-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.
-
-Explaining this requires some context-setting.
-
-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_.
-
-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
-
-if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter
-
-
-cognitive dissonance
-
-smart people clearly know
-
-
-I'll be alright. Just not tonight.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff