But at the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left [a careful comment in the Facebook thread](/images/facebook_etle_comment.png) (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking.
-A casual friend whom I'll call "Wilhelm" messaged me, complementing me on my comment.
+A casual friend whom I'll call "Thomas" messaged me, complementing me on my comment.
-For background, "Wilhelm" was a fellow old-time _Less Wrong_-er who I had met in the South Bay back in 'aught-nine, while I was doing an "internship"[^internship] in Santa Clara for what was then still the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[^siai]
+For background, "Thomas" was a fellow old-time _Less Wrong_ reader who I had met in the South Bay back in 'aught-nine, while I was doing an "internship"[^internship] in Santa Clara for what was then still the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[^siai]
-Relevantly, "Wilhelm" [was also autogynephilic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions?commentId=93u4sgeARSHfPkqPN) (and aware of it, under that name). The first time I had ever gone crossdressing in public was at a drag event with him in 2010.
+Relevantly, "Thomas" was also autogynephilic (and aware of it, under that name). The first time I had ever gone crossdressing in public was at a drag event with him in 2010.
-<a id="confided-to-wilhelm"></a>As it happened, I had just messaged him a few days earlier, on 22 March 2016, for the first time in four and a half years. (My opening message: "Ray Blanchard's Twitter feed is kind of disappointing, but I'm not sure what I was expecting".) I confided to him that I was seeing an escort on Saturday the twenty-sixth[^twenty-sixth] because the dating market was looking pretty hopeless, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and three female friends agreed that it was not unethical.[^unethical]
+<a id="confided-to-thomas"></a>As it happened, I had just messaged him a few days earlier, on 22 March 2016, for the first time in four and a half years. (My opening message: "Ray Blanchard's Twitter feed is kind of disappointing, but I'm not sure what I was expecting".) I confided to him that I was seeing an escort on Saturday the twenty-sixth[^twenty-sixth] because the dating market was looking pretty hopeless, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and three female friends agreed that it was not unethical.[^unethical]
[^internship]: "Internship" is in scare quotes, because the Singularity Institute at the time was not the kind of organization that offered formal _internships_; what I mean is that there was a house in Santa Clara where a handful of people were trying to do Singularity-relevant work, and I was allowed to sleep in the garage and also try to do work, without being paid.
[^siai]: The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover from the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky [decided that AI would kill everyone by default (and that this was a bad thing)](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG). People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually rebranded as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2013.
-[^twenty-sixth]: Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see from the dates (26 March 2016) that my date with the escort was the same day as the "20% of the ones with penises" post (and my comment thereon and following conversation with "Wilhelm"). They hadn't been stored in my long-term episodic memory as "the same day", likely because the Facebook post only seems overwhelmingly significant in retrospect; at the time, I did not realize what I would be spending the next seven years of my life on.
+[^twenty-sixth]: Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see from the dates (26 March 2016) that my date with the escort was the same day as the "20% of the ones with penises" post (and my comment thereon and following conversation with "Thomas"). They hadn't been stored in my long-term episodic memory as "the same day", likely because the Facebook post only seems overwhelmingly significant in retrospect; at the time, I did not realize what I would be spending the next seven years of my life on.
[^unethical]: Another ethically mitigating factor is that the escort had a blog where she wrote in detail about how much she liked her job. The blog posts seemed like credible evidence that she wasn't being morally-relevantly coerced into it. Of course all escorts have to put up marketing copy that makes it sound like they enjoy their time with their clients even if they privately hate it, but the blog seemed "real", not part of the role.
I had said that I was happy for him and respected him, even while my own life remained very pro-dysphoria, pro-ponytails, and anti-politics.
-After complimenting me on my comment on Yudkowsky's post on the twenty-sixth, "Wilhelm" elaborated that he thought Yudkowsky's post was really irresponsible, because virtually all of the men in Yudkowsky's audience with gender dysphoria probably had erotic target location errors. "Wilhelm" went on:
+After complimenting me on my comment on Yudkowsky's post on the twenty-sixth, "Thomas" elaborated that he thought Yudkowsky's post was really irresponsible, because virtually all of the men in Yudkowsky's audience with gender dysphoria probably had erotic target location errors. "Thomas" went on:
> To get a little paranoid, I think the power to define other people's identities is extremely useful in politics. If a political coalition can convince you that you have a persecuted identity or sexuality and it will support you, then it owns you for life, and can conscript you for culture wars and elections. Moloch would never pass up this level of power, so that means a constant stream of bad philosophy about identity and sexuality (like trans theory).
>
Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment is that around this time was my break with progressive morality. 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 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 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 "Wilhelm", I was starting to question it now.
+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 "Thomas", I was starting to question it now.
Among many works which I had previously skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet was the anti-democratic political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
------
-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.
+As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Thomas", 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, "Thomas" 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.
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.)
-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.
+I supposed I was sort of modeling "Thomas" 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.
He was a useful sounding board when I was frustrated with my so-far-mostly private trans discussions.
"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.
-In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Frantz (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of [_Thing of Things_](https://thingofthings.substack.com/)) 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.[^ozy-authority] I remarked to "Wilhelm" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (who I otherwise liked) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
+In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Frantz (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of [_Thing of Things_](https://thingofthings.substack.com/)) 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.[^ozy-authority] I remarked to "Thomas" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (who I otherwise liked) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
[^ozy-authority]: Although the fact that Ozy had [commented](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/) [on](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/) the theory at all—which was plausibly causally downstream from me yelling at everyone in private—was probably net-positive for the cause; there's no bad publicity for new ("new") ideas. I got a couple of [reply](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) [pieces](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/) out of their engagement in the early months of this blog.
-"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[^ozy-pronouns] wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.
+"Thomas" 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[^ozy-pronouns] wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.
-[^ozy-pronouns]: The feminine pronoun in this paragraph reflects the fact that "Wilhelm" and I used feminine pronouns for Ozy in our private messages. I don't misgender people _in public!_ But I do argue that public summaries of private conversations are not, technically, the same thing.
+[^ozy-pronouns]: The feminine pronoun in this paragraph reflects the fact that "Thomas" and I used feminine pronouns for Ozy in our private messages. I don't misgender people _in public!_ But I do argue that public summaries of private conversations are not, technically, the same thing.
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_.
[^scare-quotes]: I mentioned that these days, I just used scare quotes rather than tacking the word _aspiring_ in front.
-"Wilhelm" summarized the NRx response:
+"Thomas" summarized the NRx response:
> 1. Women should never have been weaponiz[ed] by democracy into being cultural/corporate commissars
> 2. Why is an unmarried woman making a nuisance of herself in a mostly male community? Where is her family? Why is she not married yet?
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).
-"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.
+"Thomas" 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 "Thomas" 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.
("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!")
-When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Wilhelm" mentioned it as a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the evolutionarily stable strategies of relating had been re-labeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
+When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Thomas" mentioned it as a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the evolutionarily stable strategies of relating had been re-labeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
He advised me that if I did find an androgynous women I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a small "dab" of patriarchy worked better than none.
-(What I really wanted was to have the kind of meta psychological engineering conversation I was having with "Wilhelm", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)
+(What I really wanted was to have the kind of meta psychological engineering conversation I was having with "Thomas", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)
I wasn't immediately sold on all these heresies—but I was _listening_. 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.
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 constituting an act of playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)
+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 "Thomas" (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 constituting an act of playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)
"I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip", I told "Chaya" and Ben. "Chaya" asked me to clarify whether I meant I had taken acid, or gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said.
[TODO: ... continue harvesting email to see what happened in April]
-[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Chaya", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Wilhelm", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi]
+[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Chaya", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Thomas", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff