+I wasn't buying the excuse that secret-Keeping practices that wouldn't be OK on Earth were somehow OK on dath ilan, which was asserted by authorial fiat to be sane and smart and benevolent enough to make it work. Or if I couldn't argue with authorial fiat: the reasons why it would be bad on Earth (even if it wouldn't be bad on dath ilan) are reasons why _fiction about dath ilan is bad for Earth_.
+
+And just—back in the 'aughts, Robin Hanson had this really great blog called _Overcoming Bias_. (You probably haven't heard of it.) I wanted that _vibe_ back, of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008—the will to _just get the right answer_, without all this galaxy-brained hand-wringing about who the right answer might hurt.
+
+I would have expected a subculture descended from the memetic legacy of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 to respond to that tripe about protecting people from being destroyed by the truth as a form of "recognizing independent agency" with something like—
+
+"Hi! You must be new here! Regarding your concern about truth doing harm to people, a standard reply is articulated in the post ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased). Regarding your concern about recognizing independent agency, a standard reply is articulated in the post ["Your Rationality Is My Business"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business)."
+
+—or _something like that_. Not that the reply needed to use those particular Sequences links, or _any_ Sequences links; what's important is that someone needs counter to this very obvious [anti-epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology).
+
+And what we actually saw in response to the "You don't get to do harm to other people" message was ... it got 5 "+1" emoji-reactions.
+
+Yudkowsky [chimed in to point out that](/images/yudkowsky-it_doesnt_say_tell_other_people.png) "Doublethink" was about _oneself_ not reasonably being in the epistemic position of knowing that one should lie to oneself. It wasn't about telling the truth to _other_ people.
+
+On the one hand, fair enough. My generalization from "you shouldn't want to have false beliefs for your own benefit" to "you shouldn't want other people to have false beliefs for their own benefit" (and the further generalization to it being OK to intervene) was not in the text of the post itself. It made sense for Yudkowsky to refute my misinterpretation of the text he wrote.
+
+On the other hand—given that Yudkowsky was paying attention to this #overflow thread anyway, I might have naïvely hoped that he would appreciate what I was trying to do?—that, after the issue had been pointed out, he would decided that he _wanted_ his chatroom to be a place where we don't want other people to have false beliefs for their own benefit?—a place that approves of "meddling" in the form of _telling people things_.
+
+The other participants mostly weren't buying what I was selling.
+
+A user called April wrote that "the standard dath ilani has internalized almost everything in the sequences": "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". (This received a checkmark emoji-react from Yudkowsky, an indication of his agreement.)
+
+Someone else said he was "pretty leery of 'ignore whether models are painful' as a principle, for Earth humans to try to adopt," and went on to offer some thoughts for Earth. I continued to think it was ridiculous that we were talking of "Earth humans" as if there were any other kind—as if rationality in the Yudkowskian tradition wasn't something to aspire to in real life.
+
+Dath ilan [is _fiction_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional), I pointed out. Dath ilan _does not exist_. It was a horrible distraction to try to see our world through Thellim's eyes and feel contempt over how much better things must be on dath ilan (which, to be clear, again, _does not exist_), when one could be looking through the eyes of an ordinary reader of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 (the _real_ 2008, which _actually happened_), and seeing everything we've lost.
+
+[As it was taught to me then](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iiWiHgtQekWNnmE6Q/if-you-demand-magic-magic-won-t-help): if you demand Keepers, _Keepers won't help_. If I'm going to be happy anywhere, or achieve greatness anywhere, or learn true secrets anywhere, or save the world anywhere, or feel strongly anywhere, or help people anywhere—I may as well do it _on Earth_.
+
+The thread died out soon enough. I had some more thoughts about dath ilan's predilection for deception, of which I typed up some notes for maybe adapting into a blog post later, but there was no point in wasting any more time on Discord.
+
+On 29 November 2022 (four years and a day after the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter performance that had ignited my rationalist civil war), Yudkowsky remarked about the sadism coverup again:
+
+> Keltham is a romantically obligate sadist. This is information that could've made him much happier if masochists had existed in sufficient supply; Civilization has no other obvious-to-me-or-Keltham reason to conceal it from him.
+
+Despite the fact that there was no point in wasting any more time on Discord, I decided not to resist the temptation to open up the thread again and dump some paragraphs from my notes on the conspiracies of dath ilan.
+
+[TODO: explain my sneakiness theory, shove the anti-semitism into a footnote]