Post #1796598

I stumbled over a 2023 blog post by Zack Davis, “San Francisco software developer,” Charles Murray stan, and dissident rationalist. Davis had a breakdown after Yud dared to tweet that you don’t need to solve “what is gender? what is sex?” to call someone by their preferred pronouns, and then Scott Alexander did not have a lot of time to discuss this terrible tweet with him. My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I deceived myself into thinking I could accomplish that by staying at the office late. Maybe I could have caught up, if it were just a matter of the task being slightly harder than anticipated and I weren’t psychologically impaired from being hyper-focused on the religious war. The problem was that focus is worth 30 IQ points, and an IQ 100 person can’t do my job. … I did eventually get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn’t finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 a.m., I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my 2013 and 2017 psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments). Davis was featured in a SF Chronicle article about psychiatric crises among AI doomsdayers (sic). Davis previously appeared on SneerClub. I hope he has found some support for his mental health because he does not seem happy or well.