memoir: the easiest solution to ms. bloat: apologize?!

Is it horrifying for an author to point out "As a reader, you can skip
whatever you want"? (Isn't it the author's responsibility to not write
text that people will want to skip?)

Maybe it's not? Math books have an established convention for this!
(Putting a star next to the sections or exercises that someone might
want to skip on a first reading.)

Is it horrifying that this "patch" for a bloated ms. involves adding
more wordcount? That's more likely. We'll see if we can cut enough to
make up for it.

diff --git a/content/drafts/people-evolved-social-control-mechanisms-and-rocks.md b/content/drafts/people-evolved-social-control-mechanisms-and-rocks.md
index bca09a4..4258daf 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/people-evolved-social-control-mechanisms-and-rocks.md
+++ b/content/drafts/people-evolved-social-control-mechanisms-and-rocks.md
@@ -323,16 +323,32 @@ Records suggest that I may have gotten as much as an hour and a half of sleep th
 
 That night, I emailed Michael and Anna about sleep at 12:17 _a.m._ 15 February 2017 (Subject: "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS") and about philosophy and the nature and amount of suffering in the universe at 1:55 _a.m._ and 2:01 _a.m._ (Subjects: "I think I'm starting to understand a lot of the stuff you used to say that I didn't understand!" and "none of my goddamned business").
 
-I presumably eventually got some sleep that night. In the morning, I concluded my public Facebook meltdown with three final posts. "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!" said the first. Then: "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!" In the third post, I promised to leave Facebook for a week. (The complete Facebook meltdown had ended up comprising 31 posts between Saturday 11 February 2017 and Wednesday 15 February 2017.)
+I presumably eventually got some sleep that night. In the morning, I concluded my public Facebook meltdown with three final posts. "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!" [said the first](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154817202665199). [Then](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154817329655199): "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!" In [the third post](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154817359255199), I promised to leave Facebook for a week. The complete Facebook meltdown had ended up comprising 31 posts between Saturday 11 February 2017 and Wednesday 15 February 2017.
 
 ------
 
-In retrospect, I was not, entirely, feeling like a normal human. The world was starting to seem much more mysterious—and threatening—than it previously had. I told Sophia I wouldn't actually be able to make it to Portland that weekend (Subject: "I don't think I can make it to Portland/Wizardworld after all, sorry (eom)"). I presumably told my work I wouldn't be in at all anymore this week.
+In retrospect, I was not, entirely, feeling like a normal human.
 
-I want to be fair to my past self. In retrospect, it's clear that I was having a paranoid nervous breakdown due to stress and sleep deprivation. Looking back at a lot of the things I was thinking at the time, I no longer think those thoughts were correct. Actually, they were pretty crazy. You might hope that people who are going crazy for largely "biological" reasons (like stress and sleep deprivation) would notice this, and correct for it by trusting their own thoughts less, deferring more to ordinary social reality when it disagreed with their own altered perceptions.
+Specifically, this is the part where I started to go crazy—when the internet-argument-induced hypomania (which was still basically in touch with reality) went over the edge into stress- and sleep-deprivation–induced mania (which basically wasn't).
+
+This presents some difficulties for me as an author, about what and how much I should write.
+
+Partially, I'm just not sure how interesting or relevant it is. The reason I've sunk so much time and wordcount into writing down this Whole Dumb Story is because I think it's actually of some public interest, despite the fact that I'm not an otherwise notable person whose autobiography people would want to read: I think my Story embeds some worthwhile insights—about the etiology of gender dysphoria in males and the hidden Bayesian structure of language and cognition, of course, but especially about how the "rationalist" community in general and Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular are less epistemically trustworthy then they would have you believe—without which, the navel-gazing effrontery of having wasted [more than a year](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) forcing out a six-figure-wordcount Diary entry would seem monstrously self-indulgent.
+
+No one enjoys hearing about someone else's dreams—or more importantly, learns anything from them. So if sleep-deprivation psychosis is a lot like dreaming while awake, there's a case that I should wrap up this post as quickly as possible ("And then I went crazy, but then I got better, and then I went crazy again in April, but then I got better for real"), and pick up the Whole Dumb Story where it continues in the next post in November 2018.[^story-gap-accounting]
+
+[^story-gap-accounting]: Where it's not that _I_ didn't do anything between April 2017 and November 2018, but you don't care about the minutiæ of my life; you (maybe) care about the Story.
+
+Ultimately, however, the part where I went crazy twice is intrinsically part of the Story. As a writer, I can't just skip over it, although I'll try to stick to the highlights. (As a _reader_, you can skip whatever you want.)
+
+If nothing else, I have a duty to be fair to my psychotic past self, when no one else was. Without denying that I was crazy, one of the things I learned while being crazy, is that people are too quick (insanely quick) to automatically dismiss anyone who has been labeled as "crazy". Despite my altered state, I was still a _person_—by which I don't mean, "a person, as contrasted to an animal." I mean that _"sane" people are animals, too_.
+
+You might hope that people whose cognition is being degraded for largely "biological" reasons (like stress and sleep deprivation) would notice this, and correct for it by trusting their own thoughts less, deferring more to ordinary social reality when it disagreed with their own altered perceptions.
 
 But in a world where all the _sane_ people were insisting that men could be women by means of saying so, can you blame me for finding it hard to tell? If the paranoid hypotheses I was starting to generate didn't match ordinary social reality, how much reason did I really have to believe that ordinary social reality was actually in the right?
 
+------
+
 I don't want to say that I was having persecution _delusions_, exactly—just that persecution hypotheses were much more _salient_ than they usually were; I was a little bit fixated on the idea of scary men coming to kill me. Somehow, I developed the idea that an HSTS transsexual I had been corresponding with was actually AGP and in denial. I sent her an email trying to gently hint about it (Subject: "one last thing before I disappear for a while"), and then I felt scared—scared that she would she would track me down and take revenge? In a followup email, I disclaimed that I was kind of losing my mind right now, and disavowed the offensive hypothesis. ("But if you're sure, I believe you!") She replied, mentioning that she also questions people's self-reports of being HSTS. She said that her husband had a knack for spotting AGPs, and did not find them attractive, calling them "cross dressers on steroids." I said I was afraid that the husband wanted to kill me.
 
 "I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I messaged "Rebecca" late that night. Now that I no longer believed self-reports are true, I could see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're in the right. I had ostensibly known that was a thing, verbally, but now I was _seeing_ it.