-Title: "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"
+Title: "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
Date: 2020-01-01
-Category: commentary
-Tags: personal
+Category: other
+Tags: 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 haven't been doing so well for the past five months.
+I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past nine months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but 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?
-Explaining this requires some context-setting.
+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 an _accurate_ account of _what I actually am_—I should expect nothing less.
-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 _absolute truthseeking_. 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/), to forge and refine a new mental martial art of _systematically correct reasoning_ that we were going to use to optimize ourselves and the world.
-(Oh, and there was also this part about how the uniquely best thing for non-math-geniuses to do with their lives was to earn lots of money and donate it to our founder's nonprofit dedicated to building a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence to take over the world in order to save our entire future light cone from the coming robot apocalypse. 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.
-And so when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley) in 2016, and met some people who gave me reason to reëvaluate
-I confess that I _may have overreacted somewhat_
-because people weren't converging (or even engaging) with me on the two-types/autogynephilia thing. Psychology is a genuinely difficult empirical science
-I would _never_ write someone off for disagreeing with me about a complicated empirical thing, because complicated empirical things are complicated enough that I have to take the Outside View seriously: no matter how "obvious" I think my view is, I might still be wrong for real in real life. So, while I was pretty upset for my own idiosyncratic personal reasons, it wasn't cause to _give up entirely on the dream of a rationality community_.
+This is _basic shit_. As we say locally, this is _basic Sequences shit_.
-https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html
-http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
-http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
-/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/
-/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/
- we live in a world where reason doesn't work
+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_
-if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter
+, 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.
-cognitive dissonance
-smart people clearly know
+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
-I'll be alright. Just not tonight.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff