my willingness to identify as a LWer that was burnt [...] HPMOR and the sequences were pretty profound influences on my development [...] frustrated at feeling like I have to abandon my identifaction as an LW rat
I don’t think I’ve been very successful; multiple years after my alienation from “the community”, I’m still hanging around leaving bitter comments about how terrible they/we are. It’s very dysfunctional! Why can’t I just write it off as a loss and move on?
I guess the main difficulty is that, for humans, knowledge actually isn’t easily separable from a community of other people with shared vocabulary. I can’t just ignore what the central rat social hierarchy is doing, because the central hierarchy nodes exert a lot of control over everyone in the world who I can really talk to.
I’ve struggled a lot with this, too. The thing I keep trying to remember is that identification with the social group “shouldn’t matter”: you can still cherish the knowledge you gained from the group’s core texts, without having to be loyal to the group as a collective (as contrasted to your loyalty to individual friends).
I don’t think I’ve been very successful; multiple years after my alienation from “the community”, I’m still hanging around leaving bitter comments about how terrible they/we are. It’s very dysfunctional! Why can’t I just write it off as a loss and move on?
I guess the main difficulty is that, for humans, knowledge actually isn’t easily separable from a community of other people with shared vocabulary. I can’t just ignore what the central rat social hierarchy is doing, because the central hierarchy nodes exert a lot of control over everyone in the world who I can really talk to.