my fluid reasoning wasn't actually that great

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / 2017 / memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md

diff --git a/content/2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md b/content/2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
index cc50c0c..5d8fae2 100644 (file)
--- a/content/2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
+++ b/content/2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ Tags: personal
 >
 > —_The Fountainhead_ by Ayn Rand
 
-So, right. I _thought_ I was done recovering from my delusional nervous breakdown and 17–20 February wrongful imprisonment (I continue to refuse to use the word _hospitalization_)—which I didn't even [get around to blogging](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) for a month—but then it turned out that I wasn't done. Or maybe I _was_ done, but then quickly ran into _another_ series of stressors which once again pushed me over the edge into sleep deprivation and impaired sanity (in the form of [damaged priors](http://lesswrong.com/lw/13b/dreams_with_damaged_priors/); I think my fluid reasoning was still pretty good throughout). _Now_ I think I'm back to normal ("normal").
+So, right. I _thought_ I was done recovering from my delusional nervous breakdown and 17–20 February wrongful imprisonment (I continue to refuse to use the word _hospitalization_)—which I didn't even [get around to blogging](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) for a month—but then it turned out that I wasn't done. Or maybe I _was_ done, but then quickly ran into _another_ series of stressors which once again pushed me over the edge into sleep deprivation and impaired sanity (in the form of [damaged priors](http://lesswrong.com/lw/13b/dreams_with_damaged_priors/); I think my fluid reasoning was still pretty good throughout—um, relatively speaking). _Now_ I think I'm back to normal ("normal").
 
 This kind of thing tends to happen to me every few years or so. (This "if it looks like [everyone is lying](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) about late-onset gender dysphoria in males, maybe [self- and other-reports and -perceptions are wrong in general](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)" breakdown was preceded by my December 2007 "school is actually bad" breakdown, my December 2010 "I feel guilty about not doing a very good job at my live-in internship for this cult [or whatever](http://lesswrong.com/lw/md/cultish_countercultishness/) that's [trying to prevent the coming robot apocalypse](http://intelligence.org/)" breakdown, and my February 2013 "school is actually still bad—no, really; also, I'm scared about how the [Tegmark IV multiverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis) contains unimaginably large amounts of suffering" breakdown.)
 
@@ -53,4 +53,4 @@ It would be difficult and tedious—not to mention somewhat emotionally painful
 
 Maybe people get kidnapped and thrown in prisons (mostly prisons-masquerading-as-hospitals if they're of my social class) _all the time_. Maybe they often _die_ in there. Maybe sometimes they escape, perhaps with the help of friends who are willing to pretend to be family members, the authorities being more likely to release someone into the care of family rather than mere friends. (And then no one talks about it, fearing stigma and loss of credibility.) Maybe sometimes the prison authorities mistake someone's identity and manage to successfully use social pressure to brainwash them into accepting that identity—the authorities reasoning that if the paperwork says the patient's name is, say, Michael Jones, that _must_ be his name, and he mustn't be released until he truly accepts this, even if the patient currently insists that his name is Mark Saotome-Westlake (the testimony of crazy people being assigned zero evidential weight, and the possibility of a paperwork mixup being assigned prior probability zero). Maybe people who talk about reincarnation and past lives are actually talking about things that really happened to them before a traumatic event after which they ended up in a new social environment that forcibly brainwashed them into adopting a new identity. (Stockholm syndrome has every reason to be _adaptive_; as a just-so story, imagine a surviving woman on the losing side of tribal warfare during the endless æons of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness doing better for her genes by starting a new life under the bondage of her captors rather than going down with a fight like her brothers.) _Maybe_—and stranger hypotheses than these still.
 
-To be continued.
+To be continued. **Update, 14 January 2018**: ... or maybe I didn't get around to writing up the rest and it's time to declare writer's bankruptcy on part II? It's not that interesting.