Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told you about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which, at the time, I thought of as a weird private quirk about me that was clearly not the same thing as "actually" being transgender, and which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about—and also about how I used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these great Sequences of blog posts about normatively correct reasoning by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which explained how beliefs are for making predictions about reality (such that it's immoral to _not_ believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are a real thing), and (incidentally) why my obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman was philosophically fraught if not outright delusional, separately from its not being remotely achieveable with forseeable technology.
-In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", I told you about how, in 2016, everyone of significance in my normatively-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly decided that guys like me actually are women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, prompting me to do some reading and interviews that led me to the belief that my weird obsessive erotic fantasy _was_ the same thing (rather, the more common of at least two such things) as actually being transgender, after all—prompting me to start this then-pseudonymous secret ("secret") blog to write about how the entire educated world had been systematically lying to me about the most important thing in my life for the last twelve years. (I also made arrangements to start feminizing hormone replacement therapy. Everyone else was doing it. Why should I miss out on account of being more self-aware?)
+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. That was what my pseudonymous secret ("secret") blog was for.
+But, you know, I didn't want to be a _fanatic_ about it. The previous post leaves off with me promising myself not to talk about this stuff under my real name through June 2017. That was what my pseudonymous secret blog was for.
... the promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed; I _had_ to push back on some of it, at least a little, at least subtly.
-"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread in mid-January. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."
+"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread in mid-January 2017. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."
As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whom I'll call "Chaya", whose marriage had fallen apart after (among other things) her husband transitioned. She told me about the parts of her husband's story that had never quite made sense to her (but which sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, the husband was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just a weird and insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on ["Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/), her response was, "Holy shit, this is _exactly_ what happened with me." It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy.
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-In another post from 4:25 _p.m._ that afternoon, I acknowledged my right-wing influences. You know, you spend nine years reading a lot of ideologically-inconvenient science, all the while thinking, "Oh, this is just interesting science, you know, I'm not going to let myself get _morally corrupted_ by it or anything." And for the last couple years you add in some ideologically-inconvenient political thinkers, too.
+In another post, from 4:25 _p.m._ that afternoon, I acknowledged my right-wing influences. You know, you spend nine years reading a lot of ideologically-inconvenient science, all the while thinking, "Oh, this is just interesting science, you know, I'm not going to let myself get _morally corrupted_ by it or anything." And for the last couple years you add in some ideologically-inconvenient political thinkers, too.
But I was still a nice good socially-liberal [Free-to-Be-You-and-Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_to_Be..._You_and_Me) gender-egalitarian individualist person. Because I understood the is–ought distinction—unlike _some_ people—I knew that I could learn from people's _models_ of the world without necessarily agreeing with their _goals_. So I had been trying to learn from the models of these bad people saying the bad things, until one day _the model clicked_. And the model was _terrifying_. And the model had _decision-relevant implications for the people who valued the things that I valued_—
> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
-That is, when factorizing a joint probability distribution into a Bayesian network, you can do it with respect to any variable ordering you want: a graph with a "wet-streets → rain" edge can represent a set of static observations just as well as a graph with a "rain → wet-streets" edge,[^koller-and-friedman-i] but "unnatural" variable orderings generate a more complicated graph that will give crazy predictions if you interpret it as a _causal_ Bayesian network and use it to predict the results of interventions. Algorithms for learning a network from data prefer graphs with fewer edges as a consequence of Occamian [minimum-message-length epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length):[^koller-and-friedman-ii] every edge is a [burdensome detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ/burdensome-details) that requires a corresponding [amount of evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nj8JKFoLSMEmD3RGp/how-much-evidence-does-it-take) just to [locate it in the space of possibilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis).
+That is, when factorizing a joint probability distribution into a Bayesian network, you can do it with respect to any variable ordering you want: [a graph with a "wet-streets → rain" edge can represent a set of static observations just as well as a graph with a "rain → wet-streets" edge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qPrPNakJBq23muf4n/bayesian-networks-aren-t-necessarily-causal),[^koller-and-friedman-i] but "unnatural" variable orderings generate a more complicated graph that will give crazy predictions if you interpret it as a _causal_ Bayesian network and use it to predict the results of interventions. Algorithms for learning a network from data prefer graphs with fewer edges as a consequence of Occamian [minimum-message-length epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length):[^koller-and-friedman-ii] every edge is a [burdensome detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ/burdensome-details) that requires a corresponding [amount of evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nj8JKFoLSMEmD3RGp/how-much-evidence-does-it-take) just to [locate it in the space of possibilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis).
[^koller-and-friedman-i]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §3.4.1, "Minimal I-Maps".
The next morning, 17 February 2017, my mother took me to the hospital to be evaluated. I didn't want to go. (I had had a very bad time in the psych ward in 2013.) I don't think I was very articulate about expressing this—at least, not in a way my mother could understand. "People are better at taking care of each other than institutions," I said, over and over. "People are better at taking care of each other than institutions!"
-I ultimately compiled. I am again grateful that the doctors' notes were made available to me after the fact. I am very conscious of the unreliability of human memory; I owe much of my ability to tell this Whole Dumb Story to the fact that most of it took place on the internet, giving me chatlogs and emails to look back on. Even in the places where I talk about my remembered thoughts and feelings (that I didn't write down at the time), the documents have been helpful in pinning down exactly when they happened chronologically.
+I ultimately compiled. I am again grateful that the doctors' notes were made available to me online after the fact. I am very conscious of the unreliability of human memory; I owe much of my ability to tell this Whole Dumb Story to the fact that most of it took place on the internet, giving me chatlogs and emails to look back on. Even in the places where I talk about my remembered thoughts and feelings (that I didn't write down at the time), the documents have been helpful in pinning down exactly when they happened chronologically.
The doctors' notes from that day describe my appearance as "somewhat disheveled, though clean, with long & unruly brown hair that he often twirls".
Sometimes, the words written down in official documents really are just lies. I have in my possession an "Involuntary Patient Advisement" form, which claims that I "self presented due to [my] suicidal thoughts". This isn't true. Getting accosted by cops while trying to go into the train station to get back to my apartment is not the same thing as "self presenting"!
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I ended up with a "Rights for Individuals in Mental Health Facilities" handbook, which claims that:
> You have the right to refuse medical treatment or treatment with medications (except in an emergency) unless a capacity hearing is held and a hearing officer or a judge finds that you do not have the capacity to consent to or refuse treatment. The advocate or public defender can assist you with this matter.
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+After being released,
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[TODO: interacting with the outpatient program]
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[TODO I interact more with Vassar
* 22–23 February—
* he asks for my phone number
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff