Diary—IIIA


#### 354 — Friday 12 June 2009 — "Fury"

I tell you _briefly_, Diary, nor too often, living as I am on short time (_cf_. 353). I passed the examination with a wide margin.

I have already broken schedule today!—or say rather that I am refactoring my schedule; my hours to live this night are not utterly given unto chaos. But when you seem to have forgotten your pencil, and you've just picked up a movie, sometimes you change your mind.

_Some Like It Hot_ was available at the library, and I hardly hesitated to seize it. Normally I am not so much a fan of the cinema, _particularly_ in these days of Eliezer Yudkowsky and my purity born of pain. (I empathized with Tyler Cowen when he wrote that he can read more quickly than most, but he can't watch a movie faster than _anyone_.) However, this movie involves crossdressing, and therefore gets booked as _research_.

I checked the blog at the library: quality discussion. I should consider investigating utilitarianism more.

I had promised Father I would clean my car and my room today, and (living as I am on short time) I must not delay. _Briefly_, I bid you good day. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Perhaps I need not be _so_ brief. I got frustrated futzing around with technology, trying to get the video to work. Eventually it turned out that my laptop (which somehow escaped naming) _could_ play the movie after all, and I watched about half the film, probably a little less. I was intending to stop it in a short time when an error stopped it for me—you would swear that all library media is damaged. I won't try to watch any more today—I will explicitly block out some time on some other day to try to watch the rest. It would be nice if I could depend on my parents being out of the house so I could use the player in the living room—but that's not essential; it worked on my laptop for some time, and most probably the dirty or scratched disc is not my fault, just as the unintelligible sections of the _Great Expectations_ tapes are most probably not my fault.

I was tempted to masturbate, but I resisted on purely selfish grounds. If there's anything to learn from the experience, you would suppose I have long since learned it, and I don't want to shower tonight. Also, my powers of imagination are _weak_; however much I might yearn to change my form, I have but one form, and all my imaginings to the contrary _in fact_ only serve to service that form.

I babbled to Josh over the telephone. Diary, I've gotten better before, and I can continue to do so. It is _not_ a burden imposed from above; it's just applied rationality. _In fact_, you're going to be doing something, and so you must take measures to make sure that it's the _best_ thing, all things properly considered. No fuss or strain—only fury at a past that should have been this simple. Now _briefly_. —ZMD


#### 355 — Thursday 16 June 2009 — "Developments"

I should worry that my progress is stalling, worry what this dayjob is doing to me, worry about my duties to contribute to the economy or my field (_what_ field?) or existential risk reduction. On the other hand, maybe I worry enough. I can worry myself _sick_ trying to understand this world and what I should do in it, but there's too much that I don't know and can't comprehend. I cannot imagine how much worse I would be doing if I didn't have my shining core of epistemic rationality.

During my shift on Sunday, I made an _xkcd_ reference—Ellen had not heard of it. That night, I was going to post some comic links on her Facebook (I settled on "Scantron" and—yes—"Friends"), only to find that there was no longer any Ellen Guerrero on Facebook—although I _did_ seem to be friends with a Daniel Guerrero who shared her face: comments made reference to a name change. I wrote her a private message (subject line "wherefore art thou"), linking the comics and asking if she was trans or if she just liked the name. I said that we may have more in common than she knew (_cf_. 298), and asked if she would like to have an extended ice-cream chat.

The next day, I met Josh in Berkeley, probably for too long. When I related the news about Daniel-formerly-Ellen, he lent me his laptop so I could check to see if she had responded. And indeed, Daniel is trans.

I could not have _planned_ this better. I might compose my reply tonight, and I will keep you posted on further developments on this front.

_Speaking_ of the theme, I lent Father my camera the other night, and when he came back, he said there was picture of me on it that I might not want to let Mother see. I expressed dismay and disbelief and embarrassment; I put my head down, and said "Shit," perhaps more than once. Father said not to be a chicken. How could I have been so careless? Examination of the camera tonight reveals how: I had accidentally saved one of my crossdressing photos to the memory card from the computer, so that the photo did _not_ show when viewing the photographs from the camera's screen, but it _would_ show when viewing the contents of the memory card on the computer. I hope Father simply neglects to bring the subject up again. You don't have to _talk_ about every part of your map.

Oh, how can I get to the next level? It is _good_ that I've been doing math and programming—but then I haven't been reading as much. And I should like to _write_, as well—O terrible my terrible boundedness! I don't want to get lost in some status game; there is so much that I want to _do!_—so much that _I_ want to _know_, and I can't let the vastness of this world get in my way. Don't tell me what I'm allowed to _know_; don't tell me what I'm allowed to _do_; oh, just let me _know_ and _do_! No one can change the world, so that can't be—that _cannot_ be why we write. Although _some_ people get paid for it—people do have jobs. It's so hard to make sense of things, so hard to trace back the values and decisions. But I want to _know_! I'm taking my life so much more seriously now. What would I be doing if I were even more serious? I'm curious, but it is not yet a _ruthless_ curiosity. —ZMD


#### 356 — Monday 22 June 2009 — "Portal"

Saturday was Daniel's last day at Safeway, so we had cake in the back for Ellen. I hung out for a few minutes, before mentioning that I had stuff to do. "Goodbye, Ellen," I said, "in more ways than one." This would have been clever and cool if I had gotten the intonation right, but I didn't. After my shift ended, I set off to the library to email Josh of this and check out some tapes for the car ride to visit my creepy Singularitarian friends, but first I had the idea to buy a balloon for Tom McCabe, whose birthday was [Sunday]. On the drive down, I stopped at a Borders to buy some Moleskines, and to my good fortune, they were actually on sale, three for two.

The visit went well. It's such a strange crowd I've fallen in with—but they are such beautiful people! I think my estimate of our [competence] went down the first night, during the discussion of the survey we took involving tradeoffs and SIAI's future. Why is everyone so bad at thinking?—you, me, everyone. It saddens me, and alarms me. Carl Shulman puts a decent chunk of probability mass on a paperclip maximizer not killing us all due to the possibility of reflective agents trading across the many worlds of a large universe—and at this point you're really tempted to wonder exactly where all of us went _completely off the rails_. And yet—in this godless universe, stupid humans have no choice but to grope about blindly, desperately searching for these rails of correct epistemic practice.

The next day was better. I had some good conversation with Marcello the next morning while most of the others were asleep. Maybe the shock that I'm worth having around is starting to wear off somewhat—but it's still so strange.

The "Against Linear Aggregation" page on the interns' site linked to a paper by Tyler Cowen on resolving the repugnant conclusion, which was incredibly helpful to me, although I will not take the space or time to explain it to you here.

I had some good conversation with Tom, Marcello, and Nick Tarleton in the evening. Nick thinks my anti-akrasia method that caused such a flutter on the blog would not work for most people. He said that out of everyone he's met, I internalize morality the most—not his exact phrasing, but it was something along those lines. I should not say I was _surprised_, exactly—but it's an interesting thing to hear. It's so hard to know where I stand; seeming as I do so brilliant and so retarded in fits and starts across domains. But this, too, is part of the strength of my new methodology—it doesn't _matter_ so much where I stand if I'm not jostling for position. Stepping back from the crowd, I have space to unleash my full fury, however little I get paid for it, and however few may even see it at all.

Tom _really_ reminds me of Richard. There was further disagreement about the intellectual capabilities of ordinary Americans; the topic comes up way too often. Tom yelled for us to stop we we all started singing "Happy Birthday," so instead we sung a Johnathan Coulton song.

It was strange meeting Steven, the steven0461 of the blog and author of _Black Belt Bayesian_, for the usual reason it's strange meeting someone whom you only know from their writings, but worse, because steven0461 writes such fluent English with clever turns of phrase, whereas in person he has a thick Dutch accent.

I _am_ starting to love math, really love it—although I love other things _too_. I understand that specialization is necessary for society to get along, but that doesn't mean I have to _like_ it, and I shouldn't have so much trouble explaining this should the topic come up in conversation. I might be coming around, really. I _can_ see myself perhaps working as an actuary. I _can_ see myself writing, living frugally, studying fanatically, donating to SIAI, again not out of _discipline_, but the joyful full flourishing of my fury in its fullness. Life is so short—how could I _bear_ to let a single precious moment slip out of my hands, where it belongs?

And Daniel—oh Daniel, who knows so little of all this and probably isn't even all that teachable but who [must] have such a beautiful heart, by the metric I judge _my_ heart to be beautiful, crossed as ours are in transition—who can say but that my first girlfriend will be a boy? My _word_, Diary. —ZMD


#### 357 — Thursday 25 June 2009 — "Shannon"

I'm really not very good at this scheduling business, the line between refactoring your schedule on the fly and ignoring it outright may not be all _that_ bright, but there comes a point when you can tell that you have _crossed_ it. I "should"—for some value of the word _should_—be starting my job search, but I don't feel like I've studied enough today, even though I think I spent in excess of seven hours today in the Lafayette library. I had planned to spend the time alternating between math and reading _The Tangled Wing_, but I was distracted by my own thoughts—which is not necessarily a bad thing if I actually made intellectual progress, but what constitutes progress?—I'll have to think about _that_. I did not make all that much mathematical progress, and I might not even have cracked _The Tangled Wing_. I wrote a lot in my notebook, and puttered around looking at library books, and I spent my half-hour of library computer time on _Less Wrong_.

It's not enough—there is _too much_ that I want to know, so _many_ gaps on my map. Nor is my ravenous curiosity entirely idle, either: there's so much that I need to know just to make sense of what I want and where I'm going: if I _hadn't_ read everything I've read about economics or evolutionary psychology and I know not how many other topics, then who knows what sorts of nonsense I would believe, what kind of stupid decisions I would be making, what kind of boring person I would be? Who knows what kind of nonsense I believe _now_? I suspect that without such meager interdisciplinary strength as I have now, without my shining core of epistemic rationality, I would be utterly _destroyed_, ripped apart as my own myriad passions cut against each other.

I aspire to a reflective decision theory; I want to know what forces brought me to where I am, and to _judge_ them. I was raised to value education and to conflate education with schooling—now that I've encountered new evidence to the effect that schooling is not optimal education and now that I have a notion of utility maximization, I can furiously seek out knowledge with every spare moment, even if my attitude is weird or is inconsistent with who I was before. My past self was _confused_. I can _move on_ now. So many people murder themselves so quietly. They got beat down by the school system, they say, "I'm not smart," and they never pick up a book again. Mark this, Diary: I am determined _not_ to let the same thing happen to me in less dramatic (and therefore all the more so insidious) way. I need to work out a theory of what I really care about in regards to my intellectual work, what I really value, how fame works, how human status instincts work, how marketing works, how learning works, how information flows in this world. I should hack together a mathematical model about authors and their readers and try to get an intuitive feel for it. Ridiculous, I know: _no one_ can hope to truly understand such broad (in the impossible possible world in which you are less charitable, you would say _vague_) topics. But this is _personal_, Diary: if I'm going to be an intellectual in a world full of other smart people, millions of whom are far smarter than myself, then I _need_ a deep theory of these things, not so I can publish a paper about it, but so that I know what kinds of papers are worth writing and worth publishing.

John D. Cook has a post today on his blog _The Endeavor_ about exactly my probability of a disjunction intrigue (_cf_. 331, 337). Diary, I'm still so inefficient—it's so horribly late; I am so horribly old. I need to shop for clothes and find a new job but I just want ever more time to _think_! Well, sunk costs. I'll update you again—say after I meet Daniel. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Diary, did I ever tell you that I'm retarded? Never forget that. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— I am _retarded_. What did I get done tonight? I wrote a good comment on the blog—but I've learned to expect more from a night. Would you believe that I used to be like this _all the time_? At least now I know what real work looks like. Except—I can no longer content myself with any form of _at least_; a central part of my new methodology is that I don't live for merely relative measures. But I'm still (_still_) trying to iron out all the details, as I told you. My word, Diary. I am _retarded_. I don't even know any abstract algebra. —ZMD


#### 358 — Friday 26 June 2009 — "Complexity Theory"

I'm updating you early. I was slow again at my dayjob—was it because of my lack of sleep, or is it just that I've stopped caring as much? If the people around me seem retarded, is it because I've gotten smarter, or more arrogant and condescending? More bitterness about schools, besides.

Michael Anissimov's _Accelerating Future_ blog mentions that Anna, Steve, and Carl are going to the European Conference on Computing and Philosophy. The relevant research areas list on the call for papers includes "IT and Gender Research," "Feminist Technoscience Studies," and "Computer & Gender Studies." What are those papers _like_? What it's like to be the kind of person who writes that kind of paper?—or shouldn't I know this already?

Diary, what should I be _doing_? I know I'm doing it wrong, but what's right? What do I want to know?—everything. _Not_ everything: I should be happy (I _should_ be happy) to forget everything I know about American football. But everything about mathematics, and computer science, and the psychology of gender.

I aspire to a reflective decision theory: if I can _notice_ that I'm grumpy right now, and that I shouldn't be, then I can take action to correct the error. Say, I could masturbate with the lube I bought today, then shower and do some mathematics. But first I'll message Daniel to try to arrange a meeting. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Yeah, it's been a lousy day. I remain _angry_ about my wasted youth. Taking a class is like getting stabbed in the face. And I so desperately need a theory of creativity—I am an _intellectual_, and yet even after all this time (_cf_. 1), I _still_ don't know how to live in a big world. I'm better positioned than most people to figure this one out; many others must be beset by the same emotions, but lack concepts like Dunbar's number or the conjunction fallacy. But again, better than most people means nothing—I'm trying to get _away_ from relative measures (the eighth virtue is humility), and it's only by getting away from relative measures that I have any hope of resolving all this mess (the [ninth] virtue is perfectionism). Oh, culture! Should I block aside some hours on a free day to devote exclusively to studying this issue? And I've stayed up too late—oh, Diary! People form communities. I've stumbled into my own community—the _Less Wrong_ crowd. I'm not that confused about the facts of the matter; I'm just trying to figure out how I should feel. I'm so hurt; I've wasted so much—I'm not half as special as I think I am. Oh, Diary, protect me! —ZMD


#### 359 — Sunday 28 June 2009 — "Echoes of My Recent Madness"

I didn't even do any math yesterday, worried as I was about questions of morality and the flow of knowledge, and what it means to be talented in such a large world (_cf_. 357). Ridiculous, I know, but I can't brush my worries under the rug just because they're ridiculous—if my fears are irrational, then I should be able to reason out _answers_—absolutely crushing knockdown counterarguments.

This is an echo of my recent madness (_cf_. 316, 317), isn't it? I'm not terrified about plagiarism _per se_ right now, but I still don't have a creative decision theory exactly pinned down. And I wish I did. It would be nice to know what's going on.

To the extent that there is such a thing as truth or good design, you should expect people to independently stumble across similar solutions. It is good that people should know things, and that many people should know the same thing. If someday the customers in the store should find their eyes alighted with curiosity, I would be happy, not offended that they should realize some things that have long since been cached wisdom among my creepy Singularitarian friends. I would not say: that is my insight, give it back. For insights of themselves belong to no one. Sometimes we might want to know who had what insights when, and what exact sequence of events led them to have this insight, but this is an ordinary historical question; it is not some kind of trial.

Does all this sound correct to you, Diary? Why must I worry so? It is hardly original to worry about one's originality, but it's not as if one should stop worrying for that reason. I'm sure thousands, millions of creative people (I want to say that the adjective is redundant, but I have read Jensen) have faced this same test, had these same concerns. And yet there is a sense in which we must all face this alone. You can read a book about someone else asking these same questions and finding answers, but ultimately you have to decide whether their answers make sense, you cannot delegate your choice to delegate. This observation, too, is something I've heard before, probably many times before, although I cannot recall a particular example. But I am the one who remembers it now, who takes this general commonplace insight, and applies it to this specific problem I'm having at this specific time in my life.

I actually think it is a rather commonplace occurrence for someone to have a shocking insight that is new to them and seems original to them, even though many others have already known it for years. Once, Father commented to me that a woman might be so similar to me in so many ways, we might have so many interests in common, and yet we would still be so radically different. This insight must have seemed profound to him, but to me this was old news: not only did I already know this (however much it bothered me), but I had a quantitative grounding for it: Lewontin's fallacy.

I remember having a similar experience with Sam Goldhaber: I think he said he was thinking about my middle school speculations on free will, and had come to a compatibilist (I'm pretty sure he didn't use that word) position. And of course, I had been a compatibilist since 2004; what was still somewhat mysterious unto him was a nearly gut-level part of my worldview. And when I mentioned evolutionary psychology, he mentioned some speculations of his own about the origin of laughter or something like that, which sounded hopelessly naive to me. I had actually read some of the literature; I knew that science is hard, that you can't expect to actually get to the truth with such idle speculations. Consider Yudkowsky's "No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know."

It's so hard to know where you stand. On the one hand, you can't possibly comprehend how big six billion is: it's tempting to think you can't possibly be unique. On the other hand, you can think of yourself as a conjunction of traits, and every detail you tack on to a conjunction drives the probability down exponentially. You're more unique than you think. On still yet the first hand, if you consider the disjunction of all the ideas you had independently, well, every detail you tack onto a disjunction increases the probability, although sublinearly (_cf_. 331, 337). It's more likely than you think for someone else to have had the same insight as you.

The last time I visited my creepy Singularitarian friends, I was talking about this sort of thing, and I think Anna said something about how the competition is nowhere near being on the order of six billion. She's right: first eliminate the world's uneducated poor. Then eliminate everyone below IQ 125: that alone cuts down our candidate pool by a factor of twenty. Then eliminate those whose epistemic rationality is so poor that they remain theists or wishy-washy agnostics: probably another factor of—maybe ten?—I don't know. Anna asked me if I thought I could make a significant difference, and I said that I didn't know. She said it would be a terrible question to get wrong. I remember that in the beginning of Yudkowsky's "AI as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk" paper (I may not have the title down verbatim), he writes that the reason the paper does not cite previous literature about AI risks is because there essentially isn't any. O shocking that such a seemingly important topic would be so neglected. In this world full of millions, what are they all doing, what topics do they find important, and why?

So it is possible that my creepy Singularitarian friends are at the forefront of something truly special, and myself by association. Though consider Lewontin's fallacy again: we could be at the forefront of something, while missing a lot of knowledge held elsewhere.

So while I don't know what advice to give Jessica, for someone like myself there is plenty of low-hanging fruit, plenty of arbitrage opportunities. There are dozens of departments of gender or feminist or women's studies at universities, and yet I don't remember seeing anyone with my particular take on things: but what should I do about this? I'm sure I know a lot more math than Helen Boyd, but so what? What does it get me; where does it get me? What am I doing wrong? If I were really focused on my gender intrigue above all else, there are tons of things I could be doing: I could join the My Husband Betty message boards and seek allies there; I could email Anne Corwin and try to start up a conversation with her; I could call on the contact Fortune Elkins gave me—there are so many things I could be doing, that I'm not. I'm not utterly dedicated to my gender intrigue above all things, and I might tell myself that it doesn't matter, I have a different methodology now, that I don't have discrete goals, but mass of things-worth-doing and I can only strive to do as many things-worth-doing as possible. It's not a bad methodology to try—I'm certainly doing better than I used to be doing—I'm certainly doing far better than most people in this crazy world. And yet, is my methodology really conducive to actually writing and finishing a novel? But I can't be one of those people who does nothing but write fiction, or what would my fiction be about? The people in the thread the other night spoke of more life experience being helpful, but they didn't say anything about _research_. They didn't say to learn science.

How does status corrupt or support how information flows in society? When you mention the is/ought distinction, David Hume is the person to cite. And yet, Diary, I have trouble believing that David Hume is the first person out of everyone to ever suppose that you can't derive an ought from an is. The principle just seems so obvious to me now. But then, I grew up in a culture marked (however faintly) by the influence of David Hume; maybe it wasn't at all obvious then. Except "obvious" is always relative to some particular mind; what's our standard here? I expect that relative to normative reasoning, our deliberation mechanisms are corrupted by status seeking behaviors, but that doesn't mean that we're not doing as well or as better as you can expect from a bunch of apes. I'm weird along multiple dimensions, you'll remember, and even though geeks in general are too (relative to the population at large), you cannot expect most scientists to have my anticompetitive mindset. I might only have my anticompetitive mindset at a result of Alfie Kohn and my purity born of pain, which was in no small part a matter of chance. If I hadn't taken Prof. Aptheker's class, or I had chosen the University at Davis over the University [at] Santa Cruz, I would be quite a different person.

Nick Bostrom wrote a paper on the simulation argument: the idea that if posthumans have a ridiculous amount of computing power and run simulations of their ancestors, then we should expect to exist in one of these simulations. And as I recall, people accused him of ripping off Hans Moravec, who mentioned the same idea in passing in one of his books. And of course if Bostrom could remember that that's where he got the idea, then of course he should have cited Moravec; that's an obvious best practice. But Diary!—Bostrom's paper on the simulation argument is a good paper; it actually helped people make sense of things; that paper deserves to exist even if Nick Bostrom is not the first person to have come up with that general notion. Why do some people have to be so mean-spirited as to say that people aren't allowed to write about topics that they did not invent from scratch? Why do some people have to be so mean-spirited as to say that some people are not allowed to talk about topics that they don't have degrees in? Anna said that I have a tendency to freak out whenever there's social pressure on me to do something. It would be a good skill to have, to learn how to not freak out just because someone disagrees with me. If I think that someone is wrong—then I can just honestly say that I think they are wrong, and not surrender my vision. Can't I honestly say that I think I have more accurate views on the nature of creativity? I suppose this is Yudkowsky's "Lonely Dissent."

And Diary, what about all the people who had good ideas but don't have the standing of Moravec or Bostrom, who are both hotshot academics? What about all the smart, creative people who don't even have the standing of a Megan McArdle (who has nothing above an MBA)? Where do I stand? Is all my beauty rendered but dust?

I remember reading the blog of one Penelope Trunk, an entrepreneurial type. She said not to waste any time doing something that you couldn't be the best at. This is where I step off the "success" train, and wave it goodbye with no regrets. Think of my songs! I've written scraps of song from time to time, Diary, and sometimes I like to sing them, sometimes in cars. I don't care if I play no instrument and don't know any music theory. I created these songs and _they are beautiful! Full stop!_ And think of Scott Aaronson! Scott Aaronson is a theoretical computer scientist at MIT, and his "On Bounded Rationality and Self-Delusion" is one of my favorite short stories ever, and his "The Court of Scientific Integrity" is also good! Why should I care if they're just pages on his website, and never got published in a magazine? Why should I care if Aaronson doesn't have an MFA? _It is beautiful! It is beautiful!_

What do we even mean when we say that someone is good at some art? When we say that some work of fiction is good, do we mean only that it's a pleasure to read and full of insights? Or do we mean that it's more pleasurable and more full of insight compared to some standard based on other things we've read? I don't think we even _know_, which saddens me. There's so much of human psychology that is broken, and yet we probably won't get the chance to fix it—we're all going to blow ourselves up first, or turned to paperclips. And even if my creepy Singularitarian friends succeed, and I do get to experience quantitative cognition, and experience my fantasy, and have my data-driven androgyny, all under the auspices of an all-powerful Friendly AI—well, it will not have been the same as having had all this in a natural manner. Although to have all that, you really shouldn't complain.

Honestly, Diary, hasn't my own life been full of riches, devoid though it may be of formal honors? The record has been lost to your injury, but I remember explaining the gender intrigue to Nora—wasn't that such a precious conversation? Maybe someone else somewhere had an even more precious conversation about a topic that they're passionate about—am I to resent that? Why should I? I want other people to have topics of passionate curiosity—I like other people, and want them to do well. One is reminded about how people lament the state of the poor in this country, even though our poor are fantastically rich by global-historical standards. You see people buying groceries with their state-issued EBT cards at Safeway, and you don't want to end up with that terrible fate—but it's really not so bad on an absolute scale. Of course it is shameful to be on welfare, but you can still go to the library! O library! —ZMD

ADDENDUM— It has not been _such_ a bad day—I did closer to three than two pages in my pink binder, and wrote a ridiculously long Diary entry that may even have constituted progress towards resolving these echoes of my recent madness. And I had a good conversation with Father, earlier. But it is not enough; it's never enough; I want to know _everything_. Is that so wrong? Do I need to apologize for it, feel bad about it, worry that my life is meaningless when I already have more meaning than a single person can handle? I love my maths!—and I seek true knowledge of ultimate gender!—and the very fate of the world hangs on my shoulders, since so few are able to understand SIAI's work and why it might be the most important thing in the world. Father is very intelligent compared to the population at large, but there's so much important general knowledge that is off his map: he balked at first when I affirmed that thought is material, or at least that this is our best guess. I still haven't put any effort into searching for a better dayjob. I have so many ideas to pursue!—is that so wrong, that I love knowledge? Why should I be ashamed of it? —ZMD


#### 360 — Tuesday 30 June 2009 — "The Real Answer Is That I'm Retarded"

I'm still _angry_. I am _angry_—what didn't anyone just _tell_ me, that knowledge is good, and that everything you do in the pursuit of knowledge is good? Instead they run you around, stress you out, put you down, stab you in the face, and suck your time away from all the activities that are actually _helping_. _Why​?!_

And yet—and yet. I am an aspiring rationalist. I seek the map that reflects the territory. I've been hurt, and when you've been hurt, it's the most natural thing in the world to lash out at those who have hurt you. And—but what do I really have to _say_ here? That I'm hurt? That I'm confused, but at least I'm desperately trying to relinquish my confusion, which level is so far above most others, except that it doesn't matter how others are doing, and I haven't been nearly desperate enough? I didn't even do any math today. I read from _The Tangled Wing_, and idly flipped through some Greg Egan books. My books from the University library (_cf_. 353) are due on the ninth, and I haven't even finished the first one! Shameful! I'm so horribly old and ignorant. Why didn't anyone _tell_ me? I don't understand the world—and there are so many trade-offs that have to be made one way or the other. I don't know what I should be doing—I can say that I regret every minute that I spent in my youth playing games or thinking about professional baseball. I could have been doing _science_. But I cannot have those minutes back, and I'm stuck here, being so old and ignorant, and the people around me don't always even believe me when I say that this is a _problem_. Don't they value their lives? I didn't used to value mine, not the way I've been starting to, lately.

I have so many thoughts that I cannot properly articulate, at least not in the meager time I have. There are so many complications that go unvoiced, so many complications that I can just barely start to apprehend, and I know that there must be ever so many more that I cannot apprehend or even conjecture, except in this vague and meta fashion. I'm just trying to not be so stupid. But this entry is stupid; I can tell. —ZMD


#### 361 — Friday 3 July 2009 — "Abundance"

Today I burned through _An Abundance of Katherines_, an absolutely _charming_ novel about a washed-up child prodigy with a history of being rejected by girls named Katherine. Too perfect, I know (_cf_. _inter alia_, 138A3, 158, 160, 171, 173, 176). It's a smart novel laced with all sorts of intellectual treats—which is not to say it _impresses_ me the way Anna Salamon does. I really don't know where I stand—I'm so _retarded_, and yet when I look around me, I _don't_ routinely see people who have something as beautiful to compare—to my shining jewel. All my insights, all my musings—it's temping to say that I am _not_ used to seeing novels with the breadth and depth of insight of my thought—although of course I'm biased, and of course I have no craft, and of course part of the theme I've been on lately is that there is _too much_, something I had been searching for could very well exist, and I would not have seen it. I don't actually read a lot of novels, lately.

My mind feels so much stronger; I can speak and write with such fluidity—and I can do maths, too.

The philosophy underlying my new methodology might really be starting to stick. I'm getting better—life is so ridiculously much better than it was before, and yet I'm still so ridiculously so far below—I wish that I knew what I know, I wish I could bring order to all these fragments. It's the old problem of documentation that I spoke of, so long ago—and yet people say I'm _young_. My word—what could these other people _possibly_ be like; what do they have to compare to you?

The philosophy underlying my new methodology might really be starting to stick. I've told you more than once before that I don't know where I stand—and after so many months of beleaguering myself with the assertion, I might finally be beginning to except that it doesn't matter. I mean, that it doesn't matter where I stand on a _relative_ scale; what matters is where I really _stand_, the beauty I contain and create, the beauty I foster all around me. I must hold myself to still higher standards: I seek perfection; I want to be threading the needle.

Everyone is an autodidact, for the same reason that we never really get out of anarchy. —ZMD


#### 362 — Saturday 4 July 2009 — "Most Jobs"

I do _not_ yet have my purity born of pain in its fullness. In a fit of fury at the _injustice_ that _nothing you do counts unless you do it in a school_, I cried briefly. Later, I redeemed a man's winning lotto ticket—he matched four numbers, netting him over a hundred dollars. He made some comment to the effect that he was still in the red some large amount over his time playing, although this made him slightly less so. I noted that lotteries _are_ of negative expected value, and he asked in a jocular tone (although I am not entirely sure whether he was joking) where I went to _B-school_. I wasn't sure how to interpret this; I thought he meant a second-tier school, in analogy to _B-list celebrity_. He clarified that he meant business school, that he noticed that I knew the term _expected value_. I said that I was an autodidact. He didn't know how to interpret this, so _I_ clarified: "I learn from books." Then I put my head down and expressed my frustration and confusion as to where as a culture we get this stupid idea that nothing you do counts unless you do it in a goddam school under the control of some so-called teacher. And I don't think, Diary, that this was out of an involuntary fit of passion: I think to no small extent I was just being dramatic. I apologized for my lack of professionalism, but Diary, I should have just acted professionally in the first place. And now I've wasted time feeling bad and angry at the system, and breaking schedule again to boot, even though I'm not _confused_ exactly about any of the facts of the matter, and I have my new way upward. I value my life, now, in a way that I didn't know was possible (though I may just be waxing dramatic again)—shouldn't that be enough?

The system _is_ insane, though—all the magazines put out special issues about how universities are _ranked_, and yet universities are supposed to be about _knowledge_, and yet what would the magazines say if there was a huge breakthrough in human knowledge?—P=NP could be proved, and it wouldn't even make the cover. Okay, actually it would, because then cryptography wouldn't work and our financial system would collapse for real. (Has anyone written a piece of fiction about this?—in such a large world, how could I know?)

Today I eventually sold some money orders to a customer who was hard to deal with: she had trouble accepting that we could only put a maximum of $500 on each money order, and that we could not cash out money orders that had already been made out to someone else. I can't help but notice that it would have been awfully _useful_ if I could speak to her in fluent Spanish—which I might have been able to do, in the possible world in which I was actually _trying_ to learn Spanish in high school. But I _wasn't_ trying; I was just going through the motions, jumping through the hoops, filling in the exercises—no one _told_ me that anything I did in the service of the acquisition of knowledge was good; they only told me to obey. And now I am damned to only think in one language—not exactly damned; I _could_ still learn, but I choose not to with my limited time; maths and science and writing take first priority. But all those wasted hours, wasted years!—but you know this, Diary, you know this very well indeed, and I should not continually wear you down with this repetition of my complaint. I should shut up and work on my maths, or message my schedule to Daniel, or email Vassar about his "most jobs are worthless" thesis, or pretend that I can become a girl. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Fuck*tastic*. (Diary, I hope I don't have to tell you explicitly that this is a term of negative affect.) I masturbated and took a nap. Taking the difference between two terms of a sequence is obviously the discrete analogue of taking the derivative of a continuous function, but sometimes we find it useful to take what I've been calling the "factor difference" of a sequence—dividing a term by the previous one. What's the continuous analogue of _that_? In the Everett branches in which I never read Asimov's _The End of Eternity_, are my analogues much less likely to use the word _analogue_? —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM—"I Don't Think It's Healthy"— I really _do_ seem subjectively smarter than, say, this time last year. How is that possible?—I thought these things weren't supposed to change. Is it the blog; is it my maths? Really, I try to tell myself, that I shouldn't worry about trying to _account_ for it—leave that sort of navel-gazing to Linda Gottfredson. My task, now, is to attain my purity born of pain _in its fullness_, something I suspect I have only barely glimpsed. My task, now, is to be _as smart as possible_, to rush into the deep unknown as fast and as hard as I am able, without worrying about whether anyone else is doing better or doing worse. If I've stumbled upon some way to do better, that's _great_—I don't need to be afraid of violating some law of nature. _Law_ is just a _word_ we use in this context to refer to the things that _can't_ be violated. It's a _misleading_ word, if it makes me hesitate to try my best, on the grounds that I'm not "supposed" to do that well: Evelyn Fox Keller, call your office! I just want to _rush_—to feel my purity in its fullness. I know I've been saying this for a while, but the transition is not yet complete—I'm still hobbled; there are still moments when my studies seem—_illegitimate_. But I _notice_ this intuition, and deliberately mark it as faulty and to be destroyed. There's an analogy, I'm sure, to recursive self-improvement: I'm sure many of my coworkers look around at their little world and don't _notice_ that there's anything _missing_, and so they don't try to fill in the gaps. I notice my gaps, and want to fill them—oh, how I want to fill them! I aspire to grow into a _reflectivity_ that I had not known before. People—_smart_ people—collect school credits. I want to collect _insights_. Generalization, selection, map and territory, Lewontin's fallacy, Aumann agreement—what else? What deep structural properties of existence am I blind to? —ZMD

THIRD ADDENDUM— I'm _retarded_—my desires pulled this way and that by a few webpages. I seek generality; I like arts _and_ sciences. And I'm still so angry at this ridiculous farce of _schooling_. What am I doing wrong?—I know I'm doing something horribly, terribly wrong and I just wish someone would tell me. What's worth doing? If it's not good to write things just to pad your CV, then what _is_ worth writing? —ZMD


#### 363 — Sunday 5 July 2009 — "Fox Keller"

I forgot to tell you that my hair is now so long that it's actually kind of annoying. And I lost my hat, so my ponytail hangs down at my dayjob instead of being concealed. It's not obvious how I should feel about this. Actually, I take that back, it _is_ obvious: I should damn this ape for not being able to keep track of a single fucking _hat_. It shouldn't be difficult.

Diary, I am composed of _fail_. But let's review. Intellectual progress for last week: I think about sixteen pages in my pink notebook, fourteen and a half pages in my pink technical binder, more than 4500 words in you, I think nine blog comments (one of which was substantive), and I read _An Abundance of Katherines_. Is this _good_?—but I'm trying to get beyond these merely relative measures (as I will keep telling you until someday I start believing it myself). I have some vague notion of what I value in this universe (romance, adventure, _insight_, people who care), and I have some vague, confused notions of how the universe actually is, and I just want to evoke or conjure as much value as I can. Being _good_ (satisficing some arbitrary threshold of value evoked) or being _better_ (satisficing some arbitrary threshold of one's percentile ranking of value evoked) is just a distraction from the main task of actually getting things _right_, and threading the needle. The eye being a Planck length across, we are naturally doomed—but the quest continues for _general_ knowledge, _general_ principles—being _less_ wrong. But I repeat myself, and I've wasted enough time in the past twenty-four hours, as if I've reverted to my old self—the lazy boy who couldn't do his homework in the days long before these of my purity born of pain.

John Maxwell IV has sent me an email saying that a recent post of mine increased his estimate of my interestingness by a approximately a factor of 1.5; he wants to meet with me. I don't suppose I should chide him for spurious precision in my reply—or should I? "Approximately"? What _units_ are interestingness measured in? Diary, we are taught that you can scale or translate your utility function as much as you like, and it really doesn't change a thing; there aren't actually any utilons floating out there in the void, to be collected, hoarded, or otherwise traded for Pokémon cards.

I can't help but wonder—I would bet on it—that the comment that attracted Maxwell was one of those describing my new methodology. (Diary, I was _shocked_ to have been upvoted so much.) I don't know if I should regret my tone; I should worry that I made myself sound awesome (even as I declaimed that I wasn't), when really I'm _not_. Except under my new perspective, I'm not even allowed to parse this; if I'm not going to content myself with merely relative awesomeness, then with what turn of phrase can I speak of the concept at all? I don't think this problem is _unsolvable_ exactly, although it be delicate.

Jessica said that I showed her the stray lock as if she cared, but _I_ cared. I could understand not caring on the assumption that caring is a limited resource, but I don't think it is; I really think we can buy more attention. On the _cheap_, really. I can get it for you wholesale.

Honestly. The tangled wing, indeed. Enough. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— What _happened_ today?—it has to have been some kind of terrible relapse, that it's now so late in the day, and I don't even understand the proof of Taylor's theorem, which I _should_ have understood—years ago. I am meeting with Maxwell tomorrow—why should he think I'm interesting?—sure, I have displayed my sparks of brilliance, but—but it's not enough; it's never enough, except it should have been enough to say this _once_—although apparently I somehow don't believe this. I recall that Mondays are visitor nights at the SIAI summer house, but I wasn't able to reach Anna.

I _briefly_ met with Seanan and Katie before my dayjob; I had trouble contacting either of them afterwards, but I returned to the park to find Katie and friends playing _Risk_. (A _game_—who has time for _games_?) I was too argumentative during my brief meetup before my job—I reminded myself of Robin Hanson, way too masculine. Maybe I can understand where the time went today: I wrote to you, I looked at the blog, I emailed Maxwell, I took a little bit of math notes, I went to my job, I went through the runaround trying to contact Seanan and Katie, I wrote a decent email to Seanan and Katie, I reread passages from _Distress_ (why?), I write to you again. You can see how all this can fill up a day, but you can also see why I should feel bad. I haven't even been reading real books! I'm so retarded, even now, when everything is going better than it ever has gone before.

So cut my losses. I should go to bed, wake up early, and read and do math for some hours so I can feel good about myself again. Then, at eleven, I'll do some chores and get ready to go. And then—hopefully I'm half as interesting as I seem. After Maxwell, it might be fun to visit a new library. And maybe visit the SIAI people—maybe Anna's phone will work tomorrow. And—life goes on. Maybe—maybe there's something I want to try writing before I go to bed? _Shut up_.

And what a coincidence, but—I don't think this John Maxwell was the only one I've known. Wasn't I roommates with a John Maxwell for a time during my last quarter at University, in the days lost to your injury? But _shut up_. I remain yours. —ZMD


#### 364 — Thursday 9 July 2009 — "The Eleventh"

The meeting with Maxwell was splendid; I may have shined—only it's so hard to explain things, and I mean this in more ways than one. I studied in the city library before going to visit my creepy Singularitarian friends, who reacted when I referred to them as such. Anna, Carl, and I think Steve had just returned from a conference in Spain. O scholarship!—words cannot express my hunger for true knowledge—or the hunger I _want_ to feel. There's too much; we are too rich—and yet so poor; I can s*ee* gaps to fill. And yet I'm still bitter; a man from Heald called earlier today, and I did not resist from dumping on him a little. It's a waste of energy to be angry, still—so _what_ if Robert Wright is famous and I'm never going to be? Can't I just be happy that _Anna_ _Salamon_ thinks I'm worth having around, or for the book on spectral graph theory that's due to come out later this year? Anna suggested dumping thirty minutes a day into cognitive behavioral therapy, which is not a bad idea. But O minutes!—O wealth! I have a way upward, and no shortage of things to do. I could fill many human lifetimes solely with my own intellectual endeavors, but _then_ I've also got making a living and existential risks to think about. Never a dull moment—I mean, besides checking.

I've ordered a copy of _An Abundance of Katherines_ to give to Anna as a gift.

Vector calc is slow going, and there's so much that I don't understand, but I can't spend forever trying to apprehend the Lagrange multipliers, when there are so many other things that need apprehending.

Today Jessica told me I should buy some of that Axe body spray, because she didn't want to say outright that I smelled bad. I thanked her for informing me of my incompetence, which is really something I need to know. I actually did buy a can (perhaps I could not resist the thought of holding it up to Jessica as I left, which I did), although I lost some feminist points on the purchase; Axe's advertisements are horrible.

The next _Less Wrong_ meetup is just Sunday: Robin Hanson, Michael Vassar, and Roko Mijic will be there.

Do I bore you with my repetitiveness? Do I, Diary?—except you're stuck. —ZMD


#### 365 — Saturday 11 July 2009 — "Territorial"

Friday has been a horrible day. I do _not_ have my purity born of pain—I'm still intellectually crippled; I have no idea what my fury is like. Oh, I am not about to be wrecked by the things they did to me (_cf_. 347)—though it's not easy to forget. Consider all the stages I have gone through, Diary—the entire sequence of insights and obsessions, all the thoughts and notebooks, all that activity, all that _life!_ What monstrous impulse could make someone try to _sum over_ all this complexity and package it as a three-point-two? It is a _sacred quest_, not unlike Robin Hanson's sacred quest, but better, because he's not a feminist. Are the others—not like this? The girls who take ecstasy at parties, the guys who are so jealous that they don't like it when their girlfriend talks to _anyone_ else—how do _they_ conceive of themselves, what is their world like, in what sense to we inhabit the same Earth?—when I have a concept of evolutionary psychology, whereas that guy just feels his anger as _righteous_—except I fear he doesn't even go so far as to describe it as such in words. Maybe if I understood that guy, I would understand why schools exist; as things stand, I'm confused about both. I wish I knew; I wish I knew how it works, what holds it together, and it's not about—I don't want it to be about me being smarter than anyone else. It's just—we deserve to _know_, that's all. Before it's over.

I have troubles about school, and status, and originality, and once upon a time my recent madness, and all these are distinct, but somehow related. And if I'm crippled, I love that I can at least analyze my disability in this way. How _dare_ any institution try to claim the domain of abstract thought for itself! How _dare_ they! You mention some interesting fact about the world, and people say they weren't good at that subject in school. But who mentioned school?—it is _sickening_.

Think of the sequence—I'm still changing; I'm still growing; I keep on having new ideas—and ideas are not strictly the province of academics; anyone can have an idea, and all that really matters is if it's any good. This dream of my purity born of pain has only recently crystallized into a new form: a continuous utility function to be maximized rather than discrete goals to satisfice, absolute measures rather than relative ones, general principles from which proper actions for any specific situation can be derived rather than fixed injunctions of narrow scope. This perspective seems so _right_, and if it's a rare perspective, then I didn't choose it _because_ it's rare.

I don't want to be crippled anymore; I just want to rush. Isn't it okay to say that I don't know where I stand, that it's so hard to estimate that to a first approximation I don't care? Isn't it okay to say that I'm not competent to think about social institutions? I know: in the least convenient possible world, you have to choose. But in this world, not yet faced with the choice, and bounded as I am in computing power, can't I punt? I want to create many beautiful things—I have created many beautiful things.

But people talk about access to a good education—and it's fucking insane. So _what_ if the schools in the inner city are crumbling? All the best libraries are in the city! I'm so retarded—I didn't spend much time in the library. Why? What made me think I wanted to go home? _Retarded_. Pretending to be asking for study tips, I complained to the librarian. I'm so _angry_. Why do none of my thoughts _count_? I have thought so many good thoughts!—the people I know who go to posh universities do not impress me. I'm so angry—I should hope it is not a male angry. To find out, I have to study—and there's so much math and computer science I should know. I want to know everything. But I'm angry. And the quality of my prose is degenerating, which I suppose does not reflect so well on me. —ZMD, 0025


#### 366 — Monday 13 July 2009 — "Isomorphic to One-Boxing"

The latest _Less Wrong_ meetup was Sunday, and as always, it was amazing. I think that I know that I told you, so I think that I know that you know, but it still seems so strange. I think of myself (I make sure to think of myself) as so obviously fucking retarded, and yet I go to these _elite_ fucking gatherings, and I _fit in_. Something is _wrong_ with this world when _I'm_ impressing Nick Tarleton (who is part of the SIAI summer program), rather than the other way around. Nick's impressed that I do math without having Something to Protect—but _honestly_, Diary, it should be obvious—if you _don't_ do math, then you just end up playing worthless fucking _games_ instead. Like Anna said, when you don't know what else to do, accumulate intellectual capital, and every moment counts. (When I said the line about accumulating intellectual capital, Steven said that that was true of any sort of capital. I said yeah, but studying is more fun than making money.) Is this the sort of thing Eliezer was referring to when he wrote that the way you acquire superpowers is by recognizing that they _are_ perfectly normal?

I showed up early, and folks were seated around the long table having a discussion with Robin Hanson, who was in the Bay Area.

A bit later, in miscellaneous discussion (the kind you don't remember all the threads of, perhaps in part because you didn't hear them all), someone said something about needing a very complicated specification of chemicals to have some sort of effect, and Roko said it would be easy to, _e.g_., make chimpanzees more docile, just lower their testosterone. I think Mike Blume made a reference to eunuchs in some ancient society, and I made a reference to our resident troll (_cf._ 320A). And I said, as far as the lowering of testosterone goes, we have plenty of data from transsexual women. This prompted to Roko to make a long-winded misogynistic joke about chimpanzees engaging in some stereotypically feminine behavior. I think I might have said, "Yeah, fuck you, too," but I guess I didn't say it loud enough, because Roko didn't notice. I think I retreated from conversation shortly thereafter, lost in my apprehension of this world, trying to apprehend my apprehension, thinking of what my feminist friends would think, maybe humming the _Voyager_ theme. Soon Roko came over and introduced himself, though we had already recognized each other.

I got to meet [redacted]—[...] I told him about my interests, and the story of Daniel-who-was-once-called-Ellen, and Kathy.

Michael Vassar is fascinating, as always.

Later on, I was present with Patrick (the _orthonormal_ of the blog) and Roko, talking about mathy things—I think they were impressed when I mentioned my rederivation of the expression for disjunctions—Diary, what the fuck?—I'm _retarded_.

Well, at least I have my fury now—so strange that even so many elite people don't have the concept of this fury, that making sense of things is _important_, and that if you can't get a University to support you, you can do it directly. If somehow Nicole were to be cast out from the great Institute, what would she do, where would she go, what would she study? I don't think she would work as hard; I don't think she is desperate the way I'm desperate, for an understanding that embraces everything. But I am almost certainly wrong, and I could be arrogant, and I have other things to do today, and so I leave you. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— More bitterness tonight. I feel like I've been systematically betrayed and lied to. But they _weren't_ lying to you; it's just that now you know something they don't. —ZMD


#### 367 — Thursday 16 July 2009 — "McArdleist"

I don't think I was very good today, although it's hard to tell. Some days you do a lot of thinking, but how do you tell whether it was good thinking? How do you know if you've made any progress, and what constitutes progress? How do you think you know what you think you know? I _think_ Vassar said that he wouldn't be surprised if a sort of hard takeoff could occur in a human _(cf_. 362A2)—I do seem to be more effective, although maybe not so much today; I didn't do very much math. My abstract algebra book arrived in the post yesterday. The preface notes: "As with previous editions, the text contains substantially more than can normally be covered in a one year course." My _word_, Diary: there's so _much_ to know! So _many_ adventures to have—there remains so much of which we are utterly ignorant. I wish I knew what sustains it all, what holds it together. Sometimes I feel a little discouragement in the back of my head, as if what I'm doing is somehow _illegitimate_. But if one is going to live, then one is going to be thinking about _something_, and better that this something should be abstract algebra, rather than Pokémon. Why _shouldn't_ I know everything? Is it not my birthright as a general intelligence? But it's _I_ who speak of _birthrights_, in fact there is only the world full of various people doing various things for various reasons. What does it even _mean_, to say that it is _right_ for such-and-this to happen, or that the _function_ of such-and-this is such-and-that?

I just wish I could untangle it all: economics and decision theory and counterfactuals and how it all applies to what I should do with my life. Maybe studying Pearl would help, although I have ever so many other things to study! I remind myself: the entire _point_ of jobs is to produce stuff that people want. I have a vague notion of the sorts of things I want, so I just need to optimize. But it's all so complicated. That's my problem lately; I try to think about big questions which it would be _really fantastically useful_ to know the answer to, and I end up concluding that it's complicated. Well, we _knew_ that. Still, even as I say that it's complicated, I _do_ have some grasp of the complications: I have a notion of Hayekian information problems, for instance.

I really do need to learn the trick of really binding myself to schedule. There's too much that I want to do—there are blogposts I could write—oh, there's so much. Yet even saying that, I feel illegitimate—even today, I am _pained_ to think of University—to think of the whole ugly system of classes. Diary, it is _crazy_! Why doesn't everyone else see this, too? Or do I have some abilities that they don't? Can I lay claim to an epistemic gift? It's all so hard to communicate—if I even have the _right_ to communicate. You right a blog comment, and people "round your point to the nearest cliché." Now, I got that phrase from the blog somewhere, but exactly where? I wish I knew. Oh, how do I resolve at long last my status anxiety? There are so many analogies to draw—oh, but what is actually _true_? Diary, it's late, Diary, no doubt you've heard all of this before or could very easily have predicted the gross details, Diary, forgive me.

Robin Hanson said that he couldn't just tell his grad students what to do; rather, they come to him and said that I want to work on this-and-such; will you be my advisor? From his tone, it didn't seem like he approved—or at least he didn't _obviously_ approve. But you might have expected him to. —ZMD


#### 368 — Friday 17 July 2009 — "Battered Shelter"

I need to get over it—I really need to get over it—all this pain and frustration has got to end. I have a new method now, a new way forward. I care about _knowledge_ and _insight_, and I'll do everything I can to optimize my information uptake—and every moment and every dime counts. Let it be said once more that I have be systematically betrayed throughout my youth—_I_ wasn't exactly innocent, either. Imagine if I had honestly been _trying_ to learn Spanish. And remember that Precalc class, for which we did our homework in a notebook?—that's actually pretty similar to my current method, which is so beautiful and which I love so much. Why didn't I think of it then? Why didn't I _rush_? Can I pray that somewhere across the many worlds, some of my analogues were so insightful?

At least I read a lot of books.

Well, I'm _not_ dead yet. I can still rush. In some ways, I'm better off this way. My sister the genius took the standard route to a career in science, and she does _not_ impress me intellectually. It's such an _obvious_ idea: have a big cache of technical textbooks, and work through them in the fullness of my fury. Why _why why_ didn't I think of it when I was fifteen?

So many people just let the system grind them up, and then they're _stuck_—they haven't read what I have; they don't have the rationality skills to think their way out of a box. At least I know to push myself against the side of the box, and if I keep growing, I might be able to break free. When I find myself in a state of psychological torment, it's _not_ just a senseless pain; I can actually _think_ about it. I can say that I'm high in intelligence and openness to experience and neuroticism, and that I've internalized some moral precepts that—may not be the most convenient for someone with such a fine attention to detail. And I can think of those left-libertarian bloggers, and how what they have to say bears on my situation. I can draw connections between my feelings about school, and how the characters in _Atlas Shrugged_ feel about working under socialism.

And when I put things this way, the sorts of things I try to tell myself about how I don't want to care about merely relative measures just seem so obviously right. Why should I get off on feeling _superior_ to Leeza and Daniel? Shouldn't they have the chance to know this wonder, too, to have the escape hatch of being able to think themselves out of a box?

I'll make sure to do a lot of math tonight, and to work hard tomorrow. My booth performance seems to have never really gotten back up to where it once was, when I cared more than I do. It really is time to move on.

In more ways than one. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— There's this feeling again—I don't know if I'm imagining this feeling, or if it's real, and maybe Daniel Dennett would say that there's simply no difference, but for myself I'm not so sure. I was doing some math, and then somehow I felt _illegitimate_. As if I'm somehow not _allowed_ to do better, as if somehow the fact of my wasted youth makes it _wrong_ to strive for full understanding now. This is the sort of thing I mean about being able to think myself out of a box: I have a concept of sunk costs and _tsuyoku naritai_, so I can make a conscious effort to dismiss these thoughts as irrational with respect to my deliberatively stated morality. But for someone _without_ that kind of background—someone dumber and less literate—you can imagine them having this same evil emotion, but not having the intellectual toolkit to describe it and disavow it in so many words. But Diary!—I love life! I love knowledge! _I want to know!_ I shouldn't have to explain or justify it to anyone! _I want to know! I want to know!_ And again, with a fury that will tear apart stars: _I want to know!_ So _what_ if I wasted my youth? Why shouldn't I know _now_? I really don't _care_ if others know more, _I_ want to know as much as I can—I want to be as smart as I can, and I want everyone else to so strive, too, because life is _so short_, and we should _all_ be trying to make the most of it. I _care_ about this civilization! I _care_! I want to be _good_! Oh, how I want to be _good_! Why do people let themselves get so torn up?—I just wish I knew what was going on. I don't want to be a stupid radical; I _know_ that there are reasons why things are the way they are—but oh, Diary, why didn't anyone tell me it could be like this? —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— I should tell you: I should be picking up some research materials from the UPS store tomorrow. O joy! —ZMD


#### 369 — Saturday 25 July 2009 — "A Change of Variables"

Diary, I am left with the sinking feeling that everything I believe is nonsense until I read Judea Pearl. Really, until I know how to think in terms of Bayes nets, then I can't very well talk about counterfactuals. But given that the universe is deterministic (modulo our friends across the many worlds), _all_ talk of alternative courses of action are counterfactual. I have an explicit policy that it's good to have ridiculously unrealistic ideals, because you can just try to get as close as you possibly can to the dream, even though you know you'll never get there: maximize a continuous utility function, rather than satisficing discrete goals. _Normatively_ this practice is obviously right, but I don't think I've yet mastered the human practice of it. Maybe I get caught up thinking about how things should be, and then I have to remind myself to look at this world as it _really is_, and ask what incremental improvement I can actually make.

The blog went to shit over the past week; apparently the community is still not capable of sanely discussing gender. I've been repeatedly listening to a new song that I bought recently after hearing it on the radio; the chorus (in part) asserts that "It's much better to face these kinds of things / With a sense of poise and rationality." I filled some nineteen pages in my pink binder [this week], which is not so bad, really. Consider that just this time last year, I was still suffering at Heald! I'm so much healthier now; I'm doing so much better than ever before; I see so much farther. And there still seems to be a lot of low-hanging fruit—consider that I spent too much time on the internet today and yesterday, and consider all the time I spent on the blogospheric blowup; consider the lost productivity at my dayjob worrying about the blowup. I don't _know_ what my limits are, and I can't trust the mainstream as any sort of baseline, because I'm weird, and I have a vision and I have an epistemic gift. —ZMD


#### 370 — Wednesday 29 July 2009 — "Wolfram"

Talk about "hard takeoff": we can observe noticeable changes in my personality on the timespan of months. When I visited the Prof. Tantalo (_cf_. 326), I insisted several times that I wasn't even a math person _really_. (He wisely asked what that even meant.) Now—I _will_ identify as being a math person, even though I am of course careful to insist that this is only a symptom of the more general condition of loving human intelligence and the only logical extensions thereof. There's just ever so much to explore, so much structure that you would never expect existed if it weren't for your creepy Singularitarian friends, because _no one told you_ it could be like this!

I had been having trouble (I am _still_ having trouble) with the coördinate transforms, so I decided to make up my own exercise with my own map, only it was not obvious to me how to define an arbitrary one-to-one map. The book defines a map as one-to-one if T(u,v)=T(u',v') implies that u=u' and v=v'. Invocation of the definition of material implication and a few (three?) applications of DeMorgan's law brings this into a form that seems like it should be more useful, although then again maybe not so much. The next day, the idea strikes me to use complex numbers to define a map: we know that polynomials on the reals are one-to-one, so shouldn't polynomials on complex numbers be one-to-one?—regretfully this is not obvious to me either, and I have reasons to suspect it's false. Today I think that the Jacobian determinant being zero implies that a function is not one-to-one; when the Jacobian determinant is zero I don't think we can do the integration at all.

And—oh, there are so many bits and complications that I can't or won't describe to you, but the point is that there is so much beauty in all of this, and I delight in my struggles to apprehend this beauty, even though I wouldn't do so well on a test right now, because I have trouble actually getting solutions to problems. I _know_ that's shameful; I'm not going to fall into that trap of thinking it's okay to not get the answer as long as you get the concept, because I know that if you really _get_ the concept, you can get the answer. So if you can't get the answer—well, _modus tollens_. But if I couldn't pass a test _now_, it's not a cause for worry because I'm never going to _stop_ studying. And even if I never master the change of variables theorem, I'll at least master some _other_ math.

I think I figured out what I might call my pink binders full of these technical pages: my STEM binders, for the journalist's initialism for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Eliezer wrote that he had to take every other day off when doing his real AI work with Marcello, because it was so mentally exhausting. I couldn't empathize: I say that I don't run up against my mental energy limits; I run up against my sleep cycle. But maybe it's not true, and I'm just confused about what it feels like to run up against your mental energy limits.

I frequently think that I have no idea how large this world is, but there's another sense in which I don't know how _small_ it is: it's scope neglect going up against the birthday paradox, and I, wedged in between, am left without access to the direct facts of the matter. The literature is vast, but not _so_ vast that you don't recognize books walking through the library, and not so vast that you don't constantly pick up references, and not just the references that _everyone_ knows. The trashy research ("research") novel I'm reading even references [ ] _The Physics of Star Trek_, which I skimmed probably in 2006.

Life is very good. Until we all die. I have some friends who are working on that. Enough. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—"_That Number_ Is _Insane_"— That research ("research") novel made me horny, and I ended up masturbating to it, which took up some time. I can't say whether it was worth it—although we all know more than we can say. Father gave me a lead on how to fix the mysterious bug in my implementation of Laguerre's method, but there's still more to fix. It should be a pleasant night of coding and math, with an hour of reading before bed, perhaps Maccoby. I wish I knew exactly why I feel bad—and hampered, still.

My current practices are founded on a philosophical edifice built up over a period of years, to only call it _self-motivation_ would be to sum over far too many details. —ZMD


#### 371 — Thursday 30 July 2009 — "Lockhart"

We lost power for some time at the store today.

Jessica said that she was up late the other night writing a research paper for her boyfriend. I'm proud to report that I think I had trouble interpreting this. I think that I imagined her researching some topic her boyfriend desperately wanted to know about, and it took me a few seconds [...] for the ultimately true "cheating at school" hypothesis to even _occur_ to me. Smiling and then explaining this when asked may have been a bit much, though: I'm so self-centered!—as if I had to tell _you_ that much.

I don't know if I ever told you about how I joked to Josh or Alyssa that I talked myself into autism. But what's the underlying truth that makes the joke funny? Nicole called tonight, and I bored her with attempted explanations of what I've been thinking about. There's so much she has to learn at her new lab, but she didn't say this with the tone of excitement that I use (that I make sure to use) when I speak of there being _so much_ to learn.

I wish I understood this world; I wish I understood how Nicole and Jessica think. There's so much structure to probe, so many strengths and skills I want to _internalize_. I want to be _big_, don't you understand? I want to be _big_ and I want to be _good_. —ZMD


#### 372 — Friday 31 July 2009 — "Bumpy"

Today was not a good day. I'm so terrible at thinking. I was so reckless in my drive to my job that I think I very nearly hit a pedestrian, who was quite understandably very angry. I stopped, and he continued crossing the street, waving his arms angry at me like I was some sort of reckless maniac (which was of course perfectly true). But he didn't seem hurt, so I drove off. A few minutes later, I felt guilty, and drove back (though it's not clear what good I actually expected this could do), but I did not see the man.

I should have noticed when I walked in that the Western Union computer was off (due to the previous day's power outage), my negligence in this respect and everything that ensued probably cost us two transactions.

I continue to consistently get _wrong answers_ to iterated integration problems; I wish I knew the exact details of this catastrophic gap in my understanding. I started reading Maccoby.

I wish I knew how to communicate with Nicole. I honestly suspect I have better conversations with my coworkers.

I had a good conversation with Father. Only—I broke schedule today; I had wanted to write code for the spectral graph theory project, and I didn't get to it yet, only it's now late enough that I won't. I didn't even do very much math today. I lament having wasted my youth, and yet how much better am I really doing? I read today—well, I read _then_, too. How much difference does having this concept of rationality really make?—well, maybe today has just been a bad day? I am proud of my maths—speaking of which, I had an interesting encounter with the new deli manager Richard. Richard and I probably have the same degree status, but he _talks_ like a guy (a _guy_) with a high school education, whereas I talk like a grad student and (I hope) a fag. He asked me how I got so good at math—he saw the buttons on my bag, and I entertain a fantasy that he also saw my clipboard which I accidentally left upstairs. I said I got it from books, and went into my standard rant about school. He asked me to show him how to calculate percentages, and I did so. He said it would be useful when he does his shopping. I said that if he was interested in this sort of thing, he could buy an algebra or prealgebra text.

I still need to beat these contemptible intuitions about status; I think they again hampered my performance today. I've run and rerun the arguments too many times; why can't my brain just accept the solution? Small is beautiful, if only because large is incomprehensible. Nothing else even makes sense. As a commenter "Consequentialist" said on the then-_Overcoming Bias_: "Even if you're only capable of becoming an average, main-sequence star, and not a quasistellar object outshining billions of others, what you must do is to become that star and not remain unlit. Oftentimes those who appear to shine brightly do so only because there's relative darkness around." That's a beautiful quote. I _choose_ to value that quote, and it's not obvious to me why I should even care that it was by some psuedonymous blog commenter rather than—oh, let's say Peter Norvig.

Kevin Carson is better than I remember him. O glorious human intelligence! I can look on old texts with new eyes (or rather a new mind) after everything I've learned from Yudkowsky. There are so many things I want to talk over with Anna! There's so much—there's so much I want to contain, but won't be able to in this world, which can't last as it is. One way—or the other. —ZMD


#### 373 — Tuesday 4 August 2009 — "Voice"

It could just be psychosomatic, but I thought I've felt a weakness in my heart recently—could my poor eating habits be catching up to me? At age _twenty-one_? That's _probably_ ridiculous, but I haven't studied medicine—and so you can see what a horribly depraved condition it is to be in, to not have studied medicine. You might wonder something about your body, but not be in a position to say whether it's ridiculous or not, even though _someone_ knows, and probably put it in a book somewhere. But _which book_? And why haven't you read it already? It's been a lousy day—I continue to be wrecked by the things they did to me. Why do I let it hurt me so? Why do I remain hampered, crippled? Why can't I just _rush_ all the time in my decision-theoretic splendor?

I must never allow myself to think that I should not write, because writing is only a form a communication. There is nothing _special_ about being a writer: on the blogosphere, writing is just how anyone _says_ things, so to say that I should not write is to say that I should not speak. But even the least educated among us _says_ things, so to say that I should not speak is to say that I should die. If I value my life at all, then I should read, write, do math, rush into the deep unknown—all for the same reason: because it is right. Because if you _don't_ rush into the deep unknown, you just stay where you are, perhaps talking to Chelsea on the telephone or playing some worthless game.

I didn't do very much today so far—I slept in, and I read on the internet before I had to go in to my dayjob. I skimmed Asimov's "Profession" (which was probably not online legally), which I have to say was charming to my autodidactic heart, as was "The Dead Past." Only it's strange—there's a sense in which Asimov does not impress me. He writes wonderful stories, but not stories with the sort of big, deep ideas that I have taken as the meaning of my life. He'll write about these global systems that assign people to jobs, without even hinting at, say, Hayekian information problems. Asimov is well known to be a polymath—but how much did he know about economics? See what happens, Diary?

What can I do to feel legitimate? Write _Less Wrong_ posts? Diary, I am frustrated; Diary, I want to _know_. —ZMD


#### 374 — Friday 7 August 2009 — "RTFM"

Father was right about my attitudes towards school perhaps changing in a few years. As much time as I spend being angry—well, this afternoon I did find myself fantasizing. Imagine that I aced the GRE Math, did a few conference papers with Anna, and got accepted to grad school at UCSC! Sure, it's only an idle fantasy—probably it won't actually happen. But I'm going to keep studying—I am always going to be studying. And I think now I _could_ do well in school, if I wanted to, knowing what I know now. In my wasted youth in the days before these of Eliezer Yudkowsky and my purity born of pain, I fundamentally _didn't know what I was doing_. I just sort of passively went through the motions, trying to obey the teacher's commands, but not even doing a very good job of it. And on the side I had my private reading. _I could do so much better now!_—now that I have my pink STEM binder, now that I have a notion of serious study! And if I'm ever a TA or a lecturer, I will impress this upon my students: it's not about obeying me; it's about _knowledge_. If you think you see a better way of doing things for yourself, do that! Don't even tell me about grades!

I've been down, Diary; I've been hurt. But now that I have this shining core of epistemic rationality, now that I've almost replaced this repugnant monstrosity of _discipline_ with the tautology of doing the right thing, it's as everything is on the up and up.

I called Anna this evening, and she says I can visit Monday night and Tuesday. Richard Hollerith is right; she's so hard to read—I hope she wasn't annoyed with me. I do love her so.

I was not very efficient at my dayjob today; I had my own abstract thoughts to think. This morning I felt discomfort in my left breast in time with my heartbeat. I really am going to kill myself one of these days, if I don't change. But change is what I'm all about, now. I bought bananas. —ZMD


#### 375 — Wednesday 12 August 2009 — "Literacy"

O Diary O eventfulness! Visiting the SIAI crowd was wonderful as usual. I liked Carl Shulman's presentation on the genetics of human intelligence. You're aware, of course, that we've hardly found any QTLs for _g_. (Tom McCabe asked what a QTL was, and I piped up, "Quantitative trait locus," before Carl could answer. Is it that I'm insecure about my scienceness?) So the idea is that variance in human intelligence is caused by everyone having a large number of minor detrimental mutations, with smarter people having fewer defects on average—this having important consequences for the possibility of enhancing whole brain emulations. I had a really good long conversation with Marcello yesterday, during which I spent a lot of time explaining my thoughts about social organization and my purity born of pain. Marcello started off asking me what useful things I knew that he could learn from me—Vassar had told him that he was good at learning things from people. Well, I _hardly_ had anything to say relevant to AI work, but it was good to talk to him. My self-confidence still (_still_) goes up and down radically; one day I feel like I have rationalist superpowers; the next day I feel _retarded_. I still don't know how to answer that fundamental question: what do you (think you) know, and how do you (think you) know it? When Lucas (the bright local high school student who has been hanging out with the SIAI crowd) asked if it would be useful to upload something other than humans, I knew enough to say, "_C. elegans_!"

An exciting development: Anna invited me to move to the Santa Clara house to collaborate, at least for a three-week trial period to see if I can be useful. The initial idea is to outfit the _Less Wrong_ wiki with good pages on concepts from the _Overcoming Bias_ canon, and for the posts to link to the wiki, and the wiki to link to posts, so new users can bounce back and forth between them. The idea is for Steve and I to work on this so that Eliezer doesn't have to spend his valuable time on it. It's sort of a right-place-right-time opportunity for me: I don't have any meaningful achievements or credentials to my name, but I just happen to be smart, intimately familiar with the canon, and willing to work for free. It's not as if Steve and I will be working on the wiki sixteen hours a day, either, so I'll get lots of study time, too, with all sorts of fascinating and helpful people around. Mother and Father okayed the plan this evening, so it looks like it's really going to happen! I'm expecting an email from Anna tomorrow detailing the exact conditions of what constitutes a _successful_ trial period. If it doesn't work out, or when my savings run too low, I'll hit the job market, or possibly return to Safeway (Father wants me to ask for a leave of absence rather than quitting outright).

Speaking of Safeway, today was ridiculously busy. I've continued to be pretty slow going through my morning routine, as through molasses, and I was looking to catch up on my backlog after my lunch, but I kept being called to check constantly, and there were all sorts of other fires I had to put out: I barely managed to balance a pan, much less catch up on my backlog.

And worse: I got written up for a negative override from last month! O terrible incompetence! What could I have been thinking at the time?—I have only the vaguest memory. I hate to announce my probable resignation on such an off-note. I'll have to work ridiculously hard tomorrow to make up for my backlog and—well, O terrible! O terrible my incompetence! Rationalists should _win_. Only it really _is_ much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality.

Recently I've done a little bit of jogging; the weakness in my breast scared me so. Or do I just like to tell you about my breasts? On my jog today, I felt retarded again: what do I think I know? What have I done? Read a lot of books and blogs? What's my background? It's as if I feel that since I don't know what I know, then I can't possibly know much—like the famous impostor syndrome. But then: I know about the impostor syndrome, without ever having passed a psychology class. Well, why shouldn't I? Shouldn't everyone? Psychology is not some matter of arcane scrolls reserved for "psych majors," you _need_ insights from psychology just to make sense of anything, just to exist as a civilized person in this world (civilized again in the Yudkowskian sense). Similarly economics, physics, decision theory—there's too much; how can anyone bind themselves to a _career_ and a _field_ when we have such a desperate need to understand this world, which is not what we think it is? Well, the careerists give me good stuff to feed on, so of course I must be ever so grateful, and I am. So I content myself to a life on the margins, sacrificing my role in the big picture in order to observe it all the better. On the other hand, being affiliated with SIAI sort of makes me margin _to center_. Only I have so many other interests—O generality!

Judea Pearl arrived in the mail recently—as if I'll have time for him soon! My _word_. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— _Fuck_. I haven't been serious enough tonight. I already was inefficient with a lot of time after I got home, probably I was so stressed out from my dayjob. How _dare_ I think myself a scientific generalist, Diary? How _dare_ I?—when it's as if I hardly read books anymore. I feel like—the stupid kid I was in high school. It's not okay. I want to _rise_; I want to push my apprehension to its very limits. Wasn't I doing so much better with my new methodology? Intrinsic motivation and the dream of a decision theory?—where did it slip, today? And tomorrow I will have to be so utterly busy beyond belief—and then I should plunge into the wiki project sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening and get a better sense of the scope of this endeavor. Why does anyone think I'm valuable? I'm so _ignorant_ and useless. —ZMD


#### 376 — Monday 17 August 2009 — "Being Strategic"

Not too long ago, Seanan wrote that I should figure out exactly how much work I can do in a day, and I objected that I was philosophically opposed to this: I don't _know_ what my limits are, and I can't know except in the vanishing limit of perfect efficiency. But of course Seanan was basically right. The last few days, I've been keeping a log of my intellectual progress (book pages read, notebook pages, pages and topics in my STEM binder), and this is obviously a fantastically good idea then I should have been doing so long ago. I've lamented that I don't know what I know, and indeed I fear this will always be the case (current rate no Singularity), but a little documentation of the things that are easy to document couldn't hurt (modulo opportunity costs) and indeed will almost certainly help.

I know, I've noticed it before, but it's become true again: I've been spending way too much of my reading time on the internet as opposed to with paper books. It's not _just_ that the stuff I read on the internet tends to be lighter fare than the stuff in good books from the University library; also, the way I read on the computer seems _inefficient_ compared to the way I now know how to blaze through books.

I still feel pain about school, but _I'm doing so much better now!_—why should I care what the baseline is, or whether I'm being original or not, when I can just _rush_? I'm still struggling with the vector calculus; these days it almost seems as if I'm getting more problems wrong than right. But today I made a conjecture about the integral around an elliptical trajectory of the angle between the normal to the orbit and the tangent (I hope I'm phrasing that right), and it turned out to actually be true! (It's pi-squared.)

And I'm not done yet; I'm sure that I'm still doing everything wrong. Apparently the Air Force has this computer training program: twenty-five hours of Sherlock training is as effective as four years on the job. That's _insane_. How can people bear to waste their youths grubbing for grades when there exists low-hanging fruit like _that_? I have to consciously fight these intuitions I have about being too good: as if I were worried about violating the laws of physics by making my life so much better so rapidly. But once you reach a certain threshold level of instrumental rationality, isn't this sort of soft takeoff to be expected? Once you pick up a bit about how to think effectively, rather then stumbling about blindly, then you can think about what you want and think about how to get it. And the insights you get from this process open up more fronts of inquiry that you can mine for new insights—why _shouldn't_ I get better? Why _shouldn't_ I be happy? It's a natural prediction of the theory.

I didn't eat well today and it almost seems like I can feel it in my breast. —ZMD


#### 377 — Tuesday 18 August 2009 — "Composition of Fail"

It's been a terrible day. I felt bad about my lack of credentials and spent too much time reading on the internet when I should have been doing math, or at least reading a book. I edited the revised edition of the synopsis of Katie's novel, to be sent to Tor. I don't know if I already told you: I think it's sad that Katie has apparently put so much effort into writing, and yet she's still not very good at it. Seanan wrote that my writing is hindered by filigree, and he's correct, but I still think I'm _much_ better than (beautiful, beautiful) Katie Kolodzie. Someone posted a link to that wonderful Scott Aaronson story on the blog today, and I shouldn't feel jealous: I loved the story, too. It's not as if _I_ have a track record of writing brilliant pieces of fiction for scientific generalists; better that Scott Aaronson should do it than _no one_. I shouldn't _want_ to feel personally superior (I will keep telling you this until I don't need to); I want to maximize the beauty in the universe. I wish that Katie were better at writing. It is better that Katie should write a good novel, than that she write a bad novel, for then the world is richer by the amount of a good novel, even if we already have tons of other good novels lying around, and even if she's competing with me for readers. And it is better that Katie should write a bad novel then lie in bed thinking about Marlon Brando, for then the world is richer by the amount of a bad novel.

I was grouchy at my job today. Some of my contemporaries were talking about college—it bothers me, still. All this talk about majors and returning to school. People! Don't you value your _lives_? If such-and-such is worth studying, why aren't you studying it _now_? I asked Derek what he desperately wanted to know about, and he said physics, and I observed that in that case, he's going to need his vector calc, too. And he demurred; he doesn't want the technical version. I stressed that no, you really _need_ vector calculus to do physics. He just wants to read about astronomy. I said that _I_ know the popular version of physics, and it's not that exciting. You need vector calc just to _look_ at Maxwell's equations. But Derek doesn't want to, or doesn't think he can, understand Maxwell's equations.

Here's what I don't understand, Diary. I don't understand it anymore, although I think I used to in the days long before these of my purity born of pain, during which I planned to get a Philosophy BA and then disappear into some corporate bureaucracy while continuing to read books. _I_ don't understand Maxwell's equations, and _for the moment_ I'm okay with not understanding Maxwell's equations, simply because I have all sorts of other equivalently high material on my plate. What I don't understand anymore, is being fundamentally okay with _never_ understanding Maxwell's equations. Where is people's natural curiosity, their striving for _something_, anything? Where was mine, in the days before these of my purity born of pain?

And for that matter, where was mine today? —ZMD


#### 378 — Monday 24 August 2009 — "Greenery"

Right. So the fundamental theorem tells us that to evaluate an integral, we only need to look at the antiderivative at the endpoints. And _Green's_ theorem is telling us that to evaluate a double integral, we only need to look at the antiderivative along the _boundary_: okay, that's not _really_ what it says, but you are only a stupid Diary and I'm not going to try to explain to you the true secret about line integrals. And _Stokes's_ theorem is just the generalization of Green's theorem to surfaces.

I continue feel shame and regret about my wasted youth. Why, why, _why_ didn't anyone just _tell_ me it could be like this? Paul Graham is doing an immensely important public service, by _telling_ people. I continue to feel hampered—but I can't let this feeling impede my development, when there are so _many_ things I want to do, and I have no idea what I'm capable of unless I put forth my most desperate effort. And even now, I'm not sure I even know what a desperate effort even _looks_ like. I don't read enough books; I don't write enough—there's _lots_ of low-hanging fruit glistening all around us!

If you listen to advertisements, it would seem that everyone is all in a back-to-school flutter. I don't _get_ it. In retrospect, autodidacticism is just such an _obvious_ idea. It is an arbitrage opportunity the size of a _truck_. Why aren't more people directly taking advantage of our vast storehouses of knowledge? And why did it take a nervous breakdown for even _me_ to see it? This world is just awash in _worthless_ undergraduates. Of course we need professional scholars, and the scholars can just _write textbooks_, and the rest of us can learn from the textbooks. And when one of the rest of us gets really, _really_ interested in a topic, and does some interesting work, then they can go apply to be an apprentice scholar.

I called Anna today. She's going to be speaking at the Summit, a major reason being that it would look bad not to have any female speakers. Anna thinks I could be useful at the Summit. It looks like I'll draw up criteria for trial success with her and Carl after I move in.

Everything is on the up-and-up—but O terrible my wasted youth! —ZMD


#### 379 — Tuesday 25 August 2009 — "Edifice"

Still more pain today about my lack of credentials. Well, so what? When people say something that strikes me as overly statist, I like to remind them that life itself does not emanate outwards from Washington and Sacramento. Well, let _me_ remind _myself_ that life itself does not emanate outwards from Santa Cruz—or Cambridge. Those who would shame me for not being in school: what's their model of the world like? Do they really predict that no one would ever learn anything, that no one would ever _do_ anything, unless some authority or structure bears down on them to do it? Would they deny the entire _edifice_ of my thought, even when presented with the notebooks themselves?

I can't please everyone. Anna Salamon is absolutely fucking brilliant and thinks I could be somewhat useful, so I'm going to go try to be useful to SIAI.

And I could—I _could_ go back to University someday, and even do well, now that I'm not so stupid, now that I actually know how to study. If I do go back, it will be on _my_ terms: to learn.

I wrote: induction is on my side now; I've gotten better before, so I can do so again. There's so much—there's so much I want to know, so much I want to do. I may be hampered, but I'm less hampered now than that stupid fucking boy at University who had no idea what he was doing. No sense of the seriousness of this entire endeavor. Not even when he stood on the staircase of the University library, pressed the Kurzweil book fast to his chest, and pretended he was Kathy. —ZMD


#### 380 — Wednesday 26 August 2009 — "My Furious Generalism"

Hey, I wrote some fiction today, adding a little bit to "Desperate Signals." That was fun! Sure, it's shamelessly autobiographical, which makes it easier to write than more ambitious fiction, but it's a start. I should finish it and demand that Katie Kolodzie rip it to shreds! Why don't I add to it everyday? I know I've been asking that question for years, but now that I'm so much more rational, it might actually have an effect. I might actually catch the rhythm, like I've caught the rhythm with math. I also wrote a good blog comment on Peter Gray's _Freedom to Learn_, and a good email to Josh relating an amusing anecdote about my experience with a triple-A dispatcher this morning. The blog comment I'm including in my intellectual progress log; should I include the email to Josh?—probably not. And the day's not over yet! No doubt I can squeeze some math in, and maybe I'll even send that email to Alicorn that I've been planning for some time. Okay, so haven't accomplished anything significant with my life yet. I'll have to make sure to work extra hard on behalf of SIAI!

Alicorn's webcomic is actually really good. She's so intelligent! We could be friends! Or more than friends? Surely I'm more appealing than that CronoDAS loser. O terrible my wasted youth? Sure. But O splendid my glorious future! —ZMD


#### 381 — Monday 31 August 2009 — "Existential"

I've moved into the Benton house. Any tension there might have been about my name has resolved itself: I'm "Z.M." here. Yet more anxiety about my lack of credentials—last night, I ranted some more about the system and my wasted youth. Although really—I should be on the way to getting over it. I was _stupid_ then; I'm better now. However bruised and scarred I am from my schooled past, at least I came out of this madness with the knowledge that you _can_ do math, _&c_. outside of school. However painful the lesson was, however wasteful the process that got me to this point, I now have this tremendous edge, this precious gift, this shining jewel of epistemic rationality, the skills I need to think my way out of a box. I _want_ to be the sort of person who loves knowledge—damn my past and damn human nature, I will trace the causal forces that act on humans, and thread the needle through to get me to where I want to go. I have a role to play in this organization that's doing very important work! We (mostly Anna) drew up a list of useful things I could do, and a points metric for what would constitute a success of the trial period. So I must work ever so hard, and it doesn't matter so much—if I was stupid before. I want the true knowledge, now. I want to do good work, now. I want to be smart, now.

There's this guy, Alex, living here with us, working on a startup with Emil. Alex is disturbingly masculine; he intimidates me, his entire way of being is alien unto me. We're all dedicated to human values, here, and want to preserve them past the threshold of transhuman intelligence, but despite Cosmides and Tooby, human value is not this unitary thing—_my_ ways are alien unto almost everyone in this world. And so much of who I am must depend on the particular path I cut through the blogosphere—but enough. I must be useful. —ZMD


#### 382 — Tuesday 1 September 2009 — "Curl"

I had thought that I brought hairbands and my razor, but I can't seem to find them today. Have I really _looked_? There's still time for redemption, but so far it has not been a good day on net. I drove Frank to SFO in the morning, and we had really good conversation, so that was nice. Part of the plan is that I'm to take four hours of unavailability for myself every weekday in the library. I spent a lot of time lost on the way back from SFO and trying to find the Santa Clara library. I ended up at the Sunnyvale library, which is very nice, and I did some math, and worried a little about the runaround about my name. Before leaving the library, I had a few moments when the whole schooling nightmare just seemed insane—not in the sense that where I rave about the insanity, but in the sense of the harmless homeless man you can just ignore. The Sunnyvale library is very good; it has a lot of books, including honest technical textbooks. People who think they know things [write] books, and everyone learns from books. That's just the way things have always been. The day has not been so good since then—I haven't accomplished much.

Last night I signed up to read the wta-talk list, on the grounds that one of my duties is to track the relevant blogs and lists for people or facts that might be useful. Only—signing up for the list gave me access to new Eliezer material that I haven't read yet, and between yesterday and today, I overdid it. You can't spend too much time with one author, any author, it makes you sick. Do Hume scholars ever get sick of Hume?—I know _exactly_ how they feel. And it's so sad: from everything he taught me, I should have known better: it puts me in no end of trouble to get burned out on Yudkowsky just when I'm supposed to be working on the _Less Wrong_ wiki! I did do some work on the wiki today, but not with Steve, and I didn't do all that much and what I did isn't all that good. Maybe I have no idea how writers work; maybe I spend so much time writing freely and fluently to you and my notebook, that I don't know what it's like to face a writing _problem_ that I don't know how to solve. I'm a putz, just like I used to tell people when I was at the University. SIAI seems somewhat pathetic today; aren't we supposed to be saving the world? The way we sit around, you'd think we were just typical slacker grad students.

I reread some Paul Graham essays yesterday, and they made me feel better, I think when I was feeling sad again about my lack of credentials.

So, I've fucked up so far today. But I can do better, really. I'll go track down Anna and have her show me her decision theory post. Or I'll read from one of the heuristics and biases volumes. Or I'll work that very small existential-risks-related document I've been thinking about. Or I'll work on something personal: notebooks, fiction! Or something, anything to get me out of this rut! I remember being at the University whining to my TA that I was supposed to be an adult now, and yet somehow I just—couldn't—get it together. Well, I've been getting things together. —ZMD


#### 383 — Thursday 3 September 2009 — "Divergence"

Gawd, I feel shitty. I haven't been productive enough. When I tell people this, they ask by what standard, but sometimes you don't need to explicitly declare a standard when it is just _obvious_ that you are underperforming. Is it that I don't have a clear notion of the work I'm trying to do, and how to do it? I can _consistently_ make intellectual progress for myself doing math at the library. The past few days I've been saying that I'll spend the afternoon doing good work on the wiki, but then somehow I just let the day drift by—and I _feel_ like I ought to be doing existential-risks related stuff, but I _don't_, and to make it worse, I don't get anything _else_ done, either. If you notice that you can't work, and somehow you can't get yourself to apply the obvious reflective correction, you should at least notice this and go read a paper book or something. But I haven't been reading paper books, and it's just so _retarded_. We're _supposed_ to be saving the world here! Okay, so I added some content to the wiki today, even some good content, but it's way too _slow_. It's not like writing to you with this rapid and fluent voice: _bang bang bang!_ O Truth!

I had a good walk and conversation with Anna last night, and she said she was even more glad I'm here than when I first came, which implies that I've exceeded expectations. (Anna is _thoroughly_ versed in the Way of Bayes, when she's impressed, it really means that her model of reality has taken a hit.)

I had good conversation with Marcello and Steve today. I don't deserve a face. How could I have let these days slip by in the way that they have; why can't I just _do stuff_? This sensation of having wasted time is an unfamiliar one unto me. Even when I spend time on the internet, I tend to be genuinely engaged with something at least somewhat worthwhile. Except these past few days, when I've just—I don't _know_, I can't _say_ where the time went, and that should scare me. Nor have I been keeping up on that log of my personal intellectual progress. O progress! It's so beautiful, being able to articulate things like this—being able to perceive patterns and deep structures, and feel the meanings, and ask: what is the limit behavior here?—how does this generalize?

I don't deserve a face—I am composed of fail. Tomorrow I should just be intent on _doing stuff_—write stuff on the wiki, lots of stuff, just put stuff up there—it's a fluid medium, you can always edit, always iterate. And when my meager powers of writing wear out, _read a paper book_. Talk to Steve! Prove something about a deterministic finite automaton. Something, _anything_ that doesn't make me feel like a bored child, or an unemployed person who knows nothing of our boundless depth of intellectual riches. I don't know how they bear their boring lives. O how we must save them! I don't deserve to sleep. Tonight I will sleep for strictly instrumental reasons: I will sleep in order that tomorrow my performance will be up to the level of a person who earns the right to sleep. —ZMD


#### 384 — Wednesday 9 September 2009 — "Distributed Cognition"

My emotions have had such high variance during my time here. Recently I've been suffering name and identity issues, and I talked with Anna about it yesterday, and she agreed to start calling me Zack, and I felt better. But then I spent a lot of time this afternoon feeling sad and anxious and reading on the internet, when I _should_ have been doing work on the _Less Wrong_ wiki. In the evening, my mood picked up after good conversation with Marcello and Steve and editing and formatting Aruna Vassar's letter to potential Summit sponsors. I think I did a good job on that, at least, and I felt strong and less afraid, like I could exist in the world without cowering and without being driven mad just because different people call me different things in different contexts. I wonder about the fallibility of human introspection. When it seems like I'm feeling sad about my name and identity issues, it might be that I'm just sad due to some sort of chemical imbalance, and this is what makes me latch onto the name and identity issues, but if it wasn't that, it would have been something else.

Why do people let themselves stop growing? This bare hypothesis that my anxieties aren't actually _caused_ by their referents isn't something I couldn't have formulated five years ago, but my intellect is noticeably deeper now, and it's as if I can glimpse all sorts of subtleties that most people couldn't get from the mere words. The whole runaround on the blog lately about determinism and counterfactuals and decision theory is really astoundingly relevant to practically all areas of life, for when do we not have to cope with matters of choice under uncertainty? I'll do better. —ZMD


#### 385 — Sunday 13 September 2009 — " 'True Names ... and Other Dangers' "

I should be happy; I should be so ridiculously happy; the people in this place are so wonderful, and there's so much important work I could be doing, and there are so many textbooks! Yet I'm still caught up in these name and identity issues, or at anyway that's what it _seems as if_ my melancholy is about, but again, we have to distinguish between beliefs and impressions; I can't be sure that's the real _answer_. Look across these pages—I've had these hurt feelings about my lack of academic credentials, about my lack of uniqueness in a large world, about the possibility of cryptomnesia—really, that last almost kept me from _programming_ (_cf_. 316, 317) . I don't know if it was telling you that helped, but eventually the fear just—faded away. It wasn't a rational argument that pushed me into it, and it wasn't a rational argument that dragged me out.

I wish I were smarter—I wish I could track down the causality of all this. Even in my one small life story there is so much richness and structure. And so much pain: if I'm going to be hurt, I think I at least deserve to know how it all came about, how it all ties together. I wish I even knew the chronology of my name: what I called myself to whom and when.

But I'm not—I don't even have it that _bad_. I seem to have this impulse towards _unity_ that it causing this distress, where I want everything to be under the same account. But I _have_ quite a lot of unity. My recent blog comments are all under the same byline I intend to use everywhere, when a lot of people clutter their life up with handles. And I made the switch at about the right time, too: I don't care to be burdened by the forum posts I made as TheNewAuk, but I am happy to own the decent blogospheric track record of Z. M. Davis. I don't know how people bear it, living a double life: making huge waves in some corners of the blogosphere as Mencius Moldbug or La Griffe du Lion, and then going back to some dayjob writing software or teaching stats. Rad Geek doesn't hide his real name of Charles Johnson, but then why have the handle at all? Susan Blackmore has some stuff under the byline _Sue_ Blackmore, and I don't know how she bears the inconsistency.

I'm not even doing anything _unusual_. I'm just following in the noble tradition of C. P. Snow, W. D. Hamilton, I. J. Good, G. E. Moore, E. T. Jaynes, G. H. Hardy, E. M. Wright, and E. M. Forster. And if my motivations are somewhat different from theirs—well, traditions are meant to be twisted. Or they _aren't_ meant to, but they always are, and it's going to take more than a timeless decision theory to buy my obedience.

For all my books and blogs, there's so much information out there that I _don't_ have, but that I need. No doubt someone else has gone through this dilemma about initials before. I wish I could just bring up a _video_ of G. E. Moore's daily life: I guess students called him "Professor Moore" and friends called him "George"? But what about when he was only a student; how did he sign his examination papers? Or even P. Z. Myers—who addresses him by what name, and when, what was the sequence and development in his case? What about A. D. Nauman? And when I was in Walnut Creek just the other day, I spied a sign for a C. K. Tomooka bookkeeping service.

I suppose part of all this drama draws from developments that I celebrate, developments that I owe my life to. Two initials in a byline is a _formal_ tradition, something done by _authors_ that establishes distance. But now—and again I owe my very existence to this development—the distinction between _author_ and _not-an-author_ has _collapsed_.

Well, look: I've already told Anna, Mike, and Marcello that they can call me Zack. I remember the relief I felt when I told Mike today. Later Mike apparently forgot, which might have started this whole downward slip this evening. But wait: "Mike"?—but his Facebook says "Michael Blume"—how _does_ he bear the inconsistency?

Some interesting things have happened in the last few days, but I'll tell you tomorrow. And don't make me sign this one.


#### 386 — Wednesday 16 September 2009 — "Pink Bears It"

Maybe we're just kidding ourselves about this saving-the-world business. I've seen Mike, Marcello, and Steve spend time playing or actively watching _Super Mario Galaxy_. How can they live with themselves? I know, you could ask the same question of me, but, _I_ have an answer, which is that I don't. _Super Mario Galaxy_ is not helping you improve your model of reality, except in the most trivial of ways. I don't like _games_. In general, I like either deep things, or frivolous things that I can project my own deepness onto, like _Jem_. Marcello doesn't even impress me, really. Today he told me that being a student generates a lot of paper. I asked if he didn't write things during the summer, too, and he said he did, but not as much. Which is about what you'd expect from a good student, but Diary, don't you think you need to be more fanatical than that to be a Friendly AI researcher? Psychological neoteny is precious if you channel it into your work, but I don't want to waste my time blowing bubbles. And Mike really disappoints me. Where's his ambition?

But I wasted my time today, continuing to freak out about my name, moaning and moping, and reading everything I could find about famous people who published under their initials. It was much more common in the old days, I think. That doesn't mean it's going to be unheard of in the future: history has a long reach in matters of names: I mean, people will still be reading T. S. Elliot and such. So, yeah, a lot of internet reading today driven by this madness. All my thoughts are colored by my egalitarianism, my lust for generality—it's somewhat unnerving to contemplate how far I've wandered from the mainstream. I mean, to the extent that there _is_ a mainstream, when everyone hangs out in different circles, and no there is no one ring to unite them all. I remain enamored by the depths and breadth of human endeavor—all the thoughts and fears and ideologies, playing themselves out in block time across the many worlds. Oh, how I want to participate in this Great Romance of Determinism! Oh, how I want to dance! And I can't dance when I feel so torn up by the fact that the same person is occasionally called different things. It's just one of those complications of life I'll have to get used to. _Get used to_ not because it is in any way a new condition, but because of my recently heightened sensitivity to it; we all get granted different insights in different orders.

W. W. Rouse Ball recounted that Isaac Newton would spend most of his waking hours writing—how can I bear to waste so much time being so bent up with these self-centered problems that aren't even _problems_? My legal name is Zachary Michael Davis, my byline (and we all need bylines, for even the least among us writes something from time to time) is Z. M. Davis, and in person people call me Zack, although some people call me Z. M. Is that too hard, too complicated for you?—well then imagine how _I_ feel. But I'm happy when I'm doing creative work, so I can just throw myself into my work, without worrying, without being so broken. Especially when (as I've noted) so many people have had it so much worse on the names front, and many have deliberately wrote under a pseudonym (I don't know how they bear it). William James Sidis wrote a lot of stuff under a pseudonym.

Why shouldn't I just be happy, when I've done so many things right? I may not be a _genius_, but I'm bright, and scheming to be brighter, and I have a rare ethics and a rare rationality.

I helped Marcello move today. Earlier in the day he addressed me once as Z. M., but then later he introduced me to one of his contemporaries as Zack.

Why am I so _hurt_? I'm not doing anything unusual, by historical standards—although I don't _like_ historical standards, and can you really be choosy about which ones to keep? Some blog commenter wished that literary initials would go away. The commenter correctly noted that in the old days, it was easier to have separate identities with separate crowds, whereas nowadays everything's on Facebook.

My life is just this tapestry; I want to do it right; I can't let this precious time with my creepy Singularitarian friends be marred by this depression. I remember a song that I heard on the radio when driving to or from one of Robin Gane-McCalla's _Overcoming Bias_ meetups, before I became close with Anna. I ended up buying a copy.

_"They call me hell_

_They call me Stacy_

_They call me her_

_They call me Jane_

_That's not my name_

_That's not my name_

_That's not my name_

_That's not my name"_

But I owe you an important development. You'll remember [redacted ...]—we had an earnest heart-to-heart during the meetup.

Dan Pink! His website has an "About Dan Pink" link, and his books also bear the byline "Daniel H. Pink." And I—oh human experience! This world is _dotted_ with independent scholars—people who care.

I had a really good library day yesterday. Computer science is neat, because you get to do math, but call it _computer science_. My compsci book refers to _everyone_ by their initials, not just in the bibliographical entries, but throughout ("K. Gödel," "A. M. Turing") and it's kind of unnerving. There's so much inconsistency across this Earth—a lot of bibliographical entries use initials for everyone. And there are a lot of scientific papers that use initials, far above the rate you would expect if everyone got to choose their own byline, but far below the rate you'd expect if it was a standard in science. Do particular institutions or journals have their own hangups about this? And I was unnerved that a footnote in _Global Catastrophic Risks_ referred to ["C. R. Shalizi."] But _everyone_ knows Cosma Shalizi!

There's a "T Campbell" who writes comics. J. B. S. Haldane and I. J. Good both got called "Jack."

Diary, why can't I just get over this? Anna wants me to be happy and productive, and I can't be happy and productive when I'm caught up in this morass—when I'm hampered like this. All because I have a pretty byline, and for a while I wanted what people call me to be the same as my byline, although then it turns out that I'm not comfortable with that. Well, what's the problem?

Should I hash out exactly how I should refer to myself, in exactly what contexts? When I'm not expected to meet someone again, I can just say, "Hi, I'm Zack." Blog comments and other public written work is under "Z. M. Davis." When I'm meeting people who might have seen things I've written (the _Less Wrong_ crowed, essentially), I can say, "Hi, I'm Zack, Z. M. Davis from the blog." When interacting with a medical receptionist or something, I can say "Zachary Davis," because that's what it says on my medical card. And then—then I just have to figure out what to say in any other context that comes up. That's easy, systematic, above everything—_clean_. This is what I need to keep telling myself—that I can just think up in advance what the right behavior is in a relevant situation, and just do that. That's no problem. Formal-type emails I can sign "Z. M. Davis," and personal-type emails—where I'm going to be having repeated personal interactions with someone and so I want them to call me "Zack"—those I'll just sign Zack. My email address is _zackmdavis@yahoo.com,_ which is fine, and I also have _zmdavis@singinst.org,_ which—which I guess is fine. I should just stop being scared, and go do good work—that's really what's important, good work. I'll go to bed fairly soon, and get up relatively early, and take four hours at the library, and then I'll come back here and actually do some existential-risks relevant _work_.

E. Lockhart wrote that she uses the initial for her teen books because she uses her full name for other books that she writes for grown-ups.

This is survivable. I can plan this out—what I'll say to whom, what I'll write in different contexts. This will _work_.

Katie Kolodzie. Is she actually planning to publish as "Katie"?—not that I expect her ms. to be accepted by a traditional publisher, because it's kind of sucky. What are Katie Kolodzie's online tendencies? And Seanan? I imagine there are a lot of intellectual-type people who simply _don't know_ about the richness of the blogosphere. No one told them, and no one told them about the value of information, either.

I can solve this; I can figure this out. So I'm not brave enough to be Z. M. at all times in all contexts—but I can have _some_ measure of my beauty, can't I? I still have my byline—and even the least of us writes something—once in a while.

Patrick Farenga uses _Pat_ and _Patrick_ interchangably. So does Susan Blackmore with _Sue_ and _Susan_.

I haven't been keeping up my intellectual progress log—O terrible! And I don't—I don't read enough old books. H. G. Wells's _Ann Veronica_ looks promising. I should be ashamed; my historical domain knowledge is very weak. I remain,

Yours,

Z. M. Davis


#### 387 — Thursday 17 September 2009 — "Anarchies"

E. B. White was nicknamed "Andy." In _Nature_'s table of contents, investigators are listed by their initials, but on the letters themselves, full names are printed. What a strange practice!—and yet this is _Nature_, the _premier_ journal. If hotshot scientists can put up with this sort of ambiguity, then surely I can, too. "Hi, I'm Zack. Z. M. Davis. Pleased to meet you."

It's strange—you know I was at Heald College for ten weeks. I did actually end up writing a really good essay while I was there, telling the story about my attempted nickname change, and tying this in with grand abstractions in the philosophy of science. It was a really good essay; I was proud. But that was August 2008. So why am I still going through this name drama with my creepy Singularitarian friends _now_, the next year? The weekend when I met Anna _et al_. for the first time in October, I think I remember Michael Vassar asked if he could call me _Z. M._, and I said, sure. And I remember later Anna saying that she had been avoiding calling me by name, because she didn't know what to call me, before somehow equilibrium settled on _Z. M_. after I moved here and before I said I was more comfortable with _Zack_. I wish I could remember or deduce how the equilibrium actually played out, though—what are the psychosocial forces that govern these sorts of things.

But I don't want to waste my life moping about feeling bad. I've _already_ wasted my youth. It frustrates me that people think it's _okay_ to grow up so _slowly_. I should have studied harder, actually thought things through. And my shameless depravity at Santa Cruz, where I just couldn't get it together. I can't let myself keep _crumpling_ like that. I like myself when I feel autonomous, when I can actually go out into the world and talk to be people, and successfully pick them up from airports. I like to do good work. And if I'm doing genuinely good work, then it shouldn't matter so much if my byline isn't exactly the same as what people call me in person.

I picked Carl up from the airport today.

"They call me _hell;_ they call me _Stacy_; they call me _her_; they call me _Jane_." And yet I remain,

Yours.

ADDENDUM— I feel better now. Contrary to what I wrote earlier but will not correct inline because I'm mentioning it explicitly here, I think PZ Myers spells his name without periods, as if the initials are taking place of a first name. Whereas I don't think that was ever my intention: my blog comments are signed zee stop space em stop space Davis.

Now that I'm feeling better, I should work. I just got an email from Michael Vassar asking about the Summit programs, which I haven't started yet. Rather than emailing back right away, I think I'm going to try to get something done tonight, and then email tomorrow in the morning. Is that dishonest? I will say in the email that I'm just getting started—hmm. The message says, "if all is going well just tell us that, OK." Vassar is very busy, I'm sure.

So, yeah. Hacking in Scribus tonight, and then emailing in the morning. Fine. I remain yours.

ADDENDUM— I forgot to tell you; Vassar referred to me as _Zach_ in the email. A perfect touch to this day.


#### 388 — Friday 18 September 2009 — "The Girl at the Knife Show"

It feels _good_ to be competent. There is a pleasure in making business calls, coördinating and coöperating to make things _work_. I don't _want_ to be lazy. I don't _want_ to waste my life away being scared and shy. So why have I been so incompetent in my life? I was a _terrible_ journalist for _The Page_, because I was too shy to interview people, and it's sickening. I'm supposed to contact schools about scholarship offers for the Summit, and I fear that this same shyness almost prevented me from doing so. I did call the Bronx High School of Science, today, and I got the extension of someone who I'll call Monday. I remember that once Anna said that it's possible I could be a social liability to our group, because I project low status—I cower and cringe, as if to say, _Please don't hit me_. And so it probably wasn't a good idea for me to have said, out loud, over the phone, that it was a stupid idea of mine to be calling a school on a Friday afternoon. Well, it _was_ a stupid idea; I should have done it earlier—but I suppose it is _not_ a dishonesty to refrain from saying this over the phone.

Last night I ended up emailing Michael Anissimov and ccing Vassar about the programs. I've wasted a _lot_ of time today, again, moping about reading the internet, when there are so many _better_ things I could be reading, and so much useful work that I really need to be doing. These programs need to be done _next week_. And I'm going to lose time because I agreed to have dinner with my family tonight. And I haven't done any math today—I should feel sick—I'm backsliding. Doing math only every _other_ day, doing too much of my reading on the internet, moping—I'm behaving the way I did back when I was in college, or before the fuller development of my purity born of pain. What is wrong? But the day is not totally spent. I'll bounce back. I lament how much better I could have done, if I had been actually trying during my youth. But the most I can do is try _now_. Local goodness, local greatness. I remain yours, Zack


#### 389 — Monday 21 September 2009 — "Trials"

Once again, I wasted a lot of time today being upset. It's so stupid; I've made such a fool of myself. All this moping about feeling worthless: it's the same bullshit that left me in tears so often in my very first quarter at the University, probably before I even had the idea of going by my initials. I wanted to be a grown-up, then, and I wasn't up to the task. How could I bear to fail at this again, now, in this most beautiful of places, this most idyllic of circumstances? And I run into this philosophical problem again: having failed so many times, what makes me think I can get it right _now_? Come to think of it, this same problem was actually discussed explicitly in that excellent essay I wrote last year about this same anxiety about names. (I think that one essay retroactively justifies the existence of fucking Heald College.)

There's no easy, quick answer. I just want to _grow up_. Okay, so I feel bad because I don't have _one_ name operating across all contexts. Well, what did I expect? I'm optimizing for multiple things here; sometimes the best solution on the table _is_ a little kludgey, and you just have to live with it. Ideally, I would be able to use the same name in all contexts, legal, familiar, and authorial, and it would be something gender-neutral that sounded like a name. Something like _Ashley_ or _Robin_. But I know—I know the hard way—that it's too difficult to change names. _Ashley_ is simply not on the table.

During my time here, I've actually been less happy than at the supermarket. After my failed transition attempt, equilibrium in the supermarket settled on _Zack_, and that was _comfortable_. And then I could be _Z. M. Davis_ online, and that was comfortable, too. And now my online and my in-person lives have come together, and I've been shaken from my safe and comfortable routine, with its safe and unambiguous roles. Now, I've always been the type to rail against roles, but there's this respect in which I'm still human—for better or for worse. It's not obvious that my intuition is for _unity_ as much as it is for _order_.

There are just so _many_ contexts in which you have to use a name, and it's not obvious what I'm supposed to do in all of them. With a low-status supermarket job where people know you, it's easy enough to be _Zack_, and leave this distinct from my online life. But then what about when I have a higher-status job that involves producing documents and making deals? What goes on my business cards? I _do_ have an impulse towards unity. Some people can wall off the personal the professional: witness the lawyer Norman S. Kinsella and the libertarian intellectual N. Stephan Kinsella. But I don't think I could bear being split down the middle like that; I want everything under one account. But it won't do for a business to say to contact our manager of such-and-such Z. M. Davis, when _Z. M._ doesn't feel like a name, and the customer expects to know how to address the manager of such-and-such. So, I could say this: in situations that involve personal contact (work and such), I can be _Zack M. Davis_, and in situations that don't (blogs and such), I can be _Z. M. Davis_. Isn't that an obvious, simple, workable solution? But I want to use _Z. M. Davis_ in some contexts at work, right?—it's my _byline_.

I have to _resolve_ this issue; I can't let myself be hampered forever, to never live fully simply because I'm not exactly certain how to book it. But you must understand that it _is_ important to get this right. Maybe I've been deluding myself all this time about writing fiction, but if I _do_ manage to become a great creator of science-but-not-technology fiction, I don't think I could _bear_ publishing as _Zack M. Davis_. On such a work of the spirit, I _need_ neutrality, and so I need my initialism. _That_ is _flat_. Somehow I just need to shoehorn my inevitable life as a boy around that fact. Maybe if I just keep reminding myself of that byline and to be a grown-up, I'll be fine. Somehow I'll thread the needle, figure out what to say to whom.

Tomorrow I am going to need to work fanatically on the Summit programs to make up for my despondence of today. [...]

_Z. M._ just doesn't feel like a name. I'm sorry, but I tried it, and it doesn't. It's great in my byline, but I'm stuck with my name. —ZMD


#### 390 — Tuesday 22 September 2009 — "A. M. Turing"

I freaked out some more this morning over this whole name-identity-role runaround. Anna offered to go on a walk with me, and that was very helpful. It's so nice to have someone you can communicate with. Anna is very instrumentalist; she wants to go out and _do_ things in the world. She's comfortable with things being messy, whereas I'm not, but I need to be a little more comfortable with it, or else I'll just tear myself apart. And _that_ would be a mess! I've fucked up, but will I have fucked up _less_ if I freak out and don't do anything just because I get called by different names in different contexts?

I can hope that some similar decision system somewhere across the many worlds was smarter than this. Some version of me should have been able to _forsee_ all of this. She would have calmly been able to figure out that she could do better studying on her own, without needing to be kicked in the face. Whatever her analogue of my name troubles are, she would have seen the problem before it became a problem, and cleanly drawn up an _answer_, a policy that _wins_.

Somewhere else, across the many worlds. Let it be so.

Maybe I won't be quite as easygoing about my identity as Anna is, but talking to her is really useful, because at least it lets me think. Okay, so I have this problem, but I don't have to freak out about it so much. Even though it's still a big problem for me, whereas Anna would not be bothered at all by it, talking to Anna at least manages to convince me that I don't have to freak out. It's just an ordinary problem, not an unsolvable _death_ problem. I agreed to do actually do some serious CBT work. We touched on gender, briefly.

But I have got a lot of work to do on those programs! I'm sure Michael Vassar thinks I'm shit. Well, so I'm _shit_. I did everything horribly, terribly wrong. I'm _retarded_, compared to what my potential would be, if I had been threading the needle all along. That opportunity is gone. Now? It's all about the not-dying.—ZMD


#### 391 — Sunday 27 September 2009 — "Avicenna"

_Pain_. Why do I let myself get so bent up like this? I'm so hurt; I'm so broken into pieces. All over a name. It shouldn't be so hard. Julia Serano was probably about 32 when she _transitioned_. How can people live with that kind of _discontinuity_ in their life?—but they manage, and so I'm sure I can manage not being called exactly the same thing in every context. I haven't done anything _wrong_. And it could be so much worse: imagine if I had started commenting on _Overcoming Bias_ as "TheNewAuk," and then that name would always be associated with me in this community, much like I have no trouble dereferencing "Doug S." and "CronoDAS" to the same person-model. I take blog comments very seriously; they have to be under my own name. And yet I couldn't bear to post as "Zack M. Davis" or "Zachary M. Davis." I don't want to be tagged so _visibly_ as a male, before you even see the first of what I have to say. "Z. M. Davis" is just this beautiful byline; it hides what is unimportant—it perhaps does not hide it _well_, but it hides it. And I know my delusions of being an author could very well be just delusions, but can we hold out a hint of seeing a book of mine in print, where it will be held in public libraries? Suppose I do write _Preserved Under Symmetry_, and suppose at that time there is still a division wrought in the minds of most between _real publishing_ and Lulu _et al_. How could I bear for that beautiful book to be posted as being written by "Zack M. Davis"? O terrible! If my byline on that book has to be "Z. M. Davis," then my byline on other things has to be "Z. M. Davis" as well, for consistency, and if my byline has to be "Z. M. Davis," then I should be called "Z. M." in person, too, for consistency—that's what I thought, once. But that kind of consistency isn't on the table, because my parents call me "Zack," and the crowd at Safeway calls me "Zack," and "Z. M." just doesn't feel like a _name_. I can't have consistency across the board, so I need a plan—did I tell you this? All I need to do is draw up a list of all the occasions I can think of on which one needs to use a name, and I will plot out in advance exactly what I will say or write on that occasion. And then I can stop being scared, and then I can go be productive. It's just that there are so _many_ contexts in which you need to use a name. You need a name on legal forms, and on blog comments, and when meeting strangers at a party. And it _depends_ on what _kind_ of party—if someone is expected to know me from my writings, then it's important to mention the byline, whereas if it's just some random gathering of no consequence, I should be content to just be some guy named Zack. There are a lot of cases that are unambiguous (my blog comments must be as "Z. M. Davis," my parents will always call me "Zack"), but there are other cases where I don't _know_ what to do. It's all very well for writers to have a cherished byline, but in a lot of other lines of work, you people are going to be calling your office, and then what do you put on the business cards? And if you were a programmer on a software project, your name is going to go into the credits. And what about when you get interviewed by the newspaper?—does it depend on whether you're a person on the street, or being interviewed about the book?

All this tension is sharpened by my epistemic greed. I don't want to be chained up by any professional category. I don't just mean that I don't want to define myself as a customer service representative; I wouldn't want to define myself as a novelist or an academic, either. There's too _much_ that I want to experience; I consider my ignorance of bookbinding and quantum field theory a _personal disgrace_. Some people can be content to have a professional name and a professional life, and a separate personal name and a personal life. But I don't understand how; how can they bear to remain so small?

But I bear it, too. I sing to myself that I want to do everything, but it's not—it's not really true. But neither would I want to abandon this hope.

But in what way am I not abandoning it, when I waste my days away worrying about _identity_? It's not helping me become _larger_. It's not helping me become someone whose name is worth knowing anyway.

And _probably_ you don't even get to choose how other people know you. Consider the eleventh-century Persian polymath Avicenna. He did not think of _himself_ as "Avicenna"; that's just our Latinized gloss.

Anna had asked if I was transgender; I said I wasn't; she asked if I was sure. And when I said that in all the ways that really matter, I have more in common with her than with Alex, she said, "That's right," in that beautiful accent of hers.

There are so _many_ contexts in which you have to use a name. People are routinely _more commonly known as_. Well, known _to whom_? People form communities, and a superstar in one is no one in another, and you have to choose what you care about. And I fractured my identity, without even knowing what I was doing, and I should have been so much smarter than that.

But I have work to do today, in preparation for the Summit. This moping has to stop. Sunk cost fallacy. Take my current values as a given, pretend that I was just dropped into this life, and figure out where to go from here. Pretend that I'm a girl from another universe, just _dropped_ into this body. It's up to me to ensure a safe Singularity. I think I'll go to the convenience store and buy some candy, and then I'll be back to finish up the programs and work on slides. I remain yours.

ADDENDUM— I'm _retarded_. All this moping about when there is all sorts of interesting work to be done! Am I going to waste my enitre life just because I don't have exactly the same name in all contexts? I regret my wasted youth—all the time I played stupid games when I could have been doing math, building skills, making myself smarter. Well, I haven't been making myself smarter lately, and it is _wrong_. I don't want to be _hampered_ like this. I want to _work_; I want to _know_. This name problem is _fixable_; I can't let it consume everything when there remains so _much_ that I haven't _seen_. I remain yours.


#### 392 — Monday 28 September 2009 — "Feels Like Layout"

I count today as confirmation of the theory that my periodic sadness isn't _caused_ by whatever it nominally seems to be about. You see, Diary, I feel _great_ now, and it's not because I've drawn up a list of exactly what form of my name to use in what context. Suddenly the whole problem seems managable. I finished the Summit programs today. Oh, how it feels good to be competent, and to have good work to do! And there's so _much_. Consider the graphic designer who wants to illustrate a presentation with an array of ones and zeroes. She _could_ type them out by hand. Or she could just say:

#!/usr/bin/python

from random import randint

k=''

for i in range(7000):

k+=str(randint(0,1))

print k

—and _that's_ what interdisciplinary knowledge is good for, my friend: the simple solutions you never would have otherwise thought of, because had things been _otherwise_, you wouldn't even have known the tools existed. Anna likes my work, and I love Anna. I can _deal_ with having more than one form of my name. I will _figure it out_! And then I will study some math! Because I haven't done enough of it lately! And I remain—forever—_yours_.


#### 393 — Thursday 8 October 2009 — "Preposterous Pseudonym"

I suppose the east coast trip went well. The day we left, I had stayed up very late getting Anna's presentation together and only got a small amount of sleep. Prompted by a comment she left, I made plans to visit Alicorn in Amherst. I missed some of the talks on the first day of the Summit because I had to do some image hunting for Anna's second presentation. I really enjoyed Marcus Hutter's and William Dickens's talks. I stuttered out a question for Dickens; I might be inspired to look up his papers and send him an extended email. I left the second day of the Summit early to catch the subway to the bus station, and the long bus to Amherst.

The actual value of the Alicorn trip was lower than the expected value, but I might have been expecting that: one of those low probability of a high payoff affairs, although not as bad as SIAI itself. Or am I just saying that after the fact because it sounds nice? Maybe I was honestly disappointed, and I expected us to be more compatibile than we actually are. Offline, she goes by the preposterous pseudonym of _Hannah Finley_. She has very long hair and is more literary intellectual than sciencey intellectual. I knew from her comments that she liked to cook, but I didn't know _how much_.

My plan had been to take the bus back to New York and fly back with Mike Blume, but that was silly and wrong, so I took a long bus to Boston and visited Nicole and her real scientist friends, which was nice. Her German boyfriend Jan is very nice. I thought I held my own very well, my _manifested_ education is superb. At the Harvard Book Store, I bought some postcards, Sheldon Axler's textbook _cum_ vicious anti-determinant screed _Linear Algebra Done Right_, and a printed-on-demand copy of H. G. Wells's _Ann Veronica_, the cover of which (Diary, this is the only truth) refers to the author as "Wells, Herbert George." In the bookstore, a man with a ponytail and a distaste for Python tried to scare me into functional programming.

I took library day today, reading out of _Tiffany Twisted_ and that first volume on the psychology of gender, doing a little bit of compsci (not enough), and writing a great deal in my personal notebook. You can tell that my productivity has been hampered lately over this business of names: I had gotten up a pattern of burning through this make of notebook at almost exactly one a month, whereas my current one was started on 20 August, and I won't finish it before tomorrow.

Anna had made an analogy to flying by instruments: jet pilots can't trust their intuitions and must learn to trust the vehicle's gauges else they will surely die. Similarly, there are certain reflective arts that I need to learn if I am only going to continue to exist in this world. This madness about names—it's all in my head. This feeling that my entire past is marred by this discontinuity is an artefact of the particular, and I think nonstandard, way that I'm slicing up reality right now. If I could just _stop caring so much_, then no one would notice a thing.

I am bothered by Alex's obvious competence, displayed in conversation tonight. Mike Blume is so much nicer, but I just wish he would get it together—or at least _notice_ that he's missing some pieces, that he would get his sense that more is possible, this sense that I have that has at least risen me _this_ far out of the gutter.

The night when we were working on getting the slides together, I think I did have a little crying fit, and Anna said that I was being useful, and that with some training, the two of us together could be twice good next summer as she alone was this summer. I had asked, better at what?—and she said, _reducing existential risk_, of course! On Saturday night I told Anna that I had been lying every time I said it before, but that I promised to start taking the CBT stuff seriously. And I have to; I'll have to do something tonight, even if it's just reading the book, because there's so much I want to do and experience, so how could I bear to waste my time whining to myself about name and identity issues? Somehow I have to cut the strings. Even if it means maiming a part of myself, I can't continue to be this weak.

I didn't do anything _wrong_, did I? I didn't even change my name; I use different _forms_ of my name in different contexts. What else am I supposed to do? And the same thing would have continued happening on a smaller scale if I had kept using _Zack_ in my byline, because _Zack_ and _Zachary_ aren't bitwise identical, _either_.

Why do I let myself get so _hurt_? My hair has grown so beautiful, and my byline is beautiful, and so I must work hard to protect these things. I didn't do anything _wrong_. It's not an option at this point to be named _Ashley Sparks_. And arguably—arguably, even from first principles, this is the least-worst solution, given my legal name. Diary, I didn't do anything _wong_; I'm just near the Mark Newman model. I want to _work_. I'm yours.

ADDENDUM— I spent time reading on the internet on Mike Blume's desktop. I should do CBT, but at this point I just want to go to sleep. Maybe I'm torn between CBT and finishing a page by Drexler. I almost want to stay up later so that my sleep will be deeper. I don't understand why I do this, how I could be so horribly and irredeemably depraved. Especially when there is such work to do. It's only a name! You could just as well call me Irene, or Sam. What I mean is that our lives are very complex and full of all sorts of rich details. We take millions of words to describe anything, and written words are "only" a prosthesis: the symbols hold meaning not of themselves, but because of the meanings _we_ associate to them. So it's probably silly to feel so much pain over the rendering of a name, because it's just this verbal _label_; most of our lives doesn't happen at anywhere near that level.


#### 394 — Saturday 10 October 2009 — " 'Singularity Institute for More Paperclips' "

I essentially lost the entirety of yesterday to depression, moping for hours over this business of names. I had a really good walk and conversation with Mike Blume at night, though. I'm feeling a little bit better, now, but I'm still noticably in pain. I don't exactly trust myself to think, today; I feel like a different person. I hope this feeling will wear off; I want to recapture the elation I've felt in the past when talking with Anna or other people in this community. But how could I have felt any elation at all, when my name is in an ambiguous state? There's some sort of reflective art that I've failed to understand. I'm going to need to pull off some sort of surgery. I need to examine this desideratum that says that I need use the same form of my name in all contexts, and _excise_ it: I have to cut some intuition if I am simply going to exist, and this seems like the minimal necessary change. I love my byline too much, the "Z. M. Davis" above my blog comments and emails is just so beautiful and epicene. But then the forces against "Z. M." functioning as a first name are also strong: it doesn't sound like a name, even to me, and then there is the burden of history. My family calls me _Zack_, and it would feel strange if they didn't. I'll have to get existentially useful with having two commonly used forms of my name—it's the only way that will _work_. And it's what I've _already_ been doing anyway, and nothing terrible has happened. I _can't_ relinquish my byline; I can't relinquish _Zack_. It's not that uncommon, either: if you go to the library and look at the frequency of literary initals, it seems _fairly_ obvious that not all those people are getting called by those initials in person. Mark Newman of the University of Michigan (_one_ of them, anyway) publishes as "M. E. J. Newman," and his faculty page says "Mark Newman," and this is only just perfectly normal. Should I consider tracking down one of the people who do this, and talking to them?

I've survive this; I'll dig through this madness somehow. I will need a general theory of what to say in what context. Picture me paging through _Atlas Shrugged,_ logging all the times we say "_Henry_ Rearden" and all the times we say _Hank_.

And every minute that I spend moping, Alex is building stuff, gaining skills and knowledge. How can I bear to let any fragment of my potential slip away?—and over these trivial nonproblems, that a lot of people would not even _notice_ as problems.

I went to the library with Steven today. I got a local library card and checked out three books on dealing with anxiety and depression. I apt-got NumPy and actually did some work on the spectral graph theory intrigue, with somewhat mysterious results.

How do you build up confidence? Is it possible to fake it?—I mean, is it _logically_ possible, that is, is it literally nothing _but_ appearances. I remain yours.


#### 395 — Tuesday 13 October 2009 — "Finite State Machine"

Yesterday Justin came with me to pick up Roko and Steve from the airport. In the car, Roko addressed me as *Zack—*I guess he picked that up from Carl or Anna. Later that night, in the house, he asked if I prefered to be called _Zack_ or "zed-em" or (remembering the American name) "zee-em." And I said that I liked "Z. M. Davis" as a byline, but that _Z. M._ doesn't parse as a name. He didn't recognize the term _byline_, and Michael Blume piped in with _pen name,_ nom de plume.

I took a very long walk that afternoon in my bare feet, continuing to fret about the name thing. I came back to a warm house full of smart friends and pasta. I love this house; I love these _people_. Even Roko, whose sexism I had scorned (_cf_. 366)—well, he's actually a really nice guy. And, it should scare me to admit this, but having leadership skills around is really useful, and Roko has them. He got us to clean the kitchen. It's shameful that this should be the case. Ideally, everyone would spontaneously pitch in to make sure things stay clean. (Which shouldn't be unrealistic; we are all timeless decision theorists.) Somewhat less ideally, _I_ would be the one to take leadership stance and get us to clean the kitchen—but I've been mostly out of comission the past six weeks, my waking hours filled with this _pain_. It's so senseless. People have told me that Anna has told them that I've been useful, and I deny it. Okay, I'm sure I have been more useful than an empty bed, but it's not enough—it's not enough to me to merely justify my existence on the margins, while Alex Schliker makes (in the Randian sense) a million dollars and Roko Mijic saves the [bloody] lightcone. What _use_ is it for me to have my beautiful epicene byline scattered across the blogsosphere, if it's going to hamper me from _doing_ stuff elsewhere?

This morning I was lying in bed (though I had to get up to pee multiple times), mulling over the situation yet longer, and I began to seriously consider the option of resolving to equilibrium in the _other_ direction. All this madness has been of a conflict between two deciderata: on the one hand, I want a gender-neutral byline, but on the other hand, I want my byline to be the same as what I'm called in person. Yesterday, I had been thinking to myself that I've never had consistency across contexts _anyway_: I mean, my legal name is _Zachary_, but no one ever calls me _that_. But now—today I was thinking that I could move to equilibrium in the other direction; give up my beautiful epicene byline and write as "Zack M. Davis" as I did once in days long before these of my purity born of pain.

I've already—before sealing this dispatch, I've already changed back to "Zack M. Davis" on my Facebook, and on my desktop, and on the sending name of my Yahoo! Mail account. It's so _ugly_! But I can't deal with having a fractured identity, either—I've gotten so _attached_ to that byline in print. And yet the forces of habit bind me to _Zack_ forever; I've tried to escape that once, maybe twice, and it doesn't work and it hurts and I don't want to escape. It _hurts_! It hurts. And consider I. A. Stewart of the _City on a Hill Press_—he's Ian A. Stewart on Facebook—what were his motivations? I'm so hurt—I don't know how people let themselves be divided. To use one name on one's sacred artwork—and then something not exactly bitwise identical on one's dayjob? But then what happens when Anna Salamon hires you to work on something important? I don't want to bind myself to any one domain, and so I don't want to have separate forms of my name for separate domains, because then what happens when something new and important happens, that is not the sacredness of the blogosphere and not the drudgery of the supermarket, either? What about when you _do_ have to deal with people in the flesh?

How did I let myself get tangled like this? I should have forseen all this—should have thought it through, _noticed what I was doing_ before fragmenting my self-identity into two. I'm so glad to live in a free country where there is no one fixed standard for these things, but sometimes it seems like I'm not strong enough for freedom. Brad DeLong is _known as_ "Brad DeLong," but his official publications are as "J. Bradford DeLong." But then consider Charles Stross who is published as "Charles Stross," but leaves comments on his own blog as "Charlie Stross"—is this the same phenomenon, or a different one?—before looking to their pages with an eye to these things, I knew DeLong as _Brad_ but Stross as _Charles_. Is it there some salient difference between being an economist and being a fiction writer? But all these talking of _being_ this or that just cements more category boundaries that I (as a child of the blogosphere and wannabe polymath) don't want to reify. And isn't it said that you have to be a polymath just to write hard science fiction nowadays? But I'm _hurt_. Anna had asked me a few weeks ago if I was unhappy here and wanted to leave—maybe I do want to do just that: run away from these beautiful people and this important exciting work to go live in an asylum and cry forever about how I don't have a name.

When Aruna first sent me the list of volunteers to be recognized in the Summit program, she had listed me as "Zack Davis," and I altered this to "Z. M. Davis" for the final version. But then—if you do that everywhere, then when people who know you by your work meet you, they either call you by your initials or ask you what you prefer to be called, and then you have to explain. And now Tom McCabe has been rendering his name as _Thomas_ lately, and I don't know if he wants to be called that in person now, or _what_. And I remember that Anna Quindlen had written a column about Jennifer Finney Boylan's memoir, and wrote of the author as "Jenny Boylan," where _Jenny_ is not bitwise identical to _Jennifer_. And Jennifer Boylan was once called James Boylan, and if I remember the book at all, then people used to also call him _Jim_, but _when_, exactly? People don't have nicknames _arbitrarily_; I've never heard James who manages the store being called _Jim_, and the Jennifers who work there are not called _Jenny_, although I think we also had a Jenny for some time.

I guess I might as well follow through to becoming "Zack M. Davis" across contexts again, but why did I let myself shatter my identity like this?—where _Z. M._ is more comfortable in print, but _Zack_ is more comfortable in speech, but different renderings in print and in speech is uncomfortable. And it turns out that P. C. Hodgell (whom we know for having written, "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be") is a woman (I must confess that my Bayes-score took a hit there) and if you can believe Wikipedia (you can't) the _P._ is for Patricia and she is called _Pat_.

But now I have done a little crying and the people here (notably Michael Blume) are being way too nice to me when really we should be frantically trying to save the world and Roko and Anna should yell at us and set us on fire. I remain yours.

ADDENDUM— Obviously this rationality stuff doesn't work, when my preferences reverse so rapidly. I saw an email where it was recounted that Michael Vassar asked if people like "ZM Davis" could churn out papers—and oh! How glorious that I am _trusted_ to be the sort of person who writes _papers_. And yet—why don't I work? Why am I continually so _hurt_?—all over this business of a name. Gary Wolf sometimes lists himself as _Gary Isaac Wolf_, and I doubt he freaks out about this. It's probably just to distinguish himself from the guy who wrote that Roger Rabbit business. Diary, I want to be _smart_. I want to be _intelligent_ ever so badly—and every day that I waste in this depression I become stupider. Ian A. Stewart's case is actually helpful, though—you see, I had thought of using "Z. M. Davis aka Zack Davis" on my resume, out of fears that if I use the form _Zack M. Davis_ anywhere at all, then that will be interpreted as a byline, and oh terrible—but actually it seems better to just put _Zack M. Davis_ on a resume, and people will lop off the middle initial when they need to, and it clearly compacts to _Z. M. Davis_ when I need it to, just as Stewart did it. I went shopping today (glad to be given something useful that I can do even in my impaired state), and during my trip, I felt a reversal. Earlier today I had considered abandoning my current _Less Wrong_ and associated wiki accounts, and getting new accounts as "Zack\_M\_Davis" and "Zack M. Davis" respectively. And for a time while I was at the store, this seemed insane—why _should_ I give up my beautiful byline? So _what_ if some people call me _Z. M._?—I'll still use _Zack M. Davis_ on my resume, and everything will be _fine_.

And then I'm back here and that doesn't seem as safe. But my beautiful byline!—I'm just following the Pat Hodgell model; is that so wrong?

Mark Newman, the one who publishes as M. E. J. Newman, coauthored some papers with E. A. Leicht, whose personal webpage is titled "Elizabeth Leicht."

Why, why, why am I so torn up into pieces? I don't see anyone else being so torn up.

When I said that I have a lot to learn from Alex, Roko laughed.

_Don_ or _Donald_ Bordeaux, _Russ_ or _Russell_ Roberts; they seem to use them interchangably.

Okay, yeah. _I'm sick_. At this point, I just have to realize that I'm _sick_. How much have I ruined already, how many bridges have I burned? Okay, the people here seem to like me and support me, but I'm obviously hampered; I'm obviously broken. It's not as if I were an academic hotshot with high executive function who could just swoop in and save the world. But that would so obviously be a better outcome, so why don't I just do it?—I know it doesn't really work that way, but—Diary, I am _supposed_ to love life. Alex once received an award on behalf of Paul Graham, because Graham had better things to do. There's so much I could learn from Alex. But how _do_ you learn these things? Since fucking _high school_ I've been saying that I should be dauntless. Time is running out for this world—and I've made such a fool out of myself. How can I _fix this_? I have to either fix myself on one thing that I need to be called across contexts, or abandon this intuition that says there has to be a canonical representation. It was _uncomfortable_ when Justin would address me in person as Z. M. Davis—but am I really prepared to give up my beautiful byline just to avoid that? How do you plan across years? I would sort of like to masturbate and go to bed, but then what am I going to do tomorrow? Mope around again? It's no good; can't you see it's no good? I need to take decisive action—I don't know if that's to see a shrink or to abandon my initialism wholesale, but this sickness has to _end_.

I could have—you know, equilibrium here had been towards calling me _Z. M._ (_cf_. 381), and [I] talked to Anna to stop it—it _was_ making me unhappy. That means something. Does the glory of my byline over the net outweigh the discomfort of it in person? The right answer, the shut-up-and-multiply anwer, would have to be _yes_, I think: it's only through text that anyone can be immortal; the primate stuff is only ashes. And yet (Anna is never too shy to remind me) we _are_ primates. Getting called _Zack_—getting called _Zack_ by these beautiful people—is _comfortable_. Isn't that the end of the story? Of course not: there's no rule that you have to display the same face to all the world; some people are comfortable to hold pen names that aren't any sort of derivative of their legal name. But I don't want to live separate lives; I can't leave it at the office.

I could ditch my pretty byline. If anyone asks, I could just honestly say that I was wasting too much emotional energy deciding which form of my name to use in which context.

Only consider (Anna could tell me to consider) the value of information. I could email B. K. DeLong, and ask if he's felt this sort of pain, and what he would recommend.

I called Nicole today and told her about this mess. She asked why it mattered so much what I was called; she apparently does not have this intuition that there needs to be a canonical representation.

Mike Blume suggests I should draw the boundary of the self closer in—to not identify with everything my brain does. The always-witty Steven said that I could call myself _Zack_, and my brain _Z. M._, and I told him to shut up.

But honestly! Think of all the fascinating people here, and the fascinating work we have to do! This is such amazing Diary fodder—much more than the supermarket. So I should work so ridiculously hard, and tell all to you, my light, my friend.

Or consider Josh. Would I be comfortable with him calling me _Z. M._?—you know, I _don't_ think so. Only it's so sad—I chose this beautiful byline for this sacred reasons, and the person who is most comfortable using it is fucking Michael Vassar.

I've _really_ fucked up. I'm so intelligent; I have so much beauty to give to this world, and yet I am such a fuckup. In his latest diavlog (with Andrew Gelman), Yudkowsky referenced H. P. Lovecraft—and this is how sensitive I am now to this business of names, that I notice this in particular.

Mother is prone to this same sort of neuroticism, but I bet she can't write so fluently about it.

Probably it is a mistake for so many of my external reference points to be famous people. Maybe I can learn something from Virginia Woolf or G. K. Chesterton, but you can be certain that I'd learn something from the story of a smart neurotic who never did anything interesting. I suppose the blogosphere mitigates this one a bit.

So many details and complications in my thought and my story!—I remain convinced that there are not enough biographies of obscure people who had interesting thoughts. At the library the other day, there were no less than three different biographies of W. C. Fields—at least one of those biographers might have turned their attention to someone else.

A Google search reveals that there are a nontrivial number of *Zoe Davis*es. How could I—how could I abandon my byline?—when I didn't even _try_ coming up with that list of circumstances. I've made such a fool of myself. I don't know what to do. Enough.


#### 396 — Sunday 18 October 2009 — "False Insight"

I've ditched my pretty byline. I want to do NaNoWriMo this year—I thought of fictionalizing all this identity drama: I would write a story about a wannabe polymath Kathryn T. Kowalski, who has an identity crisis after falling in with a crowd of smart people who appreciated her blog comments as "K. T. Kowalski." There's a publishing company specializing in lesbian and GBLT fiction called P.D. Publishing, Inc. that's accepted at least two NaNoWriMo novels, and I just spent some time elaborately fantasizing about selling this novel to them. Now I feel repulsed by the whole idea—it would mean having spent _way_ too much time obsessing over this business of a name; I would be _embarassed_ for my friends to read it. Maybe I should be happy, then—that I've cured myself of my recent recent madness. But that means coming up with a new NaNoWriMo idea, and I've actually gotten kind of _attached_ to this one. Well, NaNoWriMo is an _excercise_—I'm doing it in order to get myself into a writing mode; I can write this story for theraputic reasons—more than one—and then never show it to anyone. Or I can send it to P.D. Publishing for kicks. Only that's terrible—I should never do something _just for kicks_. It would be kind of great if this were a _cure_—that whenever I feel bad about being _Zack_ now, I could just imagine the embarassment of having _that_ novel _published_ to my name, and then I'd be fine.

Only I feel so _strange_ now. It's as if I've slipped _deeply_ into a mode of thinking that has a "literary" quality to it, entirely different from the "scientific" mode I normally operate in, even when thinking about fiction. It's like being on some kind of drug. I can totally imagine religious people or Bettina Aptheker feeling like this _all the time_. It's a reminder of how important this whole transhumanist project is—there are so many worthwhile experiences that we need to unlock. O to explore the phase space of possible minds!—running it through with a little thread of memory.

But I haven't been working nearly hard enough on the wiki, lost as I have been in my sadness.

Maybe—maybe my original plot is salvagable into something that I wouldn't be ashamed of, if I pushed the name thing into the background, made it less of a central plot point? Or do I just think of a different NaNoWriMo idea? Something Singularity-related?—yeah, I _can't_ write that story about names; I have got to get myself to not-think about names. Maybe in some years I will be distant enough from the drama that I can write the story about Kathryn T. Kowalski and have [it] not be embarassing; now is too soon. Way back during the days when I was beginning to discover the autodidactic fury that I have lost somewhat in recent weeks, I had an idea. Picture a cross between Judea Pearl and Julia Serano, and—well, so it's not much of an idea, but NaNoWriMo is _about_ writing crap for the purposes of getting yourself to write.

I feel good, right now. It's so strange: my behavior has been so poor over the last six or so weeks—and now I _want_ to say that I could turn it around. But when has that been true? I made an analogy to Roko the other day: that when you learn a new theorem, it doesn't start seeming false the next day. And yet this does happen when I just "figure out" how to make myself less broken.

What would happen if I told myself that it would actually _work_, if I just thought about the absurdity of actually getting that novel about K. T. Kowalski published by P.D. Publishing? That this grotesque vision alone would be enough to resolve my recent recent madness? Aspiring rationalists are given to loathe the idea that _thinking makes it so_—but what if in some domains it's really _true_?

There's so much important stuff to do—so much that I have to protect. And I've spent all these weeks moping about a _name_? I wish I could declare this moment to be the time that I halt, melt, and catch fire: that I rise from the ashes. But then this works so rarely, and it doesn't stick. I already had the insight days ago: rationalists should _win_; this name drama isn't helping me _win_, so _fuck it_. And then—I've been feeling a little better, but not so much.

I had gotten myself into this horrible situation where my preferences were inconsistent: I loved my beautiful byline, but I was also attached to being called _Zack_, and I also wanted a consistent identity across contexts—and O terrible! I know it is written that hindsight devalues science, but it still seems like this could have been so _forseeable_. Robin Hanson once wrote a post on how to be radical. You don't want to try to be radical on _all_ dimensions, because then almost certainly something will go wrong with at least one of them. Instead, you want to be radical on a few carefully-chosen dimensions that are most important. And I've been so terribly stupid—I'm only now beginning to realize an important lesson in my continuing project to degender myself: _don't force it_. _Z. M._ did not feel like a name; I should have _noticed_ this before introducing myself as such; I should have practiced and thought it through before actually calling myself that. Or consider the time I shaved my eybrows, or those _dumb_ headbands I used to wear: all of this was so _contrived_; it rung false. Compare my beautiful, beautiful hair, or my beautiful pink accessories: these _worked,_ they flow organically from my entire person; if they were affectations to start with, they aren't anymore.

What policy could I have followed the _first_ time through, to get things right? You don't want to say, "Notice when something isn't working immediately, and cut your losses as soon as you can." If I had followed that policy, I might not have my beautiful hair—there is a valley of bad hair when you don't have enough for a ponytail. I _knew_ this in advance not only because it is transparently obvious, but also because someone on the internet said it.


#### 397 — Monday 19 October 2009 — "Dresden Kodak"

Okay, so I'm torn. A lot ideas and themes are unifying themselves in my head for this story about Katie Kowalski, but on the other hand I don't want to write anything about name drama—I just want to forget it, to pretend that it didn't happen. But I do have a good vague pointer in the general direction of a story here, and it ties in with themes: everything I've been thinking about unity and curiosity. _Unity_ would even be a good working title, with the sincerest of internal apologies to (really) S. D. Perry, who wrote a _DS9_ relaunch novel by that title. I could let my protagonist be untroubled by her multiple identities, but then where would the drama be? I could scrap this idea and write something entirely different, but this story is falling together so well. It _is_ nice what's been happening to my thoughts over this story: the same thing that happened when I was actively working on "Greater Glory": abstractions and concepts from my life and thoughts just _link up_ with each other. It makes you wonder why I write so little fiction, given that I seem to have such a native faculty for it. But I can say that this is just for NaNoWriMo, this entire point of which is to write a bad novel. I don't have to submit it to P.D. Publishing, and I don't even have to show it to anyone. If anyone _asks_ to see it, I can just say _no_, on the grounds that it's a terrible novel. I could offer to show them "Greater Glory" instead—and hopefully the momentum from NaNoWriMo would help me finish that. So _fine_, I can write a private novel in November.

I feel better now about this whole name drama. _Zack_ is _safe_. I just wish—I wish I knew more about how all this happened though. Pity those people who don't even keep Diaries!—even with a Diary, there's so much of my life that is _lost_ to me. I thought—I thought I gave up on being called _Z. M._ in person back in February 2008 (during the time lost to your injury), reserving "Z. M. Davis" for a byline. So how exactly did this recent drama come about? Exactly how did I introduce myself to whom, what assumptions did they make or not make? There's so much of even our ordinary, everyday world that remains undiscovered. That, indeed, will be one of the themes of the story about Kathy Kowalski. I should email Hannah Finnley my old fiction (hopefully she will be convinced that "Greater Glory"is not mean after all), and ask if she wants to do NaNoWriMo as well. Downplay the name drama, sure, but this is the story I'm going to write.

I wish I had more data on how I come off to others—I must have lost so much "karma" with my compatriots these last six or so weeks. Well, I abandoned my pretty byline and I fixed the problem. Life had been getting better before, hadn't it?—I was just starting to run things off the scale. I think I can continue that trend. As I wrote, induction is on _my_ side now: I've gotten better before, so I can do so again.

Arguably—and it's only an argument—this recent recent madness is not so bad, because I could not have reasonably been expected to prepare for this eventuality. _Z. M. Davis_ was _genuinely_ a pretty byline, and a lot of writer-type have no trouble with that sort of thing—is it entirely a case of being easy on my past self, to say that I could not have known in advance that my online and meatspace lives would run so gloriously together like this? And you know—I am glad not to end up with the fate of M. R. C. Greenwood. I still wish—as I always wish—I wish I had figured this all out _sooner_. I'm _retarded_.

But here's to being less wrong going forward. I remain (for the sake of old times),

Your increasingly rational correspondent,

Zack M. Davis


#### 398 — Tuesday 20 October 2009 — "Z for ..."

Ideas for the Kathryn Kowalski project continue to bubble around, and I remain _damaged_, continuing to spend hours musing about names when ostensibly I was supposed to be doing compsci. It's so dumb, because I didn't even get any existential-risks related stuff done yesterday, and Roko (it's pronounced _rah-koh_, by the way, even if stupid Americans read it as _roh-koh_) was really easygoing about it—he's being so _nice_. I don't want to be coddled; I don't want to remain so _ineffective_—whereas Roko is effective and Alex is _very_ effective, and they both have a sense of themselves as men. I can't just let them win like that, can I? I must compete for the dignity of my anticompetitiveness. I feel like I've _always_ been underperforming relative to my actual intelligence, and I'm getting so horribly old. It is sick; I won't stand for it. If I'm more comfortable being called _Zack_, and I'm more comfortable with my byline and my in-person name being the same, then I should just run with that, and try to do something _useful_ under that banner. It would make sense to invest so much in byline-optimization if my usefulness were not in question, but it _is_. I told you about Robin Hanson's advice. Well, I only have so many radicalness-points to _spend_, and it's just stupid to sink so _many_ of them into writing under my initials when this business of names is causing me so much _pain_. I don't know whether it helps more to say that my past self was just _stupid_, or whether I _was_ buying something with my initials, and _am_ giving something up by letting them go, but that it's worth it on net to satisfy my native intuitions about what-sounds-like-a-name in order to free up my attention and emotional energy for things that are actually useful. Rationalist sentiments both—and I don't think Bayes alone can decide between them; it's another matter of magical categories.

My NaNoWriMo book is about intellectual ambition, and the vastness and disconnectedness of this world, and yet the unity of knowledge. But then there's the disconnectedness of desires, too. I'm comfortable being called _Zack_, and I'm happiest when doing intellectual work, so why can't I just run with it? You can say that I didn't do anything wrong that I could have been expected to know in advance. Literary initals are a _reasonable thing to do_ on the internet, when you're not anticipating your online and meatspace lives to bleed together like mine have.

I still wish—I still wish I knew what I was thinking between February 2008 and my recent recent madness. There are videos on my Facebook of me singing with my little stuffed penguin: I referred to myself as "Z. M. Davis" in the title, but the description referred to "Zack and Amy" doing this-and-such. So I guess that's the kind of informal/formal division I thought I could pull off? In reality, maybe I just didn't _notice_; I wasn't thinking about it as hard as I am now. Speaking of formal and informal, I noticed recently that I had probably been doing something somewhat unusual without even noticing it. Including the middle initial is a mark of formality, but _Zack_ is a mark of informality, and it might be unusual to combine the two. A lot of people in my legal position would sign their publications _Zachary M. Davis_, even while being called _Zack_.

Wow, I'm feeling kind of better upon writing. I think I can go forward (I have thought this many times in recent days, but it can be as if I'm feeling the thought anew again) with _Zack M. Davis_; it's fine. And this experimenting with _Z. M. Davis_ was a reasonable thing to try in youth (not necessarily a _rational_ thing to do; rationalists should _win_), but I've really got more important thing to worry about right now.

It turns out that [redacted] is SforSingularity.

ADDENDUM—"Dizzy Jazzy Puppy"— In addition to reading more late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century fiction, I should consider listening to more jazz covers. Shannon Butcher (whose name I envy) did this jazz cover of "Just a Girl," and it's so beautiful. One of the things I cherish about human memory is the associativity—the way certain books and songs seem _linked_ to each other and the period of my life in which I consumed them. There's this ten-minute jazz cover of "A Whole New World" that just seems to _fit_ with Anne Campbell's _A Mind of Her Own_ and that time in 2008 (March?). More than once these kinds of associations have spawned cached phrases, like the time I sat with my back against San José City Hall reading _The Feminine Mystique_ in the dying light long after the fire trucks had gone, or the time that I stood on the staircase of the University library, pressed the Kurzweil book fast to my chest, and pretended I was Kathy. I told you, but—there's a sense in which my life is so much better now than I had ever known how to dream—and yet so much worse than I now know is achievable to me if I just had the rationality to thread the needle. I can't let this business of the spelling of a [name] destroy everything. I'm supposed to be bringing the wiki into shape _but I'm not_. It's dumb. I want to write in a piece of fiction somewhere that this strangeness of mine was never _about_ androgyny anyway; it's _about_ general intelligence. Anna might be back tomorrow, and I hope we can go for a walk, but how will I explain to her? And I don't know how to go forward.

Alex has come up to Steven and asked a few questions. And Alex said, "So everyone's finally doing a lot of work." O terrible that I don't have anything within my recent weeks with which to contest his terrible condescension! I told you—I've been acting like I did in high school or at University, all this moping. I _pick up_ a lot of knowledge from the internet, so there's a sense in which even at my worst, I do better than nine-tenths of the population. But it's not enough—I won't stand to be a dreamy hanger-on in a world that gets built by men like Alex.

I've been doing something _wrong_. I grew a lot in my time at Safeway; between the booth and my personal studies I learned something about the deep structure of general competence. Now I've been offered this amazing new opportunity, and I'm letting it slip away; I'm backsliding.

Some would argue that it's just regression to the mean: that I will _always_ be a smart guy with not enough drive to do anything really interesting and public with his life, that the brief illusion that things were otherwise was exactly that. But if I _know_ this, if I can _predict_ this terrible fate, then I should be able to figure out a way around it. I don't expect superpowers; I know that there are a lot of particular things you can't change given resource contraints. But reality is just so _detailed_; there must be all sorts of hacks and low-hanging fruit. If _all_ you want is to get into Harvard, or to change your name to _Shannon Butcher_, you might just be screwed. There are just too many other people who want to go to Harvard, and you might have too many attachments to your current name that you can't just magically disavow. (Plus the jazz artist _Shannon Butcher_ and the romance writer _Shannon K. Butcher_ might get mad at you.) But if what you want is _intellectual competence_ or _data-driven androgyny_, then what's stopping you from running it off the scale?

I fantasized about saying it (echoing Yudkowsky as far too often): my name is Zack M. Davis, I'm an aspiring rationalist, and _I've got_—something to protect. It's true, isn't it? So why can't I just stuff the drama (folding it up into a novel in spare hours in November) and frantically bring this wiki up into shape? I could _say_ that I'll go do this right now—but my _word_, this entire theme just feels too much like high school. I've backslid. _Why_? Can't I just say the entire initials business was a subgoal stomp from the start? But maybe it _was_ buying me _something_.

This is so _retarded_. I know Eliezer's stuff by heart—I have a job to do—so _write_! I remain yours. Zack M. Davis.


#### 399 — Wednesday 21 October 2009 — "Somewhat Less Retarded"

All humans have inconsistent preferences, but it's rarely so _obvious_ as it has been for me lately. I again spent my library time in an unfocused daze, reading a bit from books and websites and generally feeling gloomy about my name. I continue to consume way too much coffee and candy. There are times when the thought of being known by my initials seems horrifyingly weird, and there are times when the thought of having a recognizably masculine name seems awful, and I don't know how to square the two. I suppose this is only inconsistent if you insist on having the same name everywhere, which a lot of people don't. There's the great A. J. Ayer, and then there's Freddie, the great A. O. Scott, but then Tony. It's not inconsistent to want different things _at different times_: like wanting to be aroused for this romantic moment, but not to be having sex every minute of every day. But we expect _those_ kinds of states to be transient, so what do you do when you have to be a girl just to get it up?

Some people say that in the old days, homosexuality was something you _did_, not something that you _are_—that this business of _identity_ is modern. I think there's a truth here. Of course people talk about the trans spectrum, but I don't hear as much about just how much room you _do_ have to wiggle around from where you were born. We have all this drama about how it's not a choice, how people must struggle to express what they innately are—but we do not celebrate the extent to which it _is_ a choice, when I think we _should_. I've had ideas along these lines before—as the price (monetary and otherwise) of sex changes goes _down_, quantity demanded should go _up_. That's just basic economics, delicious as it is to apply to this uncommon case.

And what if the price goes _way_ down? By abandoning my identity as _Z. M. Davis_, what opportunities and natural trajectories have I given up?—but I've gained a lot, too.

But I spend a lot time thinking I made the obviously right choice. Should I deliberately try to self-modify to feel that way all the time?—at what cost to my data-driven androgyny? Or do I keep the other identity—and this wound—open?

In Egan's _Incandesence_, Lahl tells Rakesh and friends that virtually everything about the DNA world remains to be discovered. I don't wonder if virtually everything about our _own_ world remains to be discovered. Of course, Greg Egan believes in _general_ intelligence, and we don't—or we do, but we don't think we have it. Only a thread.

Today, I might have received my first email from Yudkowsky addressed to me (many were *cc*ed), about tone for the wiki. After a downturn, I may yet have restored myself as,

Your increasingly rational correspondent,

Zack M. Davis

ADDENDUM— Yes, obviously I've backslid _horribly_. I actually found myself getting _bored_ this evening, not being inspired on the wiki and not having any particular website that I wanted to read. That's how far I've gotten out of the habit of reading paper books. This is of course _insane_. I, who sung the preciousness of every moment—_bored_? In this beautiful house with this beautiful library that has practically all the best books! And over what? A _name_. How _moronic_. Although I was saying to myself that a name does have lasting consequences—well, so does every moment that you weren't studying. And I never even emailed B. K. DeLong or "s. e. smith," when that might have been so useful. Or maybe not; maybe the answer was in my heart. Really—I actually had a chance to _be_ "Z. M." That's what equilibrium had settled on here; that's what people were calling me (_cf_. 381). And it was making me unhappy; I terminated it. So that's—that's the end of the story, right there. Maybe some people who conceive of themselves _as_ fantasy authors can publish under their initials, and everything else is just personal, but I have a deliberative awareness of what a delusion _fame_ is, and I have this impulse towards unity—and in this internet age especially, it wouldn't work. I don't want to drive that wedge between _my friends_ and _my fans_, because I know that fandom, just like the other, is local. And maybe some people can take the other fork and be intials all the time, like the glorious B. C. Holmes.

Anna and Carl should be back soon; we thought it would be today, but maybe it will be tomorrow. I want to say to Anna, "Some transhumanist _I_ am. I can't even change nicknames. How am I ever going to change sex, change substrate, consume every field of human knowledge, live to a billion, design new emotions from scratch, and pioneer all sorts of other grand endeavors I don't even have concepts for?"

But this is what felt right, here. In another Everett branch the dice fell differently and I was smarter, earlier. Here I've still got this wonderful life with all these wonderful creepy Singularitarian friends. And—forget about _my_ feelings, and dwell on all the social advantages of having a normal name. I need to spend my weirdness points strategically. I'm so much more _confident_, being able to go out in the world and say, "Hi, I'm Zack." It's nice. And I've still got my beautiful shoelaces and I've still got my beautiful hair. Right, enough. Anna should laugh at me and set me on fire for all this time that I've wasted. Yours, but you know me.


#### 400 — Thursday 22 October 2009 — "Perils of Rebranding"

I've been writing to you _way_ too often. Can you _believe_ that I'm still retarded about this name thing? It's so dumb. My name is _Zack_; technically _Zachary_. What the fuck is wrong with me? Again, there's an impulse that I shouldn't mention names at all in my NaNoWriMo effort, but you _need_ some sort of drama in the story, and this story—these vague notions that I think I may be able to kludge together into a story—has sort of built itself progressively in my mind. It's not _my_ fault. While of course it will be terribly embarassing to mention this drama of names, what's the point of going mad if you don't get something to write about out of the experience? And I don't have to show anyone. You have to write a few bad novels before you can write a good one; better to hone my skills on the _stupid_ problem that I don't want to show off anyway. And there's so much psychological insight to be brought to bear on these kinds of idenity crises, that I want to do in this novel: how you can socialize yourself in various ways, but you're not indefinitely malleable: you might be used to being called one thing or another; you can't _force_ it.

I'm picking Anna up from the airport tomorrow.


#### 401 — Friday 23 October 2009 — "Fork"

Why can't I get over this? Why can't I get over this? I know I will, like I got over my pain about college. But why don't I cut to the chase? It is written that in probability theory, once you know your destination, you're already there. So why don't my feelings follow a random walk, too? Why do I have to be _predictably_ impaired? I talked to Seanan on the telephone yesterday, and he's doing NaNoWriMo, too.

Make a decision, and stick with it. I've still got my beautiful hair, and I've still got my beautiful shoelaces, and there are all these beautiful people around with whom I can do such beautiful work. I made my decision; now I'm going to live with it. I am _old;_ I have wasted enough time already; the opportunities of a lifetime are right in front of me, and I can't let myself blow it all down the drain, flailing about worrying about how to _market_ myself. Retarded, retarded, retarded. And _look_. I can still write my gender book (as "Zack M. Davis"?—doesn't that fuck with the message?), and things will be—fine.

If _all_ I wanted to do in the world, _all_ I wanted to be known for, was that _one book_, then of course I would require my literary intials. But what about everything _else_? What about in _person_? It was _comfortable_ working in the supermarket and being called Zack, when I tried to get my parents to call me _Z. M._ it felt _wrong_. And I _had_ my beautiful hair (although by the end I was oftentimes shielding it with a hat), and I doubt that anyone ever mistook me as being masculine (I was so pleased when Jessica guessed that I was gay). So that's all I need, right? I can still write a book, and as for the _full_ vendetta—can't I just let that be someone else's life? No one can live for optimizing their Wikipedia page. It was _comfortable_ working in Safeway and being called _Zack_. Maybe there are some people who could live for their public and their audience, but what about those personal moments with your friends and coworkers? It's easier, there, having a name-that-sounds-like-a-name. And _my_ coworkers! The level of discourse here is just so phenomenally high!

I can't have separate personal and professional names, separate online and meatspace names, because it's all _one life_. I don't want to disown or partition any part of it; don't want to say that the thoughts I had during my dayjob _don't_ matter, but the thoughts that the editors of _Asimov's_ let through are sacred.

I've been _shredded_ over this for _weeks_. Why can't I just pull the trigger (such a contemptibly boyish metaphor) and let go? I am only granted this narrow fragment of spacetime—I can't waste it in _depression_ over _symbols_. Maybe Anna will help me be brave? And different people get different impressions; they don't know what's literary initals and what's actually initals-as-first-name. Razib thought it was funny that John Maxwell called me _Z. M._ I guess because Razib interpreted it as literary or scientific initals (think _E. O. Wilson_ or _A. W. F. Edwards_), whereas John thought of it as my name. If I'm going to be mixing with all different sorts of people, and I want to have a consistent identity, then it's best to keep it simple.

Only I seem to recall being in third or fourth grade and assuming E. B. White was a woman. So I have to decide. Am I trying to live the most satisfying life on a personal level? Or do I want to optimize for misleading the ten-year-olds of a generation or two hence? And even—even if I wanted to mislead the children, doesn't that require there _existing_ a generation or two hence? Which is itself still yet in doubt. I need to make myself comfortable, _now_, so that I can produce. Anna and Carl say that we have a very high discount rate—which implies that we ought to be working ourselves to death now.  
I made my choice. I'll live with it. The other fork can be someone else's life. I've got more important things to think about.

See, a writer has the option of being a _recluse_. But when you're part of a _community_, I think it's different. One day the other week, hungry for data to help resolve my recent recent madness, I stumbled upon a book of letters between H. G. Wells and—someone else, I forget whom. And the other's letters actually opened with, "my dear H. G. Wells." So that doesn't tell me what they _called_ him over the pressure waves.

Enough! Diary, somehow force me to declare this to be _enough_! I've got more important things to live for—it doesn't _pay_ to have spent two months operating at third-capacity obsessing over this _nonsense_. I'll just have to get my ears pierced and let that be enough. I remain yours—force me to write it—I'll have to get used to it again—

Zack M. Davis

ADDENDUM— This is _insane_. _Insane insane insane_. How did I let myself get in this goddam mess in the first place? C. Jess Riedel has a plausibly feminine name, but when you look at his Facebook, he is all guy, so I could just do the same in reverse—and in this disconnected world, you have to choose what you care about. It's true—so why do I let myself waste away playing _Desktop Tower Defense_ and listening to Shannon Butcher—it's downright out-of-character. And I don't know—I should just give it up when we have got a world to save. I've got to self-modify away this inconsistency—it's got to be done one way or the other or I will surely die. And this is the easiest way. So let it go down this way. I'm _retarded_.

SECOND ADDENDUM— I called the Kaiser doctor again and signed up for the anxiety group. (If I knew any abstract algebra, this would be a lovely time for some kind of pun.) I don't think I told you—when I met him, and explained my story, I mentioned the androgyny angle repeatedly, and you would _guess_ that he would take this as some kind of cue to refer to me to gender counseling, but he didn't even seem to take note of it. Was I too hasty to abandon my byline? But I'm insane—I don't even know how to take care of myself. Supposedly there are a lot of people out there who can't even teach themselves math; they don't have enough of a baseline to bootstrap themselves up from. And I'm—just as bad, in my own way. I can't even teach myself CBT. Anna (whom I'll be picking up in just about an hour) should hate me; Anna should hit me with a stick. Why couldn't I have forseen all this? How could I bear to start posting on a blog, without considering all the places it could lead? But there are people who manage to change countries without breaking down. Arguably—by anyone else's standards, I haven't done anything wrong, and in fact there's quite a lot that I've done right. And this world is so fractured—no one can _agree_ what the _function_ of authorship is—so you have to make it for yourself. And there are men such as my father who do not conceive of themselves as intellectuals, and so they do not worry about what to put on their publications, because they don't publish anything. And I'm _hurt_; how did I let myself get _hurt_ like this? I wouldn't be surprised if Father's been reading more paper books than I have lately. How did I let myself get so torn apart like this? It's dumb. There's Bill Roscoe who goes down on papers as _A. W. Roscoe_, and I hardly think that anyone—gives a shit, so why should I? And Hannah Finley emailed back the first of her commentaries on my old scraps of fiction, and I didn't read it all; I only just skimmed my eyes over, but she says that Claudia makes no sense. Which I suppose makes sense; it was after all, this terrible, unreadable metafiction, and I'm—down. Why can't I just let this be someone else's drama? We've got the light cone to think about here? Alex doesn't take us too seriously; he's not afraid of us—why should he be? And what equilibrium am I going to spin myself into? This is all so _dumb_.


#### 402 — Sunday 25 October 2009 — "Bingo Night"

I've been _wrong_. I've been saying this for a while, but things might have fallen into place tonight such that I can level up and be less wrong. Looking back, I want to divide the last three-years-and-change into two eras: those of University and these of my purity born of pain. I've learned a lot of fantastically valuable stuff during these eras. I learned how to think; I learned how to study; I grew out my beautiful hair; I have these beautiful new creepy Singularitarian friends, and an altruistic endeavor to be a part of, in addition to my private endeavors.

On the other hand, it's all dust and ashes. I've never written a good academic paper. I've never completed a good piece of fiction. And I've been so immature. Particularly these past few weeks, consuming too much candy and coffee, wasting time, unable to study.

I visited my parents' house. I brought back _Permutation City_ for Mike, and _Abstract Algebra_ because it's not a home without a copy of Dummit and Foote.

I've exchanged emails with Hannah Finley; she thinks "Greater Glory" is mean. Yudkowsky has appointed Vladimir Nesov to be God of the wiki. You can imagine that if I hadn't been so impaired, I would have done more work and better work, such that I would have been picked instead. But I have been impaired, over this stupid name bullshit.  
Was I hasty, letting go of my byline? But it's for the best. Tonight I've been getting more used to the thought of really letting go. But there's still—a little bit of pain.

I know that tonight is supposed to the night I get my shit together, but I'm seriously considering playing a little _Desktop Tower Defense_ first.

I was _comfortable_ being called _Zack_ in the supermarket. And I still had my quirky reputation, and Jessica still thought I was weird, and honestly, Diary, no one can live for their Wikipedia page. I'm giving something up, but—I'm running out of time, too. I'm old and stupid, and I can't afford to waste any more emotional energy on this trivia. I'm still not-masculine, and that's what counts. Cathy Uselton at University had the right idea; no one would think _her_ feminine, and she didn't even fuck up her name. Or consider Cassandra. No one, _&c_.

Diary, how much do you know about Cassandra, anyway?—I have a suspicion that everything I might have told you about her was lost to the time of your injury.

It was so nice to see Anna again the other day. Oh, how could I get so bent up about names?

This depression of the last few weeks has been bad. The historical analogy would be to that period in 2007 where I fucked everything up; I even stopped notebooking for months.

I'm almost ready to give it up; I'm almost ready to exit this depression and go back to my knowledge quest. The initals thing has been a subgoal stomp from the start; if I had been smarter, maybe I would have started a software company at 16 and changed my name to _Courtney_, but it's too late for that now.

I'm almost ready, but first—a little more tower defense. Then: well, I want to say "less Lynn Conway, more Rachel fucking Maddow." But that wouldn't be very clear.

Emil agreed to let me name the fox _Rebecca_. I remain yours,

Zack M. Davis


#### 403 — Tuesday 27 October 2009 — "Storm Damage"

I'm feeling better now. It is _weird_ for people on the blog to be referring to me as _Zack_, but then it was _weird_ for people to be calling me _Z.M._ in person, so if this is the cost of integration, I'll pay it. It's just so nice to have a _name_, even an ugly and masculine one. I actually got in some decent study time at the library today, which is nice, because my study habits have been _terrible_ lately. Through this entire drama, I've developed some bad habits. My impulse control (with respect to sweets, low-quality reading, and worse) has gotten much worse, and even though I feel better now, it's as if I've lost all my momentum and will have to build it up again from scratch.

Futher (beautiful, articulate) exchanges with Finley; she's convinced me that "Greater Glory" is unpublishable, if only because I don't want to alienate her and people who think like her.

Today Alex was telling Justin that he shouldn't waste his time playing video games; I was inspired to get myself a LinkedIn profile.

So things will be great (current rate no Singularity); I just need to build up some momentum.

The temporal distance between Anna and me is about the same as the distance between _me_ and the time my wrist got fractured in that football game. So maybe I have a little bit of time left. I remain yours.

Zack M. Davis