OK, new rule, I am not arguing about “rationalists” or their qualities or goodness/badness, period

The latest hot take seems to be “’rationalist tumblr’ doesn’t acknowledge the existence/experiences of autistic women” (here, more vitriolically here) and like.  I could say things!  I could say a lot of things!  But my desire to say things is predicated on me liking the blog posts of individual people or caring about individual people and once the word “rationalist” gets involved the well is irreversibly poisoned, or more accurately there become two tracks to the conversation, one of which is about individual people and their qualities, and one of which is about “the rationalists,” whoever they are, and the two only meet in the dark of night in the most obscure and oblique ways

I guess some of my friends are “””rationalists,””” and some of my favorite blogs are by “””rationalists,””” and I myself may transform into a “””rationalist””” under certain phases of the discursive moon, but my god, I just do not care about this word and its strange glancing contact with actual human reality, and every time I am tempted to say anything involving the word “rationalists” I am going to put down the computer and read a book

Look, I thought we’d been over this, when a certain kind of speech is regularly used to dehumanize people it is impossible to wield that kind of speech only against “the actually bad ones” without catching anyone else in the blast radius

@reddragdiva

I really need to start working soon, but for now, here’s the promised follow-up to this post

Esther has gotten me to start watching Doctor Who with her.  (Series 5, which is emotionally important to her because it helped her through a really tough time.  I have simultaneously gotten her into Homestuck, which it so happens I was clinging to during a bad time of my own – though a comparatively much milder one – at around the same time she was clinging to DW Series 5.)

And Doctor Who is of course ridiculously entertaining and also, of course, a very cartoonish and unrealistic show.  The Doctor, in particular, is clearly a kind of savior fantasy, a charismatic man who can waltz into a seemingly hopeless situation, maintain his characteristic cheer and wit and compassion-for-all-beings in spite of that situation, and reliably come up with some combination of clever planning, luck and technobabble that saves the day.

But here is the thing.  I have noticed that when I am helping Esther deal with her brain problems, I feel a whole lot like the Doctor.

I do not always enjoy helping people with their brain problems.  There are some people whose episodes of anxiety or depression (etc.) produce behavior that reliably scares me, makes me extremely anxious myself, or makes me feel guilty or subhuman.  I don’t want it to sound like I am enjoying this process because I get to be some sort of self-sacrificial savior.  With some people it would be like that, but with Esther it isn’t.  It doesn’t feel hard or self-sacrificial at all.

What it feels like is, well … Esther’s anxieties tend to be about really terrible things – not just losing her job or something, but being a dream figment who’s about to disappear forever, or going to hell, or being the most unethical being in existence.  And, first of all, she finds it anxiolytic to just be around me, to see me and hear my voice.  And second, these are the kinds of existential or philosophical or science-fictional worries that can actually be helped (in her case) by arguments, about the epistemic grounds for God, about how one might know if one is dreaming, about competing theories of ethics and their troubling flaws.

And those kinds of arguments are my strong suit – I mean, I can generate that sort of thing even when I’m in a state where I can’t remember ordinary words or manage to clothe and feed myself.  It comes naturally.  (Which, historically, has tended to seem to me like a sign that I’m one of those unworldly Bazinga! nerds who Just Doesn’t Get It in mundane life situations and thus always ends up hurting people)

But now, I can waltz in to a hopeless cosmic-horror scenario, and be instantly comforting just because of who I am and what I look and sound like, and then use the particular sort of cleverness that comes naturally to me to devise a plan and get everyone out safely.  While cracking jokes and being gratuitously nice.

I’m the Doctor.

It really is possible, sometimes.

This is my brain on Brian Tomasik

ursaeinsilviscacant:

(Note: please DO NOT respond to this with any kind of unreality/horror jokes or things designed to make me think the world isn’t real. I am feeling much better now

Last night, Rob was feeling dissociated (possibly because of anti-depressant dose change) and he said he felt like “the feeling when you have just realised you’re in a dram and about to wake up.” He mentioned how in the past he had had dreams where he was in love with a woman and was disappointed on waking to realise that she was a dream figment and not real. And then he said that I was like a dream in many ways and we are very well matched.

A normal person would have just taken this very sweet compliment at face-value, been flattered and kissed him and taken care of their dissociating boyfriend. But I’m crazy and also kind of an asshole who is bad at taking care of people. :( Although he said none of the brain problems were actually unpleasant, just weird.

I became afraid that I was a character in a dream who somehow had subjective experiences and that Rob was going to wake up and I would die. Brian Tomasik thinks imaginary people might have experiences. I was so scared and I was crying on and off for like and hour (and sometimes laughing at the same time as crying because I knew how crazy and ridiculous I was being.)

Rob is the best boyfriend ever and even though he was also having brain problems he looked after me. He did a bunch of reality tests on pieces of text to make sure they didn’t change (text usually changes in a dream), and came up with a bunch of logical arguments for why I wasn’t a dream, and listened to me providing a whole bunch of very specific memories (like the colour of the doors of houses I used to live in) that his brain would have no reason to give a dream lady. And he hugged me a lot and when I was crying I made him promise to have a good life and be happy if he woke up soon and I stopped existing. He is so good.

I actually think it is really good that I can have this kind of brain problem. A few years ago, if I came across evidence I was a person in a dream, I would be like “aww yissss! I get to not exist really soon! And there’s no Hell for dream people!” but last night I was crying because I wanted to have decades of life where I have a good job and kiss many cuties and hang out with my friends and buy malaria nets and eat cookies and get laid and read books and help children learn to read and go swimming and go to the Bay and meet the bonobos and have pet rats and marry Rob and have a nice house together and I would not get to do the cool things if I was a dream and I died. And I am so happy that I am not a dream, because it has been too long now for me to be a dream. I am happy and I am safe and I will not die for a long time. Maybe I will even be a cyborg who lives for centuries in the glorious transhumanist future, although that is very unlikely IMO. But what I have, this life, is wonderful, and not a dream.

For the record, I really didn’t need much taking care of last night – my dissociation was actually fairly pleasant.  It mostly consisted of some mild derealization combined with a sense that my circumstances were no longer  familiar, as though my self from years ago was viewing them as a glimpse of the future.  Since my circumstances were really good, this was very enjoyable – I kept thinking “wow, I’m in England right now, to visit my girlfriend, who is right here, and I am talking to her, and we love each other, and she’s really good-looking, this is actually happening right now,” and of course that led into the conversation about dreams

(Also, I’m going to make a longer post about this sort of thing in a minute, but it is amazing that I can be a good, emotionally supportive boyfriend by, among other things, “coming up with a bunch of logical arguments.”  This is not how the television tells me life is supposed to be)

A lot of the less widely known Nabokovs have just been really boring to me (sorry), but I’ve started reading The Gift and so far (around page 70) it is plotless but it has the “Nabokov’s brain is like mine” quality at full 100% blast

“the sensory environment is FULL of things which are all very PARTICULAR in their unique qualities.  the shape of that dresser over there recapitulates the structure of a joke someone told me 8 years ago.  someone is talking in the room and they are not saying anything i care about but the flow of their speech is JUST like a certain variety of truck moving along a certain sort of asphalt.  oh my GOD.  the conjunction of the truck speech and the joke dresser is, aesthetically, like a poem, no i don’t mean ‘poetic,’ i mean it’s like a SPECIFIC poem i read 5 months ago, while sitting in a large and mildly uncomfortable chair.  it was a bad, derivative poem.  oh now the truck speech is asking me what i think about the youth of today.  what are the youth of today.  i guess there must be a lot of them.  this room contains a lot of very particular objects arranged in space.  the many youths of today are also arranged in space, much less neatly.  i suppose it will now be socially necessary for me to say some words.  uh,”

Also, it wouldn’t be a Nabokov book without a General Ideas Harangue popping up gratuitously out of nowhere, and yep, there it is, our good old friend:

Any corny man of ideas, any “serious” novelist in horn-rimmed glasses—the family doctor of Europe and the seismographer of its social tremors—would no doubt have found in this story something highly characteristic of the “frame of mind of young people in the postwar years”—a combination of words which in itself (even apart from the “general idea” it conveyed) made me speechless with scorn. I used to feel a cloying nausea when I heard or read the latest drivel, vulgar and humorless drivel, about the “symptoms of the age” and the “tragedy of youth.” And, since I could not be kindled by Yasha’s tragedy (though his mother did think I was afire), I would have become enmired involuntarily in a “deep” social-interest novel with a disgusting Freudian reek.

Why do I think there isn’t really an obligatory/supererogatory distinction?

If I look at my own experience as someone who is affected by other people’s moral actions, I never see a definite, emotionally salient line between, say, “you have hurt me, but not in a way that violates your moral duties” and “you have failed in your moral duties by hurting me.”

Or rather, these sorts of distinctions do come up, but not in a way that lines up with usual moral theories.  I do feel sometimes that other people have “crossed a line” – done something I cannot abide another person doing – and often this causes uniquely strong resentment, or causes me to break off contact with the person.  But it’s not that these “failures of basic human decency” are uniquely bad because they fall below some fixed standard.  It’s rather that the standard is something I’ve personally set – “I’ve decided that I won’t tolerate behavior this bad or worse from people.”

The behavior itself, and the harm it causes, is all continuous, without any line where its consequences or other moral aspects “flip” into some new, qualitatively worse domain.  It’s just normally, “quantitatively” worse, to the point that it happens to fall below what I’ve decided is my limit.

Likewise, much of the behavior that frustrates or angers me on a day-to-day basis is minor but sustained – always “mild enough” on its own terms, never (even in cumulative total) feeling like it should be forbidden.  One can be quite terribly bad without ever doing anything that I feel “ought not to be done by anyone.”

Or, on the positive end of the scale: I find myself often specially valuing good deeds from others that I suppose could be called “obligatory,” in that they’re things I feel like ought to be classed under “basic human decency,” but in my social environment, generally aren’t.  But again, this isn’t really because of some binary obligatory/supererogatory switch – it’s just that I find it very comforting when other people agree with me that “it would be very bad if I didn’t do this.”

I value all good things other people do to me exactly in proportion to how good they are (which I feel like is a tautology, but maybe not?); I don’t judge them according to extra binary switches beyond the continuous scale of basic goodness.  It’s just that it’s especially nice to see reliable goodness if I’ve gotten used to its absence.  And vice versa: “failures of basic human decency” rankle as much as they do because I’ve gotten used to expecting their absence.  But in the end there is only the continuous scale of goodness and badness, and nothing else.

I am so embarrassed that I forgot what sexual selection was that now I can’t get to sleep

Keep reading

I need to work soon, but right now I’m re-reading parts of TNC while listening to Hamilton, and experiencing Feels

I think TNC is a probably better “response” to Neoreaction A Basilisk than any of the stuff I actually wrote about the latter.  Admittedly I wrote it before NAB even existed, but then that’s thematically appropriate, isn’t it

This is an Amateur Sociology Fanblog

ursaeinsilviscacant:

“You might be wrong” is not a reason to not have opinions. It’s a reason to have opinions but be willing to change them.

If you say “I am not The Smartest, so I am banned from opinions forever” you will stagnate in fear.

Like, I see a lot of stuff warning against overconfidence in LW circles and also in non-LW circles of people interested in rationality and self improvement. And I don’t doubt this is useful for some people. For some people it probably leads to research, mind-changing and openness to new ideas. It leads to trusting experts of snake-oil salesmen.

But for me, it makes me afraid to research things, afraid to talk to people, afraid to even think thoughts because what if I am wrong? It’s a paralyzing fear, not a salutary one.

This is also one reason it took me so long to leave the church. When I expressed anxiety about the problem of evil, I got “how can you complain when the great saints suffered so much and still loved God?” When I wondered aloud whether the reasons transubstantiation and the trinity sounded like self-contradictory nonsense was because they were actual self-contradictory nonsense I got “Do you really think you’re smarter than Augustine and Aquinas?”

People will say “but philosophers are the experts on whether God exists, and most philosophers are atheists!” but when I was a Catholic I thought the Church Fathers were the experts, and how was I, a poor benighted non-expert either way, allowed to have an opinion on which group was experts?

Being wrong is fixable and rarely world-ending. It is okay to be wrong sometimes. Being wrong is not good, but it is better to risk being wrong than to, for example, lie on your bedroom floor crying because you’re not allowed to have dinner because you’re not allowed to think “I know I need to eat” because that’s Amateur Biology and you have Insufficient Expertise to be allowed opinions.

(Ozy, since this post is implicitly criticising your writing, you are perfectly welcome to respond to it is you wish, although I still prefer not to interact with you in general, but I do not think you are bad as a human being and wish you success and happiness in your personal life.)