+[^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.
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+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.
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+(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?)
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+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]
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+[^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.
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+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:
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+> 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
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+... 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.
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+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?_
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+Apparently, yes:
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+**Eliezer** — 12/17/2022 5:50 PM