"I Tell Myself" 12 December drafting

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / i-tell-myself-notes.txt

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@@ -165,6 +165,7 @@ chapter and verse
 
 I will try to be less silly about "my thing is actually important for the world" claims, when what I really mean is that I'm just not a consequentialist about speech
 
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory
 "Outside the Laboratory" dumbness could be selection rather than causal
 
 I don't expect anyone to take a stand for a taboo topic that they don't care about
@@ -544,3 +545,17 @@ but ... that's my entire social circle
 If I can't ragequit the community, I have to do the analogue of going to grad school, while hating school—I don't have an exit this time
 
 (Picture me playing Hermione Granger in an adaptation of the Great Teacher's famous _Harry Potter_ fanfic: "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try
+> it's a lens through which you can view many-but-not-all personal dilemmas—"What standard am I holding myself to?  Is it high enough?"
+
+see, you're doing this "reasoning about sex differences" thing, and you're allowed to do the reasoning-about-sex-differences thing because you're female. (Same reason Nixon could go to China, and I'm allowed to express gender-identity skepticism.) But since everyone else is required to speak as if gender identity is real and sex differences aren't (because those are the rules for being a good person in Berkeley), we get an equilibrium where discrimination against transfems is a huge Issue
+I'm being incredibly cynical here and it feels awful, but I just ... can't take the things people say literally anymore; I tried, and it drove me crazy
+
+everything anyone says is "true" if the speaker is allowed to define their own category boundaries!
+
+if I'm allowed to have unflattering psychological theories about other people, then those people are also allowed to have unflattering psychological theories about me—not just as a matter of procedural fairness, but "symmetry" in the physics sense (the Rules are universal and don't depend on who "I" am)
+
+"If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything." —Daniel Dennett
+
+> "The Choice between Good and Bad," said the Lord of Dark in a slow, careful voice, as though explaining something to a child, "is not a matter of saying 'Good!'  It is about deciding which is which."