Hmm. Yeah, I agree with you. But booze loosens something up for me. It turns something in my social brain on high. This is not the same thing as confidence, so my wording was bad.

I have a suspicion that your option number 2 is already baked pretty deep into actual humans' psychologies.

I read and identified with and commented on your post a year and a half ago. I just wanted to say I'm glad to know that you're feeling more ambitious now. And thanks for sharing. I haven't solved these same problems for myself nearly to the same extent, so learning about your recent experiences is extremely valuable for me.

Why Opium produces sleep: ... Because there is in it a dormitive power.

Moliere, Le Malade Imaginere (1673), Act III, sc. iii.

Good.

I agree. The best cogs understand their role in the machine, which requires intimate understanding of the machine as a whole. AND they can feel what's going on as it happens.

If you didn't manage to notice your retinal blind spot or the mechanisms by which you conjugate verbs in your native tongue, what are the chances that you aren't at least a little mistaken about your true goals and desires and how best to achieve them?

Even though I'm very familiar and comfortable with your thesis, I found that sentence striking.

I had exactly the same reaction. I believe (though have extremely small data number of data points) that offering a number instead of asking for one would be taken as low-status. On the other hand, I doubt that the balance between having a proposition accepted or denied is often that delicate. Presumably in most cases, by the time you're considering exchanging information, she or he has already made up their minds enough that such a small faux-pas wouldn't matter much.

I identified very strongly with your article. I feel exactly the same way and suspect the same things are going on in my brain when I hear really bad feminist arguments. They're somehow more annoying than really bad (even worse!) gender regressive arguments.

This has lead me to question whether I should indulge myself in making my contrarian, actually-gender-progressive, arguments against what I perceive as mainstream opinion (feminism). Feminism really isn't nearly as mainstream as it feels to me. I'm just privileged as a member of the intellectual progressive elite - I got to go to good schools, I'm a professional, I select progressive friends and grew up with somewhat progressive parents. Yes, it was a revelation when I realized how many problems there are with mainstream feminism, but I'm also a product of a pretty rare selection bias in a society that's actually still racist. I actually buy the feminist narrative that there is still a lot of (level 1) sexism in our society, even though I tend to only see the problems with (level 2) mainstream feminism.

But there is a problem here for a consequentialist. No matter how clearly I put my criticisms, they're only understood as "some reactionary rationalization". People don't grasp the nuance and count one more head on the wrong side. It seems like it will lead to better consequences if I spend a majority of time "me too"ing mainstream feminism and biting my tongue about most of the issues in it. Or at least building more explicit feminist cred before pointing out some of the problems.

So this leads me to a question for you: why do you think that, in the face of your realization about why you criticize what you criticize, continuing to do it is the right thing to do?

doesn't follow politics / political junkie / avoids talking about politics due to mind-killing