memoir: Valinor before and after COVID

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md

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@@ -222,7 +222,7 @@ I was _furious_ when "Against Lie Inflation" came out. (Furious at what I percei
 
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-While visiting Valinor on 7 August 2019, the older son (age 2¾ years) asked me, "Why are you a boy?"
+While visiting Valinor on 7 August 2019, Merlin Blume (age 2¾ years) asked me, "Why are you a boy?"
 
 After a long pause, I said, "Yes," as if I had misheard the question as "Are you a boy?" I think it was a motivated mishearing: it was only after I answered that I consciously realized that's not what the kid asked.
 
@@ -446,6 +446,16 @@ Secret posse member reassured me that finishing the memoir privately would be cl
 
 (It does not, actually, have a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.)
 
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+
+While visiting Valinor on 4 February 2020, I remember my nose dripping while I was holding Koios, the baby. Alicorn offered me a tissue. I asked if I shouldn't be holding the baby while my nose was dripping. She said it was fine. On the topic of possible sickness, I said that I hoped the novel coronavirus people were talking about didn't go pandemic.
+
+It did. The Berkeley rats took social distancing guidelines very seriously, so it would be a while before I could visit again.
+
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+
+[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/]
+
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 There's another extremely important part of the story that _would_ fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell.
@@ -486,12 +496,6 @@ Given that I spent so many hours on this little research/writing project in May
 
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-[TODO: pandemic starts]
-
-[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/]
-
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 On 1 June 2020, I received a Twitter DM from _New York Times_ reporter Cade Metz, who said he was "exploring a story about the intersection of the rationality community and Silicon Valley". I sent him an email saying that I would be happy to talk, but that I'd actually been pretty disappointed with the community lately: I was worried that the social pressures of trying to _be_ a "community" and protect the group's status (_e.g._, from _New York Times_ reporters who might portray us in an unflattering light??) incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of _systematically correct reasoning_ that made the community valuable in the first place.
 
 He never got back to me. Three weeks later, all existing _Slate Star Codex_ posts were taken down.