> And I say
> Ooh, how'm I gonna get over you?
> I'll be alright, just not tonight
-> But someday
-> Hey, ooh I wish you'd want me to stay
+> But someday, hey, ooh I wish you'd want me to stay
> I'll be alright, just not tonight
> But someday—_
>
> —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics)
-I haven't been doing so well for a lot of the last ... um, thirteen months. 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) [Barellies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) [song](https://youtu.be/jZMQ0OKVO80?t=112) 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, thirteen months. 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hny1prRDE3I) [Sara](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) [Barellies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) [song](https://youtu.be/jZMQ0OKVO80?t=112) 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_.)
[...]
-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_.)
+A friend—call her ["Erin Burr"](https://genius.com/7888863)—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 Erin 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_.)
-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.
+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.
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.
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_.
+I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here? That's a reference to a post by the Great Teacher about how people [(especially nonconformist nerds like us)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate) tend to impose far too many demands before being willing to contribute their efforts to a collective endeavor. That post [concludes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining)—
+> If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.
+I think I've _more than_ met this standard. I _tried_ personally fixing the issue no matter how much effort it took! Also, the issue _does_, in fact, arise from outright bad faith. (We had [an entire Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) about this! You lying motherfuckers!)
+
+That ended up being quite a lot of effort!—but at this point I've _exhausted every possible avenue of appeal_. Arguing [publicly on the object level](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) didn't work. Arguing [publicly on the meta level](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) didn't work. Arguing privately didn't work. There is _nothing left for me to do_ but lick my wounds, wait for my broken heart to heal, and hope that getting molecularly disassembled and turned into paperclips doesn't hurt too much.
[section: the community is politically constrained]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff