>
> —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.
-believed our own propoganda
+(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.)
-Blanchard ... categories
+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.
+
+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_.
+
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html
+
+
+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/
+
+
+ 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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-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
+
+outside view hobby-horse
+
+standards
cognitive dissonance
smart people clearly know
+free-speech norms
I'll be alright. Just not tonight.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff