>
> —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.
+So, I _really_ wasn't doing so well for the five-month period between December and April.
Explaining this requires some context-setting.
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 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" 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.
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
-
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_.
+A.T. and R.B.'s Facebook comments
+
+emphasize that the categories-are-relative thing is an important grain of truth, but that I expect _us_ to see deeper into the Bayes-structure
+
+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
+
+bad-faith nitpicker—I would be annoyed if someone repeatedly begged me to correct a mistake I made in a blog post from five years ago or a Tweet from November
+
+Losing faith in guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons
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/
+"I ought to accept ... within the conceptual boundaries" is a betrayal of everything we stand for
+
+(I don't consider "if it'll save someone's life" to be a compelling consideration here, for the same reason that "What if Omega punishes all agents who don't choose the alphabetically first option?" doesn't seem like a compelling argument against timeless decision theory. Specifying punishments for agents that don't follow a particular ritual of cognition doesn't help us understand the laws that make intelligence work.)
+
+when _yet another_ (higher-profile, but more careful, this time only committing the error by Grecian implicature rather than overtly—if you're being careful to disclaim most obvious misinterpretations) people comitting the fallacy, I _flipped out_
+
+The sheer number of hours we invested in this operation is _nuts_: desperate all-out effort, arguing over email with two ppl who were higher-status than me and fighting an entire Discord server three times, $1000, three postcards
+
+what about _my_ mental health?
+
+Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women? We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really?
- we live in a world where reason doesn't work
+my friend thinks I'm naive to have expected such a community—she was recommending "What You Can't Say" in 2009—but in 2009, we did not expect that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue, which is new evidence about the wisdom of the original vision
-not gaslight me about the most important thing in my life?
+but if my expectations (about the community) were wrong, that's a problem with my model; reality doesn't have to care
-I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
+it's naive to think you can win against an egregore 1000 times bigger than you
+
+MASSIVE cognitive dissonance, "What? What???"
+
+the Church
+
+won't you be embarrassed to leave if we create utopia
+
+invent a fake epistemology lesson
+
+we live in a world where reason doesn't work
+
+_not_ gaslight me about the most important thing in my life?
+
+I don't think I'm setting my price for joining particularly high here?
if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter
-there has to be a way to _correct_ errors, and possibly even profit from correcting errors
+There could be similarly egregious errors that I'm not as sensitive too
+
+I don't think you can build an aligned superintelligence from a culture this crazy
+
+maybe S. was trying to talk about "legal fiction" categories, but I'm trying to talk about epistemology, and that's a probable reading when you say "categories"
+
+Hansonian mental illness that people should be less accomodating of
+
+there has to be a way to apply a finite amount of effort to _correct_ errors, and possibly even profit from correcting errors
+
+the frame in which I'm
outside view hobby-horse
free-speech norms
I'll be alright. Just not tonight.
+
+(probably tell the story with no external links, only this-blog links)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff