Not a good mental health week over here; mood has been intermittently bad for the last few days and was solidly bad today, though hanging out with a friend certainly helped.  My guess is that it has to do with lowering my antidepressant dosage.

I will try to deal with this well and not lash out confusedly like I did last night.  I apologize in advance if I do it again but I think I will be able not to.

When I am not distracted by something or someone, I can’t stop thinking about scenarios in which everyone actually (rightly) hates me, thinks I am stupid, etc. and is only pretending not to.  Then thinking about how self-absorbed it is to be worrying about this.  This isn’t really as dramatic as it sounds – it’s mostly just annoying and makes it necessary to distract myself a lot.

The internet is very distracting but can also feed anxiety.  I should probably try to find to a good, engaging book to read.  The Iron Dragon’s Daughter would have been that 150 pages ago, but has become terrible.  I’m in the middle of various other books that aren’t that engaging.  I should probably try to find a new one.

Anxiety brain says: the climax of my life will be the moment someone writes an article in Harper’s or The New Yorker or similar criticizing me for having a “simplistic worldview,” and the article gets many shares on digital media and helps springboard the writer’s career as a “reflective, humanistic thinker.”

Afterwards, I will be a sort of bizarre minor celebrity who people will sometimes recognize as the man who was Debunked for being Simplistic, and no one who recognizes me this way will quite be able to take me seriously.

My id wants to write more posts about the stuff I’m mad about but I won’t because, empirically, people don’t respond well to those posts.

Then of course I start to think it’s “creepy” that I can make people like me more by noticing they don’t like what I want to say and not saying it.  Do people even really know me, etc.

Maybe I should do some of experiment where I just say exactly what I want to say at all times and see if anyone likes me afterward, just to resolve these kinds of worries.  (I don’t think that’s a serious suggestion, but some modified, more sensible form of it could end up being a serious suggestion)

Anxiety brain is now worrying about whether anything I say ever makes any sense to anyone – or whether I just say incoherent gibberish, but mostly incoherent gibberish that sounds “agreeable” enough that other people are willing to nod along to it

This is not a plausible one even by your standards, anxiety brain

Um, sorry? <3

It’s not your fault!  I mean, I’m sure you know that, but I’m saying it anyway

What is frustrating is more this feeling that my social capital is mostly built on saying things that no one is likely to disagree with?

Like, making fun of Eliezer Yudkowsky is a great gimmick because as far as I can tell no one feels threatened by him, his “enemies” just find him amusing and entertainingly ridiculous at worst, and his fans are happy to take my mocking in good humor and then have good-natured arguments with me on the basis of it (or, at worst, savior my Big Yud tag and then be friends with me)

But when I see someone doing the same things that squick me out about EY, but it’s not as much of a comfortable position to take, I don’t really think I can do it

I guess I feel like a coward who mocks the people it is socially acceptable to mock in my social context and doesn’t ever take socially unacceptable stands

I’m still mad about internet yelling and I don’t know what to do about it

Obviously this is a recurring issue for me – it’s come up in several previous conversations here

I don’t like it that I can change how people respond to me by changing how I use words, or other superficial indicators

And I know people have to use those to judge people they don’t know well, but I still don’t like it, especially when there’s so much of that judgment around, and you can so easily slip between the cracks of it if you just try

There’s such immense energy that goes into attacking guys who wear fedoras and I honestly have no idea why all the shitty guys who wear fedoras haven’t gotten a clue and thought “gee, I could be equally shitty and people would let me get away with it more if I didn’t wear this fedora.”  I don’t know why people don’t adapt to cues like this more often, it’s a miracle and a blessing that they don’t, and it creeps me out that I can.

(I never wore a fedora, that was an example, my point is that I don’t feel like I’ve made any moral progress in years but I have gotten better at making people think I’m a good person)

(Now I’m worried that this series of posts makes it sound like I think I’m morally awful or something and I don’t, I’m not hiding dark secrets or anything, I just can’t stop thinking about this kind of stuff sometimes)

I don’t know why anyone uses the word “rational” anymore; it was very irrational of me to use it for as long as I did while realizing that it was derailing conversations that could have stayed on track; the last thing any of this makes me want to do is punish people who keep using it for some reason

They’re not the cold calculating ones here, I am

If you see what I mean

blurds replied to your post “For the last few years I’ve felt more socially competent than I did in…”

There is nothing in this process besides learning and internalizing new rules. Put me in a situation I don’t have a workaround for and I’m still a silent mess

Maybe, but that doesn’t leave me understanding why there is so much animosity for people who aren’t as good at following the rules

E.g. a lot of my relative “lack of arrogance” is knowing now that I have to surround a lot of my statements with a bunch of disclaimers, and I don’t actually like doing this (if these disclaimers get used this often they should be considered always implicit as part of some Principle of Charity + Gricean Maxims thing?), but people who don’t perform the ritual get punished, and I’m left feeling like I’m dodging bullets again and again, like I’ve infiltrated something

People seem to put a lot of moral weight on rules that I’m only following because people seem to put so much moral weight on them.  (Maybe everyone is doing this simultaneously and it’s just a bad equilibrium)

Remember the post I made a few days ago about how it’s annoying that you can’t talk about certain things sometimes without bringing up the specter of “feminism” and derailing the conversation?  In some conversations I’ve learned to make my points in a careful way so they just sound like “common sense” instead of “feminism”

But here’s the thing – I have also learned the exact same thing with talking about heuristics and biases and the kind of stuff Less Wrong talks about when they’re being sensible; I’ve learned that I have to talk about this kind of stuff carefully and talk around the dread specter of “rationality”

Neither of these makes any internal sense to me, I have just learned to deal with not bringing up specters that derail the conversation.  There are various such specters and sometimes I understand why they exist for a certain person but often it’s just baffling.  Like I have this sense of “what will not derail this conversation” that is becoming better and better over time, but that makes me feel manipulative, because it involves steering around the signals (“feminism,” “rational,” etc.) that people would normally be using as red flags, and meanwhile I’m here steering around these whirlpools while not even understanding why they’re there

Which I guess might just be what “social skills” are?  But that creeps me out, then