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
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_. 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/)—and not just out of a duty or passion for some philosophical ideal of Truth, but as a result of _understanding how intelligence works_, the _reduction_ of "thought" to _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.
+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, 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/)—and not just out of a duty towards some philosophical ideal of Truth, but as a result of _understanding how intelligence works_—the reduction of "thought" to _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.
-(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 petty Diary-like post, much less change their mind about anything because of it. I should explain for my own mental health. For closure. 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 that seems fake now.)
+
+(A _secondary_ reason for explaining, is that it could _possibly_ function as a useful warning to the next guy to end up in an analogous situation of trusting the branded systematically-correct-reasoning community to actually be interested in doing systematically correct reasoning, and incurring a lot of wasted effort and pain desperately trying to correct the situation. But I don't know how common that is.)
+
+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 should be able to correct a _trivial_ philosophy-of-language mistake 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 elsewhere, and it _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, but which turned out to be a gaudy delusion.
+
+So. Here it is. The Whole Dumb Story about my obsessive special interest and how I lost faith in the alleged systematically-correct-reasoning community. I don't know why you would want to read this, but I need to write it.
+
+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 somebody has to and no one else will)
+
+—my _favorite_—and basically only—masturbation fantasy has always been some variation on me getting magically transformed into a woman. I ... want to write more about the phenomenology of this, some time. I don't think the details are important here.
+
+So, there was that erotic thing, which I was pretty ashamed of (at least, at first), and _of course_ never told a single soul. (It would have been about three years since the fantasy started that I even worked up the bravery to tell my Diary about it, 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 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_, _z_) because I thought my handwriting look more feminine.
+
+Now, of course I had _heard of_ there being such a thing as transsexualism.
+
[...]
-(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" even while I'm ... ah, expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—I just _need to tell the story_ about why I've been crazy all year—crazier than usual—so that I can stop grieving and _move on_ with my life.)
+(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" even while I'm ... ah, expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—I just _need to tell the story_ about why I've been crazy all year so that I can stop grieving and _move on_.)
[...]
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 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.
-
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
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff