SFBA Rationalist Cult members teetering on the edge of recognizing their error.

This unfortunately still leaves me with a choice between "this was working with a hostile foreign power to influence an election and the Republicans on the committee agree with this but think it isn't so bad, WTF, that's disqualifying, and a shit ton of people on the internet are wilfully lying or r-slurred"

and, uhhh, thinking that these guys are more partisan and fear-mongering than they present as.

I think I'm really motivated by contrarianism & dislike of lots of the vibes around the democrats to want to believe Trump isn't that bad, but golly the facts seem to make that an uphill battle.

"I recognize my own woke derangement syndrome makes me want to question the facts."

I got a series of DMs from someone calling me nasty names for not having strong enough priors about RWers being r-slurred liars....

Me! That was me! I did that. It's here that you can see that the SFBA Rationalist concept of 'priors' aka 'preconceived notions' aka 'beliefs' is an agency-robbing mythos. This person can't take responsibility for their 'priors' because their 'priors' exist (in their dimwit head) as a fiction of perfect math. Reasoning through math can't be wrong, and you can't be responsible for the fact that you got something wrong if you were using math which was correctly calculated to arrive at that wrong information. Fricking morons. SFBA Rationalist Cultists are in for a rude awakening about the degree to which their mindless faith in Bayesian math derailed their ability to recognize their error.

I think I got some motivated epistemic learned helplessness going on here/ using the "nothing ever happens" heuristic that almost always works.

To be fair, these types are capable of some introspection.

Same as AI X-risk really: The arguments that this is really really bad are convincing, and taking them seriously (generally a virtue) implies I should be bombing data centres & assassinating ML researchers.

Or you could convince Scott Alexander to retract "You Are Still Calling Wolf."

But that seems a bit extreme, so I'm just gonna sit here & try not to think about it too much

lmao these people are so weak.

My US-politics information feed, now that I think about it in response to your question, is largely partisans from either side sharing terrible things the other side did, and rather too much of that is focussed on culture war stuff like trans issues.

They thought that they were spectating the culture war in their culture war threads (@TracingWoodgrains this is important) and that this gave them logical detachment from their politics, unlike those emotional leftists, and so even as they reified their politics they were in denial of the fact of that reification. Mass myopia. Fricking hilarious.

All politics is libidinal. The people trying to be unemotional about it are in a complicated form of denial about their own emotions. Which is, arguably, autism.

So I'm not sure if I'm sensibly fighting the tendency for my finger to keep wobbling back to the fire/ ignoring news that makes me feel bad & doesn't help me/ sanitising my inputs or if I'm cravenly ignoring a pressing threat because it doesn't affect me personally & thus normalising evil.

Scott Alexander normalized the evil.