From 3f570ae73d23df2c4f0f5d5a52a272145930255f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2019 23:22:20 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] I am in so much psychological pain all the time and it's never going to stop until I write it down --- ...nd-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md | 10 +++------- notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt | 12 ++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 15 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md index 49454c9..de0bea0 100644 --- a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -22,13 +22,9 @@ So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectua Oh, and there was also [this part about](https://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf) how [the entire future of humanity and the universe depended on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile) our figuring out how to reflect human values in a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence. That part's complicated. -What are you looking at me like that for? [It's not a cult!](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness) +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. -At least, it [_wasn't_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) a cult. 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. - -This does not seem remotely credible to me any more. I should explain. _Not_ because I expect anyone to actually read this melodramatic might-as-well-be-a-Diary-entry, much less change their mind about anything because of it. I should explain for my own mental health. For closure. The sooner I manage to get the Whole Dumb Story _written down_, the sooner I can stop grieving and _move on with my life_. (However many decades that turns out to be. The part about superintelligence eventually destroying the world still seems right; it's just the part about there existing a systematically-correct-reasoning community poised to help save it that seems fake now.) - -(A _secondary_ reason for explaining, is that it could _possibly_ function as a useful warning to the next guy to end up in an similar situation of trusting the branded systematically-correct-reasoning community to actually be interested in doing systematically correct reasoning, and incurring a lot of wasted effort and pain [making an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) to [try to](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth) correct the situation. But I don't know how common that is.) +This does not seem remotely credible to me any more. I should explain. _Not_ because I expect anyone to actually read this melodramatic might-as-well-be-a-Diary-entry, much less change their mind about anything because of it. I should explain for my own mental health. The pain won't go away until I write about it. The sooner I manage to get the Whole Dumb Story _written down_, the sooner I can stop grieving and _move on with my life_. (However many decades that turns out to be. The part about superintelligence eventually destroying the world still seems right; it's just the part about there existing a systematically-correct-reasoning community poised to help save it that seems fake now.) I fear the explanation requires some personal backstory about me. I ... almost don't want to tell the backstory, because the thing I've been upset about all year is that I thought a systematically-correct-reasoning community worthy of the brand name should be able to correct a _trivial_ philosophy-of-language error which has nothing to do with me, and it was pretty frustrating when some people seemed to ignore the literal content of my careful very narrowly-scoped knockdown philosophy-of-language argument, and dismiss me with, "Oh, you're just upset about your personal thing (which doesn't matter)." So part of me is afraid that such a person reading the parts of this post that are about the ways in which I _am_, in fact, _really upset_ about my personal thing (which I _don't_ expect anyone else to care about), might take it as vindication that they were correct to be dismissive of my explicit philosophical arguments (which I _did_ expect others to take seriously). @@ -114,6 +110,6 @@ And if the community whose marketing literature says they're all about systemati [section: the community is politically constrained] -[section: "Against Lie Inflation" made me scream in fury] +[section: "Against Lie Inflation" (and less violently https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSemJckYr29Gnxod2/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science ) made me scream in fury] [section: the success of "Heads I Win" made me feel better; interesting how re-shared de-emphasized the political aspect] diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt index 9710804..141c212 100644 --- a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt +++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt @@ -22,6 +22,7 @@ OUTLINE * 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 +* my vocbaulary is trained on this cult * reasonable vs. unreasonable misunderstandings @@ -450,3 +451,14 @@ In the English language as it is spoken today, third-person singular gender pron [From (1), (2), and _modus ponens_] Therefore, you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want without negative side-effects on your cognition. It's _unhealthy_ to spend this many hours stuck in a loop of, "We had an entire Sequence about this! You lying motherfuckers!" + +What are you looking at me like that for? [It's not a cult!](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness) + +At least, it [_wasn't_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) a cult. + +(A _secondary_ reason for explaining, is that it could _possibly_ function as a useful warning to the next guy to end up in an similar situation of trusting the branded systematically-correct-reasoning community to actually be interested in doing systematically correct reasoning, and incurring a lot of wasted effort and pain [making an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) to [try to](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth) correct the situation. But I don't know how common that is.) + +https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/ +https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/ + + -- 2.17.1