+OUTLINE
+* I haven't been doing so well, and I need to tell the story for my own sanity
+* I spent my entire adult life in "rationality", and I actually believed
+* In 2016, it was a huge shock to realize that I could be trans, too (I thought AGP was a different thing), and making this less confusing for other people seemed in line with the rationality mission
+* It was pretty traumatizing when it turned out not to be!
+* But I notice people kept brining up this "Categories are arbitrary, therefore it's not wrong to insist that TWAW", and that's _definitely_ wrong; that, I knew I could win
+* But then Eliezer did it, too, and I _flipped the fuck out_, and set out on a mission to try to get this shit settled in public
+* Theory of jurisprudence, standing, rudeness
+* When email didn't work (details redacted), I thought, "Oh, it's probably because of the politics", so I wrote up the completely general version with examples about dolphins and job titles and Mullerian mimickry in snakes
+* And this is _still_ being perceived as too political, even though everyone else shot first?!?!
+* And I can't object without looking
+* What I think is going on. People want to say on the good size of the Blue Egregore, and that means they can't even defend the _basics_ if there's _any_ political context, or even the context of a _person_ with political cooties
+* I don't know what the optimal play is ("pretend that political constraints don't exist" might not actually work in the real world), but this is pretty bad for our collective sanity, and my mental health, and I wish we could at least try to deal with it on the meta level
+* I'm politically constrained, too: I don't talk about race differences even though I believe them (link to apophasis/hypocritical humor)
+* social incentive gradients towards truth, forged by status
+* not sure what the path forward is, my quest for Truth continues onwards (but I'm going to try to unwind the cult-speak)
+
+
+
+
+person paper on purity
+
+Sara Bareilles song
+
I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past eight months or so. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it feels too much like attacking my friends? Maybe I'm not sure how much I can say without leaking too much information from private conversations? But I need to write _something_—not to attack anyone or spill anyone's secrets, but just to _tell the truth_ about why I've been wasting stretches of days in _constant emotional pain_ all year. For my own healing, for my own sanity.
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.
+(["_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake_. Perhaps, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening_."](http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good))
+
+
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff