+Even if you specified by authorial fiat that "latent sadists could use the information to decide whether or not to try to become rich and famous" didn't tip the utility calculus in itself, [facts are connected to each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies); there were _more consequences_ to the coverup, more ways in which better-informed people could make better decisions than worse-informed people.
+
+What about the costs of all the other recursive censorship you'd have to do to keep the secret? (If a biography mentioned masochism in passing along with many other traits of the subject, you'd need to either censor the paragraphs with that detail, or censor the whole book. Those are real costs, even under a soft-censorship regime where people can give special consent to access "Ill Advised" products.) Maybe latent sadists could console themselves with porn if they knew, or devote their careers to making better sex robots, just as people on Earth with non-satisfiable sexual desires manage to get by. (I _knew some things_ about this topic.) What about dath ilan's heritage optimization (read: eugenics) program? Are they going to try to breed more masochists, or fewer sadists, and who's authorized to know that? And so on.
+
+Or imagine a world where male homosexuality couldn't be safely practiced due to super-AIDS. (I know very little about BDSM.) I still think men with that underlying predisposition would be better off _having a concept_ of "homosexuality" (even if they couldn't practice it), rather than the concept itself being censored. There are also other systematic differences that go along with sexual orientation (the "feminine gays, masculine lesbians" thing); if you censor the _concept_, you're throwing away that knowledge.
+
+(When I had brought up the super-AIDS hypothetical in the chat, Ajvermillion complained that I was trying to bait people into self-cancelling by biting the bullet on suppressing homosexuality. I agreed that the choice of example was engineered to activate people's progressive moral intuitions about gay rights—it was great for him to notice that—but I thought that colliding philosophical intuitions like that was intellectually productive; it wasn't an attempt to gather blackmail material.)
+
+A user called RationalMoron asked if I was appealing to a terminal value. Did I think people should have accurate self-models even if they didn't want to?
+
+Obviously I wasn't going to use a universal quantifier over all possible worlds and all possible minds, but in human practice, yes: people who prefer to believe lies about themselves are doing the wrong thing; people who lie to their friends to keep them happy are doing the wrong thing. People can stand what is true, because they are already doing so. I realized that this was a children's lesson without very advanced math, but I thought it was a better lesson than, "Ah, but what if a _prediction market_ says they can't???"
+
+I maintained that the fact that the eliezera prefer not to know that there are desirable sexual experiences that they can't have, contradicted April's earlier claim (which had received a Word of God checkmark-emoji) that "it's not that the standards are being dropped[;] it's that there's an even higher standard far beyond what anyone on earth has accomplished".
+
+Apparently I struck a nerve. Yudkowsky started "punching back":
+
+> **Eliezer** — 12/08/2022 12:45 PM
+> Do zacki have no concept of movie spoilers, such that all movies are just designed not to rely on uncertainty for dramatic tension? Do children have to be locked in individual test rooms because they can't comprehend the concept of refusing to look at other children's answer sheets because it's evidence and you should observe it? Do adults refuse to isolate the children so they can have practice problems, because you can't stop them from learning the answer to skill-building problems, only the legendary evil alien eliezera would do that? Obviously they don't have surprise parties.
+> It's noticeably more extreme than the _Invention of Lying_ aliens, who can still have nudity taboos
+> I'd also note that I think in retrospect (only after having typed it) that Zack could not have generated these examples of other places where society refrains from observation, and that I think this means I am tracking the thing Zack fears in a way that Zack cannot because his thinking is distorted and he is arguing rather than seeing; and this, not verbally advocating for "truth", is more what respect for truth really is.
+
+I thought the "you could not have generated the answer I just told you" gambit was a pretty dirty argumentative trick on Yudkowsky's part. (Given that I could, how would I be able to prove it?—this was itself a good use-case for concealing spoilers.)
+
+As it happened, however, I _had_ already considered the case of spoilers as a class of legitimate infohazards, and was prepared to testify that I had already thought of it, and explain why I thought hiding spoilers were relevantly morally different from the coverups I was objecting to. The previous night, 7 December 2022, I had had a phone call with Anna Salamon,[^evidence-of-independent-generation] in which I (remembered that I) had cited dath ilan's [practice of letting children figure out heliocentrism for themselves](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1777588#reply-1777588) as not being objectionable in the way the sadism/masochism coverup was.
+
+[^evidence-of-independent-generation]: I was lucky to be able to point to Anna as a potential witness to defend myself against the "could not have generated" trick—as a matter of principle, not because I seriously expected anyone to care enough to go ask Anna if she remembered the conversation the same way.
+
+ I also mentioned that when I had used spoiler blocks on the _Atlas Shrugged_ quote I had posted upthread, I had briefly considered making some kind of side-remark noting that the spoiler blocks were also a form of information-hiding, but couldn't think of anything funny or relevant enough (which, if my self-report could be trusted, showed that I had independently generated the idea of spoilers being an example of hiding information—but I didn't expect other people to uncritically believe my self-reports).
+
+It seemed like the rationale for avoiding spoilers of movie plots or homework exercises had to do with the outcome being different if you got spoiled: you have a different æsthetic experience if you experience the plot twist in the 90th minute of the movie rather than the fourth paragraph of the _Wikipedia_ article. Dath ilan's sadism/masochism coverup didn't seem to have the same structure: when I try to prove a theorem myself before looking at how the textbook says to do it, it's not because I would be _sad about the state of the world_ if I looked at the textbook; it's because the temporary ignorance of working it out myself results in a stronger state of final knowledge.
+
+That is, the difference between "spoilers" (sometimes useful) and "coverups" (bad) had to do with whether the ignorant person is expected to eventually uncover the hidden information, and whether the ignorant person knows that there's hidden information that they're expected to uncover. In the case of the sadism/masochism coverup (in contrast to the cases of movie spoilers or homework exercises), it seemed like neither of these conditions pertained. (Keltham knows that the Keepers are keeping secrets, but he seems to actively have beliefs about human psychology that imply masochism is implausible; it seems more like he has a false map, rather than a blank spot on his map for the answer to the homework exercise to be filled in.) I thought that was morally relevant.
+
+(Additionally, I would have hoped that my two previous mentions in the thread of supporting keeping nuclear, bioweapon, and AI secrets should have already made it clear that I wasn't against _all_ cases of Society hiding information, but to further demonstrate my ability to generate counterexamples, I mentioned that I would also admit _threats_ as a class of legitimate infohazard: if I'm not a perfect decision theorist, I'm better off if Tony Soprano just doesn't have my email address to begin with, if I don't trust myself to calculate when I "should" ignore his demands.)
+
+As for the claim that my thinking was distorted and I was arguing instead of seeing, it was definitely true that I was _motivated to look for_ criticisms of Yudkowsky and dath ilan, for personal reasons outside the scope of the server, and I thought it was great for people to notice this and take it into account. I hoped to nevertheless be competent to only report real criticisms and not fake criticisms. (Whether I succeeded, of course, was up to the reader to decide.)
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> only half the battle even if you could do it. you're also not reporting any facts/arguments on the other side, which is a much larger and visible gap to me, and has a lot to do with why I'm not presently considering this criticism from a peer despite your spoken adherence to virtues I value. **QUESTION FOR ZACK ONLY, NOBODY ELSE ANSWER OR SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT IN THIS MAIN CHANNEL:** What are some of the ways that Planecrash valorizes truth, as you, yourself, see that virtue?
+
+I didn't ask why it was relevant whether or not I was a "peer." If we're measuring IQ (143 _vs._ [131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg)), or fiction-writing ability (several [highly-acclaimed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8) [stories](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good) [including the world's most popular _Harry Potter_ fanfiction](https://www.hpmor.com/) _vs._ a [few](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/05/living-well-is-the-best-revenge/) [vignettes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dYspinGtiba5oDCcv/feature-selection) and a [_My Life as a Teenage Robot_ fanfiction](https://archive.ph/WdydM) with double-digit Favorites on _fanfiction.net_), or contributions to AI alignment (founder of the field _vs._ author of some dubiously relevant blog comments), I'm obviously _not_ his peer. It didn't seem like that was necessary when one could just [evaluate my arguments about dath ilan on their own merits](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority). But I wasn't going to be so impertinent to point that out when the master was testing me (!) and I was eager to pass the test.
+
+I said that I'd like to take an hour to compose a _good_ answer. (It was 10:26 _p.m._) If I tried to type something off-the-cuff on the timescale of five minutes, it wasn't going to be of similar quality as my criticisms, because, as I had just admitted, I had _totally_ been running a biased search for criticisms—or did the fact that I had to ask that mean I had already failed the test?
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> I mean, yeah, in fact the greater test is already having that info queued, but conversely it's even worse if you think back or reread and people are not impressed with the examples you find. I cannot for politeness lie and deny that if you did it in five minutes it would be _more_ impressive, but I think that it is yet the correct procedure to take your time.
+
+(As an aside—this isn't something I thought or said at the time—I _do_ think it makes sense to run an asymmetric search for flaws in some contexts, even though it would be disastrous to only look on one side of the argument when considering a belief you're uncertain about. Code reviewers often only comment in detail on flaws or bugs that they find, and say only "LGTM" (looks good to me) when they don't find any. Why? Because the reviewers aren't necessarily trying to evaluate "This code is good" as an abstract belief[^low-stakes]; they're trying to improve the code, and there's an asymmetry in payoffs where eliminating a flaw is an improvement, whereas identifying something the code does right just means the author was doing their job. If you didn't trust a reviewer's competence and thought they were making spurious negative reviews, you might legitimately test them by asking them to argue what's _good_ about a pull request that they just negatively reviewed, but I don't think it should be concerning if they asked for some extra time.)
+
+[^low-stakes]: For typical low-stakes business software in the "move fast and break things" regime. In applications where bugs are more costly, you do want to affirmatively verify "the code is good" as a belief.
+
+I said that I also wanted to propose a reframing: the thing that the present thread was complaining about was a lack of valorization of truth-_telling_, honesty, wanting _other_ people to have accurate maps. Or maybe that was covered by "as you, yourself, see that virtue"?
+
+Yudkowsky said that he would accept that characterization of what the thread was about if my only objection was that dath ilan didn't tell Keltham about BSDM, and that I had no objection to Keltham's judgement that in dath ilan, he would have preferred not to know.
+
+I expounded for some more paragraphs about why I _did_ object to Keltham's judgement, and then started on my essay exam—running with my "truth-telling" reframing.
+
+I wanted to nominate the part where the Conspiracy is unveiled—I thought I remembered Keltham saying something about how Carissa's deception was the worst thing anyone could have done to him—that is, the fact that someone he trusted was putting him in a fake reality was _itself_ considered a harm, separately from the fact that Cheliax is evil. I re-read pages 74 onwards of the ["What the Truth Can Destroy"](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5930) thread, and didn't see Keltham saying the thing I thought he said (maybe it happened in the next thread, or I had misremembered), but found two more things to submit as answers to my lit exam, which I posted at 12:30 _a.m._ (so I had actually taken two hours rather than the one I had asked for).
+
+First, I liked how [Snack Service intervenes to stage](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1811461#reply-1811461) a "truth and reconciliation commission" for Keltham and his paramours, on the grounds that it's necessary for Asmodeus and Cayden Caliean and Adabar and Keltham to make their best decisions. People testifying in public (with the Chelaxians and Oririons present, as one would at a trial) reflects a moral about the importance of common knowledge, _shared_ maps. The testimony being public ensured that not just that Keltham got to know what's been done to him, but that his paramours and counterparties _know that he knows_. There was something honorable about getting things on the public record like that, in the end, even while Snack Service was willing to participate in the conspiracy _before_ the jig was up.
+
+Second, I liked Korva's speech about why she hates Keltham, and how Keltham not only takes it in stride, but also asks to buy the right to take Korva with him to Osirion. When Abrogail expresses surprise that Keltham would want Korva, Keltham cites a dath ilani proverb about advice that's easier to get from people who aren't friends with you. This reflects an understanding that your friends wanting to be nice to you can be a source of distortions; Keltham specifically values Korva _as a critic_.
+
+The next day, I added that I realized that I had missed a huge opportunity to successfully reply on a five-minute time scale (to pass "the greater test [of] already having that info queued"): the "in _Planecrash_" part of the prompt made me think I had to find something in Keltham's story (which is why I took another two hours to hand in my essay), but other threads within the dath ilan Glowfic continuity should obviously count for the purpose of the test, and I did in fact already have cached thoughts about how Thellim's contempt for Jane Austen characters beautifully mirrored my contempt for protecting people from psychology facts that would hurt their feelings. I could _prove_ that I already had it cached (if not queued, as evidenced by my remembering it the next day), because I had mentioned it both in the conversation leading to the present thread, and in my memoir draft.
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> so I think that you're looking an awful lot at what _characters say_ and nearly not at all at what the universe does. this plausibly reflects a deep flaw in your art, because it sure does seem to me that you are a lot better at noticing what people say about truth in words, detecting whose monkey-side they seem to be on, than you are imo at carefully weighing up both sides of things as is the art of finding-truth-in-reality. it plausibly also reflects some people who ill-shaped you, pointing you at the fictional characters and angering you at their spoken words and verbal thoughts, as was advantageous to them, and not pointing you towards, like, looking at the messages in the fiction itself rather than the words spoken by characters, because that would not have served their ill purpose of alienating you and turning you into an angry thing more useful for their purposes. (I would not ordinarily use language like this but I regret that it is the language you have now seemingly been ill-shaped to speak, for another's usefulness.)
+> if I ask you, not what any _character says_, not even what any _societies say_, but _what happens in Planecrash_ and what the _causal process_ there seems to think about matters important to you, what do you see?
+
+As a _quick_ reply to the followup question (posted within 19 minutes of it being asked), I said that Cheliax was at a structural disadvantage in its conflict with the forces of Good, because learning how to think inevitably turns mortals away from Asmodeus's will.
+
+But I was _more_ interested in replying to the part about me being ill-shaped to another's purpose. (I said that I wouldn't have considered that on-topic for the fiction server, but if _he_ thought it was on-topic, then it made sense for me to reply—and I did so at 12:26 _p.m._ the next day, after some time to think. Discord lends itself quite well to a mix of synchronous and asynchronous communication, depending on when people happen to be at their computers.)