-### Keltham and S/M
-
-[TODO—
- * "They're better off not knowing about masochists that they can't have" disregards other ways of dealing with it: fantasy, porn, inventing in better sex robots, implications for eugenic policy ...
- * Difficulties of recursive censorship; do the people who can afford it have to stay in the closet for the benefit of people like Keltham? You could claim that they're so good at coordinating that they negotiated this, but how does the negotiation work when the people the deal allegedly benefits don't know about it?
- * Prediction markets imply that they believe in distributed agency, rather than being benevolent socialists
- * The text seems to suggest that "obligate sadism" is a real thing that already exists. It's not analogous to a drug that you can't miss if no one ever invents it.
- * Compare homosexuality. If it couldn't be practiced because super-AIDS (the Shawcross virus from Greg Egan's "The Moral Virologist") made it too dangerous, would we approve of censoring the concept?
- * Homosexuality has other correlates (you totally can clock gay men by their voices); it's useful to be able to point to the cluster.
- * Compare how we handle pedophilia in our world. We criminalize and stigmatize it. We don't _censor the concept_. Given that the tendency exists (it's not merely a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy), we do better by reasoning about it. Imagine an abused child or MAP person who had _no idea what was going on_.
-]
-
-### Kitchen Knives
-
-[TODO—
-
- * Word of God says, "there's also a deliberate semiconspiracy whereby movies make standard kitchen knives look much deadlier and easier to wield than they actually are, so that people who suddenly go nuts won't improvise much more dangerous weapons than that"
- * "too nuts to see past cached thoughts" presupposes a specific model of mental illness that I think is importantly backwards; while I was psychotic, my problem was the _opposite_ of not being able to "see past cached thoughts": on the contrary, I was having _lots_ of new ideas that I had never thought of before (<http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/cognitive-bayesian-therapy-i/>), and would never have thought of in my normal state—it's just that, after I got some sleep, I decided that all of my new ideas were clearly false, _which is why_ we call the psychotic state "crazy", and the normal state "sane".
- * You can't leak to the general public without leaking to crazy people. Where do you think they come from?
- * the mechanism by which the plan positively contributes to the goal, is deception: the plan works _because_ if people who want to commit violence have _less accurate beliefs_ about how to effectively commit violence, they will be less effective at their goal of committing violence.
- * If you were just trying to reduce murders, is this hte plan you would pick? Obviously not. (Think about how you would solve the problem "on Earth"!) Making it easier to commit people is a much more direct mechanism. The algorithm that promoted the movie-misportrayal to your attention is one that favors deception.
- * "It's targeted at crazy people" excuse suggests that it's OK to lie to people you've labeled as crazy. But Yudkowsky infamously says this about all Earthlings. What should we infer about whether we should trust him?
- * "i presume ilani who notice the trope also then deduce the obvious consequence of the trope"
- * If anything, "there's a deliberate conspiracy to mislead people about the difficulty of murder by stabbing" is the kind of thought that someone is _more likely_ to have as a paranoid delusion than otherwise! It's as if dath ilan is an exotic environment where mind-states that are tuned to hypothesize conspiracies everywhere are _adaptive_, in contrast to how on Earth, people who see conspiracies everywhere are wrong.
- * this is correlated insanity that loves clever deceptions, not actually being smart and doing a neutral policy search
- * A much larger cost is the frustration of ornery, nitpicky nerds who _want realistic fiction_, and don't want their favorite artform perverted to _manipulate extremely rare criminal-insanity cases_. Earth has Andy Weir fans and Greg Egan fans! When Andy Weir or Greg Egan sit down to write a novel or a screenplay, they are trying to paint a picture of _a world that makes sense_. They are not trying to manipulate rare social outcomes. Is that that kind of respect-for-reality just _not a thing_ in dath ilani art? Are they so uniformly, monomanically obsessed with trolling their perceived inferiors, that the voice of, "Knives Don't Actually Work That Way; Knives Don't Actually Work That Way _Even When Saying That Out Loud Increases Murders_; Knives Don't Actually Work That Way _Even When a Prediction Market Says That Saying That Out Loud Increases Murders_", has no power in the movie industry whatsoever?
-]
-
-### Conclusion
-
-
--------
-
-[OUTLINE—
- * the race of dath ilani humans are called the "eliezera" in Word of God canon
- presenting an eliezera racial supremacy narrative. (It's still a racial supremacy narrative even if he doesn't _use the verbatim phrase_ "racial supremacy.")
- * Bluntly, this is not a culture that gives a shit about people being well-informed. This is a culture that has explicitly
- * In more detail: the algorithm that designed dath ilani Civilization is one that systematically favors plans that involve deception, over than plans that involve being honest.
- * This is not a normative claim or a generic slur that dath ilani are "evil" or "bad"; it's a positve claim about systematic deception. If you keep seeing plans for which social-deception-value exceeds claimed-social-benefit value, you should infer that the plans are being generated by a process that "values" (is optimizing for) deception, whether it's a person or a conscious mind.
- * Watsonian rationale: with smarter people, knowledge actually is dangerous. I'm more interested in a Doylist interpretation, that this reflects authoritarian tendencies in later Yudkowsky's thought.
-
-Perhaps for lack of any world-saving research to do, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan .
-
-The bulk of the dath ilan Glowfic canon was an epic titled [_Planecrash_](https://www.glowfic.com/boards/215)[^planecrash-title] coauthored with Lintamande, in which Keltham, an unusually selfish teenage boy from dath ilan, apparently dies in a freak aviation accident, and [wakes up in the world of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai) Golarion, setting of the _Dungeons-&-Dragons_–alike _Pathfinder_ role-playing game. A [couple](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508) of [other](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263) Glowfic stories with different coauthors further flesh out the setting of dath ilan, which inspired a new worldbuilding trope,
-
-[^planecrash-title]: The title is a triple pun, referring to the airplane crash leading to Keltham's death in dath ilan, and how his resurrection in Golarion collides dath ilan with [the "planes" of existence of the _Pathfinder_ universe](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Great_Beyond), and Keltham's threat to destroy (crash) the _Pathfinder_ reality if mortals aren't given better afterlife conditions. (I use the word "threat" colloquially here; the work itself goes into some detail distinguishing between bargaining and decision-theoretic threats that should be defied.)
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-Everyone in dath ilan receives rationality training from childhood, but knowledge and training deemed psychologically hazardous to the general population is safeguarded by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). AGI research takes place in a secret underground city; some unspecified form of social engineering steers the _hoi polloi_ away from thinking about the possibility of AI.
-
-Something that annoyed me about the portrayal of dath ilan was their incredibly casual attitude towards hiding information for some alleged greater good, seemingly without considering that [there are benefits and not just costs to people knowing things](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/).
-
-You can, of course, make up a sensible [Watsonian](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) rationale for this. A world with much smarter people is more "volatile"; with more ways for criminals and terrorists to convert knowledge into danger, maybe you _need_ more censorship just to prevent Society from blowing itself up.
-
-I'm more preoccupied by a [Doylistic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) interpretation—that dath ilan's obsessive secret-Keeping reflects something deep about how the Yudkowsky of the current year relates to speech and information, in contrast to the Yudkowsky who wrote the Sequences. The Sequences had encouraged you—yes, _you_, the reader—to be as rational as possible. In contrast, the dath ilan mythos seems to portray advanced rationality as dangerous knowledge that people need to be protected from.
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-As another notable example of dath ilan hiding information for the alleged greater good, in Golarion, Keltham discovers that he's a sexual sadist, and deduces that Civilization has deliberately prevented him from realizing this, because there aren't enough corresponding masochists to go around in dath ilan. Having concepts for "sadism" and "masochism" as variations in human psychology would make sadists like Keltham sad about the desirable sexual experiences they'll never get to have, so Civilization arranges for them to _not be exposed to knowledge that would make them sad, because it would make them sad_ (!!).
-
-What happens, I asked, to the occasional dath ilani free speech activists, with their eloquent manifestos arguing that Civilization would be better off coordinating on maps that reflect the territory, rather than coordinating to be a Keeper-managed zoo? (They _had_ to exist: in a medianworld centered on Yudkowsky, there are going to be a few weirdos who are +2.5 standard deviations on "speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" and −2.5 standard deivations on love of clever plots; this seems less weird than negative utilitarians, who were [established to exist](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1789623#reply-1789623).) I _assumed_ they get dealt with somehow in the end (exiled from most cities? ... involuntarily cryopreserved?), but there had to be an interesting story about someone who starts out whistleblowing small lies (which Exception Handling allows; they think it's cute, and it's "priced in" to the game they're playing), and then just keeps _escalating and escalating and escalating_ until Governance decides to unperson him.