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[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md

diff --git a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md
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--- a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md
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@@ -14,13 +14,24 @@ Status: draft
 >
 > —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics)
 
-So, I haven't been doing so well for the past four and a half months.
+I haven't been doing so well for the past five months.
 
-Explaining this will require some context.
+Explaining this requires some context-setting.
 
-I've spent basically my entire adult life
+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, 
+
+
+if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter
+
+
+guided by the beauty of our weapons
 
-believed our own propoganda
 
 Blanchard ... categories