+Eliezer Yudkowsky's fiction about the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_) aims to portray a smarter, saner, better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from dath ilan, where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge. (This likely inspired the trope of a [_medianworld_](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639), a setting where the average person is like the author along important dimensions.)[^medianworlds]
+
+[^medianworlds]: You might think that the thought experiment of imagining what someone's medianworld is like would only be interesting for people who are "weird" in our own world, thinking that our world is a medianworld for people who are normal in our world. But [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit-hypervolume probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's vastly more hypervolume in the hyperspace around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too. (Or they could, if the normies of our world were into worldbuilding.)
+
+Dath ilan's cognitive superiority to the real world is a recurring theme in modern Yudkowsky's work. In the fictional canon, it's a focus of the story ["But Hurting People is Wrong"](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), but even when not discussing fiction, Yudkowsky often makes sneering comments about "Earth" or "Earth people", apparently meant to disparage all actually existing humans for not living up to his fiction.
+
+One is led to believe that people who were deeply inspired by Yudkowsky's [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) (a series of influential posts about rationality published on the _Overcoming Bias_ blog largely between 2007 and 2009) should regard dath ilan as a rationalist utopia. After all, on the terms of the 2014 April Fools' Day joke, that's where the knowledge came from.
+
+And yet, for such a supposed rationalist utopia, it's remarkable the extent to which dath ilan's Society is portrayed as being organized around conspiracies to lie or otherwise cover up the truth—not just when forced to by dire matters of planetary security (as when keeping nuclear or AGI secrets), but seemingly for any somewhat plausible excuse whatsoever, including protecting the feelings of people who would be happier if kept ignorant. Evidently, there are _many_ truths existing which dath ilan fears and would wish unknown to the whole world.
+
+The contrast to the [sense of life](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sense_of_life.html) portrayed in the Sequences is striking. The Sequences emphasized that you—yes, you, the reader—had an interest in having an accurate world-model. On the subject of confronting unpleasant hypotheses, the Sequences [gave this advice](https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points) (bolding mine):
+
+> When you're doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and **deliberately think about whatever hurts the most**. Don't rehearse standard objections whose standard counters would make you feel better. Ask yourself what _smart_ people who disagree would say to your first reply, and your second reply. Whenever you catch yourself flinching away from an objection you fleetingly thought of, drag it out into the forefront of your mind. **Punch yourself in the solar plexus. Stick a knife in your heart, and wiggle to widen the hole.** In the face of the pain, rehearse only this:
+>
+> What is true is already so.
+> Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
+> Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
+> And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
+> People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
+
+Meanwhile, the dath ilan mythos depicts rationality itself as hazardous knowledge that people need to be protected from. Dath ilani Civilization is steered by a secretive order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). ["The universe is not so dark a place that everyone needs to become a Keeper to ensure the species's survival,"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1861879#reply-1861879) we're told. "Just dark enough that some people ought to." Ordinary dath ilani do receive rationality training, but it's implied to be deliberately crippled, featuring ["signposts around the first steps [towards becoming a Keeper], placed to warn dath ilani off starting down that path unless they mean it."](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1799590#reply-1799590) The maxim that "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is described as being ["remembered as much for how it's false, as for how it's true, because among the things that truths can destroy is people."](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1687922#reply-1687922)
+
+Clearly, this is not a culture that cares about ordinary people being well-informed. Apparently, they believe that owning up to it _does_ make it worse, that the untrue _is_ there to be lived (for non-Keepers).
+
+We might say that the algorithm that designed dath ilan's Civilization can be seen as systematically preferring deception. When I speak of an algorithm preferring deception, [what I mean is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) that given a social problem, candidate solutions that involve deceiving the populace seem to be higher in dath ilani Civilization's implicit search ordering than solutions that involve informing the populace. Solutions that work by means of telling the truth will be implemented only when solutions that work by means of deception are seen to fail.
+
+Crucially, these are [functionalist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) [criteria](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/) of "preference" and "deception". It's about how Civilization is structured in a way that systematically encourages divergences between popular belief and reality. I'm _not_ positing that Civilization's Keepers and Legislators and Chief Executive are laughing maniacally and telling each other out loud, "I personally love it when non-Keepers have false beliefs; we need to do as much of that as possible—as a [terminal value](https://www.readthesequences.com/Terminal-Values-And-Instrumental-Values)!"
+
+Rather, I'm positing that they don't care about non-Keepers having false beliefs. (They might care about [not technically lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PrXR66hQcaJXsgWsa/not-technically-lying), but that [turns out to be a weak constraint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).)
+
+If you're in the business of coming up with clever plans to solve problems, and you don't care about people having false beliefs, you mostly end up with clever plans that work by means of giving people false beliefs that trick them into doing what you want them to do (perhaps without technically lying).
+
+Why wouldn't you? There are more false maps than true maps. If you don't specifically care about [affirmatively telling the truth](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#Intent_to_inform), you mostly end up supplying false maps in order to control people's behavior by means of controling their information, because if you told them the truth, they wouldn't behave the way you want them to. Instrumental convergence is a harsh mistress.
+
+### Interlude: Methodology for Worldbuilding Criticism; Or, I Can't Argue With Authorial Fiat
+
+At this point, some readers might object that this kind of "dark" interpretation of a fictional universe oversteps the authority of the literary critic. One imagines that Yudkowsky doesn't particularly think of dath ilan as a world governed by deception. What grounds could I possibly have to argue that it is, given that he's the author and I'm not? Isn't that just making up my own fictional world and substituting it for the "real" dath ilan defined by Yudkowsky's authorial intent?
+
+But the craft of literature isn't a matter of merely conveying a fictional reality that existed fully formed in the author's imagination in advance of writing it down. The craft is about producing text that readers can use to build up their own model of the fictional world. The exacting labor of [converting vague ideas into definite text](http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html) is the difference between writing and daydreaming. We can accept [Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) as supplementary material where the text of a story is ambiguous or silent on a point of interest, but some kind of [Death of the Author](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor) stance is ultimately necessary for making sense of literature in a world in which telepathy doesn't exist and authors do occasionally die. The text is not a mere pointer to the "real" work inside the author's head; the text _is_ the work. That's the only way the technology of writing can function.
+
+Moreover, a Death of the Author stance seems particularly important for evaluating medianworlds. What makes the exercise of constructing a medianworld interesting is the challenge of envisioning the details of a _realistic_ Society that would result given a population with an alternative [distribution of cognitive repertoires](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/), but where the same generalizations of biology, sociology, and economics that govern our own world are presumed to hold. If the world portrayed by the text [doesn't seem to hold together](/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/) or has [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) that the author doesn't acknowledge, it's the solemn duty of literary critics to point that out to less discerning readers.
+
+In analogy, mathematicians, like authors, are also in the business of creating imaginary worlds, but mathematical objects, once defined, can be examined on their own terms. A mathematician encountering [a deeply unsatisfying theorem about their new definition](https://blog.plover.com/math/major-screwups-4.html) understands that there can be no recourse in protesting, "But that's not how _I_ imagined it working." That would be failing to engage with the real difficulties of mathematical research. If you wanted different behavior, you should have written a better definition!
+
+Similarly, an author who says, "In _my_ medianworld, fully automated luxury gay space communism with central planning just works, because the populace is so smart and nice, unlike _Earth people_, who are so mean and dumb that they have to use _markets_ to allocate scarce resources" is failing to engage with the real difficulties of the medianworld exercise. Readers would have a right to be skeptical.
+
+Authors, of course, have much more wiggle room than mathematicians to try to salvage their cherished ideas. Rather than being forced back to the drawing board by an unwanted implication, a fiction writer finds it all too easy to simply add another sentence denying it. But the author's total freedom to specify the text necessarily interacts with readers' attempts to imagine a self-consistent universe that "projects into" that text. Short of an explicitly omniscient narrator declaring "And then a miracle occured", discerning readers will tend to reach for interprerations of the text that make sense—even if making sense entails casting doubt on the narrator's editorial spin on the described events.
+
+Yudkowsky's 2009 story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good) is an incisive commentary on how unwary readers' moral compasses can be hijacked by author editorializing. If the story depicts our heroes wantonly slaughtering orcs, readers tend not to worry about the ethics of warfare: if the [designated hero](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesignatedHero) is doing it, it presumably isn't a problem. But living creatures that are depicted as speaking language, having organized armies with complex tools, _&c._ are presumably sapient for the same reasons humans are. It's fundamentally fair game for "The Sword of Good" to point that out—at least, short of the narrator _explicitly_ declaring, "Despite appearances, the orcs are unconscious [philosophical zombies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies); killing them has no moral significance." (But a story that did declare that would be highly unusual, and basically conceding the critic's point about stories that didn't!)
+
+All I'm doing in this essay is holding the dath ilan mythos to the same standard that "The Sword of Good" holds classic fantasy tropes to. Maybe it's good to run a global conspiracy to keep people ignorant in order to protect their emotional well-being, and maybe those orcs deserved to die. But given a text that _does_ literally describe massive coverups or killing of human-like creatures, it's fundamentally fair game for literary critics to point that out, and prompt readers to rethink whether they should accept "it's good because the good guys are doing it" or "it's good because it's dath ilan, which is not Earth" as an implicit excuse.
+
+### History Screening
+
+[TODO—
+
+ * Dath ilan placed its history behind a causal screen.
+ * This is a drastic measure: consider all the costs of deleting history
+ * The actual explanation turns out to be incredibly casual—"As long as they were doing that anyways": the assumption that the hoi polloi are better off not knowing where they came from isn't argued for at all
+ * Doylist interpretation makes sense (Keltham encountering a mideval monarchy is more interesting if he doesn't know what a Queen is), but if it's that kind of universe, what's with the comments about dath ilan being superior to Earth? Topia-for-storytelling shouldn't be hailed as a eutopia
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939
+> And so long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well also carry out the less important but still useful operation of putting all of Civilization's past behind the most complete possible causal screen. That part wasn't as important, but still legitimately helpful; and doing it would help to overshadow the other changes, and lead to less attention going to the more dangerous places.
+
+]
+
+### The Merrin Show
+
+For example, we are told of an Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy centered around a famous medical technician with a psychological need to feel unimportant, of whom ["everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1764946#reply-1764946) that her achievements are nothing special, which is deemed to be kindness to her. It's like a reverse [Emperor Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton) situation. (Norton was ordinary, but everyone around him colluded to make him think he was special; Merrin is special, but everyone around her colludes to make her think she's ordinary.)
+
+But _as_ a rationalist, I condemn the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy as _morally wrong_, for the same [reasons I condemn the Emperor Norton Conspiracy](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton). As [it was taught to me on _Overcoming Bias_ back in the 'aughts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality): what's true is already so. Denying it won't make it better. Acknowledging it won't make it worse. And _because_ it is true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, _because they are already doing so_.
+
+In ["For No Laid Course Prepare"](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263), the story about how Merrin came to the attention of dath ilan's bureau of Exception Handling, we see the thoughts of a Keeper, Rittaen, who talks to Merrin. We're told that the discipline of modeling people mechanistically rather than [through empathy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds) is restricted to Keepers to prevent the risk of ["turning into an exceptionally dangerous psychopath"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1862201#reply-1862201). Rittaen [uses his person-as-machine Sight](https://glowfic.com/replies/1862204#reply-1862204) to infer that Merrin was biologically predisposed to learn to be afraid of having too much status.
+
+Notwithstanding that Rittaen can be Watsonianly assumed to have detailed neuroscience skills that the author Doylistically doesn't know how to write, I am entirely unimpressed by the assertion that this idea is somehow _dangerous_, a secret that only Keepers can bear, rather than something _Merrin herself should be clued into_. "It's not [Rittaen's] place to meddle just because he knows Merrin better than Merrin does," we're told.