—I said, "Can I touch your breasts?" and she said, "No."
-Nothing happened. What's significant is that I would have _ever_ said that to an actual ("cis") woman in a similar context—definitely not one who was _staying at my house_. I have ethics—and Comment 171 syndrome, which I hope is not the same thing. This was different. I had reason to believe that _she was like me_, and I was less afraid of hurting her on that account—that whatever evolutionary-psychological brain adaptation women have to be especially afraid of males probably _wasn't there_.
+Nothing happened. What's significant is that I would have _ever_ said that to an actual ("cis") woman in a similar context—definitely not one who was _staying at my house_. I have ethics—and Comment 171 syndrome, which I hope is not the same thing. This was different, I thought. I had reason to believe that "Helen" was _like me_, and the reason it felt ethically okay to ask was because I was less afraid of hurting her on that account—that whatever evolutionary-psychological brain adaptation women have to be especially afraid of males probably _wasn't there_.
-------
------
-I messaged an _alumna_ of my [App Academy](https://www.appacademy.io/) class of November 2013. I remembered that on the first day of App Academy, she had asked about the harrassment policy, to which the founder/instructor hesitated and promised to get back to her; apparently, it had never come up before. (This was back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted.) Later in the cohort, she started a quarrel with another student (an 18-year-old boy, in contrast to most attendees already having a college degree) over the offensive political implications of something he had said; someone else pointed out in his defense that he was young. (Young enough, or autistic enough, not to have been trained not to say anything that could be construed as anti-feminist in a professional setting?)
+I messaged an _alumna_ of my [App Academy](https://www.appacademy.io/) class of November 2013. I remembered that on the first day of App Academy, she had asked about the harrassment policy, to which the founder/instructor hesitated and promised to get back to her; apparently, it had never come up before. (This was back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted.) Later in the cohort, she started a quarrel with another student (an 18-year-old boy, in contrast to most attendees already having a college degree) over the offensive political implications of something he had said; someone else pointed out in his defense that he was young. (Young enough not to have been trained not to say anything that could be construed as anti-feminist in a professional setting?)
In short, I wanted to consult her feminism expertise; she seemed like the kind of person who might have valuable opinions on whether men could become women by means of saying so. "[O]n the one hand, I'm glad that other people get to live my wildest fantasy", I said, after explaining the problem, "but on the other hand, maaaaaybe we shouldn't actively encourage people to take their fantasies quite this literally? Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"
She asked if I was at all suicidal. (I wasn't.)
-And just—these are all very reasonable opinions. If I were her (if only!), I'm sure I would believe the same thing. But if so many nice, smart, reasonable liberals privately notice that the public narrative is very singular, and none of them are interested in pointing out that the singular narrative is _not true_, because they mostly approve of the purposes to which the singular narrative is being used—doesn't that—_shouldn't_ that—put a damper on how trustworthy the consensus of the nice, smart, reasonable liberals is? How do you _know_ what's good in the real world, if you [mostly live in the fake world of the narrative](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/)?
+And just—these are all very reasonable opinions. If I were her (if only!), I'm sure I would believe the same thing. But if so many nice, smart, reasonable liberals privately notice that the public narrative is very singular, and none of them are interested in pointing out that the singular narrative is _not true_, because they mostly appreciate how the singular narrative has been culturally important—doesn't that—_shouldn't_ that—put a damper on how trustworthy the consensus of the nice, smart, reasonable liberals is? How do you _know_ what's good in the real world, if you [mostly live in the fake world of the narrative](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/)?
------
------
-... the "quietly stay out of everyone's way" policy lasted about 3 days.
+... the pretense of "quietly stay[ing] out of everyone's way" lasted about 3 days.
In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Director of Communications Rob Bensinger, someone named Amelia[^amelia-rip] said something about closeted trans women (linking to the ["I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42) piece).
> Some of you may have noticed that I've recently decided to wage a suicidally aggressive one-person culture war campaign with the aim of liberating mindshare from the delusional victimhood identity politics mind-virus and bringing it under the control of our familiar "compete for status by signaling cynical self-awareness" egregore! The latter is actually probably not as Friendly as we like to think, as some unknown fraction of its output is counterfeit utility in the form of seemingly cynically self-aware insights that are, in fact, not true. Even if the fraction of counterfeit insights is near unity, the competition to generate seemingly cynically self-aware insights is so obviously much healthier than the competition for designated victimhood status, that I feel good about this campaign being morally correct, even the amount of mindshare liberated is small and I personally don't survive.
-I followed it up the next morning with a post addressed to "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends", pointing out that [...
+I followed it up the next morning with a hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends".[^terf-allusion] As a transhumanist, I believed that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, "being a woman", but apparently I felt like being vague) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not _propagate backwards in time_. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a _goddamned moral responsibility_ to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by _crazy people who think they can edit the past_.
-[TODO: brief summary of "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"; don't want to spend wordcount quoting the whole thing]
+[^terf-allusion]: An allusion to TERFs, "trans-exclusionary radical feminists."
-It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman who I'll call "Noreen."
+It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman who I'll call "Noreen." "_[O]ne_ of the things trans women want is to be referred to as women," she said. "This is not actually difficult, we can just _do_ it." She was pretty sure I must have read the relevant _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/).
-[TODO: summarize comments on "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"]
+I replied that I had an unfinished draft [post about this](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), but briefly, faced with a demand to alter one's language in order to spare someone's feelings, one possible response might be to submit to the demand. But another possible response might be, "_I don't negotiate with terrorists_. People have been using this word to refer to a particular thing for the last 200,000 years since the invention of language, and if that hurts your feelings, that's not my problem." The second response was certainly not very nice. But maybe there were other values than being nice?—sometimes?
-Somewhat awkwardly, I had a date scheduled with "Noreen" that evening. The way that happened was, elsewhere on Facebook on 7 Feburary, I had said that [...]
+In this case, the value being served had to do with there being an empirical statistical structure of bodies and minds in the world that became a lot harder to talk about if you insisted that everyone gets to define how others perceive them. I didn't _like_ the structure that I was seeing, because (like many people in my age cohort, and many people who shared my paraphilic sexual orientation) I had this ideological obsession with androgyny as a moral ideal. The cost of making it harder to talk about the structure might outweigh the benefit of letting everyone dictate how other people should perceive them!
-[TODO public meltdown—
+Nick Tarleton asked me to clarify: was I saying that people who claim that "trans women are women" were sneaking in connotations or denotations that were false in light of so many trans women being (I claimed) autogynephilic?—even when those people also claimed that they didn't mean anything predictive by "women".
- * I ended up escalating into a full-on public meltdown on my own Facebook wall. First posts, 11 Feb "some of you may have noticed" and 12 Feb "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends; summarize discussion
+Yes! I replied. People seemed to be talking as if there was some intrinsic gender-identity switch in the brain, and if a physiological male had the switch in the female position, that meant they Are Trans and need to transition, and I thought that was a really bad model of what the underlying psychological condition was. I thought we should be talking about clever strategies to maximize the quantity "gender euphoria minus gender dysphoria", and it wasn't at all obvious that full-time transition was the uniquely best solution.
- * My terrible, terrible date with "Noreen" was on Sunday 12 February (comment exchange was on 7 February, initial planning PM was 9 February) We saw _West Side Story_ at the Castro Theater. We walked around the Castro and debated the gender thing beforehand. I was so distracted!!
+"Noreen" said that [TODO finish summary ...]
- * Elsewhere on Facebook, "Noreen" complained about the difficulty of dating, I used the opportunity to ask her for a date. (I later commented to "Chaya", "I wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I'm going through a "well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things like try to spin a complaint ("As if only guys have trouble getting dates") into a date")
+I replied, but was circular, right?—that women are people who are happier being categorized as women. However you verbally chose to define it, your mental associations with the word _woman_ were going to be anchored on your experiences with adult human females. I wasn't saying people couldn't transition! You can transition if you want! I just thought the details were really important!
- * more discussion on "nice, mean versions" 13 February
+Someone who I'll call "Kevin" (who I had never interacted with before or since; my post-visibility settings were set to Public) [TODO finish summary ...]
+
+I replied, but this was circular, right? If gender didn't have any (probabilistic!) implications, why did getting gendered correctly matter so much to people?
+
+[TODO: "Kevin"'s reply]
+
+I replied, Human psychology is a very high-dimensional vector space! If you'd bought into an ideology that says everyone is equal and that sex differences must therefore be small-to-nonexistent, then you can choose to selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, and when you're locked into that worldview, it does indeed genuinely look to you like individual personality differences swamp sex differences! And when you're locked into that worldview, looking at the dimensions along which the differences are relatively large is genuinely painful! Once you notice this, maybe you can think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that makes psychological-sex-differences denialism so appealing, while making use of the additional power you gain by letting yourself look at the whole configuration space!
+
+[TODO: "Kevin"'s reply]
+
+I replied, "Really important" was part of the map, not the territory! From the standpoint of someone who had never bought into the everyone-is-equal ideology in the first place, my desperate search for clever strategies to serve the androgyny-as-moral-ideal religion probably looked crazy and immoral. If my ancestors could see me, they'd probably be like, "Why are you making so many goddamned paperclips?! This wasn't supposed to be about paperclips!" And I was like, "But I want _moar paperclips._"
+
+[TODO
+ * I'm sorry that I'm being confusing manic writing style with lots of exclamation points; Michael: is this how you feel all the time?? meltdown
+]
+
+-------
+
+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 match-making 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 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.
+
+------
+
+I continued to be very distracted the next day, Monday 13 February 2017. I went to my office, but definitely didn't get any dayjob work done. I made another seven Facebook posts.
+
+[TODO: Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality]
+
+> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
+
+That one ended up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, me arguing with "Noreen."
+
+[TODO: comments on "nice, mean versions"]
+
+[TODO: emails from Michael Vassar]
+
+[TODO: my mental state "She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state."; visiting Divia]
+
+------
+
+[TODO: my flirtation with NRx was starting to "click"; model clicked; discussions with "Wilhelm"]
+
+------
+
+[TODO: going off the rails night of 13–14 February
+
+Judging by the datestamps on PMs and Facebook posts, it looks like I didn't sleep the night 13–14 February.
+
+Ten Facebook posts between 0048 and 0843.
+
+chat with "Chaya"
+ * "Chaya" Tue Feb 14 02:51:44 PST 2017 So my theory is ["Noreen"] would not be reacting as vehemently had you not recently asked her out / And that she is trying to play a signaling game to salvage her status in the community by distancing herself from you" / "See? See everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake too!
+ "I wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I'm going through a \"well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things like try to spin a complaint (\"As if only guys have trouble getting dates\") into a date",
+"like, maybe it's OK to do male-typical things!
+]
> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
> I really *was* getting to the point that I hated transwomen
> And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root
> I'm very grateful for that
-]
+Email to Scott at 0330 (Subject: "a bit of feedback")
+Email to Yudkowsky at 0418 (Subject: "the spirit of intervention")
-[email Yudkowsky "the spirit of intervention" at 0418 a.m. (I don't even want to read it now) 14 February]
+Email to Anna 0616 (Subject: "I love you and I'm scared and I should sleep to aboid being institutionalized")
+Email to Michael 0632 (Subject: "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)")
-[email to Michael "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)" 0632]
+Michael's reply 1037—
+> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. How were Anna and Divia? I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret ["Noreen"] and ["Kevin"], in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
-Michael's reply—
-> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. How were Anna and Divia? I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret Tchetchetkine and Larch, in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
+I said in an email to Anna on 14 February 14:22, "I don't know what's real. I should lie down? I'm sorry", and messaged Ben at 16:09 with "I just woke up", which suggests that I may have gotten an hour and a half of sleep in between
- * "Chaya" 14 Feb 10:52:04: So my theory is ["Noreen"] would not be reacting as vehemently had you not recently asked her out / And that she is trying to play a signaling game to salvage her status in the community by distancing herself from you" / "See? See everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake too!
+--------
* total meltdown encompassed 31 posts between Saturday 11 February and promising to leave Facebook for a week 0844 15 February
-[according to emails, I hung out with Ben in the day of 14 Feb, but I have no memory of this]
-
[I messaged Ben "I just woke up" at Tue Feb 14 16:09:41 PST 2017, so apparently I did sleep a little that day?!]
email Michael and Anna "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS" 15 Feb 0017
✓ touch up Persongen explanation [pt. 2]
✓ touch up "Helen" key photo explanation
-_ explain date with "Noreen"
-_ summarize "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"
-_ summarize comments on "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"
+✓ summarize "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"
+✓ explain date with "Noreen"
+- Facebook meltdown
_ October 11th posts
-_ explain fight with "Noreen" et al.
+
- Eliezerfic fight: Big Yud tests me [pt. 6]
_ Eliezerfic fight: derail with lintamande [pt. 6]
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—
-✓ matchmaking thread (thread was 4 February, relevant comments were 7 February): https://www.facebook.com/Katie.Cohen821/posts/pfbid02PNKKSCBTC99ULzPsueKvZkYmpNvELrkEfGymcrAfWZPu39LRCyh2bE4a9Ht3yg3Dl
-✓ download Weisberg et al.
-✓ Nate would later admit that this was a mistake: https://intelligence.org/2015/12/11/openai-and-other-news/
-✓ my October 11th? https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154424272680199
-✓ Sophia's October 11?
-✓ "Helen" key photo
+_ check timing of comments on nice/mean versions??
+_ Castro Theatre name/spelling
+_ check that "Totally Excellent" comments with Noreen were all before movie date?
+_ Ben "put a Like on my comments", plural?
_ "pretty productive blogging spree" should be links to minor posts
_ look back at all the Facebook posts I cite in my outline
------
_ click-to-reveal spoiler block image
_ more Discord italics-correction
_ "around plot relevant sentences" ... only revealing, which, specifically?
_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
far editing tier—
+_ probably give Amelia as pseudonym?
_ didn't "Helen" also send me $8 for the key, and the bank statement had her deadname on it?
_ re Persongen, footnote or sentences about how I knew I was wrong to use naïve-Bayes on facets, but I didn't know what was right
_ squeeze "Darkness and Light" into the Eliezerfic account
> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
-> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf
-> The technically-not-lying version: http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm
-> The long version: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
(180 comments)
-the other week, "Chaya" had put up a matchmaking thread on her Facebook wall, hoping to connect friends of hers looking for new romantic partners, and also reminding people about _reciprocity.io_, a site someone in the community had set up to match people to date or hang out with. Brent Dill had commented that _reciprocity.io_ had been useless, and I said (on 7 February) that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males. "Noreen" complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I said she shouldn't apologize
+the other week, "Chaya" had put up a matchmaking thread on her Facebook wall, hoping to connect friends of hers looking for new romantic partners, and also reminding people about _reciprocity.io_, a site someone in the community had set up to match people to date or hang out with. Brent Dill had commented that _reciprocity.io_ had been useless, and I said (on 7 February) that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
+
+matchmaking thread (thread was 4 February, relevant comments were 7 February): https://www.facebook.com/Katie.Cohen821/posts/pfbid02PNKKSCBTC99ULzPsueKvZkYmpNvELrkEfGymcrAfWZPu39LRCyh2bE4a9Ht3yg3Dl
+
+
+Sat Feb 11 12:49:33 PST 2017
+just like it's possible to identify as a woman despite not having unusually many female-typical traits, it's also possible to identify as a liberal despite not having unusually many liberal-typical beliefs
\ No newline at end of file
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