preemptive grief dressed as epistemics

there's a class of experiences that break your epistemics before they break your heart, and it is.. quite hard to see them coming.

you don't see them coming not because you weren't paying attention but because the signal was genuinely clean, but..... then it didn't. and you're left wondering whether the evidence was real or whether you were just running a very sophisticated pattern match on your own desires were you too.. egotistical? lustful? ignorant? intoxicated? the list.. goes on

i like to model "trust" in human relationships as a form of compute; humans allocate prediction resources to another agent, betting that their future behavior will be consistent with the model they built when that bet pays off, they repeatedly compound, naturally. it's evident to then go deeper, and start treating the model as load-bearing

i don't think that this is necessarily irrationality but rather something like.... bayesian updating working correctly? the problem is that the same process that makes genuine connection possible also makes you maximally vulnerable to the moment the model breaks

so then.. well.. the rationalist move, supposedly, is to maintain uncertainty and hold your models loosely; don't let your priors get too strong too fast, so on so forth. i understand the theory, i very much do, but i think it's mostly cope

the people i know who are genuinely good at connection don't hold it loosely

they hold it fully and update hard when they have to.

the looseness to me feels like just preemptive grief dressed up as epistemics

there's a particular kind of mind that you recognize on contact, not because it's like yours exactly, but because the inferential gaps are just... shorter? in a way? (does that make sense?)

you're.. not translating anymore. in.. a way. things feel like they land at the right depth without negotiation

unfortunately (or fortunately) i don't encounter this often enough to be casual about it when i do. and when i do my system flags it and i update accordingly and sometimes that's the whole problem

i think the failure mode i keep running into is that i optimize for signal quality and don't weight external constraints enough

i can.. really tell when something is real but i'm less good at modeling all the reasons real things don't work out anyway.. there's like a whole category of true connections that fail not because they weren't true but because the environment isn't structured to support them and these are the roughest

other people's feelings...... prior commitments..... the basic logistics of lives that were built before you showed up

somehow, and i want to emphasize on somehow because god how dumb am i.. i keep being surprised by this even though i know it abstractly. the map says the terrain is passable and then there's a wall..... and then there's a category of exit reason that has the shape of principle but functions as cover

i think you can tell because it doesn't survive light questioning, not because the person is lying exactly, they're not.. really lying?? (i would rather call it convenience), but because the real reason is something they can't or won't carry out of the room. which is.. fair

so, then, they find something portable or something that sounds like information about you

i believe i have been on the receiving end of this recently and i keep turning it over not because i believe it but because i'm trying to understand what it was actually protecting

the part that stays with me is not the ending tbh, because well, endings are legible, they always are, but the part that stays is the beginning

the part where everything was just working, where the inferential distance was short where updates were clean and it felt like something real was being built in real time

i don't think i was wrong about that?

i think it was real and it ended anyway and those are both true simultaneously and i'm still figuring out how to hold that without one of them canceling the other out

i attach fully or i don't attach.

i've tried the other way and it just means i'm present in body and somewhere else in mind, which.... lol is worse for everyone

so i attach fully and sometimes that means i'm sitting with the wreckage of something that lasted 48 hours but somehow weighs more than things that lasted years?

so then it's safe to assume the weight isn't proportional to the duration but rather proportional to the signal quality. and the signal was very clean

i'll be fine. i'm...... always fine eventually.

i have work i care about and problems that are interesting and people who know me and love me

but right now on this particular morning my whole soul feels shattered and i think the rationalist thing, actually, is to just say that to not package it into something more manageable than it is

so i think the map was accurate. the territory just had constraints the map didn't show. and that's not a reason to make worse maps, it's a reason to keep making accurate maps and accept that sometimes you'll walk into walls anyway