poke at stuff in the morning

How deadly is the lack of a commit yesterday? Can we hope that it was
an anomaly—that the Schelling–Ainslie timeless-decision-theoretic
model of procrastination is wrong?

diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
index 12af627..73b6123 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
+++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@ this is _really basic shit_
 The way this is supposed to work is that you just make your arguments and trust that good arguments will outcompete bad ones; emailing people begging for a clarification is kind of rude and I want to acknowledge the frame in which I'm the bad guy (or pitably mentally ill)—but I was taught that arguing with people when they're doing something wrong is actually doing them a _favor_—I was taught that it's virtuous to make an extraordinary effort
 
 bad-faith nitpicker—I would be annoyed if someone repeatedly begged me to correct a mistake I made in a blog post from five years ago or a Tweet from November
-I wouldn't hold anyone to standards I wouldn't myself—for whatever that's worth http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2018/07/object-vs-meta-golden-rule/
+I wouldn't hold anyone to standards I wouldn't myself—for whatever that's worth http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2018/07/object-vs-meta-golden-rule/ (not a coincidence that are positions aren't reversed)
 
 Losing faith in guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons
 
@@ -352,6 +352,8 @@ https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096
 
 _Why_ is it humorous? Because you don't like sports? (["Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn't yours.  A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-challenge))
 
+It's alarming when someone who shattered all your dreams with logic ten years ago, then turns around and tells you your dreams can be real by definition
+
 https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
 
 https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1065666629155995648 "The only leaders in the current ecosystem who express any kind of controversial opinion, ever, are organisms that specialize in subsisting on the resource flows produced by expressing that kind of controversial opinion."
@@ -362,11 +364,17 @@ A rationality mistake is made that's useful for supporting political agenda X, n
 
 if THAT is now too politically contentious to affirm in public, we're DEAD
 
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/
+
 http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/ "you yourself admit that your model won't assign literally all of its probability mass to the exact outcome?!"
 
 "category boundaries" were just a visual metaphor for talking about beliefs? There's a little naive Bayes model in my head with "blueness" and "eggness" observation nodes hooked up to a central "blegg" category-membership node, such that I can use observations to update my beliefs about category-membership, and use my beliefs about category-membership to predict observations. The set of things I'll classify as a blegg with probability greater than p is conveniently visualized as an area with a boundary in blueness–eggness space, but the beliefs are the important thing.
 
-http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/
+The "borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike the popular author](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/)—you actually know math.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models
+
+
 
 
 
@@ -536,3 +544,4 @@ Steve said it's funny that Ziz and I are ragequitting over opposite things, and
 ; I'm a weird guy; I would like to believe there could be a cis woman like me. Not obvious that I acutally know any. My sister is a natural experiment; hands vs. finger; "felt sense"]
 
 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers
+

diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md b/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md
index 452390b..b80e257 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md
+++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md
@@ -1,4 +1,8 @@
-(I normally eschew the use of boldface in prose, but as a strategic concession to people's lack of reading comprehension, I'll be bolding key sentences that I fear people would otherwise fail to process and misunderstand my position as a result.)
+(I typically eschew the use of boldface in prose, but as a strategic concession to people's lack of reading comprehension, I'll be bolding key sentences that I fear people would otherwise fail to process and misunderstand my position as a result.)
+
+---
+
+**Almost everything I do is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.** 
 
 ----
 
@@ -18,9 +22,9 @@ But from the standpoint of my secret erotic fantasy, this is actually a _great_
 
 In the comments, [I wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd)—
 
-> Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is No?
+> Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is _No_?
 
-To which I now realize the correct answer is: _Yes_, it's cheating! The map is not the territory! 
+To which I now realize the correct answer is: Yes, it's fucking cheating! The map is not the territory! You can't change the current _referent_ of "personal identity" with the semantic mind game of declaring that "personal identity" now refers to something else! How dumb do you think we are?! (But more on this later.)
 
 -----
 
@@ -36,13 +40,15 @@ Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the con
 
 The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about.
 
-I can be polite in most circumstances, as the price of keeping the peace in Society. But it is a price, a cost—and it's a _cognitive_ cost, the cost of _destroying information_ that would make people uncomfortable. Systematically correct reasoners needn't _mention_ the cost in most circumstances (that would not be polite), but we should at least be able to refrain from clever not-technically-lying sophistries engineered to _make it look like there's no cost_. 
+I can be polite in most circumstances, as the price of keeping the peace in Society. But it is a price, a cost—and it's a _cognitive_ cost, the cost of _destroying information_ that would make people uncomfortable. Systematically correct reasoners needn't _mention_ the cost in most circumstances (that would not be polite), but we should at least be able to refrain from indulging in clever not-technically-lying sophistry that tries to _make it look like there's no cost_. 
 
 -----
 
 If we _actually had_ the magical sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would even be _tempted_ to invent these category-gerrymandering mind games.
 
-If it cost $200K, I would just take out a bank loan and _do it_. 
+If it cost $200K, I would just take out a bank loan and _do it_.
+
+Not because I like my voice, but because 
 
 -----
 
@@ -165,3 +171,12 @@ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
 The Popular Author 
 
 "People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most."
+
+----
+
+[wireheading and war are the only two reasons to]
+
+-----
+
+[psychological unity of humankind and sex]
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind