-Is it okay because the idea of humanoid aliens walking around in real life is sufficiently implausible that no one is "really fooled"? But this seems to be contradicted by the text, in which [the narrator 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 underground AGI alignment project). 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.
-
-Is it okay because dath ilan are the [designated good guys](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesignatedHero)? Well, [so was FTX](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sdjcH7KAxgB328RAb/ftx-ea-fellowships).
-
-[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
-]
-
-### 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?
-]