The [Glowfic](https://www.glowfic.com/) collaborative-fiction community has [this worldbuilding trope of an author's "medianworld"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639)—a setting where the average person is _like you_ along important dimensions.
-(You might think that this is only an interesting thought experiment for people who are weird in our own world, but [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's _much_ more hypervolume in the _n_-space around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too.)
+(You might think that this is only an interesting thought experiment for people who are weird in our own world, but [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit-hypervolume probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's vastly _more_ hypervolume in the space around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too.)
What makes the exercise challenging is the craft of portraying the medianworld as a realistic world with a consilient history. It's _not_ a Society of duplicates of you, because the only simple, consistent history producing that outcome would be giving actual-you some sort of [science-fictional](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter_duplicate) [duplicator technology](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator/); actual-you and all your memories come from _our_ world.
-Rather, your medianworld is a real human Society that would spit out something very much like you at the center of the distribution: for everything that makes you weird _here_, half the population of your medianworld is even more so. The worldbuilding problem is: how would that _actually_ happen, given different initial conditions, but the same underlying laws of economics, sociology, psychology, _&c._? How would the macro-level features of Society shake out, were a Society to supervene on that population?
+Rather, your medianworld is a real human Society that would spit out something very much like you at the center of the distribution: for everything that makes you weird _here_, half the population of your medianworld is even more so. The worldbuilding problem is: how would that _actually_ happen, given different initial conditions, but the same underlying laws of economics, sociology, psychology, _&c._? (_Our_ world produced someone like you at least once, so it's reasonable to suppose that a world with the same laws but different parameters could do it much more often.) How would the macro-level features of Society shake out, were a Society to supervene on that population?
----
But making $9.40 an hour at the supermarket indefinitely (and paying a nominal rent to live with my mom) didn't seem like an acceptable destiny for someone of my social class. It was assumed that at some point, I would have to figure out how to get a grown-up job (although my colleagues who had been at the supermarket for 20 years probably wouldn't approve of me calling it that).
-Somehow, this seemed more of a daunting problem than learning linear algebra. To make a dumb story short (I tried [career college](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) briefly on the theory that they could _just_ teach me job-stuff without them fraudulently claiming credit for my education, then found that horrible and traumatizing for the same reasons as regular school and quit, then thought I could study for the same [certifications](https://www.comptia.org/certifications/which-certification) on my own, then took a differential equations class at community college just for fun and to prove that my math self-study measured up—and did poorly, leaving me devastated and feeling obligated to finish my degree after all in order to prove that I could), I eventually ended up back in college again, at community college, and then San Francisco State, my father not willing to pay for me to go back to the University in Santa Cruz again.
+Somehow, this seemed more of a daunting problem than learning linear algebra. To make a dumb story short (I tried [career college](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) briefly on the theory that they could _just_ teach me job-stuff without them fraudulently claiming credit for my education, then found that horrible and traumatizing for the same reasons as regular school and quit, then thought I could study for the same [certifications](https://www.comptia.org/certifications/which-certification) on my own, then took a differential equations class at community college just for fun and to prove that my math self-study measured up to standards—and did poorly, leaving me devastated and feeling obligated to finish my degree after all in order to prove that I could), I eventually ended up back in college again, at community college, and then San Francisco State, my father not willing to pay for me to go back to the University in Santa Cruz again.
-Especially now that I had a higher form of existence to contrast it with, going back to school was _awful_. I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the _subject matter_. I wanted it to be _normal_ for boasts of acheivement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained _deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality_", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test."
+Now that I had a higher form of existence to contrast it with, going back to school was _awful_. I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the _subject matter_. I wanted it to be _normal_ for boasts of acheivement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained _deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality_", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test."
(Where, sure, it makes sense to take a test occasionally in order to verify that one isn't self-deceiving about the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality, or in order to provide some amount of third-party-legible _evidence about_ the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality—but the test score itself isn't the _point_.)
We could imagine someone sympathetic to my plight in school deciding that my problem was a psychological condition called "student dysphoria"—discomfort with one's assigned social role of student. We could imagine a whole political movement to help sufferers of student dysphoria by _renaming_ everything: instead of a "student", I could be a "research associate", instead of taking "classes", I could attend "research seminars"—all while the _substance_ of my daily working conditions and social expectations remained the same.
-I don't think this would be helping me. When I was angry about being in school, it wasn't because of _the word_ "student"—it was because I wanted more autonomy and I wanted more respect for my intellectual initiative. Changing the words without granting me the autonomy and respect I craved wouldn't be solving my _actual_ problem. It would probably make things _worse_ by sabotaging the concepts and language I needed to _articulate_ what my problem was. My pain and suffering was no less _real_ for being "merely" game-theoretic (looking to the reactions of others), rather than some intrinsic organic condition to be accomodated.
+I don't think this would be helping me. When I was angry about being in school, it wasn't because of _the word_ "student"—it was because I wanted more autonomy and I wanted more respect for my intellectual initiative. Changing the words without granting me the autonomy and respect I craved wouldn't be solving my _actual_ problem. It would probably make things _worse_ by sabotaging the concepts and language I needed to _articulate_ what my problem was. My pain and suffering was no less _real_ for being ["merely" game-theoretic (looking to the reactions of others)](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), rather than some intrinsic organic condition to be accomodated.
-Likewise, being a "student" would have been fine in a world where students got more autonomy—a world where there was a collective understanding that courses are a supplement or pragmatically useful guidepost to one's studies, rather than course grades being _the whole thing_. I'm happy to learn from the masters: that's what textbooks _are_. I wasn't _delusional_ about doing particularly novel original research; I just wanted recognition for the real work I _was_ doing.
+Likewise, being a "student" would have been fine in a world where students got more autonomy—a world where there was a collective understanding that courses are a supplement or pragmatically useful guidepost to one's studies, rather than course grades being _the whole thing_. I'm happy to learn from the masters: that's what textbooks _are_. I wasn't _delusional_ about doing particularly novel original research; I just wanted recognition for the real intellectual work I _was_ doing under my own power.
-Asking whether "student dysphoria" is a real condition would be the wrong question. The pain of not being seen by Society the way you want to be seen is unquestionably real—and because it is real, it can only be sustainably abated by addressing its real causes.
+Asking whether student dysphoria is a real or fake condition would be the wrong question. The pain of not being seen by Society the way you want to be seen is unquestionably real—but _because_ it's real, it can only be sustainably abated by addressing its real causes.
In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology is _complicated_; every human is their own unique snowflake. But it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake" theory. In order to [compress our observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) of the world we see, we end up distilling our observations into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons: no one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".
-Concepts and theories are good to the extent that they can "pay for" their complexity by making more accurate predictions. How much complexity is worth how much accuracy? Arguably, it depends! General relativity has superceded Newtonian classical mechanics as the ultimate theory of how gravity works, but if you're not dealing with velocities approaching the speed of light, Newton still makes _very good_ predictions: it's pretty reasonable to still talk about Newtonian gravitation being true if it makes the math easier on you, and the more complicated math doesn't give appreciably different answers to the problems you're interested in.
+Concepts and theories are good to the extent that they can "pay for" their complexity by making more accurate predictions. How much complexity is worth how much accuracy? Arguably, it depends! General relativity has superceded Newtonian classical mechanics as the ultimate theory of how gravity works, but if you're not dealing with velocities approaching the speed of light, Newton still makes _very good_ predictions: it's pretty reasonable to still talk about Newtonian gravitation being "true" if it makes the math easier on you, and the more complicated math doesn't give appreciably different answers to the problems you're interested in.
Moreover, if relativity hasn't been invented yet, it makes sense to stick with Newtonian gravity as the _best_ theory you have _so far_, even if there are a few anomalies [like the precession of Mercury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury) that it struggles to explain.
OK, "paperclips" is a legitimate example of categories being subjective/value-dependent
http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
+
+A "rationalist" community worthy of the name would be able to do the thing Steve Sailer does, while retaining our humanistic ethics https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-is-elon-musks-plan-for-reversing-the-tyranny-of-the-ex-men/
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-twitter-coup
+> a battle is won if the result of the battle is to make the next battle easier. The same is true of a political confrontation.
+[...]
+> I noticed that the streets had been largely cleared of homeless encampments (which have been pushed into the nearby forests). Most people take this as a conservative victory. It is actually a defeat.
+> It is a victory in the ordinary sense of the term—an action which gets what the actors want. It is a tactical victory—but a strategic defeat. At a party the other day, I spoke to one of the people who orchestrated this “victory,” and explained why I saw it this way.
+[...]
+> for a rebel, all true victories are total. He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave
+in this sense, I keep winning battles, but I've basically conceded the war
https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1511772161156997131
+https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10716417/Two-women-female-New-Jersey-prison-PREGNANT-trans-inmates.html
+
+https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/bite-model-behavior-control
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/77950/i-really-really-hate-the-lactation-thing
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff