-----
-After being released from psych prison, arrangements were made for made for me to attend the Intensive Outpatient Program at Kaiser Walnut Creek. That was also anti-helpful, but it was much less of a problem. The outpatient psych authorities are of course just as stupid and overbearingly paternalistic as the inpatient psych prison wards, with the essential
+After being released from psych prison, arrangements were made for made for me to attend the Intensive Outpatient Program at Kaiser Walnut Creek—more school-like group sessions where they talk about feelings and coping strategies. That was also anti-helpful, but it was much less of a problem. The outpatient psych authorities are of course just as stupid and overbearingly paternalistic as the inpatient psych prison authorities, with the crucial difference that they don't have any power. In psych prison, the doors are locked; you physically can't leave.
+The outpatient program has a few social-pressure sales tactics meant to persuade you that you have some underlying condition that requires their "care". They were unpersuaded by my cause-and-effect reasoning that I had gone crazy due to stress-induced sleep deprivation, and was now fine after having gotten sleep. Getting sleep _fixed the problem_.
-The intake assessment
+But the doors aren't locked; they don't actually have any power over you that you don't give them.
-"retreats into highly intellectualized, incomprehensible philosophy as a defense against disorganization/psychotic thought process".
+The intake assessment describes me as "retreat[ing] into highly intellectualized, incomprehensible philosophy as a defense against disorganization/psychotic thought process". (Well, all philosophy looks incomprehensible when you, personally, don't comprehend it.) Another note describes me as "hostile, belligerent, and condescending throughout the program" on the morning of 24 February. (They deserved it.)
+-----
-[TODO: interacting with the outpatient program]
+I started talking more with Michael Vassar. He sent me an email asking for my phone number: "Thinking much more about how you can help me to meet my needs than about how I can help you though, and feel guilty about it given the situation, so feel free to tell me 'no, not now'." I replied, "I like helping people meet their needs! It's prosocial!"
+On a separate email thread, I ended up mentioning something to Michael that I shouldn't have, due to a previous confidentiality promise I had made. (I can tell you _that_ I screwed up on a secrecy obligation, without revealing what it was.) I felt particularly bad about this given that I had been told that Michael was notoriously bad at keeping secrets, and asked him to keep this one secret as a favor to me.
------
+Michael replied:
+
+> Happy to not talk about it. Just freaking ask. I can easily honor commitments, just not optimize for general secrecy. The latter thing is always wrong. I'm not being sloppy and accidentally defecting against the generalized optimization for secrecy, I'm actively at war with it. We need to discuss this soon.
+
+I asked what were the ways he thought I could help him meet his needs. He said that he thought my fight was ground zero in a war against words. If I had the mental composure to hold up, knowing that I had allies, he really thought that full documentation of my experiences would be the maximum leverage of my time. Otherwise, he was all but unable to ask for money for himself, even if he honestly thought he was the best use of it, but he was able to ask for nonprofit funding. What about starting a nonprofit, with me as executive director and him as fundraiser?—the Society for the Preservation of Generative Grammar and for Defense Against Structural Violence, providing legal defense for people whose rights or livelihood are threatened by political correctness. (Subject: "Re: You're really bad at communicating!")
+
+Regarding the suggestion to document my experiences, I replied, "Too narcissistic!" This is incredibly ironic in hindsight, given the absurd amount of effort I've ended up spending since 2019 writing up this Whole Dumb Story. But you see, I had to try making object-level arguments _first_. It was only after that conclusively failed, that I've gone to the narcissistic extreme of full documentation of my experiences as a last resort. (Or as therapy.)
+
+I didn't want to start a nonprofit, either. I thought our kind of people were smart enough to function without the taboo against giving money to individuals instead of faceless institutions. I had $97,000 saved up from being a San Francisco software engineer who doesn't live in San Francisco. Besides keeping most of it as savings, and spending some of it to take a sabbatical from my career, I was thinking it made sense to spend some of it just giving unconditional gifts to Michael and others who had helped me, although I wanted to think carefully about the details before doing anything rash.
[TODO I interact more with Vassar
- * 22–23 February—
- * he asks for my phone number
- * I messed up by revealing secret info to Michael (I can say _that_ I messed up a secret, without revealing what the secret was)
- * Michael says that he can easily keep committments; "I'm not being sloppy and accidentally defecting against the generalized optimization for secrecy, I'm actively at war with it."
- * 28 February "Re: You're really bad at communicating!", nonprofit suggestion
- * "I really think that fill documentation of your experience would be maximum leverage for your time"— my reply, "Too narcissitic!" (oops!)
- * Between my checking and brokerage account, I have ~$97K to play with
* "rationalist community health check?? asking for one bit of advice"
* going through a "Having a nervous breakdown, suddenly understanding all the things Michael has been trying to tell me for eight years that I didn't understand at the time, and subsequently panicking and running around yelling at everyone because I'm terrified of the rationalist community degenerating into just another arbitrary Bay Area humanist cult when we were supposed to be the Second Scientific Revolution" phase of my intellectual development
* nice people doing their jobs
7 March—
-> 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.
-reply—
+> 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.
+
+Michael replied:
+
> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
]
-]
+-------
[TODO: 28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
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
+
+------
+
+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.)
+
+At standup meeting on my last day, 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.
+
-------
On 12 March 2017, I made a Facebook post trying to explain my new outlook:
-> The core of the update is that it turns out to be surprisingly useful to model the world as being made out of three things: people (who can be friends, enemies, or strangers), evolved social-control mechanisms (which use people as components as well as trains, pieces of paper, credit cards, web forms, &c.), and rocks. Instead of taking the things that people say about the evolved social-control mechanisms literally with respect to what _you_ think the words mean, you should constantly be making predictions (preferably predictions that you can get feedback about on the timescale of seconds or minutes) about what will happen if you interact with the social-control mechanisms in a particular way, and then noticing if the predictions come true or not. It turns out that non-nerds—you know, those people we disdain for being stupid or sexist or voting for Donald Trump or whatever your favorite excuse is—already knew this; they just didn't tell you because they were—correctly—modeling you as a component in the evolved social-control mechanisms rather than as a person.
+> The core of the update is that it turns out to be surprisingly useful to model the world as being made out of three things: people (who can be friends, enemies, or strangers), evolved social-control mechanisms (which use people as components as well as trains, pieces of paper, credit cards, web forms, _&c_.), and rocks. Instead of taking the things that people say about the evolved social-control mechanisms literally with respect to what _you_ think the words mean, you should constantly be making predictions (preferably predictions that you can get feedback about on the timescale of seconds or minutes) about what will happen if you interact with the social-control mechanisms in a particular way, and then noticing if the predictions come true or not. It turns out that non-nerds—you know, those people we disdain for being stupid or sexist or voting for Donald Trump or whatever your favorite excuse is—already knew this; they just didn't tell you because they were—correctly—modeling you as a component in the evolved social-control mechanisms rather than as a person.
-----
I met Jessica in March
-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.)
-
-At standup meeting on my last day, 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.
[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