* concern that people will be drawn to the beacon of the sequences, and end up in a shitty Bay Area cult
* mandatory obfuscation (Anne Vitale syndrome)
* if part of the resistacne to an honest cost/benefit analysis is
+* my vocbaulary is trained on this cult
* reasonable vs. unreasonable misunderstandings
(I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto" even while I'm expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—I just _need to tell the story_ about why I've been crazy all year so that I can stop grieving and _move on_.)
-"Don't Revere the Bearer of Good Info"
+"Don't Revere the Bearer of Good Info" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info
casuistry
+Schelling: "One must seek, in other words, a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."'— this was basically what I was hoping to do with "Where to Draw The Boundaries?"—I was hoping to get a victory on _just_ the philosophy-of-language part
+
Eliezer's NRx 2013 vs. 2019 takes
+
+In the English language as it is spoken today, third-person singular gender pronouns _do_ have truth conditions. If a stranger crossing your path is rude to you, you'll say, "What's _her_ problem?" or "What's _his_ problem?" depending on your perception of their secondary sex characteristics.
+
+(1) If _x_ is a noun, you can't define _x_ any way you want without negative side-effects on your cognition (for at least 37 different reasons).
+(2) _Woman_ is a noun.
+[From (1), (2), and _modus ponens_] Therefore, you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want without negative side-effects on your cognition.
+
+It's _unhealthy_ to spend this many hours stuck in a loop of, "We had an entire Sequence about this! You lying motherfuckers!"
+
+What are you looking at me like that for? [It's not a cult!](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness)
+
+At least, it [_wasn't_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) a cult.
+
+(A _secondary_ reason for explaining, is that it could _possibly_ function as a useful warning to the next guy to end up in an similar situation of trusting the branded systematically-correct-reasoning community to actually be interested in doing systematically correct reasoning, and incurring a lot of wasted effort and pain [making an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) to [try to](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth) correct the situation. But I don't know how common that is.)
+
+https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/
+https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/
+
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff