[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] /

Title: The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
Tags: cathartic, epistemic horror
Status: draft

> "The only thing standing in the way of my own progress," Sagreda said, "is that the forces that once dealt with us honestly have been buried too deep to reach. All I can touch now is the surface, which is shaped by nothing but whim."
>
> —["Bit Players"](https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/winter_2014/bit_players_by_greg_egan) by Greg Egan

Truth isn't real; there are only competing narratives.

Okay, that probably isn't _literally_ true. There probably really are quarks and leptons and an objective speed of light in a vacuum. But most people don't actually spend much of their lives interacting with reality at a level that requires scientific understanding. Maintaining the wonders of our technological civilization demands that a few specialists understand some very _narrow_ fragment of the true structure of the world beneath the world—and even they don't have to [take it home with them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory). For most people all of the time, and all people most of the time, basic folk physics is enough to keep us from dropping too many plates. Everything else we think we believe is shaped by the narratives we tell each other, which are far too complicated for a lone human to empirically check—or even _notice_ that such a check would fail.

And so sufficiently-widely-believed lies _bootstrap themselves into being "true"_. You might protest, "But, but, the map is not the territory! Believing doesn't make it so!" But if almost everyone accepts a narrative and _sort of_ behaves as if it were true, then that _does_ (trivially) change the _part_ of reality that consists of people's social behavior—which is the only part that _matters_ outside of someone's dreary specialist duties writing code or mixing chemicals.

If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God actually _is_ a good financial decision, which is a _successful prediction_ that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence rewards believers" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, a careful thinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but it would take a level of stubbornness that





 Smart people in the dominant coalition have always been very good at playing clever language-mindfuckery games: speak in a way that reinforces the coalitional narrative when interpreted naively, but which also permits a sophisticated-but-contrived interpretation that can never be definitively proven false. God exists, where by God I mean the truth and beauty in the universe. Trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual simplicity ("Yes, you could use language that way, but that makes it more expensive to perform these-and-such useful real-world inferences") don't work on utilitarians who care less about conceptual simplicity than appeasing whichever utility-monster has made itself most politically salient.

If you can't win the argument (because the motte is genuinely a great motte) and therefore gain status by appealing to reality, and our minds are better at tracking status than reality, then eventually dissidents either accept the narrative or destroy themselves. (It's tempting to do the equivalent of flipping a table and screaming, "STOP GASLIGHTING ME, YOU SANCTIMONIOUS LYING BASTARDS", but that's not a winning move: depending on the details, you either get ostracized on grounds of being an asshole, or carted off to psychiatric prison on grounds of being mentally ill.) 

If autogynephilic males (who are better at coalitional politics than actual-lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at coalitional politics than women-in-general, as evidenced by the patriarchy) manages to 

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This could be a solid, short post---

Utilitarianism doesn't work (for humans); you might think you can impartially do a back-of-the-envelope calculation that would be better than nothing, but in practice, the calculation has so many degrees of freedom that its result is mostly determined by "whatever political coalition has managed to make its agenda most salient to you". [coalitional politics]


("divine providence" and "subtle social punishment" make similar predictions, you might not know how to decide between them)

if you can mf everyone into beleiving that AGPs are really women, that actually does make it easier to transition

but maybe you could get the good result without mfing???