X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fi-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md;h=ecc2096e717453a264ed206e4b8c7e51d3809b61;hb=e34c84b97f51ba732ff2b72bdad312e61b93548c;hp=9dd66117ad88375a1deba4bd9bb2cb8d4c722f5e;hpb=4b9d266b1377975a202c855cd47acd2275f26567;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git diff --git a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md index 9dd6611..ecc2096 100644 --- a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md +++ b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ -Title: "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End" +Title: "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning Date: 2020-01-01 -Category: commentary -Tags: personal +Category: other +Tags: personal, my robot cult Status: draft > _And I tell myself to let the story end @@ -14,30 +14,36 @@ Status: draft > > —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics) -I haven't been doing so well for the past five months. +I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past nine months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but I think this has been a below-average year even by my standards. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends? -Explaining this requires some context-setting. +But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an incredibly boring and petty story about people getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with lately makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.) -So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _absolute truthseeking_. Sure, anyone will _say_ that their beliefs are true, but you can tell most people aren't being very serious about it. _We_ were going to be serious: starting with the shared canon of knowledge of cognitive biases, reflectivity, and Bayesian probability theory bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/), to forge and refine a new mental martial art of _systematically correct reasoning_ that we were going to use to optimize ourselves and the world. +So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Sure, anyone will _say_ that their beliefs are true, but you can tell most people aren't being very serious about it. _We_ were going to be serious: starting with the shared canon of knowledge of cognitive biases, reflectivity, and Bayesian probability theory bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/). -(Oh, and there was also this part about how the uniquely best thing for non-math-geniuses to do with their lives was to earn lots of money and donate it to our founder's nonprofit dedicated to building a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence to take over the world in order to save our entire future light cone from the coming robot apocalypse. That part's complicated.) +[TODO: find a better way to summarize the core minds-as-engines that construct maps that reflect the territory] + +(Oh, and there was also this part about how the entire future of humanity and the universe depended on our figuring out how to reflect human values in a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence. That part's complicated.) I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance. -And so, when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley) in 2016, +[briefly tell the story of my AGP and sex-differences denialism, seems causually realted; didn't expect to blog about it] + +[mention Santa Clara involvement] + + +So, I think this is a bad argument. But specifically, it's a bad argument for _completely general reasons that have nothing to do with gender_. And more specifically, it's a -if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter -guided by the beauty of our weapons +This is _basic shit_. As we say locally, this is _basic Sequences shit_. -Blanchard ... categories -cognitive dissonance +we did not realize that _whether I should cut my dick off_ would become a politicized issue. -smart people clearly know +Now, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off! A lot of people seem to be doing it nowadays, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy with their decision! But in order to _decide_ whether it's a good idea, I need _accurate information_. I need an _honest_ accounting of the costs and benefits of transition, so that I can cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's a good idea, and not cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's not a good idea. +[virtue of scholarship, so many fields of knowledge that are relevant] -I'll be alright. Just not tonight. +actively manufacture _fake rationality lessons_ that have been optimized to confuse me into cutting my dick off _independently_ of whether or not we live in a world