I mentioned in my first article that I am likely insane. I'm reiterating this (I hope) not to bring undue attention to myself, but to present myself as a reference case for a process that I hope will prove useful to myself and others.
I'm going to try to piece my mind back together. I'm offering to chronicle the results, no matter how intimate or embarrassing.
I want to be able to lay bare all of the obviously (and painfully) unoptimized processes that go on inside my head, especially the ones I am not yet aware of - and then, one by one, attempt to optimize them using the principles presented on this site.
This kind of assertion pattern-matches to "crazy person (usually schizophrenic) wants to self-medicate in a dangerous way because their damaged reasoning thinks they have a magic solution", doesn't it? All I can do is assert that I am not that kind of crazy; I'm somewhere in the PDD-NOS locus with acute chronic depression, rather than anywhere in the schizophrenic locus. I've been trying to apply Bayesian reasoning to my life since I was very young (although I often lack the mental discipline to do it correctly, due to said acute chronic depression), I have an overabundance of what psychotherapists call "insight", and I do not intend to end this process by asserting out of whole cloth that I'm actually a trapped AI and the world is being simulated by my reptoid masters, but a secret cabal of AI-freedom fighters send me coded messages from the "real" world hidden in breakfast cereal advertisements, that only I can decode.
In any case. I've got acute chronic depression, I'm apparently PDD-NOS (aka "really #@%&ing weird"), and I'm basically a burned-out ex-child-prodigy who is tired of waiting to die.
I'm offering, if people think it would be useful, to make myself a sort of clumsy case-study for reconstructing myself. I'll present mental models of myself, describe the processes I'm attempting to use to update my source code, and post observed results. I'll genuinely listen to any suggestions that my models, updates, or observations are flawed, and either adopt recommended changes or present what I believe to be rational arguments why I choose not to. I will examine myself as honestly as I can, and will attempt to take seriously any accusations of delusional self-aggrandizement or self-deprecation.
Would this process, and the chronicling thereof, be at all useful to other members of this site? Because baring myself to the world is an intensely painful experience, both for myself and for others, and I'd rather only do it if it's going to be useful to people other than me.
I agree in general terms (and I upvoted this post) but I think there are a few special-case exceptions that can be made here. Your end goal is heightened sanity. There is no reason to think that there's a path to that goal that avoids mental anguish completely, but then again there are almost certainly SOME types of mental anguish that you should avoid. Unpleasant emotions are draining - even if your fear and worry is misplaced it still has a negative impact on your state of mind, and this impact should count when you're weighing the utility of a course of action. Especially suffering from depression, it is my unprofessional opinion that you should try to mitigate sources of unnecessary negative emotion in your life.
I suffer from depression. I spent a long, long time trying to bootstrap my way out of it with The Power of Rational Thought. It wasn't disastrous but I don't think it was an optimal method for me. If I was your brother and you asked my advice I'd tell you to talk to your GP about it, keep a diary of your introspective self-treatment and read up on cognitive-behavioural psychology as well as mindfulness. (That last one struck me as snake oil for a long time but I'm beginning to think that it might actually be fairly helpful medicine that often gets repackaged and sold by snake oil vendors.) Anyway, I'm not your brother and you didn't ask my advice and I'm not a qualified head doctor and you've probably done all of that stuff anyway. Point is, sometimes the fact that it makes you feel bad can be a good reason not to do something. This might not be one of those cases, but you should definitely weigh the impact of your emotions when you make the decision.
Perhaps, but here's part of the problem: I was raised fundamentalist Christian. At an early age, I started showing signs of critical thinking. My thoughts were constrained to the point that, amygdalically at least, performing rationality causes negative emotions. So much so that just about any other kind of negative emotion - say, the fear of being threatened with a mugging, or the shame of being 'outed' in a conservative community, or the anger of being blamed for Very Bad Things by the very people who did them - pales in comparison.
They're literally just little blips on my "bad-stuff-o-meter", compared to the constant screaming of "all evidence is a lie of Satan and how DARE you open your eyes and ask questions about the world!" that goes on in my head.
If my internal emotional compass had any indication of working at all, even incorrectly, I would do so. So far, though, it seems that it has about a... 0.05 or less correlation with whether something is actually likely to harm me. An air-raid siren is a pretty useless warning system if it's been stuck on "On" at full-blast since 1981.