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._ 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.)
+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).
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]
+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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff