+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"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_(South_Africa)) 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.)
+
+I said that he seemed _really_ stuck on this hypothesis that it was Michael Vassar's fault that I'd been shaped into an alienated and angry thing.
+
+To be clear, I totally agreed that I had been shaped into an alienated and an alienated and angry thing. Obviously. But speaking of people "look[ing] inside themselves and correctly see[ing] that this is not how they work" (as Yudkowsky had said earlier), I thought he was getting the causality all wrong.
+
+It seemed to _me_ that the reason I had become an alienated and angry thing is because I had been shaped by [making an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) since 2016 to respond to a class of things that included Yudkowsky "mak[ing] up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false"—again referencing Oliver Habryka's comment on "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal."
+
+That's the context in which it wasn't surprising that my Art had involved some amount of specialization in "detecting whose monkey-side they seem to be on." In a world where monkeys are trying to cover up otherwise-obvious truths, successfully blowing the whistle on them involves being sensitive to their monkey games; figuring out the truth they're trying to cover up is the easy part. The whistleblowing-skill of of promoting otherwise-obvious things to _common_ knowledge in opposition to a Power trying to prevent common knowledge, is different from the science-skill of figuring out organically-nonobvious things from scratch. It _makes sense_ for Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Kolmogorov—or for that matter, John Galt and Robert Stadler—to have developed different crystalized skills.
+
+(Indeed, it even makes sense for Kolmogorov and Stadler to _not_ develop some skills, because the skills would show up under Detect Thoughts.)
+
+If it was all Michael's fault for "extensively meta-gas[lighting me] into believing that everyone generally and [him] personally [were] engaging in some kind of weird out-in-the-open gaslighting", I asked, echoing Yudkowsky's language from earlier (with appropriate quotation marks and brackets),[^gaslighting] then _how come Oli could see it, too?_
+
+[^gaslighting]: In particular, Yudkowsky was the one who introduced the word _gaslighting_ into the conversation; I hadn't previously used the word myself.
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> I think if you asked Oli about the state of reality with respect to this whole affair, he'd have a very different take from your take, _if you're still able to hear differences instead of only those similarities you demand._
+
+That sounded like an easy enough experimental test! I wrote Habryka an email explaining the context, and asking him what "very different take" he might have, if any. (I resisted the temptation to start a [Manifold market](https://manifold.markets/) first.) As I mentioned in the email, I didn't expect to have a very different take from him _about the state of reality_. ("Zack is (still?!) very upset about this, but Oli mostly doesn't care" is a values-difference, not a disagreement about the state of reality.) I didn't think I disagreed with _Yudkowsky_ much about the state of reality! (In his own account, he thought it was "sometimes personally prudent [...] to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about", and I believed him; I was just unhappy about some of the side-effects of his _prudence_.)
+
+Oliver didn't reply. (I might have guessed the wrong email address, out of the two I had on file for him?) I don't blame him; it might have been timelessly ungrateful of me to ask. (The reason people are reluctant to make on-the-record statements in politically charged contexts is because they're afraid the statements will be _used_ to drag them into more political fights later. He had already done me a huge favor by being brave enough to state the obvious in March; I had no right to demand anything more of him.)
+
+Regarding my quick reply about Cheliax's structural disadvantage, Yudkowsky said it was "okay as one element", but complained that the characters had already observed it out loud, and that I "didn't name any concrete sequence of events that bore it out or falsified it." He continued:
+
+> I think you could find a lot more than this if your brain were still able to see incongruent facts as well as only congruent facts. what does the underlying reality of Planecrash think about your Most Important Issues? what is shown, but maybe never even told at all? you gave the reply of somebody who can _only_ see social realities and _only_ what people say and not what _just happens, at all_, even inside a story, you didn't say _a thing that happened._
+
+At this point, I was a bit suspicious that _any_ answer that wasn't exactly whatever he was thinking of would be dismissed as too social or too inferentially close to something one of the characters had said. What did it mean for the _universe_ to say something about valorizing truth?
+
+The original prompt ("What are some of the ways _Planecrash_ valorizes truth") had put me into 11th-grade English class mode; the revision "if I ask you, not what any _character_ says [...]" made me think the 11th-grade English teacher expected a different answer. Now the revised–revised prompt "what does the underlying reality of _Planecrash_ think about your Most Important Issues?", with the previous rebukes in my context window, was making me think I should be reaching for an act of philosophical [Original Seeing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing), rather than trying to be a diligent schoolstudent playing the 11th-grade English class game. I thought about it ... and I _saw something_.
+
+_Thesis_: the universe of _Planecrash_ is saying that virtue ethics—including, as a special case, my virtue ethics about it being good to tell the truth and reveal information—are somewhat unnatural.
+
+In the story, the god Adabar values trading fairly, even with those who can't verify that their partners are keeping up their end of the deal,[^trade-verification] and also wants to promote fair trading _elsewhere_ in Reality (as contrasted to just being fair Himself).
+
+[^trade-verification]: Significantly, this is somewhat "unnatural" behavior according to Yudkowsky's view of decision theory. Ideal agents are expected to cooperate with agents whose cooperation is _conditional_ on their own cooperation, not simply those that cooperate with them: you "should" defect against a rock with the word "COOPERATE" painted on it, and you "shouldn't" trade for what you could just as easily steal. See §6 of ["Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma: Program Equilibrium via Provability Logic"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5577).
+
+Adabar is kind of a weirdo. He's not a vanishly rare freak (whose specification would require lots of uncompressible information); there _is_ a basin of attraction in the space of pre-gods, where creatures who develop a computationally efficient "fairness" heuristic in their ancestral environment and reify that into their utilityfunction when they ascend to divinity, but it's not a _huge_ basin of attraction; most gods aren't like Adabar.
+
+It's the same thing with honesty. Generic consequentialists have no reason to "tell the truth" to agents with different utility functions when they're not under compact and being compensated for the service. Why _would_ you emit signals that other agents can interpret as a map that reflects the territory? [You can't get more paperclips that way!](https://arbital.com/p/not_more_paperclips/)
+
+I had previously written about this in ["Commucation Requires Common Interests or Differential Signal Costs"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybG3WWLdxeTTL3Gpd/communication-requires-common-interests-or-differential); you needed some common interests in order for flexible, "digital" language to exist at all. ("Digital" language being that for which the relationship between signals and meaning can be arbitrary, in contrast to costly signaling, where me expending resources at least tell you that I could afford those resources.)
+
+It's _possible_ for imperfectly deceptive social organisms to develop a taste for "honesty" as a computationally efficient heuristic for navigating to Pareto improvements in the ancestral environment, which _might_ get reified into the utilityfunction as they ascend—but that's an Adabar-class weird outcome, not the default outcome.
+
+So—insofar as my Most Important Issues revolved around an obsession with motivational transparency, wanting to live in a world that wasn't lying to me, wanting to _reveal information_ as an end in itself, unilaterally rather than only as part of a coordinated negotiation scheme, without necessarily being _paid_ for it, but just because it is _right_ ...
+
+It seems like my answer to the question of, "What does the underlying causal process of _Planecrash_ think about your Most Important Issues; what are some the ways that _Planecrash_ valorizes truth-telling as you, yourself, see that virtue?" is, "It doesn't" (!). Truth-telling is a virtue ethic, and _Planecrash_ depicts a universe ruled by consequentialist gods who only implement virtue ethics insofar as that made it into their utilityfunction.
+
+I realized, of course, that this certainly wasn't the answer Yudkowsky was looking for. But it seemed like a _better_ answer than me trying to play the schoolstudent. He asked what I saw when I looked at what the fictional universe was saying about my problems, and I looked, and _I saw something_. (Something philosophically substantive, definitely not just a social reality.) It seemed more honest to just report that, rather than keep trying to [guess the teacher's password](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password).
+
+[("Hermione knew the correct answer wouldn't impress Professor Quirrell, but it was the correct answer, so she said it.")](https://hpmor.com/chapter/70)
+
+So, after sleeping on it first, I posted the explanation of what I saw to the channel (including the parts about how the original prompts steered me, and that I realized that this wasn't the answer he was looking for).
+
+The outcome was—silence. No response from Yudkowsky in several days. Maybe I shouldn't have ran with my Original Seeing answer? I showed the transcripts to a friend, who compared my answer about consequentialist gods to including a list of your country's war crimes in a high school essay assignment about patriotism; I had done a terrible job of emitting symbols that made me a good monkey, and a mediocre-at-best job of flipping the table (rejecting Yudkowsky's "pass my test before I recognize your criticism as legitimate" game) and picking a fight instead.
+
+("Don't look at me," he added, "I would've flipped the table at the beginning.")
+
+I tried to explain that my third answer wasn't _just_ doubling down on my previous thesis: "my virtue ethics run against the grain of the hidden Bayesian structure of reality" wasn't an argument _in favor of_ my virtue ethics. My friend wasn't buying it; I still hadn't been fulfilling the original prompt.
+
+He had me there. I had no more excuses after that: I had apparently failed the test. I was feeling pretty glum about this, and lamented my poor performance in the `#drama` channel of another Discord server (that Yudkowsky was also a member of). I had thought I was doing okay—I definitely _didn't_ say, "That's impossible because Big Yud and Linta are lying liars who hate Truth", and there were reasons why my Original Seeing answer made sense _to me_ as a thing to say, but _that wasn't what I was being tested on_. It _genuinely_ looked bad in context. I had failed in [my ambition to know how it looks](/2022/context-is-for-queens/#knowing-how-that-looks).
+
+I think Yudkowsky saw the #drama messages in the other server (he left an emoji-reaction in the relevant timespan of messages) and took pity on me. (Negative feedback from a teacher is kinder than the teacher not even deigning to grade your assignment at all.)
+
+As examples of the kind of thing he was looking for, he cited Keltham letting Carissa wait before telling him disturbing things about Golarion, or talking himself out of taking another Owl's Wisdom or putting on a cognitive-enhancement headband on account of his squeamishness about mind-altering interventions. If Keltham had been more proactive about seeking knowledge, he could have uncovered the Conspiracy earlier; the universe punished his cowardice. Or consider Peranza, who awakens to seeing the evil of Asmodeanism—but manages to get out a critical warning to the Good god Iomedae, and ends up being rescued from punishment in Hell; the universe rewarded her bravery. This is a big theme, Yudkowsky said; I shouldn't have had to look in weird side corners to dredge up something exotic to say; my initial answers were "really small on the scale of a story whose central conflict is that Cheliax is hiding the truth from Keltham and Asmodeus is hiding the truth from Cheliax."
+
+In characteristically condescending fashion, he said that he was worried about "the possibility that earthlings are only capable of hearing what the characters said to each other, because to ask what the universe thinks is some kind of direction of thought that Twitter has trained out of them", and hoped that readers don't "come away with the wordless sense of the universe being a place that rewards you for not looking places."
+
+Regarding the intended exam answers about the universe's treatment of Keltham and Peranza—fair enough; I'll acknowledge that I didn't do great on the literary exam as assigned. Other participants in the chatroom, and readers of this memoir, _should_ correspondingly update their beliefs about my competence. When I tried to do Original Seeing about what the universe of _Planecrash_ was saying, it came out in a particular _shape_ (characteristic of my recent preoccupations), and a more powerful mind would be able to do different shapes; I could protest that the prompts didn't do enough to steer me away from that (the use of the second person in "as you, yourself, see that virtue" and "your Most Important Issues" keeping me anchored on my own concerns), but that would be too much excuse-making for a mediocre exam performance.
+
+(Peranza's pre-awakening username[^glowfic-username] was 'not-looking-there'! My 11th-grade English class algorithm probably would have gotten there if I had just given it more compute, instead of running with my philosophy insight!)
+
+[^glowfic-username]: "Glowfic" stories were originally hosted on DreamWidth (a LiveJournal clone), with each character's dialogue and actions being posted from "their own" account (and therefore their own username, typically distinct from the character's own name). When the bespoke _glowfic.com_ website launched, the convention of characters having usernames was retained.
+
+On the other hand, however poorly my exam performance reflected on other people's estimates of my competence and the question of whether Yudkowsky should consider my criticisms of dath ilan as coming from a "peer", it ... still doesn't invalidate my criticisms of dath ilan, which can, still, be evaluated on their own merits.
+
+(Was I a fool to so submissively agree to be tested, given that Yudkowsky could predictably find some grounds to dismiss me as a mere earthling? Should I have tried to negotiate—I'm happy to take your test, but only if _you_ reply to my argument that spoiler protections are morally different from coverups?)
+
+The universe of _Planecrash_ (like [almost all](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_all) universes) doesn't itself reward you for not looking places. But dath ilan as a Society _absolutely_ punishes you for looking places _if you expect to tell anyone about it_.[^punishment]
+
+[^punishment]: I mean "punish" in a colloquial sense, just that there are things most dath ilani get to do, like living in most cities, that my analogue in dath ilan wouldn't be allowed to do on account of his tendency to shout truths from street corners. I understand that there's a decision-theoretic sense in which this doesn't count as a "punishment", because dath ilan is only trying to advance its _own_ interests in preventing the spread of what it considers infohazards; the "punishment" makes sense for them whether or not I change my policy in response to it.
+
+Yudkowsky added that he wished he had paid more attention to my re-framing, where "[he] said 'valorizes truth' and [I] repeated back 'valorizes truth-telling'". I pointed out that I had marked that as a proposed revision; I thought I was proposing a change rather than repeating. But maybe you don't get to propose changes when someone is testing you. He then gave a nice speech (in the style of C. S. Lewis's _The Screwtape Letters_) about the dangers of focusing on truth-telling:
+
+> so if you have an awareness of you in how people can be broken, where it's possible to redirect them into infinite loops, how they can be induced to press the anger button over and over, then you can perhaps see how somebody setting out to break Zack Davis would get him to focus on truth-telling rather than truth-seeking. for the Way of searching out truth within yourself is one of calm, balance, questioning not 'what society tells you' but also your own thoughts, and also sometimes answering those questions and moving on to different ones; the operation, not of firmly rooting your feet, nor finding somewhere to hover forever uncertainly in place and immovable in that proud ignorance, but of picking up your feet and putting them back down, over and over, the uncomfortable operation of not staying in the same mental place, which most people find some way or another to reject. it valorizes calm, and balance, and these are not useful states of mind to people who would like you frantically doing something useful to them.
+> when you get somebody to turn outward and away from Reality and towards their fellow monkeys and focus on truth-telling, then, their fellow monkeys being imperfect, there will always be something in which to explode into fury; so this is a useful state of mind to inculcate in somebody, lending itself to constant outrage at a world where somebody has once said a thing that if you look at it hard could be misleading or teach the wrong lesson, it misled you, how dare they!
+> so by all means if you would like to destroy a rationalist, teach them anger and focus it on others' imperfect conformance to the principles they were once taught to hold dear to themselves
+
+... and you know, that's a fair criticism of me. It _is_ unhealthy to focus on other people's errors rather than perfecting oneself! I'm optimistic about rectifying this after I've gotten this Whole Dumb Story out of my system—to retire from this distasteful chore of criticizing Yudkowsky and "the community", and just go directly do the thing that I thought "the community" was for, in the time we have left.
+
+But, as I pointed out, it was significant that the particular problem to which my Art had been shaped (in some ways) and misshaped (in others) wasn't just a matter of people being imperfect. Someone at the 2021 Event Horizon Independence Day party had told me that people couldn't respond to my arguments because of the obvious political incentives. And so, the angry question I wanted to ask, since I didn't immediately know how to rephrase it to not be doing the angry monkey thing, was, did Yudkowsky think I was supposed to _take that lying down?_
+
+Apparently, yes:
+
+**Eliezer** — 12/17/2022 5:50 PM
+you sure are supposed to not get angry at the people who didn't create those political punishments
+that's insane
+they're living in Cheliax and you want them to behave like they're not in Cheliax and get arrested by the Church
+your issue is with Asmodeus. take it to Him, and if you can't take Him down then don't blame others who can't do that either.
+
+Admirably explicit! If he were that frank all the time, I wouldn't actually have had a problem with him. (I don't expect people to pay arbitrary costs to defy their political incentives; my problem with the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" and "simplest and best protocol" performances was precisely that they were _pretending not to be political statements_; if we can be clear about the _existence_ of the Asmodean elephant in the room listening to everything we say, I don't blame anyone for not saying anything else that the elephant would report to its superiors.)
+
+[TODO: still having trouble with how I want to summarize this part of the conversation?! maybe looking at the record of exactly how I ended up voicing my full greviance will unlock my memory-reconstruction and unblock the writing here
+ * Yudkowsky says Planecrash is the tragedy of Keltham out of dath ilan, wrongfully trusting Cheliax
+ * Arete says that the moral here isn't that you should truthseek
+ * I said that's not what the story was _about_, just an aspect of the story
+ * Yudkowsky says the standards are very high, comparison to SneerClub quoting Draco on rape, but leaving out Harry's reaction to support the politicized story they want to tell; that's tantamount to lying.
+ * Indeed, I agree that leaving out details that would undermine the politicized story you want to tell is tantamount to lying!! That's why I'm mad at him!
+ * other commenters pick up on "But you're still saying to trust awesome institutions"
+ * Yudkowsky could say "But my narrow point about pronouns was correct", but I'm suspicious that the "real" goal was political. I could say "But my narrow point about dath ilan's secrecy was correct", but Yudkowsky is suspicious that the "real" goal was political ... and we're both right??