From: Zack M. Davis Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:11:50 +0000 (-0700) Subject: "Listening Disorder": tweak failure graf, link liveness X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=c636b4f5e9789844830b8918dd230fc06b4ab45e;p=An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git "Listening Disorder": tweak failure graf, link liveness --- diff --git a/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md b/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md index 50ca1d4..c50d8b3 100644 --- a/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md +++ b/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md @@ -18,9 +18,9 @@ Crucially, however, I know that me avoiding my mail is my (temporary) reluctance Although I'm not any kind of superhuman stoic, I think I have developed a certain tolerance and even taste for criticism. The email-avoidance behavior only kicks in when I'm facing particularly heightened social risk when fighting with people whose opinions I have reason to care about. In contrast, being criticized by randos elsewhere on the internet is more amusing than anything else. It's flattering to be hated: it means that someone thinks you're important enough to be worth hating, rather than ignored by default (as almost everything must be in our information-rich, attention-poor world). -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 indispensable 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".) +The people I'm complaining about often point to [/r/SneerClub](https://www.reddit.com/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 indispensable 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 love 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://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/n44drl/sexual_dimorphism_in_yudkowskys_sequences_in/). (My submission got locked, but [someone else's got 36 karma](https://www.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 didn't license me to inflict it on others. +Once, before blocking me on Twitter (for retweeting [satire of Scott Alexander](http://archive.today/2026.01.12-071133/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. 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. @@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ So, in light of the analogy to my eating disorder, should I be more merciful to I'm tentatively inclined to continue being unmerciful. The issue is that I just don't think the analogy is that strong in the ways that matter. The analogy is useful for forcing me to confront uncomfortable information about how difficult it is to remediate a particular psychological weakness (aversions to information or foods, respectively). But the analogy doesn't have much to say about the costs of each aversion if left untreated. -I think information aversion is a major if not the primary obstacle to human rationality, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. When people fail to achieve the truth, it's less often because they're lacking information than that they're [avoiding their belief's real weak points](https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points). You can't get away avoiding just the information that bothers you, when the piece of information that bothers you are threats to your current beliefs (as contrasted to, _e.g._, unrealistic horror movies that you can not watch without confusing yourself about the world outside of the movies). +I think information aversion is a major if not the primary obstacle to human rationality, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. When people fail to achieve the truth, I think it's usually because they're [avoiding their beliefs' real weak points](https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points), rather than due to an insufficiently nurturing discourse environment. You can't get away avoiding just the information that bothers you, when the pieces of information that bothers you are threats to your current beliefs (as contrasted to, _e.g._, unrealistic horror movies that you can avoid watching without confusing yourself about the world outside of the movies). For my food aversion, contrary to popular belief, it actually just doesn't seem like a big deal health-wise, as far as I can tell. (And if it were, it would be only my own concern.) I think I _am_ getting away with just avoiding the food that bothers me. In a way, this is "luck": if the science had come out the other way, I would have to make some tough behavioral changes or face the consequences.