To be clear, I understand that attention is a precious and limited resource, now more than ever. One must ruthlessly filter and prune one's information evironment in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio, lest one drown in an ocean of slop. If someone is quick to drop out of conversations because they're busy and don't have time for whatever nonsense people are yammering about, then that person has my respect, and indeed, admiration. (Perhaps I should learn to one day have so much respect for my own time.)
-But the people I'm complaining about are obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're avoiding criticism, protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.)
+But the people I'm complaining about are obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.)
It's not that I'm some kind of superhuman stoic who has no empathy for why someone would want to hide from information. I have feelings, too. Sometimes I procrastinate checking my email or the comment section when a tough conversation has been happening and I'm worried that someone might have said something critical about me that I would find upsetting to read. I avoid it because I just don't want to deal with it now, when I could deal with it some hours or days later when I'm feeling up to it. (I always feel better after I eventually work up the bravery to check, but this fact is surprisingly hard to remember.)
The people I'm complaining about often point to /r/SneerClub (a group of "haters" of our local intellectual scene) as the epitome of "bad" speech that one shouldn't be so much as tempted to look at, but my main complaint about Sneer Club is that they're just not that smart and almost never come up with any really penetrating criticisms. In theory, one might have hoped that a dedicated anti-fan club might be an indispensible source of valuable criticism, as people who hate you are motivated to search hard for all the things you're doing wrong that your friends like you too much to tell you about or even notice. Unfortunately, in practice, they just go for the cheap dunks. Thus, /r/SneerClub mostly ends up being boring to me, although the novelty of having dedicated haters is worth enough passing interest that I did make sure to [submit one of my particularly sneerable-seeming pieces there](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/n44drl/sexual_dimorphism_in_yudkowskys_sequences_in/). (My submission got locked, but [someone else's got 36 karma](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nt37j1/the_rationalist_subcultures_resident_blanchardian/) before the mods decided to delist it because "it feels for once like an actual bullying thing to post".)
-Once, before blocking me on Twitter (for retweeting [satire of Scott Alexander](https://x.com/0x49fa98/status/2010491654797426940) that they thought was too sneering), someone told me that my own masochistic taste wasn't a good reason to inflict it on others. But I think [my "masochism" is an essential rationality practice](/blog/2016/Sep/bayesomasochism/). It's not an idiosyncratic quirk of no consequence; it's an acquired taste that I deliberately cultivated for my epistemic health. By nature, people [instinctively cling to comforting beliefs and feel pain doubting them](https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points).
+Once, before blocking me on Twitter (for retweeting [satire of Scott Alexander](https://x.com/0x49fa98/status/2010491654797426940) that they thought was too sneering), someone told me that my own masochistic taste didn't license me to inflict it on others.
+But I think [my "masochism" is an essential rationality practice](/blog/2016/Sep/bayesomasochism/). It's not an idiosyncratic innate quirk of no consequence; it's an acquired taste that I deliberately cultivated for my epistemic health. By nature, people [instinctively cling to comforting beliefs and feel pain doubting them](https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points). In the absence of any reliable way to avoid clinging to beliefs in the first place, the only honest way to deal with the pain is to embrace it.
-It's not feasible
+Without "masochism", people [hide their heads in a bubble](/blog/2026/02/hazards-of-selection-effects-on-approved-information/) and never confront the less comfortable aspects of the world they're living in. The path I've chosen isn't always comfortable, but it has its own rewards—and I think it is substantially a choice, [not an immutable trait like height](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HaH9mTdKt8pcNAtYn/comment-on-banning-said-achmiz#Fortitude_Is_a_Rationalist_Skill). I think the people I'm complaining about could be more like me if they wanted to, and the fact that they don't want to disqualifies them from being serious intellectuals. At least along this dimension, they are beneath me.
-Embracing the pain turns out to be more feasible than willing it away.
+----
-Without "masochism",
+But part of the practice of not being afraid of information is actively seeking out counterarguments against my own comfortable beliefs. "My rivals in my local intellectual scene are beneath me" is exactly the kind of ego-gratifying belief that people tend to cling to contrary to evidence. I should search especially hard for potential reasons I've got it all wrong, even if my stated reasons for my belief (that rational agents shouldn't pay to avoid information) seem axiomatic.
+When I do the search, I hit on one analogy that keeps haunting me. So, I'm kind of a picky eater. It's not _that_ bad (and it's not as bad as when I was a child), but most vegetables just don't parse as food to me. (Onions and potatoes are not relevantly vegetables.) I can tolerate peas and carrots in the context of a soup or a fried-rice dish, but I wouldn't actually just eat a carrot. Salad just seems like an Absolute No—not just, I'd prefer to eat it later (as I sometimes prefer to check my email later), but rather that it's just Not Food. This has occasionally caused awkwardness in social eating situations.
+The analogy is: just as I hold some people in absolute contempt for being so finicky about what information reaches their eyes (because I think the finickiness makes them less rational), maybe some people would hold me with the same absolute contempt, that I'm so finicky about what food reaches my mouth (because they think the finickiness makes me less healthy). If I don't want picky eaters to be treated with contempt in social eating situations, maybe I shouldn't treat fragile intellectuals with contempt in public forums. If I want to indulge my eating disorder rather than trying to cure it, maybe I should let them indulge their listening disorder.
+The domains of information and food intake aren't that similar, so of course there are disanalogies that run in my favor. I could say that my health is no one's business but my own, but that falsehood in public discourse affects everyone. I could point out that I'm not _claiming_ to be some athlete with an optimally nourished body (where a mediocre diet could call the claim into question), whereas the people I feel contempt for are claiming to be intellectuals.
-I think the people I'm complaining about could be more like me if they wanted to, and the fact that they don't want to disqualifies them from being serious intellectuals. At least along this dimension, they are beneath me.
+The strength of the analogy is that it forces me to attend to the weight of an involuntary, emotional Absolute No.
-----
[TODO—
-But part of being not afraid of information and not trying to suck off my own ego is, looking for evidence against my own position, looking for ways in which my enemies might be sympathetic rather than enjoying the rush of demonizing them.
-
-And there's one analogy that keeps haunting me. So, I'm kind of a picky eater. It's not _that_ bad (and it's not as bad as when I was a child), but it's not great, that most vegetables don't parse as food to me. (Onions and potatoes are not relevantly vegetables.) I can tolerate peas and carrots in the context of a soup or a fried rice dish, but I wouldn't actually just eat a carrot. Salad just seems like a Absolute No, that is Not Food. (Not just, I'll eat it later, but I don't want to eat it.) And this has occasionally caused awkwardness in social eating situations.
-
-And somehow I got away with it, I won the childhood battle of wills? If that seems socially deviant, the secret is that there's only so much labor people are willing to do to force you. My father made me eat a carrot when I was ten, and I threw up on the spot. He didn't try again. Because, well—why would he? It's just less work to let me keep being childish. I suspect that this is more common than people admit? (link to mentions of vegetable aversion by Eigenrobot, Aella, Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowshowitz)
-
-The analogy is: maybe someone would look on me with the same absolute contempt, that I'm so finicky about what food reaches my mouth, and it's making me less healthy. The reason it's a productive analogy is: if I don't want to be treated with contempt in social eating situations, maybe I should also have more sympathy for these people. If I want to indulge my eating disorder rather than trying to cure it, maybe I should let them indulge their listening disorder.
-
-Am I a less complete human being because of this? There are people who won the childhood battle of wills and avoided learning math. I think they're missing something good in life.
-I think there are important disanalogies that work in my favor: people aren't depending on my peak condition health, whereas in some ways we are depending on people to not support retarded policies (that they should know better if they weren't in an information bubble). I'm not _claiming_ to be a peak athlete, whereas I am claiming to be an intellectual (and the people I feel contempt for are claiming to be intellectuals).
+not something to be brushed off with a platitude about hypothetical Bayesian reasoners.
But insofar as I'm saying, look, whatever health effects there are from this are quantitatively small, the people I feel contempt for could say the same thing. They might concede in the abstract that they're theoretically missing something by not being an info-omnivore, but maintain that they're not missing anything important by sticking to their curated bubble. (And maybe I think that's false on the merits for them and their purposes and true for me and my purposes, but the point of the analogy is to be sympathetic to them.)
-And the health benefits can be captured in other ways: if you get fiber from legumes and fruit, and vitamins from a pill, you don't necessarily need the vegetables for anything. In fact, the whole idea of eating vegetables might be one of those things where agriculture was anti-human (against the interests of individual humans who were adapted to hunt and gather meat and berries, but agriculture economically outcompeted them).
+And the health benefits can be captured in other ways: if you get fiber from legumes and fruit, and vitamins from a pill, you don't necessarily need the vegetables for anything.
Regarding whether they could be like me—well, I think I _could_ beat my eating disorder if I really wanted to! There are ways: figure out what dimensions the aversion is operating under, do repeated exposure therapy in increasing doses, get good at cooking. I know that tastes can be acquired. I actually drink decaf coffee, because I acquired a coffee taste that remained after I started being scared of caffiene. I could probably acquire a vegetable taste if I wanted to, if I made it a project. (When Katie microwaved kale, the smell actually did have a "food" register to it.) But I just—don't want to! I really don't want to; I don't want to spend time or effort on that particular project when I already have so many other projects in my life.
So, should I have mercy on people with listening disorders? Should I not take public status shots at them the way that I do? Um, actually I think the analogy is weak enough (accepting info is more fundamental to the rationality project than diet balance is to being healthy enough to participate in Society), that I'm still going to be pretty "mean" about it. But maybe I can be more clear-eyed about how much pain I'm dealing. I shouldn't flinch from that.
]
+
+[TODO scrap or footnote—
+
+And somehow I got away with it, I won the childhood battle of wills? If that seems socially deviant, the secret is that there's only so much labor people are willing to do to force you. My father made me eat a carrot when I was ten, and I threw up on the spot. He didn't try again. Because, well—why would he? It's just less work to let me keep being childish. I suspect that this is more common than people admit? (link to mentions of vegetable aversion by Eigenrobot, Aella, Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowshowitz)
+
+Am I a less complete human being because of this? There are people who won the childhood battle of wills and avoided learning math. I think they're missing something good in life.
+
+In fact, the whole idea of eating vegetables might be one of those things where agriculture was anti-human (against the interests of individual humans who were adapted to hunt and gather meat and berries, but agriculture economically outcompeted them).
+
+]
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