-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.
+I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past nine months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but I think this has been a below-average year even by my standards. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
-Explaining this requires some context-setting.
+But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an incredibly boring and petty story about people getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with lately makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
-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.
+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 _systematically correct reasoning_. 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/).
-(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.)
+[TODO: find a better way to summarize the core minds-as-engines that construct maps that reflect the territory]
-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
+(Oh, and there was also this part about how the entire future of humanity and the universe depended on our figuring out how to reflect human values in a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence. 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.
+[briefly tell the story of my AGP and sex-differences denialism, seems causually realted; didn't expect to blog about it]
-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/
+[mention Santa Clara involvement]
- we live in a world where reason doesn't work
-not gaslight me about the most important thing in my life?
+So, I think this is a bad argument. But specifically, it's a bad argument for _completely general reasons that have nothing to do with gender_. And more specifically, it's a
-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
+This is _basic shit_. As we say locally, this is _basic Sequences shit_.
-outside view hobby-horse
-standards
-cognitive dissonance
+we did not realize that _whether I should cut my dick off_ would become a politicized issue.
-smart people clearly know
+Now, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off! A lot of people seem to be doing it nowadays, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy with their decision! But in order to _decide_ whether it's a good idea, I need _accurate information_. I need an _honest_ accounting of the costs and benefits of transition, so that I can cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's a good idea, and not cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's not a good idea.
-free-speech norms
+[virtue of scholarship, so many fields of knowledge that are relevant]
-I'll be alright. Just not tonight.
+actively manufacture _fake rationality lessons_ that have been optimized to confuse me into cutting my dick off _independently_ of whether or not we live in a world
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff