Having Pat in your head doesn’t feel like a separately identifyable agent process that I can just discard, it just feels like typical hyper-self-awareness where you think of these status trespassers Eliezer-2010 as cornball or cringey like a Kanye West figure. Status regulation is an important part of my personality it makes me seem more authentic and likeable to others and it’s a trait I find attractive in others.
I would also add that a big part of the Pat problem is motivation/energy. It’s more comfortable to believe the Pat narrative, it requires less work. I too find his talk of the “outside view” tedious though and I don’t particularly believe him to be right. Hopefully by identifying him, something can be done.
Great post once again, when I was younger I was a hedgehog, when I got older and started reading the sequences I strove for complete foxhood and have been using exactly some of these “modest epistemology” arguments although a much weaker version that I couldn’t really formalize. This has been very helpful in clarifying things to myself and seeing the weaknesses of the latter approach. One criticism, why bring up Republicans, I’m not even a Republican and I sort of recoiled at that part.