>
> —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics)
-I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past nine months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but this has been a below-average year even by my standards. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
+I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past nine months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but I think this has been a below-average year even by my standards. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
-But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an incredibly boring and petty story about people getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_—I should expect nothing less.
+But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an incredibly boring and petty story about people getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with lately makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
+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 _systematically correct reasoning_. 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/).
+[TODO: find a better way to summarize the core minds-as-engines that construct maps that reflect the territory]
+(Oh, and there was also this part about how the entire future of humanity and the universe depended on our figuring out how to reflect human values in a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence. 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.
+[briefly tell the story of my AGP and sex-differences denialism, seems causually realted; didn't expect to blog about it]
+[mention Santa Clara involvement]
-This is _basic shit_. As we say locally, this is _basic Sequences shit_.
+So, I think this is a bad argument. But specifically, it's a bad argument for _completely general reasons that have nothing to do with gender_. And more specifically, it's a
-we did not realize that _whether I should cut my dick off_ would become a politicized issue.
-Now, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off! A lot of people seem to be doing it nowadays, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy with their decision! But in order to _decide_ whether it's a good idea, I need _accurate information_
-, so that I can cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's a good idea, and not cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's not a good idea.
+This is _basic shit_. As we say locally, this is _basic Sequences shit_.
-actively manufacture _fake rationality lessons_ that have been optimized to confuse me into cutting my dick off _independently_ of whether or not we live in a world
+we did not realize that _whether I should cut my dick off_ would become a politicized issue.
+
+Now, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off! A lot of people seem to be doing it nowadays, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy with their decision! But in order to _decide_ whether it's a good idea, I need _accurate information_. I need an _honest_ accounting of the costs and benefits of transition, so that I can cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's a good idea, and not cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's not a good idea.
+
+[virtue of scholarship, so many fields of knowledge that are relevant]
+actively manufacture _fake rationality lessons_ that have been optimized to confuse me into cutting my dick off _independently_ of whether or not we live in a world
* 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
+* slowly waking up from sex-differences denialim through LessWrong
* 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
+* Theory of jurisprudence, standing, rudeness; Outside View of bad-faith nitpickers
* 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)
+* conscious, deliberate dishonesty/cageiness is better than the egregore piloting your moves without you knowing
* 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)
+* 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
+* what did I expect, taking on an egregore so much bigger than me?
+* if I agree that people should be allowed to transition, why am I freaking out? Because I _actually care about getting the theory correct_
+
+* what I mean by "gaslighting"
+
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.
+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_.
+
+
+
+
+, 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.)
rebrand—or, failing that, disband—or, failing that, be destroyed.
+(As usual, no one cares about trans men.)
+
We're all about, like, science and rationality and stuff, right? And so if there's a theory that's been sitting in the psychology literature for twenty years, that looks _correct_ (or at least, ah, [less wrong](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TitleDrop) than the mainstream view), that's _directly_ relevant to a _lot_ of people around here, that seems like the sort of thing
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster
I _have_ to keep escalating, because I don't have a choice
-keep the rheotrical emphasis on "tale of personal heartbreak, plus careful analysis of the sociopolitical causes thereof" rather than "attacking my friends and heros"
+I'm trying to keep the rheotrical emphasis on "tale of personal heartbreak, plus careful analysis of the sociopolitical causes of said heartbreak" rather than "attacking my friends and heros"
+
+It shouldn't be a political demand; people should actually process my arguments because they're good arguments
+
+"Actually, we're Ashkenazi supremacists"
+
+James Watson 'aught-seven
+
+
+Arguing is not a punishment https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends/
+
+Brief group conversational silences are ostracism threats, but like, threats are great because you have the option of complying with them if you don't want a war.)
+
+
+
+I do, however, think there's a subtler failure mode than "heretics get shouted down", namely, "heretics have to put up with spurious isolated demands for rigor, logical rudeness, conversation-halters, &c., such that the community doesn't update or updates slower than it could have."
+
+This is, of course, a much harder problem to solve, because "Speaker gets shouted down" is easy for third parties to detect as a discourse-norm violation, whereas "Speaker's (polite!) interlocutors are engaging in motivated continuation" is a subtle judgment call that a lot of third-parties are going to get wrong. But if and to the extent that such a thing does happen in our community—and you shouldn't take my word for it—I think it's causally downstream of silencing going on elsewhere in the trash fire that is Society (which we're not isolated from).
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff