Tags: anecdotal, cosplay, Steven Universe
Status: draft
-_(Attention conservation notice: Diary-like navel-gazing today. If you're here for the insight porn, come back tomorrow. If you're here for Actual Philosophy, come back next week.)_
+_(Attention conservation notice: Diary-like navel-gazing today. If you're here for the insight porn, come back tomorrow. If you're here for the Actual Philosophy, come back next week.)_
> ROSE: [...] we can't both exist. I'm going to become half of you. And I need you to know that every moment you love being yourself, that's me, loving you, and loving _being_ you.
>
> —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 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.
(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.)
(probably tell the story with no external links, only this-blog links)
I'll be alright. Just not tonight. But someday.
+
+Avoiding politically-expensive topics is fine! Fabricating bad epistemology to support a politically-convenient position and then not retracting it after someone puts a lot of effort into explaining the problem is not OK.
+
+I guess this issue is that the mob thinks that arguments are soldiers and doesn't understand local validity, and if you're trying to appease the mob, you're not even allowed to do the local-validity "This is a bad argument, but the conclusion might be true for other reasons" thing?
+
+
+I think a non-stupid reason is that the way I talk has actually been trained really hard on this subculture for ten years: most of my emails during this whole campaign have contained multiple Sequences or Slate Star Codex links that I can just expect people to have read. I can spontaneously use the phrase "Absolute Denial Macro" in conversation and expect to be understood. That's a massive "home field advantage." If I just give up on "rationalists" being as sane as we were in 2009 (when we knew that men can't become women by means of saying so), and go out in the world to make intellectual friends elsewhere (by making friends with Quillette readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates), then I lose all that accumulated capital. The language I speak is mostly educated American English, but I rely on subculture dialect for a lot. My sister has a chemistry doctorate from MIT (so speaks the language of STEM intellectuals generally), and when I showed her "... To Make Predictions", she reported finding it somewhat hard to read, probably because I casually use phrases like "thus, an excellent motte", and expect to be understood without the reader taking 10 minutes to read the link. This essay, which was me writing from the heart in the words that came most naturally to me, could not be published in Quillette. The links and phraseology are just too context-bound.
+
+Berkeley "rationalists" are very good at free speech norms and deserve credit for that! But it still feels like a liberal church where you can say "I believe in evolution" without getting socially punished. Like, it's good that you can do that. But I had a sense that more is possible: a place where you can not just not-get-punished for being an evolutionist, but a place where you can say, "Wait! Given all this evidence for natural selection as the origin of design in the biological world, we don't need this 'God' hypothesis anymore. And now that we know that, we can work out whatever psychological needs we were trying to fulfil with this 'church' organization, and use that knowledge to design something that does an even better job at fulfilling those needs!" and have everyone just get it, at least on the meta level.
+
+I can accept a church community that disagrees on whether evolution is true. (Er, on the terms of this allegory.) I can accept a church community that disagrees on what the implications are conditional on the hypothesis that evolution is true. I cannot accept a church in which the canonical response to "Evolution is true! God isn't real!" is "Well, it depends on how you choose to draw the 'God' category boundary." I mean, I agree that words can be used in many ways, and that the answer to questions about God does depend on how the asker and answerer are choosing to draw the category boundary corresponding to the English language word 'God'. That observation can legitimately be part of the counterargument to "God isn't real!" But if the entire counterargument is just, "Well, it depends on how you define the word 'God', and a lot of people would be very sad if we defined 'God' in a way such that it turned out to not exist" ... unacceptable! Absolutely unacceptable! If this is the peak of publicly acceptable intellectual discourse in Berkeley, CA, and our AI alignment research group is based out of Berkeley (where they will inevitably be shaped by the local culture), and we can't even notice that there is a problem, then we're dead! We're just fucking dead! Right? Right?? I can't be the only one who sees this, am I? What is Toronto??????
+
+
I conflated "feminist" with the kind of woman I want
+https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/
Tags: cathartic, epistemic horror
Status: draft
-_(Epistemic status: highly speculative, but in an environment of sufficiently intense ambient information warfare, honest speculation honestly labeled as such is probably more reliable than most purported "facts.")_
-
> The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
>
> —["Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush"](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html) by Ron Suskind, _The New York Times Magazine_
What _does_ vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict are which facts you can _talk_ about—and thus, [in the long run](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/it-must-be-said/), which facts you can even _notice_. If you successfully mindfuck everyone into believing that AGPs are really women, then _they really are_.
-Once, in the hateful and bigoted days of our ancestors, people noticed whether babies were female or male, acculturated them into different social roles (childbearing and war being more relevant to their cultural systems then those of today's [barren](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/), [pacified](TODO: linky authoritarian submission) elites), and had [short, simple words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) for the resulting clusters in personspace: girls and boys, women and men.
+Once, in the hateful and bigoted days of our ancestors, people noticed whether babies were female or male, acculturated them into different social roles (childbearing and war being more relevant to their cultural systems then those of today's [barren](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/), [pacified](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23876) elites), and had [short, simple words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) for the resulting clusters in personspace: girls and boys, women and men.
+
+But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve _their_ reality at the joints, didn't distinguish between the fact of sex, and social sex _roles_—from _within_ a given Society, there was no reason to make that distinction. For a brief, beautiful moment in the West, second-wave feminism's push to make Society [more congenial to masculine-of-center women](http://www.ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861) provided a reason, giving us the sex/gender distinction.
-But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve _their_ reality at the joints, didn't distinguish between the fact of sex, and social sex _roles_—from _within_ a given Society, there was no reason to make that distinction. For a brief, beautiful moment in the West, 2nd-wave feminism's push to make Society [more congenial to masculine-of-center women](TODO: Eric Wulff link??) provided a reason, giving us the sex/gender split. That incentive lasted about forty years: after its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, and instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](TODO: linky transvestivism paper)), and the 5–15% (??) of [girls](TODO: ROGD linky) on the losing end of female intrasexual competition (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic).
+That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, so instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369)), and the ~5% (?) of [girls](https://www.parentsofrogdkids.com/) on the losing end of female intrasexual competition (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic).
+Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](TODO: "Cathedral" link)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: "sex", having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter.
-to collapse the sex/gender distinction pried apart at such painstaking cost by their feminist cousins two generations earlier—in the other direction,
-
-This is the first, initial stage of [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Breulliard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/). Medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West is a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](TODO: blatant lies) about one's sex).
+
+In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West is a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHrZRJR4igQ) about one's sex).
I have a recurring dream
https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web
-
https://status451.com/2018/07/01/the-importance-of-having-your-pain-be-legible/
policing: "we definitely expect better models of gender out of you": https://twitter.com/atax1a/status/1157066530028265473
+I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
+You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)—why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
+but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical reality—if human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobic—well, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
+which suggests a "signaling hazard" argument in favor of political correctness (!!)—we can't tolerate racism, or else Good people would have to incur more costs to signal antiracism (same structure as "we can't tolerate gays, or else normal guys have to incur more costs to signal not-gayness")
+
+older works (pre-second wave feminism?) would actually say "man" (or "woman"—see how anachronistic it feels to put the female option second and in parentheses?), presumably not because human nature has changed that much, but because of shifting cultural priorities about when sex is "relevant." (Modern speakers [similarly frown on](https://agentultra.com/blog/the-black-man-stopped-me/) mentioning race when it's not relevant.)
+
+My gender crusade becomes much less interesting insofar as it can be explained simply by me being born too early and not getting "kids these days." It's not that cultural change is necessarily bad; it's that I want culture to innovate in the direction of "achieving godlike understanding of objective reality and optimizing the hell out of it" rather than "playing mind games on each other to make it artificially harder to notice that we don't actually live in a Total Morphological Freedom tech regime."
+
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words : well, that explains the TWAW mantra
+First-Offender Models and the Unilateralist's Blessing
+The Parable of the Faithful Man and the Cowardly Priest
+
Game Theory of "Apartment Patty"
Virtue Signaling Is Costly and Honest
_ Tue: Social Strategy Notes, July 2019
Servants of the Egregore (write-up of egregore theory as told by "Wilhelm")
-Kolmogorov's Iron Triangle; Or, the Not-Being-a-Worthless-Coward Option (epigraph quote: Raleigh's "The Lie")—(include analogy: the fear that atheism would lead to immortality given that ppl don't have to fear Hell, wouldn't have seemed obviously absurd at the time)
+
+Kolmogorov's Iron Triangle; Or, the Not-Being-a-Worthless-Coward Option (epigraph quote: Raleigh's "The Lie")—(include analogy: the fear that atheism would lead to immortality given that ppl don't have to fear Hell, wouldn't have seemed obviously absurd at the time) — honesty, ability to think, and mainstream credibility. The Kolmogorov option sacrifices a lot of honesty in exchange for mainstream credibility. This might seem like a good trade until you consider that "honesty" and "ability to think" aren't independent (because people are bad at compartmentalization and we need to talk to each other to think together).
+
Research Question: Complicity
The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
Trying to Be Explicit
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff