Tags: personal, software industry
Status: draft
-> _There's a heart that must be free
-> To fly
-> That burns with the need to know
-> The reason why
-> Why must we all conceal
-> What we think, how we feel?
-> Must there be a secret me I'm forced to hide?_
->
-> —"Reflection", _Mulan_ (as performed by Christina Aguilera)
+_(Attention conservation notice: petulant navel-gazing is boring. [Please subscribe](/feeds/all.atom.xml) for actual content later, I double-dog promise!)_
February has been a pretty exciting month for me in terms of advancing in my chosen profession!
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+!!Con is doing way better than Rust on the diversity front; is that because they're doing somrething different, or because of talks vs. contribs
+-----
-!!Con is doing way better than Rust on the diversity front; is that because they're doing somrething different, or because of talks vs. contribs
+OUTLINE—
+
+ * Requiem for the Rationalists
+ * I've been involved in this subculture that's specifically about truthseeking for the past 10 years, and so in late 2016, early 2017 I kind of freaked-out, because the two-types thing seemed pretty obvious to me, and I thought that if we were going to be an epistemic community, we should get this one right, and if we can't, that's really confusing—there was actually a nervous breakdown and hopsitalization involved
+ * that may have bene slightly pre-mature; psychology is hard!
+ * lately I've been focusing on this philosophy-of-language thing, which seems _much_ more solid
+ * And ... I'm still not impressed.
+ * All the actually-smart people clearly _see_ the Bayes-structure I'm trying to point to, but they either find some excuse to dismiss it (often using the word "whatever"; I consider this blameworthy), or say that they don't want to touch the subject in public (which I don't find blameworthy if you do it explicitly)
+ * nothing is _really_ changing, but I need to stop attaching value to the rationalist brand name
+ * expecting "rationalist" social consensus to be reasonable creates a _huge_ amount of cognitive dissonance
+ * "If you speak overmuch of the way, you will not attain it."
+ * my open-source peeps are way worse
+ * martyrdom, strategy, pseudonyms
+ * I had fantasized about _suddenly_ stopping preference-falsifying on Twitter to be a Damore- or Lindsay-Shepard-like hero
+
+(The virtue of navel-gazing is that it takes less effort to just bare your soul, but this still feels like it takes enough effort to get right-enough that I might not even bother? We'll see if I summon up the energy to just bang it out in one sitting on a dedicated day: that's what "Untitled Metablogging" was, and it was a hit; and the anti-martyrdom thing is important)
+
+I fantasized about wearing makeup and a "he" sticker
+
+you don't even hanged for your actual crimes, just the flashiest thing that can be taken out of context; Moldbug _is_ pretty racist, but his worst parts are written in coded language ("a country X which contains two classes of people, which we’ll call A and B": https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/11/why-i-am-not-white-nationalist/) https://archive.is/9Ezk3
+
+bundling and marketing channels, negotiation for space; I can keep quiet in a particular venue, but "not in X space" becomes "shut up and die" if X encompasses all spaces
+
+psychological hazards of embracing the "evil" label
+
+people just like me who read different books in a different order
+
+"Everyone is entitled to her religion/belief" is a peace treaty
+
+tempted to escalate to misgendering just as a protest against mind control (even though I wouldn't be inclined to fight about pronouns if I could get people to agree about the theory), but that's not a winning move
+
+How strong is the hypothesized "if you ever gerrymander a category, then parsimony is ever after your enemy" effect?
+
+—the hypothesis that it's a big effect, is just a hypothesis; maybe compartmentalization is safe. If I think I'm doing rationality better than everyone else, then that should _show up_ in me making progress on other subjects!
+
+"categories are arbitrary" is _generalized anti-epistemology_ that wouldn't have even _occured_ to anyone if they weren't trying to protect a broken belief
+
+clickthrough rates are bad, which is a point against the bundling strategy of writing good non-gender-war content under the same pseudonym
+
+lack of a positive vision
+
+so tempting to endlessly relitigate every minor point of conversation, when I should just let it go
+
+the "rationalist" banner is a source of huge cognitive dissonance if the majority gets it wrong
+
+cis women also get surgery / "seems fake" / 13th century word meanings
+
+I can't be friends with people who are going to gaslight me this hard
+
+important to notice that the ideological repression narrative is one of microaggressions/exclusion: should be a source of empathy!
+
+reach for condescending rhetoric: "pretending to be stupid" is emotionally satisfying rhetoric that does point to a real problem, but it's not a precise formulation, and the meta-level "you're irrational" dicussion is already so fraught that it needs all the precision it can get (ridicule might help as a violent appeal to shared values, but you need a coalition for that)
+
+the relevance of AGP is to provide a non-intersex mechanism for why males might want to be female; it's not "autoerotic people can't be female", to which claim "cis women are AGP too" would be a counterexample
+
+my obsessive personality (being angry about school felt _just_ like this)
+
+B.'s advice about the unwarranted assumption of good faith
+
+summing over three conversations, don't want to get into details because don't want to relitigate object-level points addressed in prev. (and future) posts, and because I don't want to leak too much info about private conversations
+
+part of the reason I've been slow to finish my draft to Ozy is the sense that it doesn't really matter
+
+I didn't explain the Schelling point thing
+
+at first I was upset about two-types in 2016/17, but that may have been premature; but now a recent flurry of activity about the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition thing
+
+"Wilhelm" told me to give up, but I have a _massive_ homefield advantage that doesn't port; that's an incentive to stand my ground and fight a culture war, unpleasant as that is
+
+trans women who I love and admire and don't want to hurt—but who are a _different thing_ from actual women—_sufficiently_ different in a way that deserves either a separate noun, _or_ at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness ("women"/cis-women as the central thing, and "trans" as a wierd version); the "women, cis or trans; neither kind more central than the other" is not going to fly. Which isn't to say that "cis" is a bad word to have (I don't mind having words for "straight" or "heterosexual") (this could be its own post)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff