Clarity didn't work, trying mysterianism (2012)

Most of the useful reading pinned the story to agency and identity, not to happiness in the shallow sense. The earring is “good” in the sense that it wins at local decision guidance. The horror is that a life can look excellent from the outside while the chooser inside has been thinned out into something more like an obedient mechanism. Several people mapped that directly onto AI assistants and brain-computer fantasies. The worry is not one bad recommendation. It is long-term dependency. If the tool keeps making the next move for you, optionality and self-authorship erode even if each individual step feels rational. A second thread pushed on whether the story is actually too fuzzy to carry that lesson cleanly. The title itself admits it was written as mysterian fiction rather than argument, and several readers said that helped it travel as a meme while also making it easy to misread. A follow-up post by the author was cited as clarifying that the target was a more abstract fear from rationalist “fun theory”: if doing the right thing becomes a solved computation, there may be no room left for the human act of choosing at all. That made some readers like the story more as a vivid label for a concern than as a rigorous case for it. The strongest disagreement came from people who rejected the premise that preserving unguided agency is automatically worth more than better decisions. They pointed out that modern life already depends on external systems that outperform unaided intuition, from math and science to public-health rules, and that “think for yourself” can be a romantic slogan that collapses in the face of real-world error. That did not overturn the main reading. It sharpened it. The practical line is not “never take advice.” It is that advice is different from surrendering the habit of deciding, because the latter can leave you with success metrics intact and personhood hollowed out.