+++ /dev/null
-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
-Status: draft
-
-> _And I tell myself to let the story end
-> And my heart will rest in someone else's hand
-> My 'why not me?' philosophy began
-> And I say
-> Ooh, how'm I gonna get over you?
-> 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 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 I think this has been a below-average year even by my standards. 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 people 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 lately 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/).
-
-[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 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.
-
-[briefly tell the story of my AGP and sex-differences denialism, seems causually realted; didn't expect to blog about it]
-
-[mention Santa Clara involvement]
-
-
-
-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
-
-
-
-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.
-
-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.
-
-[virtue of scholarship, so many fields of knowledge that are relevant]
-
-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