Perhaps Try a Little Therapy, As a Treat?

post by segfault (caleb-ditchfield) · 2024-09-06T08:51:00.987Z · LW · GW · 61 comments

Contents

  Interlude: Why Read This (Or Why Ignore) [Or: Why I Feel Compelled to Write This]
    3. Duncan’s going to get someone killed if he doesn’t stop.
  Important Context: Who’s this Duncan Guy, and Who TF Are You?
    Caleb Ditchfield (aka klob, kryptoklob, segfault, ditchfieldcaleb, etcetera)
  Let’s Start at the Beginning 
  There’s Just Way Too Much To Go Into Here
  The short version:
  The Part Where I Dissect Duncan’s Shitty Abstract
    Duncan Sabien, shame on you, and let me know when you’re ready to apologize.
  Let Me Tell You About the First Friend I Made When I Moved to the Bay Area
    Duncan Sabien, you don’t know me at all. Shame on you.
None
62 comments

This post was really hard to write.

I don’t enjoy taking a shit on people.

I don’t like defaming people’s names, and I try really, really hard not to spread rumors about people (and their inner character) unless I’m really damn confident that I’m correct in my observations.

I certainly have had so much experience with the rumor mill in college to never willingly wish to be a contributor - or instigator - towards a negative public perception of someone that I’ve never even met before.

And so this post gives me no ultimate satisfaction to write, and though I’m confident in my ability to back up what I say, it definitely doesn’t make me happy to publish this.

Unfortunately, the amount of fear-mongering, bullying, and outright lies that Duncan Sabien has published, encouraged, and let fester about me in the Bay Area spaces that I cherish - LessWrong, Rationality, PauseAI, Effective Altruism, and adjacent areas - demands that I stand up for myself and let you guys knows just how wrong this guy really is.

I hope that this serves as a sort of barrier to future people whom he might critique, and a warning to those who have trusted Duncan in the past - perhaps, get your own read of people and participants in the space. Duncan’s judgement probably shouldn’t be trusted anymore.

---

Interlude: Why Read This (Or Why Ignore) [Or: Why I Feel Compelled to Write This]

I’m making this post for a couple of reasons - listed below, not necessarily in order of importance or priority. If any of these listed reasons appeals to you, I guess read it?

Again, airing this out for the world to see isn’t actually my idea of fun, and I’d much rather be talking about the 37 cool and awesome things I’ve done than showcase a time in my life when I was going through:

• an intense breakup with an an ex-girlfriend who developed anger issues, and losing most of my social group out here in the Bay Area because they seem to have taken her side of things
• having to call the FBI on my former best friend of 10 years due to some very uncomfortable things I found out about, and not being taken seriously by the mutual friends of [him and I]
• dealing with an overprotective white knight by the name of Duncan Sabien who isn’t very good at checking his priors but thinks that he is.
   

Yes, I’m very open about my personal life, and often, too, but that doesn’t mean I want to share the conversation logs I’m about to share! They are private. But Duncan’s left me no choice, and I’ve certainly been extremely patient over these months attempting to mediate this situation.

So here we go - here’s why I feel like this needs to be written:

1. My reputation matters. I am a good person. I care about consent, and being fair, and being kind, and being just, and especially, about truth.

I have never, ever broken the consent of a woman I’ve slept with or engaged with sexually. Ever. And that’s important. It’s a golden track record that I’m proud to have.

Duncan is claiming I am an unsafe person. That I’m a stalker, that I’m some creep, that I’m mentally ill, that I’m manic, among many other things that he really has no right, context, or knowledge to claim - and…and unfortunately, Duncan’s got influence in the spaces I inhabit, and has already gotten me banned from some of the spaces I’ve been inhabiting for awhile (LessWrong’s Lighthaven campus as an example). More on this later.

2. If this happened to me, it probably has happened to others, and unless someone does something about it, it will probably happen to future completely innocent and kind people, too.

I get that he’s trying to protect his people. I’m that kind of person too - the kind of person that will go lengths to protect the people he cares about. (Just wait until you hear about how I recently got kicked out of two casinos while literally worried for my friend’s life.) But he’s gone overboard, he’s probably overstressed, and he’s in way over his head, and critically - he’s lying. Even unintentionally. People should know that this is what’s happening.

3. Duncan’s going to get someone killed if he doesn’t stop.

I was incredibly aghast at the callous nature of Duncan and his followers throughout this process. Vibes of “well, what if he committed suicide…would that be good or bad?” and tacit agreement of such vibes and comments on Duncan’s facebook posts permeated the conversation; calls to Duncan to realize that he might be wrong were left unheard.

I’m lucky / thankful / glad that no, I’m not actually suicidal in the slightest. I’ve got lots of experience dealing with this kind of rumor mill (in college). But others don’t. And if he keeps this up, he’s going to get someone killed. And that is not okay.

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Important Context: Who’s this Duncan Guy, and Who TF Are You?

Great questions, title-creator-guy. If you’re reading this post I assume that you know somewhat about me and have some context as to who I am, but if you’re coming from the Duncan Sabien camp, the things you’ve heard about me are probably tainted by a number of things you may want to be aware of. Let’s give a quick profile of Duncan, and then a quick profile of me (though mine will be longer - I obviously know a lot more about myself than I do about him).

Duncan Sabien

• 38, parkourist, and author of the Homo Sabiens
• Married w/ a kid (I won’t name either of them out of respect for their privacy)
• Former employee of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR)
• (Former?) teacher
• Somewhat influential member of the Bay Area / Berkeley Rationalist & Effective Altruist circles

Duncan’s been writing his blog, Homo Sabiens, for years. I’ve been reading his facebook posts - unsure how I first came across his profile - and his blog posts - for years. Well before I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area (summer 2020). His posts were a breath of fresh air; a reprieve, they made sense. And so I shared them with whoever would listen (I’ve referred many friends over to his blog).

Two of his essays, in particular, stuck with me, and are some of the most damn helpful essays I’ve literally ever read - and they are:

1. Social Dark Matter - there’s stuff out there that society doesn’t want to talk about, because it’s not even fun to think about. Stuff like sexual assault, and rape, and psychopathy. How do we train ourselves to be better able to recognize it when it happens? This essay is what helped me realize I needed to report my former best friend of ten years to the FBI and cut that friendship off. And so I did. Wasn’t easy in the slightest, and he still continues to tell people I’m off my rocker, on drugs, etcetera - but that’s for another post.
2. You Don’t Exist, Duncan [LW · GW] - reading through this essay is difficult. Like, really difficult. Reading this essay for the first two times really opened my eyes that wow, other people struggle with [whatever this is], too! Duncan struggled with it, too! I’m not alone in this whatever-this-actually-means fight! I still don’t know what that means, exactly. But that essay and the words within it gave me the vocabulary to let my (now-ex) girlfriend know exactly how she was making me feel when she invalidated my feelings, my mental state, and told me that I had emotions that nope, actually I didn’t. And to Duncan I am grateful for that.

Caleb Ditchfield (aka klob, kryptoklob, segfault, ditchfieldcaleb, etcetera)

I have various intros saved in my Obsidian note-taking app for various contexts - dating apps, regular discord intros, more professional scenarios, etc. It takes awhile to type them up - so why not?

But I’ll type one up for the purpose of this blog post.

I’m Caleb. I’m from a small town in Georgia called Columbus.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist, evangelical Christian household, was taught 6-day creation, and that evolution was a lie.

My sister was, essentially, kicked out of the house at 16 years old because it came out that she was bi.

My parents told me and warned me that I was probably going to hell for lying to them about things like reading Harry Potter under the covers past my bedtime at night with a flashlight.

I didn’t learn emotional things from my parents; I kind of had to learn them on fly in late high school and early college, and I’m lucky that I had a friend group that was willing to help me learn, an early college girlfriend (Scarlet) who saw my potential and was willing to show me the ropes, so to speak, and a community of kind, friendly, polyamorous burner folk to show me how to be a mature, responsible, consent-forward and caring individual.

Without them, it surely would have been drastically harder.

I’m a software engineer guy with a Computer Science degree from Georgia Tech; I work in blockchain (Ethereum blockchains, specifically).

I’ve never been one to listen to authority, and silly rules are pushed back on, often.

I’m a guy that absolutely fucking cherishes his friends, talks about consent to the point of annoying some of them sometimes, and I’m the guy that my woman friends come to when they are dealing with consent issues on the fringes of the friend group and with their partners - because they know that I am a safe person.

I’m the guy that some women friends let look at their phones, and scroll through anything, because they trust me and know that I’m a safe person.

And this is how I know when some of them are in emotionally abusive - or physically abusive - situations.

It’s not an easy role to be in, especially when I am powerless to protect those I love.

But I do it anyway. I’m a guy with influence, with money (sometimes), with status (sometimes), and a I’m a guy who knows what he’s about and what he stands up for.

Have a look at the #goals channel of my community Discord server.

 

In summer of 2020, I moved from Atlanta, GA to San Francisco, CA to start a new chapter of my life. Ever since seeing the HBO show Silicon Valley I had kind of dreamed of moving out here - and I got my chance, thankfully. I loaded up my 2007 Chevy Malibu w/ attached trailer and made the drive in 4 short days.

---

Here’s the part where I link you to the entire facebook messenger conversation history between Duncan Sabien and I. I did consider only linking the relevant parts to each section of this post, but the risk of people saying things like “Context! You’re intentionally leaving out important context!” was far too high.

But first, because this is so draining, I’m going to go get some food and play a few rounds of Starcraft II.

---

Let’s Start at the Beginning
 

 

There’s so much context I could give here that it’s hard to decide what to include - I’m absolutely not going to flood you with an 83-page document like Duncan Sabien has created about me - I wouldn’t expect you to read that. Nor would I want you to.

Here’s the original, live document that Duncan Sabien has created about me. Fair warning to check the edit history if this is still live - I wouldn’t be surprised if Duncan were to update the document in response to this post.

In case of that eventuality, I’ve already made 10+ copies of the document as he’s been compiling it; here’s the latest version I have made my own copy of, dated, 9/5/2024 9:12PM PST - unmodified, uncommented - feel free to browse it - but I’d like to draw your attention instead to

this document. Right here. This is the important link to click in this blog post.

Importantly, I gave the following people access to see the comments as I’ve been working on the document for the past ~3 days or so:

• Duncan Sabien himself (via the same gMail he used to create the “caleb-is-awful-and-unsafe-83-page-manifesto” document)
• My best friend (in Atlanta, who I haven’t heard from in a few weeks and that itself is concerning? But alas.)
• A friend I recently made via the Bet on Love show w/ Aella & co that I was on earlier this year.

I won’t name the people in order to respect their privacy, but I did feel like it was important to point out that I did absolutely give the opportunity for Duncan to entirely privately comment back and forth with me on this contra document - for about 72 hours - and that he has not engaged with me.

That’s way more than he’s done for me - as he’s blocked me on facebook, his blog, everything possible, before making this document, which like -

Dude. If you’re gonna make a public, 83-page document about how I’m a terrible person and blast it out to the world, at least have the decency to not actively be trying to block me from seeing it. That’s what we call a dick move.
 

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There’s Just Way Too Much To Go Into Here

 

So I’ll cover the preamble, and let you decide from there. I’ve commented 16 of the 83 pages in the document with corrections. So much of it is personal drama. I hate that! But Duncan’s the one airing this out in the first place, so I’m placing the blame squarely on him for not doing the due diligence of checking his facts before he blasted this trash out into the world.

The below is pulled verbatim from the document.

The short version:

Caleb Ditchfield (“kryptoklob” or “klob”) is frequently full-blown manic, has very poor boundaries, lovebombs and floods people with increasingly intimate information and personal asks, and then responds to subsequent distancing with vindictive hostility and obsessive fixation/stalking.  He’s also at least mildly delusional and displays ungrounded grandiosity, including routinely deploying narrative reframes and outright lies to attempt to portray his own behavior as reasonable and good and other people as biased or unfair or otherwise suspect.  You should not invite him into your social circles, whether online or otherwise; he is not a safe person to interact with.

While I can speak most extensively to my own experience of Caleb’s stalkery behavior (which has included e.g. him looking up my home address, tweeting about me repeatedly, messaging me around various blocks, making public prediction markets about whether I’m a real person, and sending me creepy emails at 5:00 in the morning mentioning my child and spouse by name) several other people can also attest to the above summary, among them people quoted or screenshot’d below.  This is not a Duncan-only problem; see e.g. this approximate quote from an unrelated third party, warned by a friend of mine:

Sigh. There’s so much to unpack there.

So let’s unpack it. I’ll just copy and paste the comments from the google doc and let that do the talking. Here goes!

The Part Where I Dissect Duncan’s Shitty Abstract

 

Caleb Ditchfield (“kryptoklob” or “klob”) is frequently full-blown manic

You're not my doctor, as far as I know you're not even a doctor, and making this claim is paramount to, or perhaps actually libel.

You need to retract this claim, Duncan.

[I am not manic, Duncan’s never met me in person, and has no basis to make this claim. I have a doctor that I see regularly, who prescribes me medication for the only condition I have, which is adult ADHD. I’m happy to talk about this stuff - I think it’s important that we normalize talking about mental health stuff, so I do it with my friends and I’ll probably make a blog post about it in the future.]

has very poor boundaries

I don’t think Duncan knows what “a boundary” is.

It’s definitely something that I often talk about with friends, that I - as a polyamorous, ethically-non-monogamous person, have extensive experience with, in terms of both defining, respecting, and understanding them. The way Duncan’s used this term makes me think that he doesn’t actually know what a boundary is.

Here’s a blog post I made many months ago about boundaries - hopefully he (and maybe you, if you want to!) can learn something about them.
 

lovebombs

I have no idea what evidence he’s pulling this from. But let me direct your attention to a facebook post I made earlier this year:

 

This is the public version of the post. Here’s a link to it, in fact!

Cheers to my facebook friends who have the guts to agree with the public posts I make, and more cheers to my facebook friends who have the guts to comment on them for the world to see - I really like standing up for my beliefs in view of yes, the entire world - which is why I so often make entirely-public facebook posts.

(But yes, I know, some people are in the awkward position of not wanting their families or employers to see their beliefs, and I get that - which is why I often double post, one friends-only, and one public for the world to see)

I wasn’t able to find the friends-only version of this post that I made, and this blog post has already taken more than 8 hours of my focused attention, so I won’t continue to search for it - but, notably, three pieces of information that are significant about who commented on this post:

• Duncan Sabien himself! He commented on this post that he’d been doing it for [years, I think?]. And agreed with the sentiment.
• Duncan Sabien’s husband.

Several of my friends wholeheartedly agreed. It was a well-received post.

Notably, one particular person very much disagreed. This guy - Misha Gurevich - is kind of an important person to remember, because he’s commonly been a host of events that I’ve wanted to go to in the Bay Area, and was a photographer for the Manifest event that I was banned from.

He really, really didn’t like my post. Said something about how it disrespected the love that one feels for a partner. I respectfully disagreed - I really do love my friends that much. It’s fine if he doesn’t.

(This seems to be a key inflection point in how I started being perceived by others in the Bay Area - but as I’m not privy to those conversations, at all - remember, I haven’t had a single chance to present my case - it’s hard to tell.)

This guy is a common host of events and if he took this and ran with it, it would explain a lot about what people may have heard of me, and their weird/uncomfortable biases towards me entering spaces.

As far as “lovebombing” goes, I mean, look - I do compliment my friends a lot. They’re great. They should know that they’re great. Some of them struggle with self confidence issues way more than I do, I wanna support them. But lovebombing?

No way in hell. That’s not me. Duncan, you’re way off the mark here.

 floods people with increasingly intimate information

This isn’t something that I do. This is something that I have done, especially after I broke up with my now-ex-gf and was floundering around for support - after my friends kind of fucked off - and I was trying to re-establish a support network.

(Notably, my ex-girlfriend, my sister, and my mother literally secretly conspired behind my back to hide/steal my Adderall medication, literally broke into my house during my move, and were all around COMPLETELY TERRIBLE for my mental health while claiming to trying to help; this is why I LITERALLY HAVE SECURED A RESTRAINING ORDER against my mother, lest she try to “help” again. If you disagree with the necessity of this, then you don’t have enough context, and you can fuck right off - thank you very much.)

responds to subsequent distancing with vindictive hostility and obsessive fixation/stalking

Just very obviously not true.

I’m not the one who compiled an 83 page document here; I’m not the one who’s in Duncan’s Discord spying on his messages (though he’s got a spy in mine, per what I’ve seen in said 83-page document), and I’m not the one who’s been messaging Duncan’s friends trying to turn them against him - but Duncan is. And has been.

He’s also at least mildly delusional and displays ungrounded grandiosity, including routinely deploying narrative reframes and outright lies to attempt to portray his own behavior as reasonable and good and other people as biased or unfair or otherwise suspect.  You should not invite him into your social circles, whether online or otherwise; he is not a safe person to interact with.

This is just…blatantly not true.

Duncan Sabien is - I thought - a rationalist.

He’s - I thought - worried about grand-scale things like “will AI maybe potentially kill all of humanity, too?” like I am.

And so him to be making these claims is just.

It’s so much, man.

This post is already so long, and I’m already so exhausted by trying to defend myself.

I think I may stop it here. It’s too much!

The friends who know me well know that I am a safe person. Those who have spent even a day around me know this, too!

Duncan Sabien, shame on you, and let me know when you’re ready to apologize.

---

Let Me Tell You About the First Friend I Made When I Moved to the Bay Area

 

This friend is special.

This friend is one of the sweetest, most caring people I’ve ever met.

I met this friend through Tinder, like I do with many of my women friends out here in the Bay Area; often times we’ll go on dates, we don’t vibe well enough romantically or sexually to keep dating, and so the relationship transitions to friendship.

It’s great! It’s wholesome; it’s nice.

This is how I met Creatine, as I will pseudo-nickname her for now - after the topic that her recent masters’ thesis was on, that I attended, at the unfortunate cost of $200+ (because even though most of her family wasn’t there, the staff at the conference didn’t really want to hear about how chosen family was just as important).

Creatine is awesome. She’s a bodybuilder (recently attended a competition for this in South Lake Tahoe), she’s a fitness instructor, she loves science, she plays the piano, and she makes music. She’s the kind of person I get along with really well.

She and I have been friends - close friends - since I moved out here and went on that first date. We vibed over our mutual love for the TV show Chuck.

As an experienced polyamorous person, she often came to me for relationship advice - which I freely gave. I’ve been in a lot of relationships, and I’ve learned a lot of things.

Creatine started dating a guy, ten years older than hear (which is fine), who’s an alcoholic (which is not fine), who can’t control his emotions (which is not fine) and who was emotionally abusive to her for more than half of their relationship. I know this, because she trusted me to look at the things he sent her and evaluate them - unfortunately, she’s not great at holding strong boundaries in relationships.

(But she’ll get there - she’s a strong woman, she just needs practice holding boundaries.)

And so she’s been showing me - and sometimes my exgf - these texts from her angry, alcoholic, now-thank-fuck-ex-boyfriend who lets his kids play with guns unsupervised (and by the way - HATES my guts, because I see who he is) - and she’s wanted to break up with him for ages.

And I’ve encouraged this.

For ages.

And she finally did, and I was really proud of her for that.

Dude’s a piece of shit. The way he treated her made me so goddamn angry, it’s what prompted me to write notes-on-shadow-self - about how I could probably have manipulated her to break up with him earlier - if I wanted to.

About how I probably do have the power and the friends and the resources to get him fired, or in legal trouble, or change the outcome of his court case(s) - if I wanted to.

And do I want to?

Yeah, of course. He’s a piece of shit.

But that wouldn’t be right, so I withhold my actions, and let my friend choose her own path, because taking away someone’s agency is one of the worst things we can do to them.

(Because consent is really fucking important.)

So Duncan Sabien, shame on you for messaging her, “warning” her about me in her time of grief after breaking up with her angry alcoholic emotionally abusive ex boyfriend who lets his kids play with guns unsupervised, and perhaps next time you feel the need to intervene? Maybe have lunch with me first.

That’s the offer I made to this guy. He refused, probably because he knows that I see who he is.

I really hope my friend will come back to me someday, and re-evaluate the events of that breakup night through a different lens - through the lens of me, who, at getting a text of “hey I’m breaking up with [now-ex-bf] tonight”, realizes that the following events happened in sequence:

1. I receive the text. My phone then almost immediately dies.
2. I know, generally where my friend is. I don’t know where her ex boyfriend is. I know my friend has been drinking, and probably her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, too. This is scary for obvious reasons. He’s an angry alcoholic. I am now worried about the health and safety of my friend.
3. I sprint through two casinos looking for my friend. It takes a solid 25 minutes. I look like I’m crazy and on drugs. I don’t care. I’m worried for my friends’ life.
4. I reserve a room in the first casino for us - for the next day (Sunday night) in case she needs a place to stay (and for me, as well, obviously).
5. I finally find her in a club, at an EDM show. Great. The ex-boyfriend isn’t there. Great. She is very drunk. Not great. I make sure she’s safely in the protection of her fitness coach and among the safety of some ravers, and then I skedaddle out of the club - I’m being noticed, and they want me to leave. Fine, fine.

There’s more to this story, but that was the last time I saw my friend for quite some time. And in between seeing her at the club - and making sure she was safe - and dropping off some COVID tests on her front porch - Duncan Sabien struck up a conversation with her - per what I’ve seen in the 83-page-document - and started warning her about me.

Duncan Sabien, you don’t know me at all. Shame on you.

---

I think this is where I will end the post.

I care a lot about my friends; I do a lot for them.

When they’ve been accused of various horrible things, I literally call them up and ask them their side of the story - everyone should get a chance to have their side heard.

It pains me so much that they have not done the same with me.

Don’t trust Duncan Sabien.

(would you believe that he’s never even tried to go to therapy? ridiculous.)

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