+A user called Harmless explained the loophole. "Doublethink" was pointing out that decisions that optimize the world for your preferences can't come from nowhere: if you avoid painful thoughts in your map, you damage your ability to steer away from painful outcomes in the territory. However, there was no rule that all the information-processing going into decisions that optimize the world for your preferences had to take place in _your brain_ ...
+
+I saw where they were going and completed the thought: you could build a Friendly AI or a Civilization to see all the dirty things for you, that would make you unhappy to have to see yourself.
+
+Yudkowsky clarified his position:
+
+> My exact word choices often do matter: I said that you should always be trying to _infer_ the truth. With the info you already have. In dath ilan if not in Earth, you might decline to open a box labeled "this info will make you permanently dissatisfied with sex" if the box was labeled by a prediction market.
+> Trying to avoid inferences seems to me much more internally costly than declining to click on a spoiler box.
+
+I understood the theory, but I was still extremely skpetical of the practice, assuming the eliezera were even remotely human. Yudkowsky described the practice of "keeping BDSM secret and trying to prevent most sadists from discovering what they are—informing them only when and if they become rich enough or famous enough that they'd have a high probability of successfully obtaining a very rare masochist" as a "basically reasonable policy option that [he] might vote for, not to help the poor dear other people, but to help [his] own counterfactual self."
+
+I wasn't sure what my wordcount and "diplomacy" "budget limits" for the server were, but I couldn't let go; I kept the thread going on subsequent days. There was something I felt I should be able to convey, if I could just find the right words.
+
+When [Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) says, "trying to prevent most [_X_] from discovering what they are [...] continues to strike me as a basically reasonable policy option", then, separately from the particular value of _X_, I expected people to jump out of their chairs and say, "No! This is wrong! Morally wrong! People can stand what is true about themselves, because they are already doing so!"
+
+And to the extent that I was the only person jumping out of my chair, and there was a party-line response of the form, "Ah, but if it's been decreed by authorial fiat that these-and-such probabilities and utilities take such-and-these values, then in this case, self-knowledge is actually bad under the utilitarian calculus," I wasn't disputing the utilitarian calculus. I was wondering—here I used the "🐛" bug emoji customarily used in Glowfic culture to indicate uncertainty about the right words to use—_who destroyed your souls?_
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> it feels powerfully relevant to me that the people of whom I am saying this _are eliezera_. I get to decide what they'd want because, unlike with Earth humans, I get to put myself in their shoes. it's plausible to me that the prediction markets say that I'd be sadder if I was exposed to the concept of sadism in a world with no masochists. if so, while I wouldn't relinquish my Art and lose my powers by trying to delude myself about that once I'd been told, I'd consider it a friendly act to keep the info from me—_because_ I have less self-delusional defenses than a standard Earthling, really—and a hostile act to tell me; and if you are telling me I don't get to make that decision for myself because it's evil, and if you go around shouting it from the street corners in dath ilan, then yeah I think most cities don't let you in.
+
+I wish I had thought to ask if he'd have felt the same way in 2008.
+
+A user called Ajvermillion continued to be baffled at my skepticism: if the author specifies that the world of the story is simple in this-and-such direction, on what grounds could I _disagree_?
+
+I admitted, again, that there was a sense in which I couldn't argue with authorial fiat. But I thought that an author's choice of assumptions reveals something about what they think is true in our world, and commenting on that should be fair game for literary critics. Suppose someone wrote a story and said, "in the world portrayed in this story, everyone is super-great at _kung fu_, and they could beat up everyone from our Earth, but they never have to practice at all."
+
+(Yudkowsky retorted, "...you realize you're describing like half the alien planets in comic books? when did Superman ever get depicted as studying kung fu?" I wish I had thought to admit that, yes, I _did_ hold Eliezer Yudkowsky to a higher standard of consilient worldbuilding than DC Comics. Would he rather I _didn't_?)
+
+Something about innate _kung fu_ world seems fake in a way that seems like a literary flaw. It's not just about plausibility. Fiction often incorporates unrealistic elements in order to tell a story that has relevance to real human lives. Innate _kung fu_ skills are scientifically plausible[^instinct] in a way that faster-than-light travel is not, but throwing faster-than-light travel into the universe so that you can do a [space opera](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceOpera) doesn't make the _people_ fake in the way that Superman's fighting skills are fake.
+
+[^instinct]: All sorts of other instinctual behaviors exist in animals; I don't se why skills humans have to study for years as a "martial art" couldn't be coded into the genome.
+
+Maybe it was okay for Superman's fighting skills to be fake from a literary perspective (because realism along that dimension is not what Superman is _about_), but if the Yudkowskian ethos exulted intelligence as ["the power that cannot be removed without removing you"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXK87NgEPszhWkvQm/mundane-magic), readers had grounds to demand that the dath ilani's thinking skills be real, and a world that's claimed by authorial fiat to be super-great at epistemic rationality, but where the people don't have a will-to-truth stronger than their will-to-happiness, felt fake to me. I couldn't _prove_ that it was fake. I agreed with Harmless's case that, _technically_, as far as the Law went, you could build a Civilization or a Friendly AI to see all the ugly things that you preferred not to see.
+
+But if you could—would you? And more importantly, if you would—could you?
+
+It was possible that the attitude I was evincing here was just a difference between the eliezera out of dath ilan and the Zackistani from my medianworld, and that there was nothing more to be said about it. But I didn't think the thing was a _genetic_ trait of the Zackistani! _I_ got it from spending my early twenties obsessively re-reading blog posts that said things like, ["I believe that it is right and proper for me, as a human being, to have an interest in the future [...] One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth [...] I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in this generation."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business)
+
+There were definitely communities on Earth where I wasn't allowed in because of my tendency to shout things from street corners, and I respected those people's right to have a safe space for themselves.
+
+But those communities didn't call themselves _rationalists_, weren't _pretending_ be to be inheritors of the great tradition of E. T. Jaynes and Richard Feynman and Robin Hanson. And if they _did_, I think I would have a false advertising complaint against them.
+
+"[The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues) ... unless a prediction market says that would make you less happy," just didn't have the same ring to it. Neither did "The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. But higher than both of those, is trusting your Society's institutions to tell you which kinds of knowledge will make you happy"—even if you stipulated by authorial fiat that your Society's institutions are super-competent, such that they're probably right about the happiness thing.
+
+There's a scene in _Atlas Shrugged_ that I think illustrates [the mood dath ilan is missing](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html).[^atlas-shrugged-ref] Our heroine Dagny expresses a wish to be kept ignorant for the sake of her own happiness. "Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it!" she says. "If only I could stay here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"
+
+John Galt isn't having it. "You'll have to hear about it," he says, in "that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts", listing the disasters fated to befall the railroad before concluding, "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."
+
+"Thank you. You're right," Dagny says, noting the contrast of Galt's tough-minded honesty with "the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy".
+
+[^atlas-shrugged-ref]: In Part Three, Chapter II, "The Utopia of Greed".
+
+When I quoted this scene in the server, other participants were baffled that I seemed to be appealing to Ayn Rand's authority. I was actually going for a _reverse_ appeal-to-authority: if _Ayn Rand_ understood that facing reality is virtuous, why didn't the 2020s "rationalists"? I didn't think the disdain for "Earth people" was justified, when Earth's philosophy of rationality (as exemplified by Ayn Rand) was doing better than dath ilan's on this critical dimension.
+
+I wondered if the issue had to do with what Yudkowsky had [identified as the problem of non-absolute rules](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases#5__Counterargument__The_problem_of_non_absolute_rules_), where not-literally-absolute rules like "Don't kill" or "Don't lie" have to be stated as if they were absolutes in order to register to the human motivational system with sufficient force.
+
+Technically, as a matter of decision theory, "sacred values" are crazy. It's easy to say—and feel with the passion of religious conviction—that it's always right to choose Truth and Life, and that no one could choose otherwise except wrongly, in the vile service of Falsehood and Death. But reality presents us with quantitative choices over uncertain outcomes, in which everything trades off against everything else under the [von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem); if you had to choose between the Life of millions and a small, unimportant Truth, you'd probably choose Life—but more importantly, the very fact that you might have to choose means that Truth and Life can't both be infinitely sacred to you, and must be measured on a common scale with lesser goods like mere Happiness.
+
+I knew that. The other people in the chatroom knew that. So to the extent that the argument amounted to me saying "Don't lie" (about, _e.g._, the existence of masochism), and them saying "Don't lie unless the badness of lying is outweighed by the goodness of increased happiness", why was I so confident that I was in the right, when they were wisely acknowledging the trade-offs under the Law, and I was sticking to my (incoherent) sacred value of Truth? Didn't they obviously have the more sophisticated side of the argument?
+
+The problem was that, in my view, the people who weren't talking about Truth as if it were a sacred value were being _wildly recklessly casual_ about harms from covering things up, as if they didn't see the [non-first-order](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) [harms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) _at all_. I felt I had to appeal to the lessons for children about how Lying Is Bad, because if I tried to make a more sophisticated argument about it being _quantitatively_ crazy to cover up psychology facts that make people sad, I would face a brick wall of "authorial fiat declares that the probabilities and utilities are specifically fine-tuned such that ignorance is good."
+
+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 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).
+
+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[^iq-comparison] or fiction-writing ability[^fiction-comparison] or contributions to AI alignment[^alignment-comparison], 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.
+
+[^iq-comparison]: [143](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1076154502326013952) _vs._ [131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg).
+
+[^fiction-comparison]: 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_.
+
+[^alignment-comparison]: Founder of the field _vs._ author of some dubiously relevant blog comments.
+
+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"](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?