-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
>
> —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics)
-I really wasn't doing so well for the five-month period between December and April.
-
-Explaining this requires some context-setting.
-
+I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past eight months or so. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it feels too much like attacking my friends? Maybe I'm not sure how much I can say without leaking too much information from private conversations? But I need to write _something_—not to attack anyone or spill anyone's secrets, but just to _tell the truth_ about why I've been wasting stretches of days in _constant emotional pain_ all year. For my own healing, for my own sanity.
+
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" in 2016, and encountered evidence that convinced me of the homosexual/autogynephilic two-types theory of MtF transgenderism that I had previously assumed was false (while being privately grateful that [there was a _word_ for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)) because everyone _said_ it was false, that seemed like information worth signal-boosting.
+And so when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley) in 2016, met a lot of trans women in real life for the first time, and did some more reading that convinced me of the at-least-approximate-correctness of the homosexual/autogynephilic two-types theory of MtF transgenderism that I had previously assumed was false (while being privately grateful that [there was a _word_ for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)) because everyone _said_ it was false
+
-We're all about, like, science and rationality and stuff, right? And so if there's a theory that's been sitting in the psychology literature for twenty years, that looks _correct_ (or at least, ah, less wrong than the mainstream view), that's _directly_ relevant to a _lot_ of people around here, that seems like the sort of thing
+
+We're all about, like, science and rationality and stuff, right? And so if there's a theory that's been sitting in the psychology literature for twenty years, that looks _correct_ (or at least, ah, [less wrong](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TitleDrop) than the mainstream view), that's _directly_ relevant to a _lot_ of people around here, that seems like the sort of thing
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster
I confess that I _may have [overreacted](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [somewhat](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)_ when people weren't converging (or [even engaging](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/)) 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_.
+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](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html): 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_.
A.T. and R.B.'s Facebook comments
this is _really basic shit_
-https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html
+
+
+
The way this is supposed to work is that you just make your arguments and trust that good arguments will outcompete bad ones; emailing people begging for a clarification is kind of rude and I want to acknowledge the frame in which I'm the bad guy (or pitably mentally ill)—but I was taught that arguing with people when they're doing something wrong is actually doing them a _favor_—I was taught that it's virtuous to make an extraordinary effort
maybe 50,000 years from now we'll all be galatic superminds and laugh about all this
(probably tell the story with no external links, only this-blog links)
+
+I'll be alright. Just not tonight. But someday.
+
+Avoiding politically-expensive topics is fine! Fabricating bad epistemology to support a politically-convenient position and then not retracting it after someone puts a lot of effort into explaining the problem is not OK.
+
+I guess this issue is that the mob thinks that arguments are soldiers and doesn't understand local validity, and if you're trying to appease the mob, you're not even allowed to do the local-validity "This is a bad argument, but the conclusion might be true for other reasons" thing?
+
+
+I think a non-stupid reason is that the way I talk has actually been trained really hard on this subculture for ten years: most of my emails during this whole campaign have contained multiple Sequences or Slate Star Codex links that I can just expect people to have read. I can spontaneously use the phrase "Absolute Denial Macro" in conversation and expect to be understood. That's a massive "home field advantage." If I just give up on "rationalists" being as sane as we were in 2009 (when we knew that men can't become women by means of saying so), and go out in the world to make intellectual friends elsewhere (by making friends with Quillette readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates), then I lose all that accumulated capital. The language I speak is mostly educated American English, but I rely on subculture dialect for a lot. My sister has a chemistry doctorate from MIT (so speaks the language of STEM intellectuals generally), and when I showed her "... To Make Predictions", she reported finding it somewhat hard to read, probably because I casually use phrases like "thus, an excellent motte", and expect to be understood without the reader taking 10 minutes to read the link. This essay, which was me writing from the heart in the words that came most naturally to me, could not be published in Quillette. The links and phraseology are just too context-bound.
+
+Berkeley "rationalists" are very good at free speech norms and deserve credit for that! But it still feels like a liberal church where you can say "I believe in evolution" without getting socially punished. Like, it's good that you can do that. But I had a sense that more is possible: a place where you can not just not-get-punished for being an evolutionist, but a place where you can say, "Wait! Given all this evidence for natural selection as the origin of design in the biological world, we don't need this 'God' hypothesis anymore. And now that we know that, we can work out whatever psychological needs we were trying to fulfil with this 'church' organization, and use that knowledge to design something that does an even better job at fulfilling those needs!" and have everyone just get it, at least on the meta level.
+
+I can accept a church community that disagrees on whether evolution is true. (Er, on the terms of this allegory.) I can accept a church community that disagrees on what the implications are conditional on the hypothesis that evolution is true. I cannot accept a church in which the canonical response to "Evolution is true! God isn't real!" is "Well, it depends on how you choose to draw the 'God' category boundary." I mean, I agree that words can be used in many ways, and that the answer to questions about God does depend on how the asker and answerer are choosing to draw the category boundary corresponding to the English language word 'God'. That observation can legitimately be part of the counterargument to "God isn't real!" But if the entire counterargument is just, "Well, it depends on how you define the word 'God', and a lot of people would be very sad if we defined 'God' in a way such that it turned out to not exist" ... unacceptable! Absolutely unacceptable! If this is the peak of publicly acceptable intellectual discourse in Berkeley, CA, and our AI alignment research group is based out of Berkeley (where they will inevitably be shaped by the local culture), and we can't even notice that there is a problem, then we're dead! We're just fucking dead! Right? Right?? I can't be the only one who sees this, am I? What is Toronto??????
+
+_everyone else shot first_, and I'm _correct on the merits_
+
+competence forcing conclusions: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html
+
+language as an AI capability
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions
+
+"the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other or from any other value. [...] There are many such shards of desire, all different values."
\ No newline at end of file
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff