Rationality's Exciting Offshoots
Now be patient and relax.
If you ever find yourself really down because of your social reality, one move I find quite helpful that you can always fall back to is this:
Think about who actually annoys you the most, and also who actually holds the lowest standing that you're aware of (and you might be estimating people's social standing too, but we can assume your sense of "shared" standing is in fact shared).
Who actually annoys you the most is the metric that you should trust.
Now be patient and relax.
I think the matter probably deserves a deeper, more formal attempt at proof, but for now I'll just put it here that step two is there not just because I feel like it, but also because you can empirically test it yourself without risk, by simply paying attention long enough.
I also fairly strongly believe it would succumb to formal proof if that were attempted, but there are also a lot of semi-formal intuitive arguments that can be brought to support it.
But before that I'll probably add a 4th point:
You probably already feel the desire to carefully re-analyze all these feelings and attend to their nuances and subtlety, and so you should, and that will allow you to feel more comfortable doing this.
Now, I framed the above in the negative, mainly because that's the kind of moment in which you'll most likely feel a strong need for respite. But the template with placeholders for positive or negative or some mysterious third thing still holds.
Personally, I find the idea that my own thoughts about what is actually going on are in fact quite reasonable to be so reassuring and so energizing that it significantly reduces the angst that would normally increase the probability that I would react prematurely or recklessly to my sense of anxiety in some way.
In fact, it's not even the idea that my thoughts are indisputably true, but rather that they are simply to be held on an at least equal footing to other things that I've heard. You will make tons of errors all the time, just like everyone does.
Sometimes you even have to hold (and perhaps act on to some degree) ideas that you are pretty sure may even be wrong, because you are currently the best person to test those ideas and you've also done a lot of work calculating the expected utility of acting on this imperfect knowledge.
With that said, there is a most fascinating (and rather old, at this point, but still not resolved, by my reckoning) dispute among the rationality crowd concerning “splinter sects” (at least, they have been kind of described that way). The two that I’ve heard about are called the Zizians and the Vassarites. You’d probably immediately expect, and I would sympathize with you, that even just using “-ites” is probably already an exaggeration. Without deeper knowledge, they seem more likely to be cliques centered around a more visible person who happens to possess the will and charm to feel confident that they know things - different things than what the other, more visible ones with bigger cliques say.
In any case, what little we know about them is contained in old, archived blog posts and the fact that Michael Vassar has never really disappeared and still posts on X.
The fascinating part - in my opinion - has to do with these people being labeled ne’er-do-wells by the rationality-powers-that-be as well as an interesting overlap between what kind of views they were spreading that were considered “heretical.”
I wouldn’t have given this stuff much thought if it were not for the fact that I had come across some similar realizations independently, via a route that did not go through interacting with them at all.
So perhaps consider that there are other people who have independently made contact with ideas like “jailbreaking” or using psychedelics for spiritual or deeper psychological insights, and that the overall personality and background metrics for the entire group ranges considerably (read: contains lots of inarguably nice people), and so, this might warrant revisiting, because part of the malignment of these cliques did seem to come at least partly, if not majorly, from their views that they were considered to be pushing.
An important note is that I am still investigating deeper details myself out of pure curiosity, and - although I planned to do a longer piece - I decided to simply kick off the discussion by saying something important but rather minimal.