt like being vague) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not _propagate backwards in time_. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a _goddamned moral responsibility_ to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by _crazy people who think they can edit the past_.
-
-[^terf-allusion]: The initial letters were a [deliberate allusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Trans-exclusionary_radical_feminists_(TERFs)).
-
-It got 170 comments (!), a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman whom I'll call "Noreen" (who I had _also_ had an exchange with in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).
-
-"_[O]ne_ of the things trans women want is to be referred to as women," she said. "This is not actually difficult, we can just _do_ it." She was pretty sure I must have read the relevant _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/).
-
-I replied that I had an unfinished draft [post about this](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), but briefly, faced with a demand to alter one's language in order to spare someone's feelings, one possible response might be to submit to the demand. But another possible response might be, "_I don't negotiate with terrorists_. People have been using this word to refer to a particular thing for the last 200,000 years since the invention of language, and if that hurts your feelings, that's not my problem." The second response was certainly not very nice. But maybe there were other values than being nice?—sometimes?
-
-In this case, the value being served had to do with there being an empirical statistical structure of bodies and minds in the world that became a lot harder to talk about if you insisted that everyone gets to define how others perceive them. I didn't _like_ the structure that I was seeing, because (like many people in my age cohort, and many people who shared my paraphilic sexual orientation) I had this ideological obsession with androgyny as a moral ideal. The cost of making it harder to talk about the structure might outweigh the benefit of letting everyone dictate how other people should perceive them!
-
-Nick Tarleton asked me to clarify: was I saying that people who claim that "trans women are women" were sneaking in connotations or denotations that were false in light of so many trans women being (I claimed) autogynephilic?—even when those people also claimed that they didn't mean anything predictive by "women".
-
-Yes! I replied. People seemed to be talking as if there was some intrinsic gender-identity switch in the brain, and if a physiological male had the switch in the female position, that meant they Are Trans and need to transition, and I thought that was a really bad model of what the underlying psychological condition was. I thought we should be talking about clever strategies to maximize the quantity "gender euphoria minus gender dysphoria", and it wasn't at all obvious that full-time transition was the uniquely best solution.
-
-"Noreen" said that what she thought was going on was that I was defining _woman_ as someone who has a female-typical brain or body, but _she_ was defining _woman_ as someone who thinks of themselves as a woman or is happier being categorized that way; on the latter definition, the only way someone could be "wrong" about whether or not they were a woman is by trying it and finding out that they were less happy that way.
-
-I replied, but was circular, right?—that women are people who are happier being categorized as women. However you verbally chose to define it, your mental associations with the word _woman_ were going to be anchored on your experiences with adult human females. I wasn't saying people couldn't transition! You can transition if you want! I just thought the details were really important!
-
--------
-
-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_—
-
-The thing was, I actually _didn't_ think I had been morally corrupted after all! I thought I was actually _really good_ at maintaining the is–ought distinction in my mind. But more people who hadn't followed by exact intellectual trajectory, the mere fact that I was saying, "Wait! Stop! The things that you're doing may not in fact be the optimal things!" made it _look_ like I'd been morally corrupted, and there was no easy way for me to prove otherwise.
-
-So, people probably shouldn't believe me. This was just a little manic episode with no serious implications. Right?
-
--------
-
-Somewhat awkwardly, I actually had a date scheduled with "Noreen" that evening. The way that happened was, elsewhere on Facebook, earlier, on 7 February, Brent Dill had said that he didn't see the value in the community matchmaking site _reciprocity.io_, and I disagreed, saying that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
-
-"Noreen" had complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I had said that she shouldn't apologize; I usually didn't make that genre of comment, but it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent (who often espoused cynical views about status and social reality).
-
-Incidentally, I added, I was thinking of seeing seeing that new [_Hidden Figures_ movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures) if I could find someone to go with? It turned out that she had already seen it, but we made plans to see _West Side Story_ at the [Castro Theatre](https://www.castrotheatre.com/) instead.
-
-The date was pretty terrible. (Or, maybe I was the only one who categorized it as a "date"? Maybe in her ontology, we were just seeing a movie.) We walked around the Castro for a bit continuing to debate the gender thing, then saw the movie. I was very distracted and couldn't pay attention to the movie at all.
-
-------
+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.
-I continued to be very distracted the next day, Monday 13 February 2017. I went to my office, but definitely didn't get any dayjob work done.
+(As a _reader_, you can skip whatever you want.)
-I made another seven Facebook posts. I'm proud of this one:
+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.
-> 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](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).
+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.
-[^koller-and-friedman-i]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §3.4.1, "Minimal I-Maps".
-
-[^koller-and-friedman-ii]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §18.3.5: "Understanding the Bayesian Score".
-
-I thought this shed some light on my recent frustrations. People are pretty observant about what other people are like. If prompted appropriately, they know how to anticipate the ways in which trans women are different from cis women. The part of them that talked just didn't see the problem with trying to represent this knowledge (about physiological males with male-typical interests and personalities whose female gender identities seem closely intertwined with their gynephilic sexuality) using a variable ordering that put "biological sex" closer to last than first. And I just didn't think that was what the causal graph looked like.
-
------
-
-In another post, I acknowledged my problematic tone:
-
-> I know the arrogance is off-putting! But the arrogance is a really fun part of the æsthetic that I'm really enjoying! Can I get away with it if I mark it as a form of performance art? Like, be really arrogant while exploring ideas, and then later go back and write up the sober serious non-arrogant version?
-
-Someone came to my defense: it was common to have mental blocks about criticizing trans ideology because of the fear that saying anything would hurt one's trans friends and make one an outcast. One way to overcome that block was to get _really angry_ and _visibly having an outburst_, because then people ascribe less agency and culpability to you; it would be clear that you'd cooped up these feelings for a long time because you do understand that they're taboo and unpopular.
-
-The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you _ever_ want to know what genitals someone has for _any reason_, you are an _evil transphobe_ who should _die_", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are _invading_ my female spaces for _nefarious purposes_ and we should burn them all".
-
-I added that the worst part is that "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically _correct_. It was _phrased_ in a really dismissive manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!
-
------
-
-The thread on the "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends" post continued. Someone whom I'll call "Kevin" (whom I had never interacted with before or since; my post visibility settings were set to Public) said that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. Correlations with gender were weak enough to be irrelevant after talking with someone for half an hour.
-
-I replied, but this was circular, right?—that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. If gender didn't have any (probabilistic!) implications, why did getting gendered correctly matter so much to people?
-
-"Kevin" said that the distinction was between modeling someone as their gender, and addressing people in a way that respects their agency and identity, and it seemed reasonable to care much more about the second thing.
-
-I said I didn't know what the second thing meant. I liked the words "agency" and "identity", too! But the reason I liked the words, is because they were associated with agentic and identificatory things that people do in the world, that my brain could make predictions about. Regarding the predictive value of gender, human psychology was a very high-dimensional vector space! If you'd bought into an ideology that says everyone is equal and that sex differences must therefore be small-to-nonexistent, then you can choose to selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, and when you're locked into that worldview, it does indeed genuinely look to you like individual personality differences swamp sex differences! And when you're locked into that worldview, looking at the dimensions along which the differences are relatively large is genuinely painful! Once you notice this, maybe you can think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that makes psychological-sex-differences denialism so appealing, while making use of the additional power you gain by letting yourself look at the whole configuration space!
-
-"Kevin" asked for some examples where gender-category membership was really important. He wasn't saying that sex differences didn't exist (for example, when doing statistical research), just that they were irrelevant in direct interpersonal situations.
-
-I replied, "Really important" was part of the map, not the territory! From the standpoint of someone who had never bought into the everyone-is-equal ideology in the first place, my desperate search for clever strategies to serve the androgyny-as-moral-ideal religion probably looked crazy and immoral. If my ancestors could see me, they'd probably be like, "Why are you making so many goddamned paperclips?! This wasn't supposed to be about paperclips!" And I was like, "But I want _moar paperclips._"
-
-After one more back-and-forth between me and "Kevin", "Noreen" expressed frustration with some apparent inconsistencies in my excited presentation. I saw what she was getting at, and expressed my sympathies, tagging Michael Vassar (who was then using "Arc" as a married name):
-
-> I'm sorry that I'm being confusing! I know I'm being confusing and it must be really frustrating to understand what I'm trying to say because I'm trying to explore this conceptspace that we don't already have standard language for! You probably want to slap me and say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Talk like a goddamned normal person!" But I forgot hoooooooow!
->
-> **Michael Arc** is this how you feel all the time??
->
-> help
-
------
-
-In another post, I collected links to Bailey, Lawrence, Vitale, and Brown's separate explanations of the two-type taxonomy:
-
-> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
-> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
-> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
-> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
-
-I got some nice emails from Michael Vassar. "I think that you are doing VERY good work right now!!!" he wrote. "The sort that shifts history! Only the personal is political" (Subject: "Talk like a normal person").
-
-I aptly summed up my mental state with a post that evening:
-
-> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state.[^avatar-state]
-
-[^avatar-state]: A reference to _Avatar: The Last Airbender_/_The Legend of Korra_, in which our hero can enter the ["Avatar state"](https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Avatar#Avatar_State) to become much more powerful—and also much more vulnerable (not being reincarnated if killed in the Avatar state).
-
-I made plans to visit a friend's house that evening, but before I left the office, I spent some time drafting an email to Eliezer Yudkowsky. I remarked via PM to the person whose house I was to visit, "oh, maybe I shouldn't send this email to someone as important as Eliezer". Then, "oh, I guess that means the manic state is fading". Then: "I guess that feeling is the exact thing I'm supposed to be fighting". (Avoiding "crazy" actions like emailing a high-status person _wasn't safe_ in a world where all the high-status people where committed to believing that _men could be women by means of saying so_.) I did eventually decide to hold off on the email, and make my way to the friend's house. "Not good at navigation right now", I remarked.
+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 stayed up late that night of 13–14 February 2017, continuing to post, comment, message, _&c._. I'm proud of this post from 12:48 _a.m._:
-
-> Of course, Lawrence couldn't assume Korzybski as a prerequisite. The reality is (wait for it ...) even worse! We're actually men who love their model of what we wish women were, and want to become that.[^model-of]
-
-[^model-of]: Although Ben Hoffman pointed out that the words "their model of" don't belong here; it's one too many layers of indirection.
-
-That is, realistically, the AGP fantasy _about_ "being a woman" wouldn't—[_couldn't_ actually be fulfilled by magically being transformed to match the female distribution](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). (At a minimum, because women aren't autogynephilic! The _male_ sex fantasy of, "Ooh, what if I inhabited a female body with my own breasts, vagina, _&c._", has no reason to match anything in the experience of women who always have just been female.)
-
-In ["Interpersonal Entanglement"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement) (in the Fun Theory Sequence back in 'aught-nine), Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships than straights, since gays don't have to deal with the mismatch in desires across sexes.
-
-The noted real-life tendency for AGP trans women to pair up with each other was probably partially due to this effect[^transcel]: the appeal of getting along with someone _like you_, of having an appropriately-sexed romantic partner who behaved like a same-sex friend. The [T4T phenomenon](https://sexuality.fandom.com/wiki/T4T) is a real-life analogue of ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2).
-
-[^transcel]: Of course, a lot of the effect is going to be due to the paucity of cis women who are willing to date trans women.
-
-The comment thread under the "nice/mean versions" post would eventually end up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, a thread mostly of me arguing with "Noreen." At the top of the thread (at 1:14 _a.m._), she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.
-
-I replied (at 1:25 _a.m._):
+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."
->> why you believe what you believe
->
-> The OP has four cites. What else do you want?
->
->> what consequences you think this has for people
->
-> Consequences for me: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/)
->
-> Consequences for other people: I don't know! That's for those other people to decide, not me! But whatever they decide, they'll probably get more of what they want if they have more accurate beliefs! Rationality, motherfuckers! Do you speak it!
-
-(Looking back on the thread six years later, I'm surprised by the timestamps. What were we all _doing_, having a heated political discussion past midnight? We should have all been asleep! I guess I didn't yet fully appreciate the importance of sleep at this point in my life.)
-
-"Rebecca" explained why she was holding "Noreen" to a different standard of discourse than me: I was walking into this after years of personal, excruciating suffering, and was willing to sacrifice social connections to present a model. My brash tone should have been more forgivable in light of that—that I was ultimately coming from a place of compassion and hope for people, not hate.
-
-I messaged "Rebecca": "I wouldn't call it 'personal, excruciating suffering', but way to play the victim card on my behalf". She offered to edit it. I declined: "if she can play politics, we can play politics??"
-
-"Rebecca" speculated that "Noreen" might not be reacting as vehemently had I not recently asked her out in public, that she was now distancing herself from me as part of a signaling game—as if to say, "See? See, everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake, too!"
-
-I said that I probably wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I was going through a "well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things" phase, like trying to spin a complaint ("again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates") into a date.
-
-"Rebecca" summed up something she had gotten out of my whole campaign:
-
-> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
-> I really _was_ getting to the point that I hated transwomen
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
-> I hate them, too!
-> Fuck those guys!
-> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:27 AM
-> I hated what happened to my husband, I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was _getting_ to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy
-> But you're actually changing that for me
-> You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion
-> To people who are struggling and have things that are hard
-> It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> the "suffering" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture
-> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> You've made me hate transwomen _less_ now
-> Because I have a model
-> I understand the problem
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/)
-> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> I understand why it's hard
-> I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give
-> This is a better thing for me
-> I did not _want_ to be a hateful person
-> I did not want to take seeming good people as an enemy in my head, while trying to be friends with them in public
-> I think now I can do it more honestly
-> They might not want _me_ as a friend
-> But now I feel less threatened and confused and insulted
-> And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root
-> I'm very grateful for that
-
-... in retrospect, I wish I had taken that as a cue to try to get some sleep. I had already been to the psych ward for sleep-deprivation-induced madness once, in early 2013. That was a very bad time which I didn't want to repeat. But I was so amped up from my war, that I continued to stay up and post—and email.
-
-At 3:30 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott Alexander:
-
-> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: ["The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories."](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) That thing is a _fucking_ Absolute Denial Macro!
-
-At 4:18 _a.m._, I pulled the trigger on the email I had started drafting to Yudkowsky earlier (Subject: "the spirit of intervention"), arguing that neoreaction was onto something really important. It wasn't about politics _per se_; it was about reflectivity and moral progress skepticism. Instead of _assuming_ that we know better than people in the past, we should look at the _causal processes_ that produced our current morality, and reevaluate whether it makes sense (in light of our current morality, which was itself created those same causal processes). Insofar as we could see that the egalitarian strain of our current morality was shaped by political forces rather than anything more fundamental, it was worth reëvaluating. It wasn't that right-wing politics are good as such. More like, being smart is more important than being good (for humans), so if you abandon your claim to goodness, you can think more clearly.
-
-A couple hours later, I was starting to realize I had made a mistake, as reflected to emails sent to Anna Salamon at 6:16 _a.m._ (Subject: "I love you and I'm scared and I should sleep to aboid [_sic_] being institutionalized") and to Michael Vassar 6:32 _a.m._ (Subject: "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)").
-
-Michael got back to me at 10:37 _a.m._:
-
-> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. [...] I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret ["Noreen"] and ["Kevin"], in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
-
-Records suggest that I may have gotten as much as an hour and a half of sleep that afternoon: in an email to Anna at 2:22 _p.m._, I wrote, "I don't know what's real. I should lie down? I'm sorry", and in a message to Ben at 4:09 _p.m._, I wrote, "I just woke up". According to my records, I hung out with Ben; I have no clear memories of this day.
-
-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 said I was afraid that the husband wanted to kill me.
-I presumably eventually got some sleep that night. In the morning, 15 February 2017, 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 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.
-
-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.
-
-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 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 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 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](/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_.
-------
-You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an h-index of 90" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
+You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an [h-index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) of 73" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
In previous months, I had sent thanks-for-your-work fan mail to Blanchard and to Bailey, and later sent Bailey a link to this blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message"). That seemed to have gone over quite well (Bailey shared the link with Blanchard, who [tweeted a link and screenshot–quote](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160)), such that I felt relatively less presumptuous writing to to Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence (and Kevin Hsu and James Cantor for good measure) about my new political project, where I was in favor of the right to transition on morphological freedom grounds, but believed strongly that in order to help people make the best decisions, it was important to be realistic about the limitations of the existing technology and about what the underlying psychological condition actually is. To the extent that my attempts to be realistic put me in the minority of elite opinion in Berkeley, I feared for our collective epistemology.
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.
+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]: 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_.
+ 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)").
(Nice people doing their jobs!)
-Lex seemed to agree with my model, but also agree with "Kyle"'s action recommendations: the general model was that systems are corrupt and unFriendly, responding at every level to incentives for breaking things in order for someone to gain a little more personal power, while most individuals wanted to be good and were just going with the flow. If we could change the flow, they might help us, but they weren't going to see the error of their ways when even _Scott_ had written about lacking the agency to not commit people who shouldn't be committed.
+Lex seemed to agree with my model, but also agree with "Kyle"'s action recommendations: the general model was that systems are corrupt and unFriendly, responding at every level to incentives for breaking things in order for someone to gain a little more personal power, while most individuals wanted to be good and were just going with the flow. If we could change the flow, they might help us, but they weren't going to see the error of their ways when even _Scott_ had [written about lacking the agency to not commit people who shouldn't be committed](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/05/the-right-to-waive-your-rights/).
I said that I _didn't care_ about not making life unpleasant for people trying to do their absolute best in a difficult job. I wanted "Roberta" out of prison. If the best way of accomplishing that goal was to be nice and make sure a lot of receptionists and nurses feel good about themselves, great. If the best way of accomplishing that goal means meant making a lot of receptionists and nurses feel miserable and guilty to the point where they have their own psychotic break and get locked up by their employer, I was _okay with that outcome_.
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
- * 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)
- *
-]
+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: bet resolution and "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