Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment is that around this time was my [break with progressive morality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/). I had never _really_ been progressive, as such. (I was registered to vote as a Libertarian, the legacy of a teenage dalliance with Ayn Rand and the [greater](https://web.archive.org/web/20070531085902/http://www.reason.com/blog/) [libertarian](https://praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm) [blogosphere](https://cafehayek.com/).) But there was still an embedded cultural assumption, reflected in [my antisexist faith](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), that, as far as America's culture wars went, I was unambiguously on the right (_i.e._, left) side of history, [the Blue Team and not the Red Team](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/).
-Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Waton affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment.
+Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Watson affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment.
With some prompting from a right-wing friend (a self-aware autogynephile who I had gone crossdressing in public once with back in the early 'tens, who had gone trad and started lifting weights in the intervening few years and felt good about his AGP starting to abate), I was starting to question it now.
+[TODO: ref-back/merge with description of "Wilhelm" earlier]
+
Among many works which I had previously skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet was Mencius Moldbug's anti-democratic (!) political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), which caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent [an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/); the Republicans, [representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/), can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long. The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to try to _control the public mind_; if you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a _de facto_ state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality" in order to sidestep the [Establishment Clause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause). Moldbug contends that all of this is Bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance; it's not a coincidence that all functional _non_-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO (possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader but not meddle in day-to-day operations) with the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions, rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with _democracy_).
try being proud?
+> One blog is devoted entirely to quote unquote Scientific Transformations, so like, it will be a picture of a pretty girl in a space station with a caption that reads, Professor MacMillan stepped out of the body regenerator and his assistant smirked at the error. Or whatever. Like the premise is always nanorobots, or body switching machines, or like, who even knows? Gender-change rayguns. There are just all these pictures of women with captions explaining that they used to be men. <u>It's stupid that these are supposed to be, like, scientific</u>, because obviously science that can turn you into Pamela Anderson isn't science anyone is working on. There are archives of these things that go way back into the history of the internet but that shit is not science, it is fucking magic.
+<u>yes</u>
+> If you're a straight guy who's into the idea of being turned into a girl there's not a lot of girls who are interested in being involved in that, probably.
+
+[TODO: cry emoji]
+
+> Lots of other fetishes or whatever, like, you can frame them as cool. People can look cool getting tied up and whipped. People can look cool pissing on each other, even. Imagine if Nine Inch Nails put that in a video. You could make that cool. But wanting to be a girl? Not even like, I have known my whole life, man trapped in the body of a woman, whatever. Anyone can tell you that James is not a woman. James knows who Jennifer Finney Boylan is, and <u>he is no Jennifer Finney Boylan</u>. He's just some fuckin dude who wishes he was allowed to wear dresses.
+
+Jenny Boylan who married a woman & transitioned at 42? You might have more in common with her than you think!
+
+> This is how James knows he's an autogynephiliac instead of a transvestite. Cross-dressing seems exciting in theory but in practice it is the saddest and most disappointing thing in the world.
+
+so real
+
+> That should have been the end of his career as a transvestite, but the next night Nicole was doing something else, who knows what, so he didn't jack off all day and then he tried the dress on again at like eleven o'clock and managed to come that time, but it felt even worse than jacking off while reading stupid Internet caption porn. Like, he came, but there was barely even an orgasm, and there was no euphoria, and then he was just like, What the hell. Am I not a transvestite? Do I not like dresses? Do I have <u>a fetish that you cant' even do in real life</u>, like being turned on by being eaten by slutty giants?
+
+[Underlined without comment.]
+
+> As soon as Maria Griffiths sees James Hanson in the Star City, Nevada Wal-Mart she's like, That kid is trans and <u>he</u> doesn't even know it yet.
+
+★
+
+> Because if he's being totally honest with himself, on some level James has already figured out that this girl is trans and while he hasn't processed what that means yet he is having this desperate magnetic attraction to her. Like not even sexual. Just like, I want to be your Facebook friend or something. I need to grab you, to have you in my life. Whatever.
+
+★
_ psychiatric disaster
With internet available—
+_ TSRoadmap mis-identified my pseudonym
+_ did _Nevada_ win a Lambda award or anything like that?
+_ when did I order _Nevada_? when did I order _MTiMB_?
+_ Samo's comment, and what did the TERF phenomenon look like in 2016?
_ "Tiresias" comment
_ year of MIRI rebrand; think it was 2013; check before inserting (for ^siai footnote)
_ stats of SIAI vs. SingInst hits (for ^siai footnote)
from "Go Forth and Create the Art"—
> To the best of my knowledge there is _no_ true science that draws its strength from only one person. To the best of my knowledge that is _strictly_ an idiom of cults. A true science may have its heroes, it may even have its lonely defiant heroes, but _it will have more than one_.
+contrast Sequences-era "Study Science, Not Just Me" with dath ilan sneering at Earth
+
+I have no objection to the conspiracies in Brennan's world! Because Brennan's world was just "here's a fictional world with a different social structure" (Competitive Conspiracy, Cooperative Conspiracy, &c.); sure, there was a post about how Eld Science failed, but that didn't seem like _trash talk_ in the same way
+
contrast the sneering at Earth people with the attitude in "Whining-Based Communities"
from "Why Quantum?" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDL9NDEXPxYpDf4vz/why-quantum)
I should have said: _You_ are a product of your time. _Eliezer_ has no integrity. Or rather, he's forgotten that you can't define the word "integrity" any way you want.
