--- /dev/null
+Title: I'm Dropping the Pseudonym From This Blog
+Date: 2023-07-04 19:30
+Category: commentary
+Tags: personal, meta
+
+> Don't think.
+> If you think, then don't speak.
+> If you think and speak, then don't write.
+> If you think, speak, and write, then don't sign.
+> If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don't be surprised.
+>
+> —Soviet proverb
+
+When I decided I wanted to write about autogynephilia in late 2016, some of my very smart and cowardly friends advised me to use a pseudonym. I recognized this as prudent advice ("then don't sign"), so I [started this blog](/2016/Sep/apophenia/) under a pen name, M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake. (Growing up with the name _Zachary Davis_ in the internet era of one global namespace had taught me to appreciate distinctive names; I have to include my middle initial everywhere in order to avoid drowning in the Google results of the other hundred Zack Davises.)
+
+Awkwardly, however, my ability to recognize prudent advice when posed to me, didn't extend to being the kind of prudent person who could generate such advice—or follow it. Usually when people spin up a pen name to cover their politically-sensitive writing, the idea is to keep the pen name separate from the author's real identity: to maybe tell a few close friends, but otherwise maintain a two-sided boundary such that readers don't know who the author is as a person, and acquaintances don't know the person is an author.
+
+I couldn't do that. I live on the internet. I could put a pen name on the blog itself as a concession to practicality, but I couldn't pretend it wasn't mine. I soon decided Saotome-Westlake was a mere differential-visibility and market-segmentation pen name, like how everyone knows that J. K. Rowling is Robert Galbraith. It was probably better for my career as a San Francisco software engineer for my gender [and worse](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) heterodoxy blog to not show up on the _first_ page of my real-name Google results, but it wasn't a secret. I felt free to claim ownership of this blog under my real name, and make a [running](/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/) [joke](/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/) over links in the other direction.
+
+At this point, the joke is getting old. I feel confident enough in my human capital—and [worried enough about how long human capital will continue to be relevant](/2023/Mar/a-guest-post-on-existential-risk-and-the-irrelevance-of-human-concerns/)—that the awkwardness and confusion of ostensibly maintaining two identities when everyone who actively follows my writing knows who I am, doesn't seem worth the paltry benefit of hiding from future employers.
+
+Because I don't, actually, think I should have to hide. I _don't_ think I've betrayed the liberal values of my youth. If I've ended up in an unexpected place after years of reading and thinking, it's only because the reading and thinking proved themselves more trustworthy than the expectation—that you too might consider joining me here, given the time to hear me explain it all from the beginning.
+
+Maybe that's naïve. Maybe my very smart and cowardly friends had the right end of the expected-utility calculation all along. But I can't live like them. I don't think someone could generate the things I have to say, if they didn't _have_ to say them. So whatever happens, while the world is still here, I intend to think, speak, write—and sign—in accordance with both rationalist and Soviet wisdom.
+
+Not to be surprised.
Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Author: Zack M. Davis
-Date: 2023-07-01 05:00
+Date: 2023-07-07 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, madness, sex differences, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, two-type taxonomy, my robot cult
Status: draft
I kept the Saotome-Westlake byline because, given the world of the current year (such that this blog was even _necessary_), I figured it was probably a smarter play if the _first_ page of my real-name Google search results wasn't my gender [and worse](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) heterodoxy blog. Plus, having made the mistake (?) of listening to my very smart and cowardly friends at the start, I'd face a backwards-compatibility problem if I wanted to unwind the pseudonym: there were already a lot of references to this blog being written by Saotome-Westlake, and I didn't want to throw away or rewrite that history. (The backwards-compatibility problem is also one of several reasons I'm not transitioning.)
-It's only now, just before publishing the first parts of this memoir telling my Whole Dumb Story, that I've decided to drop the pseudonym—partially because this Whole Dumb Story is tied up in enough real-world drama that it would be absurd and dishonorable to keep up the charade of hiding my own True Name while speaking so frankly about other people, and partially because my financial situation has improved (and my timelines to transformative AI have deteriorated) to the extent that the risk of missing out on job opportunities due to open heterodoxy seems comparatively unimportant.
+It's only now, just before publishing the first parts of this memoir telling my Whole Dumb Story, that [I've decided to drop the pseudonym](/2023/Jul/i-am-dropping-the-pseudonym-from-this-blog/)—partially because this Whole Dumb Story is tied up in enough real-world drama that it would be dishonorable and absurd to keep up the charade of hiding my own True Name while speaking so frankly about other people, and partially because my financial situation has improved (and my timelines to transformative AI have deteriorated) to the extent that the risk of missing out on job opportunities due to open heterodoxy seems comparatively unimportant.
(As it happens, Andrea James's Transgender Map website [mis-doxxed me as someone else](https://archive.is/Vg8CK), so I guess the charade worked?)
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Pseudonym Misgivings
-Date: 2022-12-01 11:00
-Category: commentary
-Tags: personal, meta
-Status: draft
-
-> Don't think.
-> If you think, then don't speak.
-> If you think and speak, then don't write.
-> If you think, speak, and write, then don't sign.
-> If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don't be surprised.
->
-> —Soviet proverb
-
-
-Rowling
-Carey Callahan
-Posie Parker
-James Tiptree, Jr. / Racoona Sheldon
\ No newline at end of file
This is a pseudonym for branding and market-segmentation purposes, because it seems like it's instrumentally useful for my gender blogging to take place under a different flag than my personal life and other work, but my real name probably isn't that hard to find.
-
-—M. T. S.-W.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- #
from __future__ import unicode_literals
-AUTHOR = 'M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake'
+AUTHOR = 'Zack M. Davis'
SITENAME = 'The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought'
SITEURL = 'http://unremediatedgender.space'
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff