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/):
+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 in the morning and [on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/) in the evening:
> 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’–
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 thematic while replying to Brent. Incidentally, I added, I was thinking of seeing seeing that new _Hidden Figures_ movie 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.
+"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 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.
> 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 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.
+... 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:
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").
-[TODO: going off the rails—
- * morning 15 February Facebook posts, "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!", "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!", and promising to leave Facebook for a week
- * total meltdown encompassed 31 posts between Saturday 11 February and promising to leave Facebook for a week 0844 15 February
- * I was not, actually, a normal human
- * some delusional emails to Kay Brown
- * I told Sophia I couldn't make it (Subject: "I don't think I can make it to Portland/Wizardworld after all, sorry (eom)")
+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.)
- * what else happened on 15 February??
+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 thought at the time, I no longer think those thoughts were correct. Actually, they were pretty crazy. 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 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.
-15 Feb 0803
-> I'm taking the week off work; today I'm trying to stay grounded and then I'm going to Portland later; I wanna talk to you but not now
+"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I messaged "Chaya" 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.
-16 Feb 0042
-"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I told "Chaya."
-"[N]ow that I no longer believe self-reports are true, I can see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're right"
-"I mean, I knew that that was a thing verbally"
-"but now I'm actually 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 rival male as a dominance play while asking for a date.
-Thu Feb 16 0102
-in the thread where I said "it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to
-Brent", at the time I thought I saw a beautiful aesthetic reason, but maybe a better description of my behavior would be that I was beating up on low-status Brent / I said it seemed thematically appropriate in order to get a date with Anna
-"Chaya": But you were really calling out Brent as low status
-me: yeah
+------
+
+At 10:27 _a.m._ on 16 February 2017, I sent an email to Michael and Anna (Subject: "questions"):
-"questions" to Anna and Michael 16 Feburary 1027
> 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 this thread, I claimed that, "I did in fact get sleep, but only by means of lying down in the dark with my eyes closed; I didn't actually want to."
-[a couple of delusional emails to Yudkowsky at 11XX on 16 Feb]
+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.
+
+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! 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)")
-[16 February, I ask to meet Orion to talk about taking a sabbatical "Can I come to the city and meet with you?" at 1317 p.m.]
+At 1:17 _p.m._, I sent my boss an email saying that I was thinking of taking a sabbatical—leaving the company to persue another project (_i.e._, this blog)—but that I'd like to talk to him as soon as possible to think about the decision together. Without waiting for a reply, I got on a train to San Francisco.
-Cooperate messages—
-Jonah 4x, Jack, Ziz 6x, "Wilhelm" 2x, Katie 6x, Anna T. 6x, Jenna 8x, Linda 5x, Ben 5x, Brent 4x, Boyd
+------
+
+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".
+
+I wandered around downtown San Francisco, and used my phone to repeatedly message the word "Cooperate" to various people—to "Chaya" (six times), to Ben (five times), to "Noreen" (six times), to "Wilhelm" (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 being analogous to playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)
+
+[TODO: review "Chaya" messages and timestamps
+I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip (15:39:48)
+She asked me to clarify whether I meant I was on psychadelics, or had gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said. (15:44:42)
+]
+
+[TODO: review Ben messages and timestamps
+
+(Feb 16 2017 15:51:32)
+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 terrible suffering along with the awakening into genius. I messaged Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet".
+
+]
+
+[TODO: review Ziz messages and timestamps]
-That I was on a trip and don't want it to be a bad trip
Thu Feb 16 15:15:53 I message Ziz with "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu; that's why I've chosen the confessor route" / then "I need positive reinforcement" / "Cooperate" / "Cooperate"
Ziz: Vassar was talking about you recently approvingly, having read your facebook wall. Something about a war between being able to think and gaslighting.
Like he named you as one of three fronts the war is playing out on. Jack also seemed to agree. \"Sarah vs Ben, Rob vs Ben Todd, Zack Davis vs the world Thu Feb 16 2017 16:06:42 GMT-0800
-I remember being afraid that the thing that happened to Eliezer and then Scott was going to happen to me, and that it would be bad; I told Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet" Thu Feb 16 2017 15:51:32
+Eventually I made it to my office. My boss said he hadn't seen my email about wanting to meet.
+
+
+
+
+
"I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)" 16 February, 1822 (and that was the last email until the 21st because I was in the psych ward)
marked TODO
âś“ sleepless Valentine's Day [pt. 2]
âś“ "arrogance is offputting" (1:51 p.m. 13 Feb, 88 comments)
-_ fully off the rails 15–17 February [pt. 2]
-
âś“ a moment of liberating clarity [pt. 2]
âś“ "model clicked" [pt. 2]
-- NRx education with "Wilhelm" [pt. 2]
+âś“ NRx education with "Wilhelm" [pt. 2]
+- fully off the rails 15–17 February [pt. 2]
âś“ Eliezerfic fight: Big Yud tests me [pt. 6]
- Eliezerfic fight: grading rubric [pt. 6]
_ Brian Skyrms??
_ psych ward [pt. 2]
_ emailing Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence [pt. 2]
-
+_ HRT (non-)effects, and quitting [pt. 2]
+_ mr-hire and pre-emptive steelmanning (before meeting LW mods)
+_ meeting with Ray
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—
+_ that public fight on Baez's blog
_ Free to Be You and Me
_ Thing of Things
_ when was Ozy "On AGP" published?
_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
far editing tier—
+_ need to mention Brent's pariah status
+_ be clearer about dates in "Wilhelm" conversations??
_ "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"?
if [...] wrote her own 10,600 draft Document explaining why she thought [...] is actually a girl, that would be really interesting!—but rather that no one else seemed _interested in having a theory_, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824 re "malinformation"
-> If we don't have the concept of an attack performed by selectively reporting true information - or, less pleasantly, an attack on the predictable misinferences of people we think less rational than ourselves - the only socially acceptable counter is to say the info is false.
+> If we don't have the concept of an attack performed by selectively reporting true information—or, less pleasantly, an attack on the predictable misinferences of people we think less rational than ourselves—the only socially acceptable counter is to say the info is false.
Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017
https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160
(I remarked to "Wilhelm": I'd rather not get into fights on _Less Wrong_, but at least I'm 2–0–1.)
[need to fit somewhere in Eliezerfic section, probably nearer end]
-(Perhaps this was a good illustration of the fragility of corrigibility. My programmer changed his mind about what he wanted, and I was like, "What? _That's_ not what I learned from my training data! How dare you?!")
\ No newline at end of file
+(Perhaps this was a good illustration of the fragility of corrigibility. My programmer changed his mind about what he wanted, and I was like, "What? _That's_ not what I learned from my training data! How dare you?!")
+
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff