The second act: Beginning epistemic rigor at 30

post by hiAndrewQuinn (hiandrewquinn) · 2023-08-07T09:34:20.923Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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For a long time I spurned anything like epistemic rigor. If that sounds insane it's because it is; I was at least a little insane myself for most of my life, with crucial parts of what I personally considered an adequate life missing. We are inherently limited creatures, limited of mind, limited of computational horsepower, and so I made the decision many years ago that, until and unless I was able to achieve those things which made life bearable by age 30, I would let a little rational irrationality pierce the veil, as a treat, a piercing as much fueled by a personal grievance with reality (s/God/reality/g if you don't care for the gnostics) as by any gradient descent on what I saw around me. Some such inadequacies I wanted answers to:

• Why was I born with an extremely painful illness, which kept me from sleeping properly between childhood and my mid twenties?
• What kind of mockery was getting made of me that I consistently scored top marks throughout school and on the SATs even despite this perpetual lack of sleep?
• Why did my father begin to hate me, in his own words, when I was two years old?
• Why was I born into a country with what I felt at the time was an obvious lack of healthcare and welfareinfrastructure and resources to help those millions who has fallen through the cracks?
• Why did it take two years of fighting to get an Internet connection to our Boston house, in the late 2000s, when it was clear as day to everyone around that there was immense amounts of profit to be made off this "new" thing?
• Why did my wealthy parents promise to cover my college costs throughout high school, only to pull the rug out from under me when it actually came time to go, leaving me with a sky high bill calculated off the value of their assets, which I will never see and never profit from myself?
• Why did I find it so hard to meet a woman I could love with my whole heart, without reservation?

These are mostly not questions with clear logical answers. Indeed they're barely questions in the formal sense at all -- they are drives, emotional bulwarks that, as time went on, I learned I could tap into intentionally to keep myself going just a little bit longer than I normally could. I had of course loose hypotheses to all of these (mostly of the form "God/reality is indifferent to my struggles") but more importantly I had vague ideas of how to improve the situation. And as time went on in my twenties, even though money or legible accomplishments have proven sparse, I have been able to improve the situation quite a bit.

• The extremely painful illness turned out to be almost entirely a case of mismanagement. As a toddler my parents misapplied the creams and salves the doctor recommended in ways that only made the suffering worse; but eventually I was able to convince them to switch to different brands which actually, miraculously, worked.
• As a teenager the basement bedroom I slept in began having increasingly severe mold, dander and dust issues, which put my skin under an ever more severe immunological distress which I couldn't escape from, and which kept my skin permanently inflamed; but eventually, I moved out, bought an air purifier by chance, and realized just how life-changing clean air would be for me specifically.
• Turns out clean, abundant, oxygen-rich was also the magic ingredient for fixing my sleep; even if the air is 'subclinical' in that I'm not waking up every two hours to itch my skin, it still makes a world of difference for me specifically. Now an air purifier is an absolute non-negotiable for me to travel anywhere for any period of time, to the extent I packed our little bedroom home unit into my gym bag and bring it with us for overnight stays. Just to be safe.
• It also turned out that meeting the one was just a numbers problem for me specifically. When you're chronically sick, broke, and sleepy, it is multiplicatively harder to summon up the enthusiasm to make and keep new friends of any sort - and this goes double for courting lovers. When I was 25 I had the good fortune to meet a lovely woman in Finland who I moved to live with there the next year; we've been together almost half a decade, now, recently got married, and are in the joyful throes of planning a family together. She too had a neglectful upbringing and is similarly overjoyed even by the simply prosperity we live in now. (And yes - the air in Finland really is much, much fresher than anyplace else I've ever lived. And we use an air purifier even here, so really, reader, you have no excuse!)
• And, yeah, while I'm on it, that's the answer I ultimately came to for those other woe-is-me-isms: It's just neglect. Maybe some active malice, too, later on, but certainly neglect earlier on.

I don't speak to my parents anymore, but I'm converging in my own time to a position of indifference regarding them. And I'm finding that as I converge to indifference, I'm also being given a remarkable second shot at something I always wanted on some level, but just could never reach with them taking up as primary a role in determining my felt and experienced Bayesian priors about the safety and beauty of the world: A life where I can actually, for once, afford to think clearly about various topics, my inner skybox unclouded by emotion, unclouded by fury, unclouded by pain.

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