+++ /dev/null
-Title: Minimal Viable Product
-Date: 2020-01-01
-Category: other
-Tags: meta, procrastination
-Status: draft
-
-> Piece by piece, putting it together
-> Bit by bit, only way to make a work of art
->
-> —"Putting It Together" by Stephen Sondheim
-
-[(Previously.)](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/)
-
-In his book _Breakdown of Will_, psychologist G. Ainslie convincingly argues that the phenomenon of _weakness of will_—people doing things that they'll later regret, or failing to do things that they'll later wish they had—can be ultimately traced to psychological processes being well-modeled as discounting future rewards _hyperbolically_: that is, in inverse proportion to how far off in the future they are (plus a constant, to prevent instantaneous rewards from blowing up on the division by zero; no one is _so_ impatient that getting what she wants _right now_ is _literally infinitely valuable_). This is in contrast to the _exponential_ discounting of conventional economic models, where future rewards are discounted in proportion to an exponential function of the additive inverse of how far off they are.
-
-The problem with hyperbolic discounting (which is not shared by exponential discounting) is that it's not invariant under translation in time: the question of whether you prefer a reward of _r_ at time _t_ or a reward of 2<em>r</em> at time (_t_ + _c_) shouldn't depend on _t_, because then versions of you at different times are in conflict with each other: the agent just before the smaller-sooner reward wants to grab it in her unthinking short-term greed, even _knowing_ that her future self will damn her for it (_her_ wiser, more cunning greed being fixed on the later-and-greater alternative).
-
-Consider the plight of a(n aspiring—an ostensible?) writer, who has been hoping (_planning_ would be too strong a word) to write a great Sequence of nuanced commentaries on weighty matters so dear to her heart that they, perhaps more than anything else, constitute _the theme_ that her life is _about_. And yet hour turns into day turns into week turns into month turns into year (perhaps _only_ a year _so far_), and but a slow tickle of content emerges from her RSS feed—and even that tends to be meandering observations and silly word games that manage to avoid the serious (earnest, lucid, heartbreaking) analysis that are to constitute the fruition of the theme.
-
-Our heroine is trapped in an intertemporal conflict. Her overself distributed through time needs to _work_, to _write_ in order to be completed, but the creature-self of any individual timeslice shrinks away from the (small, but _very close_ (thanks goodness for that additive constant!)) sting of facing the truth, the exertion to name it, the responsibility of thinking honestly, the fear of being damned by her peers for thinking the wrong thing (and far worse, saying it in public, where someone could get hurt).
-
-One way to combat the irrationality of hyperbolic discounting is to bundle choices together, taking their shared logical context into account. The overself is summoned from the cooperation of the timesliced creature-selves. Any one creature-self might hope to benefit from the joy of some less dangerous diversion, leaving her sister-creatures to the toil of completing the overself—but all the creatures
-
-
-Mathematicians relate their Axiom of Choice—that there exists a way to select a single element from each of an infinite family of set—to a well-ordering principle—that every set can be said to have a _least_ element.
-
-[...]
-
-And be forgiven?
-
-POINTS TO HIT IN THE REMAINDER OF THIS POST—
- * explain bundling and defensible Schelling points
- * posit that there is no "true" utility above that of the processes negotiating
- * explain that the 80/20 of blooking _now_ meshes well with the reality of hyp
-
-eighty/twenty ... sixty-four/four ... fifty-one-and-two-tenths/twelve-and-four-fifths
-
-functional decision theory: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05060
Tags: epistemology
Status: draft
+> I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."
+>
+> "No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."
+>
+> —_Distress_ by Greg Egan
+
TODO
OUTLINE OF POINTS TO HIT—
>
> —"Let It Go", _Frozen_
+<!-- separate blockquotes -->
+
> Damn Julia Serano! Damn everyone who won't damn Julia Serano!! Damn everyone that won't put lights in her windows and sit up all night damning Julia Serano!!!
>
> —graffito observed circa 1795 (paraphrased)
* obviously, this is really bad
MAIN PURPOSE OF THIS POST: An apology (both senses, probably) for the "cathartic" tag on my blog.
+
+political spectra are dimensionality reductions
I understand that for people who have _already_ built up a self-image around the idea that they are literally women and always have been, the idea that their female gender identity arose out of a misinterpretation of misdirected male sexuality could be extremely disturbing.
-But people dealing with gender dysphoria who haven't already transitioned deserve accurate information! I'm happy to shut up about, um, rguavp VD qvssreraprf univat n fvmnoyr trargvp pbzcbarag, but this, _this_ is _personal_.
+But people dealing with gender dysphoria who haven't already transitioned deserve accurate information! [...] this, _this_ is _personal_.
If being a good person means submitting to social pressure aimed at getting me to _shut up and stop thinking_ about the true nature of the beautiful feeling at the center of my life for _twenty-five fucking years_ (!?), then I have _no interest_ in being a good person.
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Hamilton
-Date: 2020-01-01
-Category: other
-Tags: autogynephilia
-Status: draft
-
-Well, the word got around, they said, "This kid is insane, man"
-
-Autogynephilia
-It's name is autogynephilia
-And there's a woman who I haven't been
-But just you wait, just you wait
truth and anti-truth
-systems aren't real: https://meaningness.com/metablog/post-apocalyptic-health-care
\ No newline at end of file
+systems aren't real: https://meaningness.com/metablog/post-apocalyptic-health-care
+
+Bayesomasochism
+
+notebooks that I don't have anymore
+
+http://lesswrong.com/lw/km6/why_the_tails_come_apart/
+
+an irony: in my psychosis, I was scared that the world was far less legible than I had imagined, but that wasn't why my ordeal's and "Roberta"'s were so traumatic at all: the psych ward is very much governed by legible rules, rules that I had no control over
+
+notes from Messenger—
+
+and then the second post to explain all the entertaining delusions I had at Onward, and Volterra, and the night I spent at the Vagabond Inn, and getting tripsat in the hotel ... and possibly (I don't know if this warrants a Part III) mention things that happened in Portland in Sophia (which also involved another night of no sleep, and Sophia tripsitting me the entire next day, with a nap before my flight in the evening)
+
+Part II is harder, because, in addition to having to relive painful memories, some of those memories are things that I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to talk about on the internet, even with my recent monomanical obsession with opposing secrecy ... I think I'll eventually mostly do the right thing, but it's hard
+
+but as long as Part II would be published later anyway, that provides a slot to finish and publish (in between Parts I and II) another almost-done-except-for-reliving-painful-memories draft, which is a prerequisite for understanding my Portland sleeplessness—explaining the "game theory says I can't afford to give in to people who say my writing hurts them, because that creates an incentive to be hurt" thing
+
+oh, I'm also planning on self-doxxing at the beginning of Part II https://github.com/zackmdavis/Ultimately_Untrue_Thought/blob/b63295d1/content/drafts/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-ii-friendship-survived.md
+
+off-topic: at the bagel place I went to after the gym, there was a toddler behind the counter, enclosed in a kiddie-fence, and there was an iPad mounted on the fridge playing one of those awful toddler shows ("Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns!" it chanted), and I thought that this was emblematic of the tragedy where the rules that are written down are different from the rules that are actually enforced or sane or enforceable, which has disastrous effects on meaning in language (I would be much less angry about February if they had just said, "We're physically detaining you because we don't trust you not to do anything crazy; we don't expect you to regard this as 'care'")
+there's no way the health code lets you keep your toddler behind the counter, but I don't mind, and I presumably know more about it than the health inspectors do i.e., that it's happening; at the coffee kiosk in the supermarket where I used to work, we would change practices when we knew the inspector would come, and I would have expected the inspectors to know this: everyone is lying to each other ... the thing Part II is about (so maybe this isn't off-topic) is what it feels like for this sense to be tuned up to 11
+taking things that people I respected had said, interpreting them far more literally than they were intended, and inferring what lies everyone would have to be telling, for the world to really be like that, and for no one to have told me
+(this is especially bad when one of the trusted authorities [...] is known to speak in metaphors and use the word "literally" non-literally)
+
+[] had once told me that we might be living in the ruins of a dying civilization, and she meant that as a metaphor for some big-picture Great Stagnation thesis about how competence in most fields has been going down rather than up since 1973
+and I took it literally, thinking that maybe things were much more broken than I had previously dared imagine
+
+that night while I was at Onward, someone ordered phone takeout, and I had a couple french fries, which were cold, and I thought that maybe that was because you had gotten the food from dumpster-diving, but didn't tell me to spare yourself the embarrassment, to protect me and Andromeda from the knowledge of the harsh conditions of our world
+
+or that the delivery driver was late because the economy didn't work in general
+like, you think that people have service-sector jobs, but maybe it's also extremely common for people to just put on stolen service-sector uniforms and pretend to be Uber drives or FedEx men or whatever so that they can steal stuff to protect their families
+and for the most part, no one notices this mismatches between the written reality (of addresses and money and laws) and the physical primate reality (of people being animals that manipulate each other by making noises), because most people can't actually read; they're just faking it; rare smart people pick it up from books, but most people are just automata
+I started testing the hypotheses by, e.g., running off to get coffee even though (you claim) I had promised at Voltrra not to, to go to Wells Fargo and complain about the "KAISER" charge on my bill, and trying to use evopsych games on everyone I met
+which sometimes had less-than-reassuring results; when I asked a hotel clerk his name, and then I said that my name is Zack Davis, what's your last name? He said that he doesn't have a last name
+I think Sarah pointed out that the true meaning of "I don't have a last name" was "I'm a service-sector employee and I'm afraid you'll write me up"
+but I was like, either HE'S LYING STOP LYING WHY IS EVERYONE LYING TO ME; or, maybe he really doesn't have a last name; maybe he's an illegal immigrant from a community in Mexico where they really don't give people last names---which wouldn't fly for getting a legal job in the USA (where you need an SSN and the Social Security Administration assumes they have last names), but maybe he just puts on a suit and plays the part of a hotel clerk without anyone's permission, or other employees who have an in with the boss have faked the paperwork for him
+maybe the real hotel manager is tied up in the back, screaming for her life
+(A lot of these delusions were pretty racist in a non-reflectively-endorsed way; I had been scared of the social consequences of it being known that I believe in enpvny VD qvssreraprf (I already got a lot of pushback for AGP, and I have intimate personal credibility on that one, and thus the most free-speech latitude you could imagine except for people like Sophia or Anne Lawrence who have actually transitioned)
+
+and thinking about being animals that protect their family, their people
+++ /dev/null
-Title: I'm Smart Enough to Save this in My Drafts Folder Rather Than Facebook
-Date: 2020-01-01
-Category: other
-Tags: cathartic
-Status: draft
-
-Like, I used to tack the word "aspiring" in front as my preferred means of indicating that we don't think we've already solved rationality. Nowadays, I just reach for the scare quotes.
-
-ME: While I agree that words can be used in many ways depending on context, I claim that sometimes it's useful to use this top-20 noun to refer strictly to the same thing it's always referred to for the past 200,000 years since language evolved, even if we have reasonably chosen to broaden the extension of that noun to also include other, relevantly similar things in most day-to-day contexts! Given that people are capable of inferring what is meant from the relevant context, this won't confuse anyone, and we can continue peacefully using language to describe reality. Then, we can use those descriptions of reality to formulate plans! Plans that will steer the universe into regions of configuration space that rank higher in our individual and collective preference orderings!
-
-"RATIONALISTS": But, but, using that top-20 noun to refer strictly to the same thing it's always referred to for the past 200,000 years could cause psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage! You should take that into account before you use that word in that way! After all, categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!
-
-ME: As an aspiring epistemic rationalist (epistemic rationality is the only kind of rationality; "instrumental rationality" is a phrase someone made up in order to make themselves feel better about lying), I have a GODDAMNED MORAL RESPONSIBILITY to ignore psychological harm to people who are SO GODDAMNED FRAGILE that they can't handle someone making reference to the concept of BIOLOGICAL SEX. (I refuse to use the phrase "assigned at birth", you pretentious bastards.) If we need to gerrymander our descriptions of fucking REALITY in order to avoid HURTING SOMEONE'S FEELINGS, there is NO GODDAMNED POINT in pretending to have a rationalist community anymore!
-
-I am a transhumanist. I want people to have the freedom to modify their bodies and social presentation and do all sorts of beautiful new things that have never been done before, and I want to participate in enforcing social norms that protect that freedom. But in order to design social norms that best protect everyone's interests,
----
-(An Infovist's Advisory)
-> I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."
->
-> "No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."
->
-> —_Distress_ by Greg Egan
-
(Simple Models Plus Noise Are Better ...)
> The study of psychology is a violation of my privacy.
>
Garrett: I mean, like, is it the only thing you think about or is it more like one of those barely talk about it, just how you were raised, opinion could change if you surrounded yourself with a cooler, more diverse group of friends type deals?
(it's interesting that there's one other (semi-) widely-recognized expansion of that initialism)
+
+the "husband and provider and guardian of a small AI" game looks fun, that I would be so good at it that the thought isn't worth dropping just because you deserve Bob and Alice doesn't want me and Carol doesn't want me and Edith quietly detests me and Georgia belongs to Dave and the owners of OKCupid have pissed themselves laughing about how much money I'm paying them for the privilege of knowing that _ and _ haven't read my poem
+
+"You women and your risk-aversion (compared to men) due to lower reproductive variance (than men) in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness" is what my analogue who is not forbidden from such thoughts would say
+
+I like her as a person but am very conscious of the extent to which I am currently on her good side due to luck and carefully deceptive handling
+
+(I don't even think I know what I use internally; my blog says "trans women" as two words so as not to pile insult onto injury) but my model, under whatever word, is "guys like me"
+
+like many bottom-80-percentile males, I'm ambiguous on the sign of the poly thing
+
+
+suffering is the chisel God uses to shape us into our true selves
+
+suffering is bad in general, but I've already used up my please-take-care-of-me-I'm-hurt quota for the year, which means I have to enthusiastically endorse any emotional pain that happens to me today
+
+everyone already knows to be cynical about cola commercials, but somehow people expect "Seek medical care if you're concerned" to be taken literally
+
+"We have so much in common!" I said. "Too much," she said.
+the cognitive dissonance that makes "all trans women" and "all closet crossdressers" the only stable equilibria for social circles of AGP males in a culture without a public concept of AGP
+https://transblog.grieve-smith.com/the-essential-conflict/
+
+at JCC camp, I remember saying that I wasn't the kind of guy who was interested in big breasts. "Well, then you're not a guy," I was told. But actually I just hadn't hit puberty yet
+
+Like, I used to tack the word "aspiring" in front as my preferred means of indicating that we don't think we've already solved rationality. Nowadays, I just reach for the scare quotes.
+
+While I agree that words can be used in many ways depending on context, I claim that sometimes it's useful to use this top-20 noun to refer strictly to the same thing it's always referred to for the past 200,000 years since language evolved, even if we have reasonably chosen to broaden the extension of that noun to also include other, relevantly similar things in most day-to-day contexts! Given that people are capable of inferring what is meant from the relevant context, this won't confuse anyone, and we can continue peacefully using language to describe reality. Then, we can use those descriptions of reality to formulate plans! Plans that will steer the universe into regions of configuration space that rank higher in our individual and collective preference orderings!
MAIN SEQUENCE (15)—
-There's a Land That I See; Or, The Spirit of Intervention
Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes; Or, ...
The View From Nowhere
Q Time Travel Isn't Real; Or, Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman
-_ ✓ Laser 2
-S _ There's a Land That I See; Or, The Spirit of Intervention
S _ Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes
-_ ✓ Interlude XII (four lights)
-
+_ ✓ Interlude (four lights)
_ _ Product Review: FaceApp
-S _ The View From Nowhere
_ _ Blame Me for Trying
-
-
-2018 Week 1
+S _ The View From Nowhere
S Time Travel Isn't Real; Or, Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman
Q As Well for a Sheep as a Lamb; Or, Charity, Objectivity, and ...
-_ Faster Than Science (Transgender Edition)
Q Memoirs of My Recent Madness, Part II: Friendship Survived
Q Book Review: Nevada
-
-2018 Week 2
Q An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History ...
_ Stereotypes, Models, and Cognition
Imperfect Trait Measurements Regress to the Mean
An Epistolary Story About Preference Falsification
-
-2018 Week 3
Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
_ The Neglect of Probability Fallacy; Or, You Do Not Have an Intersex Condition
Q The Gender Czar's Compromise
-
-2018 Week 4
Q Simple Models Plus Noise Are Better Than Pretending Not to Have a Model
Falsifiability and What We Expect Not to See
* Mary's Room
Laser 3
-
-2018 Week 5
Q The Hand I Was Dealt
Q Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer; Or, Could Self-Reports Really Be That Wrong??
-
-2018 Week 6
Q Reduce Gender Identities to Gender Goals
The Categories Were Made for Man in Order to Make Predictions
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff