From 979314f73b79bbf6eae95403fbf0073f3c88b36e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Zack M. Davis" Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:26:36 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] drafting "Listening Disorders as Eating Disorders" --- ...listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md | 50 +++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 50 insertions(+) create mode 100644 content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md diff --git a/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md b/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..888daee --- /dev/null +++ b/content/drafts/listening-disorders-as-eating-disorders.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +Title: Listening Disorders as Eating Disorders +Date: 2027-01-01 +Status: draft +Category: philosophy +Tags: honesty + +I seem to run into a lot of people who both consider themselves intellectuals and truthseekers, and are incredibly fussy about what information reaches their eyes. They block at the drop of a hat, derail intellectually substantive discussions into mind-numbing litigation of minutiæ of "tone", and refuse to acknowledge a logical point unless it's been presented to them in the precise way that doesn't offend their (often idiosyncratic) sense of etiquette or "discourse norms." + +It would be hard to communicate how much contempt I hold these people in. (Not because I couldn't find the words. Because they'd block me before I could communicate it.) I think they are ineffective and boring people whose pretensions to intellectualism are morally fraudulent; I think they are making the world worse insofar as they manage to trick anyone into conflating intellectual virtue with mastery of their impoverished form of cant. + +To be clear, I understand that attention is a precious and limited resource, now more than ever. One must ruthlessly filter and prune one's information evironment in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio, lest one drown in an ocean of slop. If someone is quick to drop out of conversations because they're busy and don't have time for whatever nonsense people are yammering about, then they have my respect, and indeed, admiration. (Perhaps I should learn to one day have so much respect for my own time.) + +But the people I'm complaining about are very obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're avoiding criticism: protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.) + +It's not that I'm some kind of superhuman stoic who has no empathy for why someone would want to hide from information. I have feelings, too. Sometimes I procrastinate checking my email or the comment section when a tough conversation has been happening and I'm worried that someone might have said something that I would find upsetting to read. I avoid it because I just don't want to deal with it now, as opposed to dealing with it some hours or days later when I'm feeling up to it. (I always feel better after I eventually work up the bravery to check, but this fact is surprisingly hard to remember.) + +Crucially, however, I know that me avoiding my mail is _my_ (temporary) reluctance to meet the responsibilities of being a grown-up intellectual. Managing my emotions is _my_ job. I don't expect or want other people to refrain from telling me things that I might find upsetting to read, because the set of things I might find upsetting to read includes a lot of imporant decision-relevant information about the world. + +Although I'm not any kind of superhuman stoic, I think I've developed a certain tolerance and even taste for criticism. The email-avoidance only kicks in when I'm facing particularly heightened social risk when fighting with people whose opinions I have reason to care about. In contrast, being criticized by randos elsewhere on the internet is more amusing than anything else. It's flattering to be hated: it means that someone thinks you're important enough to be worth hating, rather than ignored by default, as almost everything must be in our information-rich, attention-poor world. + +The sensitive intellectual-wannabes I'm complaining about often point to /r/SneerClub as the epitome of "bad" speech that one shouldn't be so much as tempted to look at, but my main complaint about Sneer Club is that they're just not that smart and rarely come up with any really penetrating zingers. In theory, one might have hoped that a dedicated anti-fan club might be an indispensible source of valuable criticism, as people who hate you are motivated to search hard for all the things you're doing wrong that your friends like you too much to tell you about or even notice. Unfortunately, in practice they mostly just go for the cheap dunks. Thus, /r/SneerClub ends up being mostly pretty boring to me, but the novelty of having dedicated haters is worth enough passing interest that I did make sure to [submit one of my particularly sneerable-seemingly pieces there](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/n44drl/sexual_dimorphism_in_yudkowskys_sequences_in/). (My submission got locked, but [someone else's got 36 karma](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nt37j1/the_rationalist_subcultures_resident_blanchardian/) before the mods decided to delist it because "it feels for once like an actual bullying thing to post".) + +[TODO: told I'm a masochist, but Bayesomasochism is an important rationality practice] + +I think the people I'm complaining about could be more like me if they wanted to, and the fact that they don't want to disqualifies them from being serious intellectuals. At least along this dimension, they are beneath me. + +---- + +[TODO— +But part of being not afraid of information and not trying to suck off my own ego is, looking for evidence against my own position, looking for ways in which my enemies might be sympathetic rather than enjoying the rush of demonizing them. + +And there's one analogy that keeps haunting me. So, I'm kind of a picky eater. It's not _that_ bad (and it's not as bad as when I was a child), but it's not great, that most vegetables don't parse as food to me. (Onions and potatoes are not relevantly vegetables.) I can tolerate peas and carrots in the context of a soup or a fried rice dish, but I wouldn't actually just eat a carrot. Salad just seems like a Absolute No, that is Not Food. (Not just, I'll eat it later, but I don't want to eat it.) And this has occasionally caused awkwardness in social eating situations. + +And somehow I got away with it, I won the childhood battle of wills? If that seems socially deviant, the secret is that there's only so much labor people are willing to do to force you. My father made me eat a carrot when I was ten, and I threw up on the spot. He didn't try again. Because, well—why would he? It's just less work to let me keep being childish. I suspect that this is more common than people admit? (link to mentions of vegetable aversion by Eigenrobot, Aella, Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowshowitz) + +The analogy is: maybe someone would look on me with the same absolute contempt, that I'm so finicky about what food reaches my mouth, and it's making me less healthy. The reason it's a productive analogy is: if I don't want to be treated with contempt in social eating situations, maybe I should also have more sympathy for these people. If I want to indulge my eating disorder rather than trying to cure it, maybe I should let them indulge their listening disorder. + +Am I a less complete human being because of this? There are people who won the childhood battle of wills and avoided learning math. I think they're missing something good in life. + +I think there are important disanalogies that work in my favor: people aren't depending on my peak condition health, whereas in some ways we are depending on people to not support retarded policies (that they should know better if they weren't in an information bubble). I'm not _claiming_ to be a peak athlete, whereas I am claiming to be an intellectual (and the people I feel contempt for are claiming to be intellectuals). + +But insofar as I'm saying, look, whatever health effects there are from this are quantitatively small, the people I feel contempt for could say the same thing. They might concede in the abstract that they're theoretically missing something by not being an info-omnivore, but maintain that they're not missing anything important by sticking to their curated bubble. (And maybe I think that's false on the merits for them and their purposes and true for me and my purposes, but the point of the analogy is to be sympathetic to them.) + +And the health benefits can be captured in other ways: if you get fiber from legumes and fruit, and vitamins from a pill, you don't necessarily need the vegetables for anything. In fact, the whole idea of eating vegetables might be one of those things where agriculture was anti-human (against the interests of individual humans who were adapted to hunt and gather meat and berries, but agriculture economically outcompeted them). + +Regarding whether they could be like me—well, I think I _could_ beat my eating disorder if I really wanted to! There are ways: figure out what dimensions the aversion is operating under, do repeated exposure therapy in increasing doses, get good at cooking. I know that tastes can be acquired. I actually drink decaf coffee, because I acquired a coffee taste that remained after I started being scared of caffiene. I could probably acquire a vegetable taste if I wanted to, if I made it a project. (When Katie microwaved kale, the smell actually did have a "food" register to it.) But I just—don't want to! I really don't want to; I don't want to spend time or effort on that particular project when I already have so many other projects in my life. + +So, should I have mercy on people with listening disorders? Should I not take public status shots at them the way that I do? Um, actually I think the analogy is weak enough (accepting info is more fundamental to the rationality project than diet balance is to being healthy enough to participate in Society), that I'm still going to be pretty "mean" about it. But maybe I can be more clear-eyed about how much pain I'm dealing. I shouldn't flinch from that. + +] -- 2.53.0