Title: "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: other
-Tags: personal, my robot cult
+Tags: categorization, personal, my robot cult
Status: draft
> _And I tell myself to let the story end
>
> —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics)
-I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past ten months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but this has probably been a below-average year even by my standards, with _many_ hours of lost sleep, occasional crying bouts, _many, many_ hours of obsessive ruminating-while-pacing instead of doing my dayjob, and too long with a Sara Barellies song on loop to numb the pain. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
+I haven't been doing so well for a lot of the last ... um, year. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but this has probably been a below-average year even by my standards, with hours of lost sleep, occasional crying bouts, _many, many_ hours of obsessive ruminating-while-pacing instead of doing my dayjob, and too long with a Sara Barellies song on loop to numb the pain. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an _incredibly boring and petty_ story about me getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
-So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Sure, anyone will _say_ that their beliefs are true, but you can tell most people aren't being very serious about it. _We_ were going to be serious: starting with the shared canon of knowledge of cognitive biases, reflectivity, and Bayesian probability theory bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/).
+So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Starting with the shared canon of knowledge of [cognitive biases](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jnZbHi873v9vcpGpZ/what-s-a-bias-again), [reflectivity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection), and [Bayesian probability theory](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/)—and [not just out of a duty towards some philosophical ideal of Truth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth), but as a result of _understanding how intelligence works_—[the reduction of "thought"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p7ftQ6acRkgo6hqHb/dreams-of-ai-design) to [_cognitive algorithms_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms). Intelligent systems that construct predictive models of the world around them—that have "true" "beliefs"—can _use_ those models to compute which actions will best achieve their goals.
-[TODO: find a better way to summarize the core minds-as-engines that construct maps that reflect the territory]
-
-(Oh, and there was also this part about how [the entire future of humanity and the universe depended on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile) our figuring out how to reflect human values in a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence. That part's complicated.)
+Oh, and there was also [this part about](https://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf) how [the entire future of humanity and the universe depended on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile) our figuring out how to reflect human values in a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence. That part's complicated.
I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
-[...]
+This does not seem remotely credible to me any more. I should explain. _Not_ because I expect anyone to actually read this melodramatic might-as-well-be-a-Diary-entry, much less change their mind about anything because of it. I should explain for my own mental health. _The pain won't go away until I write about it._ (And if you should prefer to model the pain as having been manufactured by the [elephant in my brain](http://elephantinthebrain.com/) as a game-theoretic precommitment to force conscious-me to write in the face of social incentives that would otherwise make silence feel safer, you should know that only real pain is a credible threat.) The sooner I manage to get the Whole Dumb Story _written down_, the sooner I can stop grieving and _move on with my life_. (However many decades that turns out to be. The part about superintelligence eventually destroying the world still seems right; it's just the part about there existing a systematically-correct-reasoning community poised to help save it that seems fake now.)
+
+I fear the explanation requires some personal backstory about me. I ... almost don't want to tell the backstory, because the thing I've been upset about all year is that I thought a systematically-correct-reasoning community worthy of the brand name should be able to correct a _trivial_ philosophy-of-language error which has nothing to do with me, and it was pretty frustrating when some people seemed to ignore the literal content of my careful very narrowly-scoped knockdown philosophy-of-language argument, and dismiss me with, "Oh, you're just upset about your personal thing (which doesn't matter)." So part of me is afraid that such a person reading the parts of this post that are about the ways in which I _am_, in fact, _really upset_ about my personal thing (which I _don't_ expect anyone else to care about), might take it as vindication that they were correct to be dismissive of my explicit philosophical arguments (which I _did_ expect others to take seriously).
+
+But I shouldn't let that worry control what I write in _this_ post, because _this_ post isn't about making arguments that might convince anyone of anything: I _already_ made my arguments, and it _mostly didn't work_. _This_ post is about telling the story about that, so that I can finish grieving for the systematically-correct-reasoning community that I _thought_ I had, and make peace with the world I _actually_ live in.
+
+So, some backstory about me. Ever since I was thirteen years old—
+
+(and I _really_ didn't expect to be blogging about this eighteen years later)
+
+(I _still_ don't want to be blogging about this, but it actually turns out to be relevant to the story about trying to correct a philosophy-of-language mistake)
+
+—my _favorite_—and basically only—masturbation fantasy has always been some variation on me getting magically transformed into a woman. I ... need to write more about the phenomenology of this, some time. I don't think the details are that important here? Maybe read the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman" TV Tropes page](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) and consider that the page wouldn't have so many entries if some male writers didn't have a reason to be _extremely interested_ in _that particular fantasy scenario_.
+
+So, there was that erotic thing, which I was pretty ashamed of at the time, and _of course_ knew that I must never tell a single soul about. (It would have been about three years since the fantasy started that I even worked up the bravery to tell my Diary about it, in the addendum to entry number 53 on 8 March 2005.)
+
+But within a couple years, I also developed this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, where I was also having a lot of non-sexual thoughts about being a girl. Just—little day-to-day thoughts. Like when I would write in my pocket notebook as my female analogue. Or when I would practice swirling the descenders on all the lowercase letters that had descenders [(_g_, _j_, _p_, _y_, _z_)](/images/handwritten_phrase_jazzy_puppy.jpg) because I thought my handwriting look more feminine. [TODO: another anecdote, clarify notebook]
+
+The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing doesn't _feel_ explicitly erotic.
-(I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto." This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—or the closest analogues to "friends" or "heroes" I've got. I just don't _know how_ to tell the true tale of personal heartbreak without expressing some degree of disappointment in some people's characters. It is written that ["almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken."](https://blog.jaibot.com/). And [the _first_ step](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-on-proposing-solutions) towards fixing that which is broken, is _describing the problem_.)
+[section: some sort of causal relationship between self-identity and erotic thing, but I assumed it was just my weird thing, not "trans", which I had heard of; never had any reason to formulate the hypothesis, "dysphoria"]
+[section: another thing about me: my psychological sex differences denialism]
+
+[section: Overcoming Bias rewrites my personality over the internet; gradually getting over sex differences denialism: my reactions to "Failed Utopia 4-2" and "Changing Emotions"]
+
+[section: moving to Berkeley, realized that my thing wasn't different; seemed like something that a systematically-correct-reasoning community would be interested in getting right (maybe the 30% of the ones with penises are actually women thing does fit here after all? (I was going to omit it)]
+
+[section: had a lot of private conversations with people, and they weren't converging with me]
+
+[section: flipped out on Facebook; those discussions ended up containing a lot of appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation halters, appeal to "Categories Were Made"]
[...]
-So, I think this is a bad argument. But specifically, it's a bad argument for _completely general reasons that have nothing to do with gender_. And more specifically, it's a bad argument for completely general reasons that have been explained in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail in _our own foundational texts_.
+So, I think this is a bad argument. But specifically, it's a bad argument for _completely general reasons that have nothing to do with gender_. And more specifically, completely general reasons that have been explained in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail in _our own foundational texts_.
In 2008, the Great Teacher had this really amazing series of posts explaining the hidden probability-theoretic structure of language and cognition. Essentially, explaining _natural language as an AI capability_. What your brain is doing when you [see a tiger and say, "Yikes! A tiger!"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dMCFk2n2ur8n62hqB/feel-the-meaning) is governed the [simple math](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnPEpu5eQWkbyAJCT/the-simple-math-of-everything) by which intelligent systems make observations, use those observations to assign category-membership, and use category-membership to make predictions about properties which have not yet been observed. _Words_, language, are an information-theoretically efficient _code_ for such systems to share cognitive content.
And these posts hammered home the point over and over and over and _over_ again—culminating in [the 37-part grand moral](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)—that word and category definitions are _not_ arbitrary, because there are optimality criteria that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology"—
-> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
+> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
-Similarly, the Popular Author himself has written extensively about [the noncentral fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world), which he called _the worst argument in the world_, so
+Similarly, the Popular Author himself has written extensively about [the noncentral fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world), which he called _the worst argument in the world_:
[...]
-You see the problem.
+You see the problem. If "You can't define a word any way you want" is a good philosophy lesson, it should be a good philosophy lesson _independently_ of the particular word in question and _independently_ of the current year. If we've _learned something new_ about the philosophy of language in the last ten years, that's _really interesting_ and I want to know what it is!
This is _basic shit_. As we say locally, this is _basic Sequences shit_.
-we did not realize that _whether I should cut my dick off_ would become a politicized issue.
+[...]
+
+[section: started a pseudonymous secret blog; one of the things I focused on was the philosophy-of-language thing, because that seemed _really_ nailed down: "...To Make Predictions", "Reply on Adult Human Females". And that was going OK ...]
+
+[section: hill of meaning in defense of validity, and I _flipped the fuck out_]
+
+[...]
+
+A friend tells me that I'm delusional to expect so much from "the community", that the original vision _never_ included tackling politically sensitive subjects. (I remember this friend recommending Paul Graham's ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) back in 'aught-nine, with the suggestion to take Graham's advice to figure out what you can't say, and then _don't say it_.)
-Now, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off! A lot of people seem to be doing it nowadays, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy with their decision! But in order to _decide_ whether it's a good idea, I need _accurate information_. I need an _honest_ accounting of the costs and benefits of transition, so that I can cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's a good idea, and not cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's not a good idea.
+Perhaps so. But back in 2009, we did not anticipate that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue.
-[virtue of scholarship, so many fields of knowledge that are relevant]
+To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off! A lot of people seem to be doing it nowadays, and a lot of them seem pretty happy. But in order to _decide_ whether to join them, I need _accurate information_. I need an _honest_ accounting of the costs and benefits of transition, so that I can cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's a good idea, and not cut my dick off in the possible worlds where it's not a good idea.
-actively manufacture _fake rationality lessons_ that have been optimized to confuse me into cutting my dick off _independently_ of whether or not we live in a world
+And if the community whose marketing literature says they're all about systematically correct reasoning, is not only not going to be helpful at producing accurate information, but is furthermore going _actively manufacture fake rationality lessons_ that have been optimized to _confuse me into cutting my dick off_ independently of the empirical facts that determine whether or not we live in one of the possible worlds where cutting my dick off is a good idea, then that community is _fraudulent_. It needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.
-The "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want" argument is bullshit. All the actually-smart people know that it's bullshit at _some_ level, perhaps semi-consciously buried under a lot of cognitive dissonance. But it's _socially load-bearing_ bullshit that _not only_ does almost no one have an incentive to correct—
+[section: the community is politically constrained]
-But no one has the incentive to correct the mistake in public.
+[section: "Against Lie Inflation" (and less violently https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSemJckYr29Gnxod2/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science ) made me scream in fury, because]
-"Some people don't have penises" ... can you be a little more specific?!
\ No newline at end of file
+[section: the success of "Heads I Win" made me feel better; interesting how re-shared de-emphasized the political aspect]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff