memoir: yank out a new pt. 4!!
Previously, I was imagining a three part structure, with the middle
part being substantially bigger: "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea" (20K
words), "Hill of Validity" (40K words), "Agreeing With Stalin" (20K
words).
The reason for keeping the middle part so large was because I thought
the period from November 2018 (the Twitter thread that started the
civil war) to September 2020 (the end of the Category War) was a unit
that should be kept together.
But when I started looking for the median of the piece by wordcount,
it turns out it was actually after the discussion of "... Boundaries?"
That actually is a good cutoff point!
That is, previously I was thinking the structure was "2017 AGP
freakout", "Category War", "political epilogue"—and I wasn't happy
with how that put the December 2020 psychiatric disaster at the top of
the political epilogue. (If it didn't belong in the story of the
Category War ending September 2020, it chronologically fit in at the
beginning of the next post.)
But if Nov. 2018–Apr. 2019 is its own part, then the next part becomes
the Whole Dumb Story of my alliance with the Vassarites, and it is
natural for that to end with the psychiatric disaster of December
2020! I also get to use an awesome partial quote from Michael as a
title (which just occured to me now while trying to think of a title).
A 4·20K tetrology is better for readers than a middle-lop-sided
20K/40K/20K trilogy.
There are also seem to be psychological/motivational benefits: this
way, I'm actually done with pt. 3! (No TODO blocks, and probably not
even that much editing.) If I finish what's now pt. 5 soon (seems
doable), then I "just" have to go back an fill in the history for pt.s
2 and 4.
I also think it changes the focus, in a good way?! By framing pt. 4 as
the story of the Vassarites, I feel more like I'm telling a story,
rather than writing a hate letter about Yudkowsky. I think this is
good for me.