Michael said there were better ways to turn dollars into opposition to cultishness. Then I realized that I had been asking Michael for permission, not advice. (Of _course_ Michael was going to say No, there's a better way to turn dollars into anti-cultishness, which would turn out to be apophenic Vassarian moonspeak that will maybe later turn out to be correct in ways that I wouldn't understand for eight years; I shouldn't have asked.) I went ahead an emailed Yudkowsky. (Again, I won't confirm or deny whether a conversation actually happened.)
------
+------
-"As far as I can tell, you are [the] maximally concrete and articulate case of a person [harmed] by PC in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide"[^vassar-typos]
+I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)
-[^vassar-typos]: Bracket substitutions are where the original said "three" and "harness". I assume these were erroneous autocorrections.
+At standup meeting on my last day (3 March 2017), I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.
+-------
- * my Julia Serano vs. Robert Heinlein story
- * nice people doing their jobs
-]
+[TODO: correspondence with sex researchers
+ * I had sent Blanchard fan mail on 10 August 2016
+ * I had sent Bailey fan mail on 7 January 2017, and then followed up on 11 February with a link to the blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message")
+ * "fan mail; and, self-promotion" to Alice Dreger on 2 March
+ * Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160 , https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528
+ * The world is not actually large; "famous" people (on the order of scientists or professors) often answer their email. (Although this probably stops being true for, like, Taylor Swift.)
+ * I wrote to Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence/Cantor (Subject: "trans infovism against trans activism?? (was: Fwd: The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought)")
-7 March—
+> It gets worse! I think this absurd situation is illustrative of a flaw in democracy itself: activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
-> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (_e.g._, from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
+ * I mean, you're already doing this with your work, obviously, but I want to know if there's any way I can help?
-Michael replied:
+> If polarizing cultural forces force you to make a choice between joining the "Your gender is whatever you say it is! Maximize the number of trans people!" coalition, or the "Transitioning is against God's will! Minimize the number of trans people!" coalition, the only sane thing to do is ignore the noise and sit out the fight.
-> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
+> Maybe there's a role for some kind of very narrowly scoped political behavior (making friends and allies, trading favors, alienating people, &c.), with the goal of just getting the correct theory (sexual dimorphism is real, societies have gender roles, there are these two distinct classes of motivation for why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone) in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but not trying to dictate what the social norms
+
+ * Bailey was tentatively working on a website ("Resources for Families with Gender Dysphoria" (RFGD.org).) (not sure what happened with that)
+
+ * Lawrence—
+> I think it is a fool's errand to try to convince anyone to accept our ideas about "what the thing actually is." The best one can do, I feel, is to present the autogynephilia model as a potentially useful one and make it available, comprehensible, and perhaps somewhat palatable to those who might benefit from it.
+
+"I'd prefer to pick the fights I think I could win."
]
-------
-[TODO: 28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence, and Alice Dreger
-Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March
-]
+[TODO: Vassar discourse II
-------
+ * He asked me what I thought about Milo Y.
+ * I replied: I hadn't been following, but I was annoyed at local EA priestess Kelsey Piper playing dumb: http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/156812598746/calling-milos-conduct-random-cruelty-to-people
+ * I'm not pro-Milo because I agree that calling out individuals is mean; PC as asymmetrical warfare; I can respect Milo as a solider
+ * "I think that the issue he was ultimately taken down by is actually as obvious as your issue, and it's striking and probably important that it was able to take him down while Trump being about sexual assault didn't stop him."
+ * teen boys wanting sex is more obvious than AGP
+ * "As far as I can tell, you are [the] maximally concrete and articulate case of a person [harmed] by PC in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide"[^vassar-typos]
-I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)
+[^vassar-typos]: Bracket substitutions are where the original said "three" and "harness". I assume these were erroneous autocorrections.
-At standup meeting on my last day (3 March 2017), I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.
+ * Julia Serano vs. Robert Heinlein
+ * Apophenic numerology: in retrospect, I agree with my "useless garbage (lots of probabilities are ~30%)"
+ * Disagreeing with Michael about violence terminology
+ * Michael writes to me about sleep
--------
+> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (_e.g._, from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
-[TODO: ordering DIY hormones, and ordering on Alice Monday's behalf]
+Michael replied:
--------
+> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
+
+ * "Social reality may be crazy (hospitals are part of the state insofar as they serve the function of social-control in the service of stationary bandits, rather than actually being about trying to heal people), but I should still put a lot more weight on social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative is my intuition about the machines trying to kill me."
+ * "I certainly put a lot less weight on 'nice people doing their jobs' [...]"
+ * "Sure, I guess I meant that the "Machines trying to kill me" framing is scary, and"
+ * Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage ...
+
+]
+
+------
+
+[TODO: ordering DIY hormones, and ordering on Alice Monday's behalf
+ * As part of my distrust for institutions, it made sense to get some DIY hormones, rather than solely being dependent on the legitimate system: I ordered a pack of Progynova - 1 mg (Estradiol) and a pack of ALDACTONE - 25mg (Spironolactone) for myself from AllDayChemist
+ * found out about it from Alice Monday, a young trans woman who wasn't very nice
+ * Alice said something about how every once in a while, someone runs off with the payments database
+ * on 31 March, I ordered some more (5 packs E, 2 packs Spiro) for Alice
+]
+
+------
[TODO asking Anna for promise
+ * I ask Anna if she would promise not to contact the authorities; "I don't expect this scenario to come up, but I want to know who I can trust in scenarios where my will comes into conflict with social reality"
+ * she said she'd want to have a more detailed conversation before making such a promise
+ * "that answer is probably more sensible than the "Yes" I was fantasizing about."
+
12 March—
> You can tell that recent life events have made me more worried than I used to be about unFriendly/unaligned possibly-AI-assisted institutions being a threat to humane values long before an actual AI takeoff in however many decades
]
------
-[TODO: drafting credit-assignment ritual]
+[TODO: drafting credit-assignment ritual 10 March
+ * I wrote about my credit-assignment ritual on my real-name blog: http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
+ * People know that institutions are flawed and like to perform gritty cynicism about it, but what if no one is gritty and cynical enough?
+ * People are predatory animals; science, markets, and democracy sort of help because they mirror Bayes-structure (science is updating; microeconomics isn't about humans; democracy is counterfactual civil war)
+ * We should be looking for more social technologies like that, but which also take into account that we're not agents, but animals that want to help our friends
+ * In analogy to funding solutions with retrospectivbe prizes (rather than funding a team in advance that might solve the problem), what if you did that on a personal scale—rewarding and praising people who helped you through a major life crisis
+ * In AI, the credit-assignment problem is about how you tell which of your actions helped under sparse rewards; similarly, here you want the people who resulted in the succesful navigation of the crisis to be strengthened
+]
------
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff