X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fi-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md;h=9dd66117ad88375a1deba4bd9bb2cb8d4c722f5e;hp=195726138535dc941ab8ce36efd7145d7e65b164;hb=4b9d266b1377975a202c855cd47acd2275f26567;hpb=7b91157789614666711f607af21fde5505e3dd81 diff --git a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md index 1957261..9dd6611 100644 --- a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md +++ b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end.md @@ -14,13 +14,24 @@ Status: draft > > —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics) -So, I haven't been doing so well for the past four and a half months. +I haven't been doing so well for the past five months. -Explaining this will require some context. +Explaining this requires some context-setting. -I've spent basically my entire adult life +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. + +(Oh, and there was also this part about how the uniquely best thing for non-math-geniuses to do with their lives was to earn lots of money and donate it to our founder's nonprofit dedicated to building a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence to take over the world in order to save our entire future light cone from the coming robot apocalypse. That part's complicated.) + +I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance. + +And so, when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley) in 2016, + + +if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter + + +guided by the beauty of our weapons -believed our own propoganda Blanchard ... categories