From d44b7c515eaa6554399baff873ec71a5dedc4bbe Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 14:53:44 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] check in --- ...-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md | 2 +- notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt | 1 - notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md | 17 +++++++++++++++-- 3 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 4 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 ed6684f..e56f2d1 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 @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ 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. -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. _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 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. _The pain won't go away until I write about it._ ("I've got a thick tongue, brimming with the words that go unsung.") 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). diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt index fb93370..e24de78 100644 --- a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt +++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt @@ -544,4 +544,3 @@ but ... that's my entire social circle If I can't ragequit the community, I have to do the analogue of going to grad school, while hating school—I don't have an exit this time (Picture me playing Hermione Granger in an adaptation of the Great Teacher's famous _Harry Potter_ fanfic: "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!") - diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md b/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md index 89b4acf..eb0db92 100644 --- a/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md +++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md @@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ 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 indulging in clever not-technically-lying sophistry that tries 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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PrXR66hQcaJXsgWsa/not-technically-lying) sophistry that tries to _make it look like there's no cost_. ----- @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ Not because I like my voice, but because I definitely don't want to call (say) my friend Irene a man. That would be crazy! Because **her transition _actually worked_.** Because it actually worked _on the merits_. _Not_ because I'm _redefining concepts in order to be nice to her_. When I look at her, whatever algorithm my brain _ordinarily_ uses to sort people into "woman"/"man"/"not sure" buckets, returns "woman." -**If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and you can model it as a duck without making any grevious prediction errors, then it makes sense to call it a "duck" in the range of circumstances that your model continues to be useful**, even if a pedant might point out that it's really an [Anatid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatidae)-[oid](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-oid#Suffix) robot, or that that species is technically a goose. +**If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and you can model it as a duck without making any grevious prediction errors, then it makes sense to call it a "duck" in the range of circumstances that your model continues to be useful**, even if a pedant might point out that it's really ("really") an [Anatid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatidae)-[oid](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-oid#Suffix) robot, or that that species is technically a goose. ----- @@ -139,6 +139,12 @@ The Popular Author [lightning post assumes invicibility] +https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ + +> And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them. + +Have to?! + The Popular Author obviously never wanted to be the center of a personality cult; it just happened to him anyway because he's better at writing than everyone else. ----- @@ -183,6 +189,12 @@ If I sound angry, it's because I actually do feel a lot of anger, but I wish I k [think I'm collaborating with the cis] [nor, by my own principles can I say they're wrong about me by self-declaration] [agree that scapegoating is real] +acknowleding my complicity: +/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/ +/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/ + +"notice when I succumb to anti-gender-variance social pressure in real life." /2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/ + ----- [You "can't" define a word any way you want, or you "can"—what actually matters is the math] @@ -193,3 +205,4 @@ If I sound angry, it's because I actually do feel a lot of anger, but I wish I k ---- +[on Failed-Utopia 4-2: lesiban trans women are essentially this in real life] \ No newline at end of file -- 2.17.1