Eliezer Schlomo Yudkowsky / LessWrong

[Darndirty]

I probably deserve the autistic ratings for this, but his fanfiction really pisses me off. It's basically him shitting all over J. K. Rowling for not making the main character an overpowered Stu who outwits everyone using his Logic Powers. I only read a couple of chapters, but there's this massive undercurrent of "lol, if only Rowling was as smart as I was, then she would have written the book like this!"

Also, he should probably stop fellating Orson Scott Card, I hear he doesn't approve of homosexuality.

Harry potter is kind of a Stu though. And Hermione is definitly a Mary sue

 

[DykesDykesChina]

No one wants to read that wall of autism, man.

Germany was nowhere close to making an atomic bomb. Some German scientists even derided relativity as "Jewish physics" at one point, though voices of reason prevailed. Drivng all the Jewish scientists away certainly didn't help matters at all. The United States sent an agent, Moe Berg, to assassinate Werner Heisenberg in Switzerland if he was approaching the discovery, and he didn't because Heisenberg was nowhere close.

As for the economics, I'd recommend reading The Wages Of Destruction by Adam Tooze, but there's no way you'd ever read a book in your life so I might as well not bother.

This is true, German scientists never got close to even starting a chain reaction, let alone a nuclear explosive.

There are many lulzy conspiracy theorie about Nazi super weapons in sikrit tunnel systems below the hills of Thuringa, BTW. They build upon the (true) fact that the V2 missiles were manufactured by prisoners in the underground Mittelwerke in Thuringa, but these conspiracy theories expand from the V2 to laser cannon, nuclear bombs, Nazi UFOs ("Reichsflugscheiben"), freeze rays and probably Death Stars.

 

[Camarque]

Honestly, I think LW has tons of useful information, Yudkowsky's explanation of the Bayes' Theorem being the most important one in my opinion. I guess it helps to have a mindset of being obsessed with optimizing everything and a degree of disregard for codified morality to fully enjoy the site. For me personally that's not a problem so reading LW is very enjoyable.

The very real problem with LW however is that it's full of nerds with huge egos, EY being the biggest example. Regardless of that though, I believe he produced a lot of useful material.

 

[lechatnoir]

Wasn't sure whether to necro the Yudkowsky/LessWrong thread or just post the article; if mods feel it would be better suited there or elsewhere, let me know.

Full story linked here.

Kathy Forth was an abuse reduction writer, volunteer project coordinator for EAGxAustralia and aspiring data scientist. She was an effective altruist who specialized in understanding people through the application of rationality techniques. She was in the process of becoming a data scientist so that she could earn the money she needed to dedicate her life to charity. On March 17, 2018, she committed suicide. She left behind several pieces of writing, including her suicide note, which she wanted to be shared and which is included in its entirety below.

I, the person posting this article, have no capacity to evaluate the claims made against the individuals named below. However, I chose not to redact the names, in accordance with Kathy’s wishes. I am choosing to remain anonymous; I do not wish to be contacted by any of the people mentioned here.

Content warning:
The following piece is a suicide note that deals heavily with sexual violence. If you are suicidal or a sexual violence survivor, I would urge you to exercise extreme caution, as this essay was written by someone at the nadir of a depression induced by her sexual trauma. This includes rationalizations of her decision to commit suicide and her rejection of the mental health care system.

The suicide note of Kathy Forth
March 9, 2018

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

My elevated sexual violence risk: Super survivors exist.
Male dominated environments create a disadvantage for women in terms of sexual violence. The ratio of male sex offenders to women is several times worse for women in those environments than in other environments. These are the environments that I want to be in. These careers, interests and the social spaces that come with are necessary to me. This is who I am.

Oh, but sex offenders couldn’t possibly be targeting you just because you’re around them at work, in a rationalist meetup group, at an effective altruism event, or hanging around programmers in your free time, could they? Actually, research shows offenders prefer to target people they know. Offenders don’t target strangers much. Wherever I go to make friends, for work, or for volunteering is where I am going to be targeted. I didn’t choose this. The offenders did.

According to FBI data, teens and young women are targeted for sexual violence 5–10 times more often than older women. Despite being vulnerable, seniors are rarely targeted for rape. Instead, they are targeted disproportionately for theft. I look young enough that most people mistake me for being in the high risk age range. My baby face puts me in the high risk zone along with much younger women. Is it because offenders feel more powerful when targeting a young-looking person? Is it because young-looking people are more attractive? Quite possibly both. I’ve asked around enough by now to have noticed a trend: women who are youthful looking but not pretty are not targeted. Also, a tall woman I met who has a pretty face was not targeted. Attractiveness does appear to play a role. I’d really love for there to be a study that looks at the correlation between overall attractiveness and number of sex offenses. I think there are women whose lives are hells of sexual violence and nobody believes them. I call them super survivors. I think a study would help this hideously oppressed group of women get the help, the physical security, and support they need.

According to the CDC, being a bisexual woman doubles your sexual violence risk. I’m bisexual. In the case of male bisexuals, this might be due to the number of partners they have. They have a lot more partners, around ten times as many according to one source I found. In the case of bisexual women, I wonder if it might be the scent of our hormones. I’m not sure if other bisexuals are like this, but my testosterone level is on the high side of the women’s range. A friend told me that women’s testosterone levels are higher when they are most fertile. I know women can smell men’s testosterone, and that women respond to it. It’s plausible that this may also happen the other way around. Men may have a scent-related instinct that detects women’s fertile periods. Another possibility is that people are targeting me for my behavior. I was speaking with two sex offenders, Roko, Giego, plus a friend of theirs (before I had strong reasons to believe they were sex offenders) and they told me that women who behave as I do appear to be good to hit on. I forgot the details but they said something like I am extroverted and outgoing. Maybe this is why so many of the women in our network are so quiet. Maybe the talkative ones are driven out. Maybe the women are just afraid.

These aren’t just numbers for me. The amount of sexual violence I’ve actually experienced is elevated beyond what most women would experience. I think a set of case studies really needs to be done on pretty-faced and/or bisexual women in male-dominated environments to see how much sexual violence they’re encountering. I strongly suspect there’s a double tall poppy type effect. Firstly, we are resented for being pretty women who could “have anyone” in groups of men who get the short end of the stick because of the male to female ratio. Secondly, we are also targeted for sexual violence a lot more than other women. This is simply because most people who like women are more attracted to pretty-faced women. Sex offenders aren’t that different from everyone else. They sometimes target other women of course, but they reallylike to target pretty-faced women, just like anyone else. In these male-dominated, nerdy environments, we are cut down twice over. Once the prettiest women leave, does the cycle continue, with offenders targeting the next prettiest batch? That’s the concern with tall poppy syndrome. If you cut down the tall poppies over and over, one day only the very shortest poppy will be left. Because I am leaving, some other unfortunate woman will be targeted instead of me. My leaving hasn’t solved the problem. This has only relocated the hot potato.

I hope at least some of you will warn the prettiest women that they should leave, especially if the sex offenders start targeting them. Hell is in store for the targeted women who don’t leave. The amount of targeting for those the offenders have chosen is really very bad.

I tried becoming fat to ruin my beauty so that I could avoid sexual violence. This was surprisingly effective against street offenders in my case. I used to be street harassed all the time. After becoming fat, it completely stopped. Being fat is not effective against any other type of offender for me. I later found studies with results along the lines of there’s no instinct regarding physical attraction to different weights. This preference varies based on culture. On the other hand, the studies about facial attractiveness showed that people are consistently more attracted to women with pretty faces. In my case, I never ended up with a double chin or other ugly features in my face from the fat, so I couldn’t evade the risk this way.

I took so much risk to be one of you. I was harmed by your sex offenders, multiple different times. Want some examples? Okay. Two offenders who left enough evidence behind to be banned:

Roko (Yes, the Basilisk guy.) He touched my thigh at Signal Data Science where I was living and training to become a data scientist. I moved my legs away. He touched my thigh again. When I went to report him to Julia Wise of CEA, he was already banned from EA Global.

Adam Saffron kissed me on the neck during my internship, while living and working at Leverage Research. I told him “I don’t want you to kiss me.” I had already refused him previously, and explained that I had a boyfriend and wasn’t available. Immediately after I told him not to kiss me, he did it again! People who misbehave so blatantly tend to have a long list of survivors. So, I talked to the person who seemed most likely to be used as a central repository for reports, Geoff Anders, and sure enough Adam Saffron had done this to two other people. I was the third. I was able to get him fired. I got him banned from EA Global. Then, when I discovered that he had been included in the EA Highlights reel, I had him removed.

Am I making false accusations? What would I gain?

I am not somehow awkwardly incorrect about having been sexually assaulted by these two. Other people had the same experience with them. If they make gaslighting or smearing attempts, these are futile because you can go and verify that they misbehave by talking to people who know them, or perhaps some of the authorities involved will confirm.

That’s two confirmed perps for you. These are the minority of a much larger number of total perps, some of whom didn’t leave enough evidence. I didn’t manage to bust every one of them, as that’s actually quite hard to do given that they don’t tend to leave evidence and a lot of survivors don’t report. (RAINN)

Two confirmed perps, plus some unconfirmed perps, in around a five year stretch. Imagine what the rest of my life has been like.

To help, I used the calculator for you to make a back of the envelope estimation: I’m 37. Let’s say that offenders have been targeting me since puberty, age 13. That’s 24 years, or 4.8 stretches of 5 years. Two confirmed perps times 4.8 5-year stretches is 9.6. That’s several times what most women experience and it doesn’t even include unconfirmed perps. This sample is kind of small. I’ll add two more methods of showing you this as well.

How does it compare to real life?

I actually lost count of my total number of perps somewhere around 20. Not all of those were in LW/EA. My total number of LW/EA offenders is at least 5, possibly as high as 8 (depending on a number of factors like whether they identified as part of the movement and I wasn’t sure about that in every case). It would have been much, much higher if I hadn’t stopped attending events, especially if I had moved to The Bay. There seems to be a lot more sexual violence activity in The Bay than elsewhere, and it’s not just me who experienced this. From what I’ve heard from the other women, The Bay behaves like women are part of some horrid involuntary petting zoo. There are even people who want to change the norms in favor of sexual violence, calling it screening, kino or “pickup artistry”. Screening and kino are boundary violations at best and can easily qualify as sexual harassment or even sexual violence. I do find these experiences upsetting or even traumatic. Here is how I feel about it:

If I can’t have my body, no one can.

Who I really am:
Rationality and effective altruism are the loves of my life. They are who I am.

I also love programming. Programming is part of who I am.

I could leave rationality, effective altruism and programming to escape the male-dominated environments that increase my sexual violence risk so much. The trouble is, I wouldn’t be myself. I would have to act like someone else all day.

Imagine leaving everything you’re interested in, and all the social groups where people have something in common with you. You’d be socially isolated. You’d be constantly pretending to enjoy work you don’t like, to enjoy activities you’re not interested in, to bond with people who don’t understand you, trying to be close to people you don’t relate to… What kind of life is that?

Without the social networks I resonate with, I wouldn’t be able to be myself. These all happen to be male-dominated. It’s just part of who I am. My self would be trapped inside of this body which behaves in ways that don’t reflect the real me. I would suffocate in stifling, unengaging work and feelings of isolation.

I actually already went through that before I found the rationality and effective altruism movements. I tried countless other groups and dozens of OkCupid strategies. I just couldn’t find anyone who thinks like us outside these movements. I have been thinking like a rationalist and effective altruist for 20 years. Not exactly the same way, of course. One difference is that I grew my notions of rationality and effective altruism with a lot more emotional intelligence. The differences between my way and the LW/EA way are relatively small. Logic is logic. If a bunch of people all try to be rational, they will converge upon the same ideas and reach the same conclusions. That’s definitely true. I didn’t do a study, but I experienced this encounter as an independent verification of that phenomenon. When I found this network the resemblance was downright uncanny. These are definitely my people.

Before I found this place, my life was utterly unengaging. No one was interested in talking about the same things. I was actually trying to talk about rationality and effective altruism for years before I found this place, and was referred into it because of that!

My life was tedious and very lonely. I never want to go back to that again. Being outside this network felt like being dead inside my own skin.

I thought about making a new network, but it would probably end up with the same gender ratio which multiplies my already elevated sexual violence risk. Even if I artificially enforced a gender ratio, it would have the same people in it, and would end up with similar social norms around sexual violence. I would encounter the same stonewalling and rape myths. Even if I worked hard to implement sane social norms, the overlap between my group and the other similar groups would mean that external social norms would get into my group. Because things like rape myths do increase risk, and because they will just spread into my group whatever I do, it makes more sense to tackle the social norms in the entire rationality diaspora and EA network. Since that’s the main thing that would take the most work, there’s really no point in making my own separate group.

And what if I succeeded? What if I somehow found all the rationalists or effective altruists who are unlikely to cause sexual violence, and took them all for myself? Rationality and effective altruism would experience one of the most foul evaporative cooling events you’ve ever seen. The concentration of sex offenders would be way too high. The whole thing might blow up with sexual violence scandals the same way Catholic churches did. Causing that kind of evaporative cooling in a charity network doesn’t look like a good way to save the world to me…

That might even end it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and the amount of time and effort it would take to reduce my risk to something livable is overwhelming. If most of the people in my social network stopped stonewalling about sexual violence and started doing work to reduce risk, my life would be very different. I’d probably be able to make my life work. That’s just not how it is.

So, I can’t be myself in these movements because the risk is too high. I can’t be myself outside these movements because those places don’t really want for people like me to be themselves.

What I need is to be alive and flourishing in my own skin, not just going through the motions, trapped in my body, with my mind on mute for the rest of my life.

If I can’t even have myself, no one can.

A horrifying secret:
Just like everyone else, sex offenders are attracted to things like creativity, intelligence, and passion. That means I eventually started to notice a pattern where I’d see red flags shortly after my creativity, intelligence, and passion showed. Sometimes, people would commit sex offenses shortly after they complimented me for these things.

I saw red flags more often than I experienced abuse. The number of times I saw red flags after people complimented me for my abilities made pretty strong connections in my brain between abuse risk and showing creativity, intelligence, and passion.

For one example: Adam Saffron really valued my mind. It excited him. He is sapiosexual and he said so. He said I am brilliant and gave me other compliments like that. Because his sex offense was partly motivated by his sapiosexual attraction, my experience with him shut down a piece of my self-expression. This was automatic.

You stop doing things you are repeatedly punished for. It’s as simple as that. This phenomenon is called classical conditioning.

Somewhere in my late 20s is when I noticed that classical conditioning had begun to set in. I wasn’t showing myself as much. I was allowing myself to make dumb mistakes so as not to look particularly smart. I stopped being creative because I didn’t feel like sharing my creativity anymore and thinking about it made me sad. I especially hated sharing my passion because that inspired people to give me red flags for stalking! I couldn’t find a way around this so it slowly became worse. I began to relate to people with locked in syndrome.

At some point in the last year or two, I had a slightly early mid-life crisis: I’m halfway to dead and I still can’t be who I am! I worked on bringing myself out. I made myself post creative things in Optimal Memes for Cosmopolitan Teens. Thank you for this, Evan, because my need for novelty and a creative outlet is really quite high! Now you’ve seen a little bit of my creativity. I wish I’d been given the opportunity to apply this to research. I think it would have been great. I also tried showing my abilities to a few of the high status people. Normally, they want you to show your abilities to everybody and then if lots of people like your blog articles, they’ll pay attention to you. Well, I needed to circumvent that because of the high risk of stalking. I told everyone this and no one seemed to care. I really needed accommodations, guys. So I started finding excuses to show high status people bits of my potential, hoping someone would help get me out of my lockup!

Uuuunfortunately, one of them frotteurized me, and another gave me a rape myth! I guess that wasn’t safe either. I should have shown off only to women.

I tried to tell people about this lock-in problem from the moment I arrived in these movements. I told countless people. Dozens at least, maybe close to 100. Nobody wanted to believe it. I think it was just too horrifying. They preferred to blame the victim rather than the sex offenders. Maybe they just couldn’t imagine how this could happen to someone because they didn’t know that some women are targeted for sexual violence disproportionately. Without a concept like “super survivors” people like me will be ignored.

I guess fact that this lock-in happened was locked in as well. It wasn’t mysecret. It was yours.

Isn’t dying net negative or something?
You can ask the people who have been following my abuse reduction efforts what has happened to me over time. I’ve been posting a lot since November 2017, after I was funded to reduce risk of sexual violence in the EA movement. At first, I was level headed and everyone thought it was great. I didn’t even get a single piece of negative feedback. A bunch of people popped up with compliments, collaboration requests and to notify me that I had fans! It was lovely. My spirits were high. I thought it was all going to be okay.

Then I slowly lost some of my rationality. I made a minor update post about this. I think what had happened was that a bunch of people were brushing me off, and my brain automatically adapted to the adversarial environment by making one-sided arguments.

It’s now four months later, and I’m thoroughly burnt out on being stonewalled. I created an infographic with 25 examples of the stonewalling I’ve been encountering this whole time. I’ve lost a lot of the rationality I started with. I’m half way to social justice warrior. I am burnt out, heart broken, and filled with despair. I’m so pathetic now I have even become sloppy. I don’t even feel like the same person anymore. If I had felt listened to, things would be different. I have an anti-depressant. It works pretty well, actually. The problem is lack of motivation, because my situation is one where I will experience many punishments no matter what I do, and people are stonewalling rather than helping.

I look back over the last decade of my life, and I see that I have been slipping for much longer than four months. It’s been a slow, steady decline. First, I decided I couldn’t be a writer. I really, really wanted to be a writer. I just didn’t want to attract stalkers. Then, I ended up conditioned into this super survivor lock-in. Then some very bad things happened to me in the area of abuse and my life ended up destroyed. Then I tried to advocate for myself and I ended up burnt out and dejected. I am not the most optimistic of people, but my life has gone worse than I thought it would… many times over. I noticed this and wondered why it was. Well, it’s because other people expect me to somewhere in the same ballpark of as optimistic as they are. I can only get away with being so pessimistic before everyone dismisses everything I say due to them just not trusting my judgment. I didn’t want to be stigmatized and dismissed, so I maintained as much optimism as possible.

Therefore, I have consistently been wrong about how bad my life would be. This requirement was really quite sabotaging. I would have planned much better without this peer pressure to be optimistic. I might not be facing intractable problems right now if I had known how bad my risk was years ago. I might have figured something out. Please don’t ever expect anyone else to avoid seeming pessimistic. You may sabotage them.

Now that I am aware of this, I can sort of adjust for my own optimism bias by thinking “things will be significantly worse than I think”. If I was doing much better than this 10 years ago, and ended up here, I really don’t think my next 10 years is going to be very nice.

Yes, I’ve already taken anti-depressants. Yes, I have already talked to professionals. I will try to explain why the mental health industry is ineffective in my case.

There is no nepenthe for dignity. If you weaken it, you violate it.

It’s not just chemical happiness I need.

I need respect, knowing that others know it’s not okay to violate my boundaries.

I need personhood, knowing that others care if something does violate my boundaries.

I need alliance, knowing that others will do something about it if my boundaries are being violated.

I value respect, personhood and alliance regardless of whether I am happy. It is a strange kind of torture to be chemically uplifted while the rest of my humanity is ignored. It is bizarre and unnatural to talk someone who will not be my ally, and strange to call this “help”.

When what you need is alliance, emotional support is just as empty as a drug.

I’ve already tried to solve the security problems, but they’re not solved because people aren’t doing anywhere near enough to make the environments I need safe enough for me. Instead they’re throwing out spitball ideas they haven’t even spent five minutes thinking through, and enjoying a false sense of security because there now seems to be a solution.

Most new ideas fail (see startups), and people are not well-informed about what physical security requires. It’s actually pretty complicated because you have to cover so many different types of situations multiplied by the different kinds of offenders.

I am pretty sure my future will be filled with security problems, trauma, chaos, dysfunction, financial problems, etc. I am not interested in that gauntlet. I’m exhausted because this hurts too much, and violates too many of my values. I know that’s probably going to continue. I’ve tried everything I was able to try before my motivation ran out. I’m spent. There is nothing left of me.

I am barely myself anymore. I can’t do effective altruism like this. I’m not even sure I can work. I can’t be particularly useful to the world with this much risk of disruption in my future. I am not going to enjoy my future with a problem this large that I can’t solve.

My future isn’t likely to be pleasant for me, and I can’t be useful to you.

Besides, I’d rather you remember me as something that at least sort of resembles who I am.

I don’t want to become whatever I would be if I completely radicalized. That’s the direction I’ve been going in. I want to stop before I get there. I don’t want you to see me like that.

I’ve been really angry. I ended up imagining a way to destroy the effective altruism movement. I’m not likely to try it because I am an altruist. Also, my personality isn’t impulsive. Maybe it wouldn’t even work… but a small chance of a problem with that severity is worth taking action about. I haven’t told anyone any details since it’s an information hazard.

There is a proverb that says if a village doesn’t embrace its members, they will burn the village down just to feel the warmth.

I was feeling that.

I could have done that to you. I was strategic enough to make noise, get attention, and light a few controlled burns.

I am also strategic enough to light much larger things on fire in a much less careful fashion.

Be glad that I didn’t. You have had a near miss. I was not impulsive enough.

For your own sake, please start acknowledging abuse and allying with all the survivors by doing something which reduces risk.

Every group has abusers. You can’t hide from it.

Survivors need your actions, not your words.

Another way I could really harm effective altruism is if I continue sliding downward like this. I don’t know what I would do if my frustration level were even higher, or my if my motivation to be careful were even lower.

Please be glad that some people can kill themselves. This can be a very heroic trait. Suicidal people should not be shunned. In our evolutionary past there were regularly situations where people had to decide who was going to die. There isn’t enough food. Do we take care of our elderly parent, or the baby? Everyone gets old to the point of becoming disabled unless they die of an accident, disease or a fight. It makes sense to think that kin selection may have resulted in people killing themselves when they become too old to support themselves. Putting food into a new baby is more likely to spread your genes than putting it into an elderly disabled person. Two of the main suicide risk factors are feeling like a burden and feeling alone. These look like pretty good heuristics to detect times when you’re reducing the chance of reproductive success for your kin.

The third is feeling unafraid to die. Sometimes people feel this for a temporary reason. It is also something people feel when things are not likely to get better. Telling yourself it’s always temporary and impulsive just causes you to ignore bad situations.

Because of the third factor, you’d be more likely to survive a short-term injury, but less likely to survive a permanent disability. So, if you are injured but know you’ll get better, you’ll probably still be afraid to die. If your kin takes care of you, you won’t be lonely. Maybe you will feel like a burden, but that’s only 1 of 3 risk factors.

Given how disruptive sexual violence risk has been to my life, I think hurting in the long-term is likely, though oppression is the cause. This is not a disability. You have to blame the right party: offenders.

Professional help isn’t enough to make me functional despite this level of stress. Even if it was, I would be very upset because I would continue to experience a lack of respect. If disrespect didn’t hurt me, it would feel that all the moral weight was taken away from me as a person. Would I even have personhood then? People would happily ignore the disrespect of me because I could fill the emptiness with drugs. People could decide my human rights are not important at all, or not worth any effort, because I am “happy”. What is happiness without meaning? What is meaning without basic respect?

What happens if you throw your own dignity away? My dignity is there for a reason. Everything in my personality is connected. I have already seen myself begin to radicalize despite my rationality practice, my emotional support, and my antidepressants. I am horrified at the thought of the ghoulish things I could become if I lost hope in the dignity, personhood and moral weight that encourage me to preserve what is good about me. I need these three things to be fully intact.

My dignity, personhood and moral weight are a fundamental part of why I improve upon what I am to become a more awesome person.

I don’t wish for a drug that will cause me to endure long-term abuse. I think that would be an abomination. I won’t wirehead myself into the perfect victim. I value my dignity and a human value cannot be drugged away. Give me respect or give me death.

If I can’t have my personhood, my moral weight, and my dignity, then neither can you.

Here’s the silver lining:
Part of the reason people have not been listening to me is that some of them worry that all I want is power. If I’m dead, I don’t think they’ll worry about this anymore.

Part of the reason people have not been listening to me is because they’re jealous. A dead woman will no longer be pretty and will not attract partners. A corpse is nothing to be jealous of. If the men can see that the sexual violence attention I received really wasn’t desirable, maybe they will understand that my problem is real.

This is disgusting, but part of the problem is that some men are turned on by the thought of sexual violence. Hopefully such people will at least be bothered enough by the horror of death to notice that there was a real problem. (Hint: If you can’t seem to have an appropriate emotional response to sexual violence, please consider seeing a counselor and keep a close watch for motivated reasoning.)

A lot of people didn’t want to acknowledge the risk because they think it will be a PR problem. Now that you already have the PR problem, you may as well acknowledge it.

The silver lining is that I’ve removed a bunch of obstacles that were in the way of you understanding this problem.

I hereby put all of my completed articles, completed images of any type, completed charts, completed graphs, and public comments into the public domain under the same license as this suicide note. If I posted it you can assume it is completed. If I mentioned specific people in something that’s not public (or someone might be identifiable), please remove the identifiable information (or get permission) before sharing. My unfinished items of these types can be shared under the same license as long you make it clear that some of them are just me jotting down ideas. Please encourage people to make distinctions between something I applied rigor to, some random idea I merely jotted down, and things that are in between. I prefer all my journals to be destroyed for privacy reasons.

You can’t have me, but I’ll give you my ghost.

The sort of secret I wouldn’t reveal under normal circumstances:
A couple of years ago, I met someone who initiated a form of attraction I’d never experienced before. I was upset because of a sex offender and wanted to be protected. For months, I desperately wanted this person to protect me. My mind screamed for it every day. My survival instincts told me I needed to be in their territory. This went on for months. I fantasized about throwing myself at them, and even obeying them, because they protected me in the fantasy.

That is very strange for me because I had never felt that way about anyone. Obedience? How? That seemed so senseless.

It occurs to me that following orders from the person who protects me both outsources the challenge of defense and makes defense more efficient. The military does it. Then it all clicked.

Women obviously don’t have the defense specialization. To survive and avoid injury, trauma, rape and other abuses, it makes sense for a woman to seek someone who will defend her. I suspect this is a common instinct. Being protected from other kinds of abusers is also very attractive.

I wouldn’t want to be told what to do all day, or who to be, or what to do with my life. For someone who protected me, I would obey security related orders, and offer very enthusiastic sexual service. This could probably even motivate me to have casual sex, which I would normally have no interest in because I am coy (a slow and selective sexual orientation, a Dawkins term). It feels like reciprocating for having your life saved. I think that if anyone ever rescued me from a sex offender, I would just do them and wonder whether it was a good idea later.

I could also be stolen away from a lover this way if the protection were inadequate. “If your lover won’t protect you against threats, how are you supposed to be protected at all!?” my instincts scream. It isn’t status that I want. It is specifically the capacity for protecting me against abuse. All of the people who’ve caused these feelings in me have also behaved in such a way that I thought they would not abuse me. If I thought they would abuse me, and they protected me… I don’t I would have the same response. There’s definitely a much stronger response for people I trust.

I named this “safety pragma”. Safety pragma is about ten times stronger than any other form of attraction I have ever experienced.

It feels like this: The man is my soldier and my general. He is not disposable. He is my sacred, cherished protector. I am his soother and his country. I am not a territory to conquer. I am his People, I am who he fights and lives for, and I need him to survive so that I survive.

The movies get this subtly and horribly wrong. In movies, he protects what he feels like protecting, or what society wants him to protect, or what it is his duty to protect, and the woman is his reward. This is obvious nonsense. In reality, if he protects what I want him to protect — me specifically of course — then I will automatically feel inspired to cherish him.

Women can protect, too. I’ve had some pretty intense safety pragma directed at me.

Some women like being dominated in a kinky sense, but I’d bet safety pragma is more common and likely to be lot more powerful. The secret to earning a woman’s willingness to defer is not about being dominant toward the women! The secret is respecting the woman and knowing how to deal with dangerous men who could hurt her. Fantasies about someone ruthlessly crushing a threat gets the strongest response in my case.

What man will tell you that?

Men have no incentive to tell you how to attract women.

Pickup artistry is a sham!

tl;dr: Someone attempting to bring some form of sexual ethics education to the unadulterated :autism: of the rationalist/effective altruist community fails, commits suicide and leaves a suicide note to be published, the contents of which will surprise no one familiar with the rat/EA community.

I've only included the first part of her very long letter here; if you're interested in seeing her Sisyphean attempt to instruct transcendent intellectual übermensch on sexual ethics, it's in the link.

 

[QB 290]

After reading the full thing, this letter is a full circle jerk to try and cover up her own misery. Having someone force a kiss on you isn't something that would make any sane person commit suicide, being scared about being assaulted isn't something that would spur someone on to end their life. It's clear she had some serious hatred of men and used that as an excuse to make her death mean something, because she was ashamed she couldn't find meaning in her life. She spoke about getting fat and ugly to try and put off rapists, something else she probably needed an excuse for, despite that happening to everyone who doesn't look after themselves.
Suicide is the end of the line and nobody goes through with it without fully coming to the conclusion that life will never get better and there is no escape, doing it to inspire a political statement is re.tarded and just a waste of a perfectly good life.

That being said:
R.I.P Kathy Forth

 

[Prussian Blue]

making people read a note that long is more selfish than the suicide

 

[spiritofamermaid]

After reading the full thing, this letter is a full circle jerk to try and cover up her own misery. Having someone force a kiss on you isn't something that would make any sane person commit suicide, being scared about being assaulted isn't something that would spur someone on to end their life. It's clear she had some serious hatred of men and used that as an excuse to make her death mean something, because she was ashamed she couldn't find meaning in her life. She spoke about getting fat and ugly to try and put off rapists, something else she probably needed an excuse for, despite that happening to everyone who doesn't look after themselves.
Suicide is the end of the line and nobody goes through with it without fully coming to the conclusion that life will never get better and there is no escape, doing it to inspire a political statement is re.tarded and just a waste of a perfectly good life.

Yeah, she talked about how more needed to be done (and the whole thing about "sapiosexual" set off some warnings) despite things being done.
1) EA. Nuff said, corporate culture is terrible and they treat their employees horribly.
2) She talked to someone and since it was like the 3rd warning they fired him. What more did you want? It's much better than normal, where HR gives you a nice paycheck for not saying anything. And that one-time thing could easily be abused.
Also that whole "pretty" stuff seemed like she was trying to put herself up, and overall seemed suspicious. I'm not saying she's wrong per se, but she never brought up how she told people that she was bi, and the resulting stereotype that would ensue (people assuming you're more sexually open/loose).
She also never really talked about friends she had, nor her family, aka a support network, which is one of the most important things when it comes to depression and its ilk.

Also what was interesting to me was that she never really said how much of a part she had in it. Now, I could be wrong, but I personally believe that what she did contributed to the guys' actions more than she's admitting. She did rebuff their advances in the examples I posted, but in the case with Adam, how did he kiss her neck? Was she alone with him?

Overall, for some reason I can't bring myself to be very sympathetic towards her. It's kinda obvious that there were some underlying issues, but she's blaming it entirely on males and sexuality.

 

[Chiang Kai-shek]

Even a rationalist’s Suicide note has to be pretentious and full of psuedointellectual speak.

 

[lechatnoir]

To be fair, rationalism is basically "how can I put an intellectual veneer over the things I was planning on doing anyway: the movement"

 

[Eigengrau]

This thread seems to get necroposted once a year, so here we go again.

From what I gather, Big Yud and LessWrong are only the tip of a large iceberg of autism, the so-called "Rationalist Community" which appears to be established on the San Francisco Bay Area. This iceberg includes Scott Alexander who writes a blog called Slate Star Codex, and they have ties to the Effective Altruism movement. There are frequent meet-ups and they all share an odd utilitarian philosophy about rationality, which gives me some cult vibes.

There's also a subreddit called r/SneerClub that documents anything sneer-worthy coming from the rationalist community, including Yud's Twitter, r/SlateStarCodex or their containment sibling r/TheMotte. A lot of them are former LessWrong posters, so naturally they lean on the other side of the political spectrum (more SJW as opposed to alt-right). Ironically, RationalWiki out of all places has rather critical articles about LessWrong as well as the community around it.

Make of this what you wish, but it might be worth looking into.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

This thread seems to get necroposted once a year, so here we go again.

From what I gather, Big Yud and LessWrong are only the tip of a large iceberg of autism, the so-called "Rationalist Community" which appears to be established on the San Francisco Bay Area. This iceberg includes Scott Alexander who writes a blog called Slate Star Codex, and they have ties to the Effective Altruism movement. There are frequent meet-ups and they all share an odd utilitarian philosophy about rationality, which gives me some cult vibes.

There's also a subreddit called r/SneerClub that documents anything sneer-worthy coming from the rationalist community, including Yud's Twitter, r/SlateStarCodex or their containment sibling r/TheMotte. A lot of them are former LessWrong posters, so naturally they lean on the other side of the political spectrum (more SJW as opposed to alt-right). Ironically, RationalWiki out of all places has rather critical articles about LessWrong as well as the community around it.

Make of this what you wish, but it might be worth looking into.

Oh, man, the Rationalists. (Not Sargoon and pals, though I'm guessing there's more than a little overlap.) I was internet-adjacent to these guys in the early 2010s for reasons I won't go into, but the upshot is that these guys are basically the center of the Venn diagram of a huge number of other lolcow communities, including all the sexual ones: polyamory, AI spergs, woo, euphoric atheism, troon, furry... the list goes on. Despite that, they're not actually that interesting themselves, beyond the way that they accrete maladjusted autists.

Then again, maybe it's being at the convergence point of all this crap that makes them so uninteresting: they're so intellectually inbred that you can't have a normal conversation about anything without it seguing into why God is a fairytale or monogamy is sub-optimal or why Bayes' Theorem is the Ultimate Truth and if you're not applying it to literally every thought that passes through your head you're wrong and, worse, irrational. Intellectually, nothing for exists outside of their little closed system of obsessions, which they obsess over like it's IQ (which they view as the ultimate quantifier of quality, yet denigrate in practice because the actual results are rayciss.) Scott Alexander, of the poly troon "girl"friend, walls of text, and made-up terms for all sorts of things, is the closest this "community" has to a functional member, to put them in perspective.

 

[Underestimated Nutria]

Wasn't sure whether to necro the Yudkowsky/LessWrong thread or just post the article; if mods feel it would be better suited there or elsewhere, let me know.

Full story linked here.



tl;dr: Someone attempting to bring some form of sexual ethics education to the unadulterated :autism: of the rationalist/effective altruist community fails, commits suicide and leaves a suicide note to be published, the contents of which will surprise no one familiar with the rat/EA community.

I've only included the first part of her very long letter here; if you're interested in seeing her Sisyphean attempt to instruct transcendent intellectual übermensch on sexual ethics, it's in the link.

I've seen more than a few suicide notes, and contrary to the idea that one's dying words are masterpieces of unvarnished honestly (enshrined in the common law's "dying declaration" evidentiary exception), they're often ... staggeringly malicious, bizarre but (what should be) plain monuments of falsehood. I like this article, because the relevant suicide note in it is pretty emblematic of the phenomenon to me, as is the one quoted in your post:

The Last Psychiatrist: The Suicide Of Bill Zeller

It's worth the exercise of reading the two side by side to notice the parallels. I may transcribe some of my own if anyone's interested.

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

This thread seems to get necroposted once a year, so here we go again.

From what I gather, Big Yud and LessWrong are only the tip of a large iceberg of autism, the so-called "Rationalist Community" which appears to be established on the San Francisco Bay Area. This iceberg includes Scott Alexander who writes a blog called Slate Star Codex, and they have ties to the Effective Altruism movement. There are frequent meet-ups and they all share an odd utilitarian philosophy about rationality, which gives me some cult vibes.

There's also a subreddit called r/SneerClub that documents anything sneer-worthy coming from the rationalist community, including Yud's Twitter, r/SlateStarCodex or their containment sibling r/TheMotte. A lot of them are former LessWrong posters, so naturally they lean on the other side of the political spectrum (more SJW as opposed to alt-right). Ironically, RationalWiki out of all places has rather critical articles about LessWrong as well as the community around it.

Make of this what you wish, but it might be worth looking into.

Eh, Scott isn't really cow-worthy (mostly because he's way too dry and academic), but his comment sections can be real wells of autism. One of the only places on the internet where you can see Catholic Monarchists and tankies have it out with each other.

 

[Xiphias]

I remember these guys, mostly for writing godawful, pompous fanfiction. They're self-aware enough to tone down the Mary Sue, but not enough to make it work. Both Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) basically go like this: re-imagined "rationalist" main character discovers a magical world and immediately shows everyone up and improves a bunch of stuff by being "rational", they then get trounced by someone even better than they are proving they're not all powerful, and it ends with them getting to rule optimize the world in the end anyway because a side character helps them onto a throne they couldn't win themselves. Somehow, they manage to keep the throne despite their ineptitude and optimize the world. The End.

Scott Alexander is an actual psychiatrist instead of a programmer or self-taught whatever, and his blog posts seem sane, especially the psychiatry ones. I think he broke up with his "girl"friend a while back. Honestly looking back at it she had all the classic characteristics of a super-woke troon, though I didn't know enough about troons to spot it at the time: autism, BPD, fundie parents, polyamory, "queer" girl in a relationship with a male programmer, never mentioned being attracted to women, stay-at-home mom, tried camming for money, gender studies graduate, etc.

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

Eh, Scott isn't really cow-worthy (mostly because he's way too dry and academic), but his comment sections can be real wells of autism. One of the only places on the internet where you can see Catholic Monarchists and tankies have it out with each other.

Didn't he have some kind of emotional meltdown last year or the year before? I hate trying to find anything on his blog because it's all tiny print walls.

 

[Xiphias]

Didn't he have some kind of emotional meltdown last year or the year before? I hate trying to find anything on his blog because it's all tiny print walls.

I know he's terrified of SJWs after being mobbed by them in university. Do you remember what the meltdown was over? Maybe I can find it.

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

I know he's terrified of SJWs after being mobbed by them in university. Do you remember what the meltdown was over? Maybe I can find it.

Stop me if I have the wrong guy, but I vaguely remember him having to take time off work and maybe do like day hospital because he had some kind of OCD-depression breakdown, and he blamed it in part on SJW/anti-SJW discussions on his blog.

 

[Sir Wesley Tailpipe]

Would someone who wants to have sex with Yudkowsky be a schlomosexual?

 

[Wallace]

Stop me if I have the wrong guy, but I vaguely remember him having to take time off work and maybe do like day hospital because he had some kind of OCD-depression breakdown, and he blamed it in part on SJW/anti-SJW discussions on his blog.

No, that was Freddie deBoer. But Scott has been threatened by SJWs, including at least one call to the hospital where he works to try and get him fired, for the crime of pointing out some of the hypocrisy and bad arguments in social justice.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

Eliezer Schlomo Yudkowski is literally the most Jewish name I could think of, ever.