-I talked in #drama _about_ talking in Eliezerfic because it seemed like a free action, but the fact that I felt crummy/depressed afterwards suggests that it wasn't actually a free action (but still a substantial discount compared to screwing up in a Yudkowsky-hosted space)
\ No newline at end of file
+I talked in #drama _about_ talking in Eliezerfic because it seemed like a free action, but the fact that I felt crummy/depressed afterwards suggests that it wasn't actually a free action (but still a substantial discount compared to screwing up in a Yudkowsky-hosted space)
+
-03/13/2022,5961\r
+03/25/2022,5965\r
04/09/2022,5965\r
+04/15/2022,5965\r
04/21/2022,5990\r
+04/24/2022,5997\r
04/29/2022,6141\r
+05/06/2022,7127\r
05/08/2022,7392\r
+05/12/2022,7392\r
05/14/2022,7412\r
+05/15/2022,7420\r
05/15/2022,7757\r
+05/19/2022,7819\r
05/20/2022,8783\r
05/22/2022,8682\r
+05/22/2022,8783\r
+05/29/2022,8858\r
05/29/2022,9785\r
+05/30/2022,10308\r
06/04/2022,10655\r
+06/05/2022,11001\r
06/05/2022,11437\r
+06/09/2022,11537\r
06/10/2022,11537\r
+06/12/2022,13077\r
06/16/2022,13076\r
+06/24/2022,13089\r
06/26/2022,13285\r
+07/03/2022,13341\r
07/08/2022,13341\r
+07/17/2022,15026\r
07/17/2022,16167\r
+07/22/2022,16458\r
07/23/2022,15642\r
+07/23/2022,15717\r
07/23/2022,19852\r
07/29/2022,18832\r
+07/29/2022,20082\r
+07/31/2022,20229\r
08/03/2022,20388\r
+08/05/2022,21349\r
08/07/2022,23247\r
+08/13/2022,24379\r
08/14/2022,25009\r
+08/19/2022,25483\r
08/20/2022,26132\r
+08/20/2022,34503\r
08/25/2022,35059\r
+08/27/2022,36215\r
08/28/2022,36784\r
+09/02/2022,37671\r
09/03/2022,39599\r
+09/04/2022,40484\r
09/09/2022,41815\r
+09/11/2022,44068\r
09/15/2022,44858\r
+09/17/2022,45628\r
09/18/2022,45706\r
+09/22/2022,46724\r
09/25/2022,47740\r
+09/30/2022,49173\r
09/30/2022,49533\r
+10/02/2022,51024\r
10/07/2022,51922\r
+10/09/2022,52989\r
10/14/2022,53472\r
+10/16/2022,56344\r
10/20/2022,58146\r
+10/21/2022,60860\r
10/25/2022,62922\r
+10/28/2022,62974\r
10/29/2022,64086\r
+10/30/2022,66302\r
11/04/2022,66317\r
+11/04/2022,67058\r
11/06/2022,68083\r
+11/10/2022,68083\r
11/12/2022,69792\r
+11/18/2022,71296\r
11/20/2022,71859\r
+11/24/2022,73348\r
11/27/2022,74002\r
+12/03/2022,74002\r
12/16/2022,74039\r
+12/26/2022,74255\r
wordcounts = []
keep_going = True
while keep_going:
- subprocess.run(["git", "checkout", "HEAD~10"])
+ subprocess.run(["git", "checkout", "HEAD~5"])
wordcount = wordcount_at_this_sha()
date = date_at_this_sha()
if date < datetime.date(2022, 4, 1):
keep_going = False
wordcounts.append((date, wordcount))
+ # don't leave the head detached
+ subprocess.run(["git", "checkout", "master"])
return sorted(wordcounts)
2014-07-17
(03:36:14 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: my hope was to actually make progress on the monstrously self-indulgent story that I thought should be finished by election day https://gist.github.com/zackmdavis/3194ff3262028c54ce90
+
+https://gist.github.com/zackmdavis/cc535f594ff7d4d6c431
pre-memoir—
+_ Nevada Annotations
_ I'm Dropping the Pseudonym From This Blog
_ Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
_ Janet Mock on Late Transitioners
Minor—
-_ Nevada Annotations
_ Beyond the Binary
_ Book Review: Johnny the Walrus
_ Happy Meal
"You're conflating sex and gender"—the problem is, Does anyone actually want to change "gender"?—they're bundled for a reason
-LW/aAL—
-_ You and What Army? Or, The Wisdom to Know the Difference
-_ different ways of factoring a Bayes net of the same data make different predictions about interventions
-_ COVID life-years (rather than deaths)
-_ Signals, Deception, and the Precession of Simulacra (LW)
-_ Contra Scott Alexander on Mental Illness; Or, Oh God, Please Don't (aAL/LW)
-_ Comment on Wireheading /r/rational
-_ Second Derivative (Paul Christiano on growth timelines)
-_ Selective Reporting and Clustering
-_ Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization—marginally neglected truths are more
-_ Explicit Disjunction vs. Contradictory Arguments from a Bottom Line
-_ How they Pin It Down: Equal Environments Assumption Edition https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cXzTpSiCrNGzeoRAz/conjunction-controversy-or-how-they-nail-it-down
-_ Social Construction is an Embedded Agency Problem
-
it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictures
Training Data—"get used" to the new definitions, in time
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff