-[TODO—
- * The Merrin Show
- * Merrin: a reverse Emperor Norton case
- * Overcoming Bias readers in 2008 would have found this offensive, not cute; Merrin is living a lie, and everyone is in on it.
- * Rittaen's claim that knowledge of psychology turns you into a psychopath seems dubious.
- * Exception Handling's Sparashki ruse is still kicking up epistemic dust even if few take it literally
- * "Everybody knows"
- * It has to bottom out in someone taking it literally
- * zero-calorie superstimulus theory
-]
+Is it okay because the idea of humanoid aliens walking around in real life is sufficiently implausible that no one is "really fooled"?
+
+The narrator soon tells us that [Exception Handling deliberately does things that wouldn't otherwise make sense in order to make it harder to understand what's actually going on in Civilization](https://glowfic.com/replies/1860955#reply-1860955) (presumably, in order to protect the secret AGI alignment project). But this is in tension with the potential rationale that no one is really being fooled. Even if very few dath ilani take the "Sparashki are real" ruse literally, it's still portrayed as successfully "kicking up epistemic dust": if it were really the case that no one was being fooled about anything, then Exception Handling wouldn't have a strategic reason to do it.
+
+Later in the story, 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, the assertion that _knowing too much about psychology_ is dangerous says something about dath ilan. The explanation of Merrin's psychology that we do see isn't dangerous. (I read it, and I haven't become a psychopath.) I think a culture that shared the values of _Overcoming Bias_ readers in 2008 would consider that knowledge something _Merrin herself should be clued into_. Not dath ilan, though. "It's not [Rittaen's] place to meddle just because he knows Merrin better than Merrin does," we're told. But apparently it _is_ the place of everyone else who can see Merrin's shyness to form the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, to keep her from knowing herself?
+
+That's not an accusation of hypocrisy. The dath ilani are being consistent. In a Society that prizes freedom-from-infohazards over freedom-of-speech, it makes sense that telling people things would be meddling, but colluding to not tell them, isn't.