------
-http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/
+If I had to pick a _date_ for my break with progressive morality, it would be 7 October 2017. Over the past couple days, I had been having a frustrating Messenger conversation with some guy, which I would [later describe as feeling like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
-and on my real-name blog
+Over the previous week and months, I had been frustrated with the _Zeitgeist_, but I was trying to not to be loud or obnoxious about it, because I wanted to be a good person and not hurt anyone's feelings and not lose any more friends. ("Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she had said, "just find talking vaguely aversive.")
+
+The conversation made it very clear to me that I could have no peace with the _Zeitgeist_. It wasn't the mere fact that some guy in my social circle was being dumb and gaslighty about it. It was that fact that his gaslighting was an unusually pure distillation of _socially normative_ behavior in Berkeley 2016. There were more copies of him than there were of me.
+
+It was a Huckleberry Finn moment for me: opposing this was worth losing friends, worth hurting feelings, and, actually, worth the other thing. I posted on Facebook and [on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/):
> the moment of liberating clarity when you resolve the tension between being a good person and the requirement to pretend to be stupid by deciding not to be a good person anymore đź’–
+Michael Vassar emailed me about it, and we ended up meeting once. (I had also emailed him back in August, when I had heard from Anna that he was also skeptical of the transgender movement (Subject: "I've heard of fake geek girls, but this is ridiculous").)
+
------
I wrote about my frustrations to Scott Alexander of _Slate Star Codex_ fame (Subject: "J. Michael Bailey did nothing wrong"). The immediate result of this is that he ended up including a link to one of Kay Brown's study summaries (and expressing surprise at the claim that non-androphilic trans woman have very high IQs) in his [November links post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/), and he [got some pushback even for that](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i).
------
-[TODO SECTION: conversations with "Wilhelm" late 2016, early 2017]
-
-As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend.
-
-I kept in touch with "Wilhelm".
-
-[TODO: election thoughts; Clinton vs. Trump on Russia hawkishness]
+As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Wilhelm", who provided a refreshing contrary perspective to the things I was hearing from everyone else. When the rationalists were anxious that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended an increased risk of nuclear war, "Wilhelm" pointed out that Clinton was actually much more hawkish towards Russia.
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.
-[TODO: egregore theory; negotiating with egregores and Aumann agreement; coalition of the fringes burning down organic structure
+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://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.
-I've heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this is ridiculous.
+Rationalists implicitly seek [Aumann-like agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem) with perceived peers: 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 said I was modeling him as possessed by the NRx egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist diaspora.
-]
+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.)
-[TODO: NRx the nice parts, Brazil vs. South Africa]
+I supposed I was sort of modeling "Wilhelm" as being possessed by the neoreaction egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist egregore.
-[TODO: comics and 72 virgins: https://tapas.io/episode/308349]
+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.
"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.
-[TODO: hypomasculine men, more paperclips]
+In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Frantz (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of _Thing of Things_) 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. I remarked to "Wilhelm" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (who I otherwise liked and respected) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
-[TODO: Susan Fenimore Cooper]
+"Wilhelm" didn't think this was feasible. The problem, he explained, was that ""hypomasculine men are often broken people who idolize feminists, and worship the first one who throws a few bones of sympathy towards men". (He had been in this category, so he could make fun of them.) Thus, in feminist communities, the female person would win a priestly battle, regardless of quality of arguments. It wasn't Ozy's fault, really. She—"Wilhelm" used feminine pronouns for Ozy, although I always said _they_ in public—wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.
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_.
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).
-[TODO: further counter-replies, eminence]
+"Wilhelm" said that exceptions could be made for intellectually eminent women at the discretion of the authorities, but that the vast majority of young women didn't have the temperment to participate in male communities, instead having incentives to behave like busybodies, cause drama, and test males for mates. This wasn't something "Wilhelm" had previously wanted to believe, even in his anti-feminist (but not yet fully reactionary) days. But once you understood how past generations would have seen certain behavior, upon seeing it in the wild, among people who claim to be "above" gender roles—it was hard to unsee.
+
+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.
-[TODO: egalitarian relationships don't work]
+("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!")
+
+[TODO:
+ * (check the date break between this part and the previous)
+ * I mentioned re-reading the part of the "Gentle Introduction" about ignoble privilege
+ * "Wilhelm" mentions this as a reason not to seek the approval of women; they have not be ennobled by being used as a proxy weapon
+ * androgynous women (the kind of women I particularly like!!) have the "chip on their shoulder" effect particularly amplified
+ * mention "Beatrice" somewhere in here? (99% OKCupid match; "nowhere to go but down")
+ * actionable advice: if I find an androgynous women I'm into; don't feel the need to seek her approval or treat her as a moral authority; she will have plenty of flaws of her own due to the ignobling forces she's been exposed to
+ * if your goal is to have an egalitarian relationship, and do what most sensitive men think of as equality, it degenerates into female moral superiority which wrecks the relationship (women want to win arguments in the moment, but they don't actually want to lead the relationship)
+ * a strange conclusion: the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a "dab" of patriarchy
+ * what I wanted was to have the kind of meta-psychological engineering conversation we were having now, with the woman herself; but the few hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were out of my league
+]
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.
------
-"Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she said, "just find talking vaguely aversive." In a Facebook thread in January 2017 about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, she said something about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria.
+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), and told me to go away.
+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.
------
âś“ "arrogance is offputting" (1:51 p.m. 13 Feb, 88 comments)
_ fully off the rails 15–17 February [pt. 2]
-_ a moment of liberating clarity [pt. 2]
+âś“ a moment of liberating clarity [pt. 2]
- NRx education with "Wilhelm" [pt. 2]
-_ "model clicked"/Feb. discussion with "Wilhelm" [pt. 2]
+_ "model clicked" [pt. 2]
âś“ Eliezerfic fight: Big Yud tests me [pt. 6]
- Eliezerfic fight: grading rubric [pt. 6]
_ Eliezerfic fight: derail with lintamande [pt. 6]
_ Eliezerfic fight: knives, and showing myself out [pt. 6]
-_ psych ward [pt. 2]
-_ emailing Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence [pt. 2]
-
- regrets, wasted time, conclusion [pt. 6]
- December 2019 winter blogging vacation [pt. 4]
_ not talking about pivotal acts, downstream of not believing in Speech?
_ Alyssa lying about me [pt. 4]
_ Brian Skyrms??
+_ psych ward [pt. 2]
+_ emailing Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence [pt. 2]
+
it was actually "wander onto the AGI mailing list wanting to build a really big semantic net" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9HGR5qatMGoz4GhKj/above-average-ai-scientists)
With internet available—
+_ Thing of Things
+_ when was Ozy "On AGP" published?
+_ Yudkowsky Tweet about identifying as a decision theorist
+_ check meme theory links
+_ "nonplussed"
+_ what was the timestamp of the aAL "moment of liberating clarity" post? Facebook version was Fri Oct 7 09:23:06 PDT 2016
+_ "I begin to show an interest in programming, which might be the most obvious sign so far" (is this both versions of "not coming out" piece, or just the original?)
_ The Parable of the Honest Man and the Thing
_ Susan Fenimore Cooper
_ Hidden Figures
_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
far editing tier—
+_ "people with fragile identities" dialogue doesn't fit the flow, probably cut or move
+_ "maximize the number of trans ppl" conversation should briefly sample the guy's bogus conjunction of arguments
_ is the Glowfic author "Lintamande ... they" or "Lintamande ... she"?
_ explain plot of _Planecrash_ better
_ CfAR's AI pivot??
_ get exact dates and correct Sequencing on late 2016 conversations
_ mention Michael's influence and South Park recs in late 2016?
_ probably give Amelia as pseudonym?
-_ didn't "Helen" also send me $8 for the key, and the bank statement had her deadname on it?
_ re Persongen, footnote or sentences about how I knew I was wrong to use naĂŻve-Bayes on facets, but I didn't know what was right
_ squeeze "Darkness and Light" into the Eliezerfic account
_ clarify Sarah dropping out of the coordination group
_ backlink Yudkowsky's implicit political concession
terms to explain on first mention—
+_ NRx
_ TERF?
_ Civilization (context of dath ilan)
_ Valinor (probably don't name it, actually)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff