I did read a lot: books, and then blogs and _Wikipedia_. I liked Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand, and later, Greg Egan. In high school, I started keeping little pocket notebooks and writing in them in preference to paying attention in class—nothing very structured, just rambling and observations and scraps of dialogue. I tried to write fiction, but never seemed to finish any stories. I got the farthest with "The Greater Glory of Our Humble Academy", a novella about a school of prodigies fielding a girls' cross-country team, the draft of which surpassed 22,000 words before permanently running out of stream. You can see my worship of intelligence in the draft; from my current perspective, it looks like trying too hard to show off how well-read I was.
-The contrast between my intellectual ambition (expressed in my reading and my notebooks and stories) and the monotony of my schooling wouldn't have been a contradiction if it had been a conscious strategic choice—to do a passable job of obeying my teachers because Society demanded it, while getting the real work done on my own time. That is what I was effectively doing. (I only took one Advanced Placement class during high school, "Calculus AB", which is not the academic record one might expect on reading "The Greater Glory".) But for the most part, I consciously accepted the conflation of education and schooling, because that's what everyone in Society seemed to believe.
+The contrast between my intellectual ambition (expressed in my reading and my notebooks and half-finished stories) and the monotony of my schooling wouldn't have been a contradiction if it had been a conscious strategic choice—to do a passable job of obeying my teachers because Society demanded it, while getting the real work done on my own time. That is what I was effectively doing. (I only took one Advanced Placement class during high school, "Calculus AB", which is not the academic record one might expect on reading "The Greater Glory".) But for the most part, I consciously accepted the conflation of education and schooling, because that's what everyone in Society seemed to believe.
-There were doubts. In September 2005, I wrote in my Diary that I felt as if I didn't want to go to college. I fantasized about getting a job and being independent as soon as possible. "If I were to stop my formal education after high school, would really be a sort of intellectual suicide?" I wrote. "I don't think so. I could buy college textbooks and read them, all by myself." But that was just a passing fantasy, unthinkable given my social background. The next year, I enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and I was ego-syntonic about it. My mother once asked if I was doing okay at Santa Cruz, and floated the idea of living at home and taking classes at community college. I said, "Are you _trying_ to sabotage my education?"
+There were doubts. In September 2005, I wrote in my Diary that I felt as if I didn't want to go to college. I fantasized about getting a job and being independent as soon as possible. "If I were to stop my formal education after high school, would [that] really be a sort of intellectual suicide?" I wrote. "I don't think so. I could buy college textbooks and read them, all by myself." But that was just a passing fantasy, unthinkable given my social background. The next year, I enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and I was ego-syntonic about it. My mother once asked if I was doing okay at Santa Cruz, and floated the idea of living at home and taking classes at community college. I said, "Are you _trying_ to sabotage my education?"
+
+I wasn't doing okay at Santa Cruz.
-I wasn't doing okay at Santa Cruz.
[TODO—
- * plagiarism fears, seeing psychiatrists
- * I had a really bad nervous breakdown when I didn't know how to write my "Introduction to Feminisms" paper in fall 2007, intending to take up my Safeway job and then
+
* Part of what made school hard was "the incomplete contract", not knowing what was allowed; at least in work there was more obviously a purpose other than to obey
* I don't know why this didn't bother me in high school as much, perhaps because college was more obviously a choice; I think it didn't bother me in middle school as much because my adult conscience hadn't fully grown yet (I remember plagiarizing other kids' summaries of _As a Driven Leaf_ rather than doing the reading myself)
+ * plagiarism fears, seeing psychiatrists
+
+
+ * I had a really bad nervous breakdown when I didn't know how to write my "Introduction to Feminisms" paper in fall 2007, intending to take up my Safeway job and then
* more evidence about the incomplete contract: asking Rich about how much of the reading he did at Stanford (contrast to Nicole in summer 2025 visit claiming she learned more in lecture and often skipped reading), Diary entry about linear algebra and office hours (and more confessions in Diary 260)
* Meggie Sprengel
* enrolled in Heald, thinking that "OK, they'll just teach me Job stuff" (which won't feel bad the way school did)
Dishonest disagreements end up looking like conflicts [because they are disguised conflicts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/e4GBj6jxRZcsHFSvP/assume-bad-faith). The parties to a dishonest disagreement are competing to get their preferred belief accepted, where beliefs are being preferred for some reason other than their accuracy: for example, because acceptance of the belief would imply actions that would benefit the belief-holder. If it were _true_ that my company is the best, it would follow logically that customers should buy my products and investors should fund me. And yet a discussion with me about whether or not my company is the best probably doesn't feel like a discussion about bus arrival times or the theory of functions of a complex variable. You probably expect me to behave as if I thought my belief is better "because it's mine", to treat attacks on _the belief_ as if they were attacks on my person: a conflict rather than a disagreement.
-"My company is the best" is a particularly stark example of a dishonest belief, but the pattern is very general: when people are attached to their beliefs for whatever reason—which is true for most of the beliefs that people spend time disagreeing about, as contrasted to math and bus-schedule disagreements that resolve quickly—neither party is being rational (which doesn't mean neither party is right on the object level). Attempts to improve the situation should take into account that the typical case is not that of truth-seekers who can do better at their shared goal if they learn to trust each other, but rather of people who don't trust each other because each _correctly_ perceives that the other is _not_ truth-seeking.
+"My company is the best" is a particularly stark example of a typically dishonest belief, but the pattern is very general: when people are attached to their beliefs for whatever reason—which is true for most of the beliefs that people spend time disagreeing about, as contrasted to math and bus-schedule disagreements that resolve quickly—neither party is being rational (which doesn't mean neither party is right on the object level). Attempts to improve the situation should take into account that the typical case is not that of truthseekers who can do better at their shared goal if they learn to trust each other, but rather of people who don't trust each other because each _correctly_ perceives that the other is _not_ truthseeking.
-Again, "not truth-seeking" here is meant in a functionalist sense. It doesn't matter if both parties subjectively think of themselves as honest. The "distrust" that prevents Aumann-agreement-like convergence is about how agents respond to evidence, not about subjective feelings. It applies as much to a mislabeled barometer as it does to a human with a functionally-dishonest belief. If I don't think the barometer readings correspond to the true atmospheric pressure, I might still update on evidence from the barometer in some way if I have a guess about how its labels correspond to reality, but I'm still going to disagree with its reading according to the false labels.
+Again, "not truthseeking" here is meant in a functionalist sense. It doesn't matter if both parties subjectively think of themselves as honest. The "distrust" that prevents Aumann-agreement-like convergence is about how agents respond to evidence, not about subjective feelings. It applies as much to a mislabeled barometer as it does to a human with a functionally-dishonest belief. If I don't think the barometer readings correspond to the true atmospheric pressure, I might still update on evidence from the barometer in some way if I have a guess about how its labels correspond to reality, but I'm still going to disagree with its reading according to the false labels.
----
There are techniques for resolving economic or interpersonal conflicts that involve both parties adopting a more cooperative approach, each being more willing to do what the other party wants (while the other reciprocates by doing more of what the first one wants). Someone who had experience resolving interpersonal conflicts using techniques to improve cooperation might be tempted to apply the same toolkit to resolving dishonest disagreements.
-It might very well work for resolving the disagreement. It probably doesn't work for resolving the disagreement _correctly_, because cooperation is about finding a compromise amongst agents with partially conflicting interests, and in a dishonest disagreement in which both parties have non-epistemic goals, trying to do more of what the other party "wants" (again, in a functionalist sense) amounts to catering to their bias, not systematically getting closer to the truth.
+It might very well work for resolving the disagreement. It probably doesn't work for resolving the disagreement _correctly_, because cooperation is about finding a compromise amongst agents with partially conflicting interests, and in a dishonest disagreement in which both parties have non-epistemic goals, trying to do more of what the other party functionally "wants" amounts to catering to their bias, not systematically getting closer to the truth.
-Cooperative approaches are particularly dangerous insofar as they seem likely to produce a convincing but false illusion of rationality, despite the participants' best of subjective conscious "intentions". It's common for discussions to involve more than one point of disagreement. An apprarently productive discussion might end with me saying, "Okay, I see you have a point about X, but I was still right about Y."
+Cooperative approaches are particularly dangerous insofar as they seem likely to produce a convincing but false illusion of rationality, despite the participants' best of subjective conscious intentions. It's common for discussions to involve more than one point of disagreement. An apprarently productive discussion might end with me saying, "Okay, I see you have a point about X, but I was still right about Y."
This is a success if the reason I'm saying that is downstream of you in fact having a point about X but me in fact having been right about Y. But another state of affairs that would result in me saying that sentence, is that we were functionally playing a social game in which I implicitly agreed to concede on X (which you visibly care about) in exchange for you ceding ground on Y (which I visibly care about).
"Truth or Dare" seems to suggest that it's possible to escape the Dark World by excluding the bad guys. "[F]rom the perspective of someone with light world privilege, [...] it did not occur to me that you might be hanging around someone with ill intent at all," Sabien imagines a denizen of the light world saying. "Can you, um. Leave? Send them away? Not be spending time in the vicinity of known or suspected malefactors?"
-If we're talking about holding my associates to a standard of ideal truthseeking (as contrasted to a lower standard of "not using this truth-or-dare game to blackmail me"), then, no, I think I'm stuck spending time in the vicinity of people who are known or suspected to be biased. I can try to mitigate the problem somewhat by choosing _less_ biased friends, but when we do disagree, I [have no choice](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) but to approach that using the same rules of reasoning that I could use with a possibly-mislabeled barometer, which do not have a particularly cooperative character. Telling us that the right move is for both of us to try to see more of what's true is tautologically correct but non-actionable; I don't know how to _do_ that except by my usual methodology, which Sabien has criticized as characteristic of living in a dark world.
+If we're talking about holding my associates to a standard of ideal truthseeking (as contrasted to a lower standard of "not using this truth-or-dare game to blackmail me"), then, no, I think I'm stuck spending time in the vicinity of people who are known or suspected to be biased. I can try to mitigate the problem by choosing _less_ biased friends, but when we do disagree, I [have no choice](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) but to approach that using the same rules of reasoning that I would use with a possibly-mislabeled barometer, which do not have a particularly cooperative character. Telling us that the right move is for both of us to try to see more of what's true is tautologically correct but non-actionable; I don't know how to _do_ that except by my usual methodology, which Sabien has criticized as characteristic of living in a dark world.
That is to say: I do not understand how high-trust, high-cooperation dynamics work. I've never seen them. They are utterly outside my experience and beyond my comprehension. What I do know is how to keep my footing in a world of people with different goals from me, which I try to do with what skill and tenacity I can manage.
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff