Author: Zack M. Davis
Date: 2023-07-01 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
+Tags: bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, worldbuilding
Status: draft
> All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.
>
> —Thomas Jefferson, earthling
+Eliezer Yudkowsky's fiction about the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_) aims to portray a smarter, saner, better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from dath ilan, where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge. (This likely inspired the trope of a [_medianworld_](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639), a setting where the average person is like the author along important dimensions.)[^medianworlds]
+
+[^medianworlds]: You might think that the thought experiment of imagining what someone's medianworld is like would only be interesting for people who are "weird" in our own world, thinking that our world is a medianworld for people who are normal in our world. But [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit-hypervolume probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's vastly more hypervolume in the hyperspace around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too. (Or they could, if the normies of our world were into worldbuilding.)
+
+Dath ilan's cognitive superiority to the real world is a recurring theme in modern Yudkowsky's work. In the fictional canon, it's a focus of the story ["But Hurting People is Wrong"](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), but even when not discussing fiction, Yudkowsky often makes sneering comments about "Earth" or "Earth people", apparently meant to disparage all actually existing humans for not living up to his fiction.
+
+One is led to believe that people who were deeply inspired by Yudkowsky's [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) (a series of influential posts about rationality published on the _Overcoming Bias_ blog largely between 2007 and 2009) should regard dath ilan as a rationalist utopia. After all, on the terms of the 2014 April Fools' Day joke, that's where the knowledge came from.
+
+And yet, for such a supposed rationalist utopia, it's remarkable the extent to which dath ilan's Society is portrayed as being organized around conspiracies to lie or otherwise cover up the truth—not just when forced to by dire matters of planetary security (as when keeping nuclear or AGI secrets), but seemingly for any somewhat plausible excuse whatsoever, including protecting the feelings of people who would be happier if kept ignorant. Evidently, there are _many_ truths existing which dath ilan fears and would wish unknown to the whole world.
+
+The contrast to the [sense of life](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sense_of_life.html) portrayed in the Sequences is striking. The Sequences emphasized that you—yes, you, the reader—had an interest in having a maximally accurate world-model. On the subject of confronting unpleasant hypotheses, the Sequences [gave this advice](https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points) (bolding mine):
+
+> When you're doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and **deliberately think about whatever hurts the most**. Don't rehearse standard objections whose standard counters would make you feel better. Ask yourself what _smart_ people who disagree would say to your first reply, and your second reply. Whenever you catch yourself flinching away from an objection you fleetingly thought of, drag it out into the forefront of your mind. **Punch yourself in the solar plexus. Stick a knife in your heart, and wiggle to widen the hole.** In the face of the pain, rehearse only this:
+>
+> What is true is already so.
+> Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
+> Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
+> And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
+> People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
+
+Meanwhile, the dath ilan mythos portrays a world steered by a secretive order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). (Ordinary dath ilani do receive rationality training, but it's implied to be deliberately crippled, featuring ["signposts around the first steps [towards becoming a Keeper], placed to warn dath ilani off starting down that path unless they mean it."](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1799590#reply-1799590)) The maxim that "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is described as being ["remembered as much for how it's false, as for how it's true, because among the things that truths can destroy is people."](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1687922#reply-1687922)
+
+Clearly, this is not a culture that cares about ordinary people being well-informed. Apparently, they believe that owning up to it _does_ make it worse, that the untrue _is_ there to be lived (for non-Keepers).
+
+As a result, the algorithm that designed dath ilan's Civilization can be seen as systematically preferring deception. When I speak of an algorithm preferring deception, [what I mean is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) that given a social problem, candidate solutions that involve deceiving the populace seem to be higher in dath ilani Civilization's implicit search ordering than solutions that involve informing the populace. Solutions that work by means of telling the truth will be implemented only when solutions that work by means of deception are seen to fail.
+
+Crucially, these are functionalist criteria of "preference" and "deception". It's about how Civilization is structured in a way that systematically encourages divergences between popular belief and reality.
+
+I'm _not_ positing that Civilization's Keepers and Legislators and Chief Executive are laughing maniacally and consciously telling each other, "As an individual, I love it when non-Keepers have false beliefs; we need to do as much of that as possible—as a terminal value!"
+
+Rather, I'm positing that they don't give a shit about non-Keepers having false beliefs. (They may give a shit about [not technically lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PrXR66hQcaJXsgWsa/not-technically-lying), but that [turns out to be a weak constraint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).)
+
+If you're in the business of coming up with clever plans to solve problems, and you don't give a shit about people having false beliefs, you mostly end up with clever plans that work by means of giving people false beliefs that trick them into doing what you want them to do (perhaps without technically lying).
+
+Why wouldn't you? There are more false maps than true maps; if you don't specifically give a shit about affirmatively telling the truth, you mostly end up supplying false maps. Instrumental convergence is a harsh mistress.
+
+### Interlude: "I Can't Argue With Authorial Fiat"
+
+### History Screening
+
+### The Merrin Show
+
+### Keltham and S/M
+
+### Kitchen Knives
+
+### Conclusion
+
+
+-------
+
[OUTLINE—
- * Introduction and Thesis
- * Yudkowsky's new fictional universe is dath ilan, a medianworld centered around him (the race of dath ilani humans are called the "eliezera" in Word of God canon); the "joke" is that this is where the rationality tech of the Sequences came from (per the 2014 April Fools' Day post). Yudkowsky even talks this way in other contexts, including a trope of making fun of "Earth people" and presenting an eliezera racial supremacy narrative. (It's still a racial supremacy narrative even if he doesn't _use the verbatim phrase_ "racial supremacy.") One is led to believe that dath ilan represents a canonical rationalist utopia, someplace that readers of the Sequences would be proud of.
- * And yet, for such a supposed rationalist utopia, it's striking that dath ilan is _lying about everything_, seemingly whenever it "sounds like a good idea" to someone: not just keeping AGI secrets (the way we keep nuclear secrets on Earth), but preventing the idea from coming up as science fiction, keeping Merrin in a Truman-show-like reality where she doesn't know that she's famous, hiding info about sexuality on utilitarian grounds—even bizarre trivial stuff like knives. I discuss these examples in detail later in this essay.
+ * the race of dath ilani humans are called the "eliezera" in Word of God canon
+ presenting an eliezera racial supremacy narrative. (It's still a racial supremacy narrative even if he doesn't _use the verbatim phrase_ "racial supremacy.")
* Bluntly, this is not a culture that gives a shit about people being well-informed. This is a culture that has explicitly
* In more detail: the algorithm that designed dath ilani Civilization is one that systematically favors plans that involve deception, over than plans that involve being honest.
* This is not a normative claim or a generic slur that dath ilani are "evil" or "bad"; it's a positve claim about systematic deception. If you keep seeing plans for which social-deception-value exceeds claimed-social-benefit value, you should infer that the plans are being generated by a process that "values" (is optimizing for) deception, whether it's a person or a conscious mind.
* But what makes the medianworld exercise interesting is that it's about trying to portray a realistic world, given a shifted distribution of psychological traits. We take the text of the story as a given, but we don't have to take dath ilan's self-image literally, if we think a different world could "project" into the same text and explain it better.
* An ethnographer might note that Americans believe themselves to be "the land of the brave and the home of the free", without being obliged for their ethnography to agree with this description. I'm taking the same stance towards dath ilan: as a literary critic, I don't have to share its Society's beliefs about itself.
+ * History screening
+
* The Merrin Show
* Merrin: a reverse Emperor Norton case
* Overcoming Bias readers in 2008 would have found this offensive, not cute; Merrin is living a lie, and everyone is in on it.
-----
-Perhaps for lack of any world-saving research to do, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_). Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from a smarter, saner alternate version of Earth where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge.
+Perhaps for lack of any world-saving research to do, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan .
+
+
-The bulk of the dath ilan Glowfic canon was an epic titled [_Planecrash_](https://www.glowfic.com/boards/215)[^planecrash-title] coauthored with Lintamande, in which Keltham, an unusually selfish teenage boy from dath ilan, apparently dies in a freak aviation accident, and [wakes up in the world of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai) Golarion, setting of the _Dungeons-&-Dragons_–alike _Pathfinder_ role-playing game. A [couple](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508) of [other](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263) Glowfic stories with different coauthors further flesh out the setting of dath ilan, which inspired a new worldbuilding trope, the [_medianworld_](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639), a setting where the average person is like the author along important dimensions.[^medianworlds]
-[^planecrash-title]: The title is a pun, referring to both the airplane crash leading to Keltham's death in dath ilan, and how his resurrection in Golarion collides dath ilan with [the "planes" of existence of the _Pathfinder_ universe](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Great_Beyond).
+The bulk of the dath ilan Glowfic canon was an epic titled [_Planecrash_](https://www.glowfic.com/boards/215)[^planecrash-title] coauthored with Lintamande, in which Keltham, an unusually selfish teenage boy from dath ilan, apparently dies in a freak aviation accident, and [wakes up in the world of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai) Golarion, setting of the _Dungeons-&-Dragons_–alike _Pathfinder_ role-playing game. A [couple](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508) of [other](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263) Glowfic stories with different coauthors further flesh out the setting of dath ilan, which inspired a new worldbuilding trope,
+
+
+
+
+[^planecrash-title]: The title is a triple pun, referring to the airplane crash leading to Keltham's death in dath ilan, and how his resurrection in Golarion collides dath ilan with [the "planes" of existence of the _Pathfinder_ universe](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Great_Beyond), and Keltham's threat to destroy (crash) the _Pathfinder_ reality if mortals aren't given better afterlife conditions. (I use the word "threat" colloquially here; the work itself goes into some detail distinguishing between bargaining and decision-theoretic threats that should be defied.)
+
-[^medianworlds]: You might think that the thought experiment of imagining what someone's medianworld is like would only be interesting for people who are "weird" in our own world, thinking that our world is a medianworld for people who are normal in our world. But [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit-hypervolume probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's vastly _more_ hypervolume in the hyperspace around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too.
Everyone in dath ilan receives rationality training from childhood, but knowledge and training deemed psychologically hazardous to the general population is safeguarded by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). AGI research takes place in a secret underground city; some unspecified form of social engineering steers the _hoi polloi_ away from thinking about the possibility of AI.
I'm more preoccupied by a [Doylistic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) interpretation—that dath ilan's obsessive secret-Keeping reflects something deep about how the Yudkowsky of the current year relates to speech and information, in contrast to the Yudkowsky who wrote the Sequences. The Sequences had encouraged you—yes, _you_, the reader—to be as rational as possible. In contrast, the dath ilan mythos seems to portray advanced rationality as dangerous knowledge that people need to be protected from. ["The universe is not so dark a place that everyone needs to become a Keeper to ensure the species's survival,"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1861879#reply-1861879) we're told. "Just dark enough that some people ought to."
-[...]
+
For example, we are told of an Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy centered around a famous medical technician with a psychological need to feel unimportant, of whom ["everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1764946#reply-1764946) that her achievements are nothing special, which is deemed to be kindness to her. It's like a reverse [Emperor Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton) situation. (Norton was ordinary, but everyone around him colluded to make him think he was special; Merrin is special, but everyone around her colludes to make her think she's ordinary.)
As another notable example of dath ilan hiding information for the alleged greater good, in Golarion, Keltham discovers that he's a sexual sadist, and deduces that Civilization has deliberately prevented him from realizing this, because there aren't enough corresponding masochists to go around in dath ilan. Having concepts for "sadism" and "masochism" as variations in human psychology would make sadists like Keltham sad about the desirable sexual experiences they'll never get to have, so Civilization arranges for them to _not be exposed to knowledge that would make them sad, because it would make them sad_ (!!).
-It did not escape my notice that when "rationalist" authorities _in real life_ considered public knowledge of some paraphilia to be an infohazard (ostensibly for the benefit of people with that paraphilia), I _didn't take it lying down_.
-
-This parallel between dath ilan's sadism/masochism coverup and the autogynephilia coverup I had fought in real life, was something I was only intending to comment on in passing in the present memoir, rather than devoting any more detailed analysis to, but as I was having trouble focusing on my own writing in September 2022, I ended up posting some critical messages about dath ilan's censorship regime in the "Eliezerfic" Discord server for reader discussion of _Planecrash_, using the sadism/masochism coverup as my central example.
-
What happens, I asked, to the occasional dath ilani free speech activists, with their eloquent manifestos arguing that Civilization would be better off coordinating on maps that reflect the territory, rather than coordinating to be a Keeper-managed zoo? (They _had_ to exist: in a medianworld centered on Yudkowsky, there are going to be a few weirdos who are +2.5 standard deviations on "speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" and −2.5 standard deivations on love of clever plots; this seems less weird than negative utilitarians, who were [established to exist](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1789623#reply-1789623).) I _assumed_ they get dealt with somehow in the end (exiled from most cities? ... involuntarily cryopreserved?), but there had to be an interesting story about someone who starts out whistleblowing small lies (which Exception Handling allows; they think it's cute, and it's "priced in" to the game they're playing), and then just keeps _escalating and escalating and escalating_ until Governance decides to unperson him.
[...]
-If we believe that [IQ research validates the "Jews are clever" stereotype](https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf), I wondered if there's a distinct (albeit probably correlated) "enjoying deception" trait that validates the "Jews are sneaky" stereotype? If dath ilan is very high in this "sneakiness" trait (relative to Earth Jews), that would help explain all the conspiracies![^edgy-anti-semitism]
-
-[^edgy-anti-semitism]: It probably would have been possible to bring up the sneakiness-trait hypothesis in a less edgy way, but I didn't care to.
+If we believe that [IQ research validates the "Jews are clever" stereotype](https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf), I wondered if there's a distinct (albeit probably correlated) "enjoying deception" trait that validates the "Jews are sneaky" stereotype? If dath ilan is very high in this "sneakiness" trait (relative to Earth Jews), that would help explain all the conspiracies!
Not-actually-plausible conspiracies that everyone is in on (like "Sparashki are real") are a [superstimulus](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization) like zero-calorie sweetener: engineered to let everyone enjoy the thrill of lying, without doing any real damage to shared maps.
The existence of such a widespread sneakiness/"taste for deception" trait among the eliezera, in conjunction with their culture just not particularly valuing public knowledge (because they assume everything important is being handled by the Keepers), explains the recurring conspiracies and coverups, like the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, Exception Handling's fabrication of evidence for Sparashki being real, the sadism/masochism coverup, and [the village that deliberately teaches anti-redhead bigotry to children in order to test the robustness of dath ilan's general humanism indoctrination](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uyBeAN5jPEATMqKkX/lies-told-to-children-1).
-I stress (at least now, even if I didn't do a good job of explaining it at the time) that this hypothesis _doesn't_ require dath ilani to be cartoon villains who hate knowledge and want people to be ignorant. Just that, as a result of the widespread sneakiness trait and their outsourcing information-process to the Keepers, in the course of trying to accomplish other things, plans-that-involve-conspiracies are often higher in their search ordering than plans-that-involve-keeping-people-informed.
+I stress that this hypothesis _doesn't_ require dath ilani to be cartoon villains who hate knowledge and want people to be ignorant. Just that, as a result of the widespread sneakiness trait and their outsourcing information-process to the Keepers, in the course of trying to accomplish other things, plans-that-involve-conspiracies are often higher in their search ordering than plans-that-involve-keeping-people-informed.
I claimed that there was a hidden-core-of-rationality thing about a culture that values living in truth, that the dath ilani didn't have. In previous discussion of the Sparashki example, a user called lc had written, "If you see someone wearing an elf costume at work and conclude elves are real and make disastrous decisions based on that conclusion you are mentally deranged". And indeed, you would be mentally deranged if you did that _on Earth_, because we don't have an elves-are-real conspiracy on Earth.
(I was tempted to tag that as "epistemic status: low-confidence speculation", but that's _frequentist_ thinking—as if "Jews and gentiles are equally sneaky" were a "null hypothesis" that could only be rejected by data that would be sufficiently unlikely assuming that the null was true. Ha ha, that would be _crazy!_ Obviously, I should have a _prior_ on the effect size difference between the Jew and gentile sneakiness distributions, that can be updated as sneakiness data comes in. I think the mean of my prior distribution is at, like, _d_ ≈ 0.1? So it's not "low confidence"; it's "low confidence of the effect size being large enough to be of much practical significance".)
-For context on why I have no sense of humor about this, on Earth (which _actually exists_, unlike dath ilan), when someone says "it's not lying, because no one _expected_ me to tell the truth in that situation", what's usually going on (as Zvi Mowshowitz explains: <https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/>) is that is that conspirators benefit from deceiving outsiders, and the claim that "everyone knows" is them lying to _themselves_ about the fact that they're lying.
+For context on why I have no sense of humor about this, on Earth (which _actually exists_, unlike dath ilan), when someone says "it's not lying, because no one _expected_ me to tell the truth in that situation", what's usually going on, [as Zvi Mowshowitz explains](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/), is that is that conspirators benefit from deceiving outsiders, and the claim that "everyone knows" is them lying to _themselves_ about the fact that they're lying.
(If _you_ got hurt by not knowing, well, it's not like anyone got hurt, because if you didn't know, then you weren't anyone.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff