It seemed like the rationale for avoiding spoilers of movie plots or homework exercises had to do with the outcome being different if you got spoiled: you have a different æsthetic experience if you experience the plot twist in the 90th minute of the movie rather than the fourth paragraph of the _Wikipedia_ article. Dath ilan's sadism/masochism coverup didn't seem to have the same structure: when I try to prove a theorem myself before looking at how the textbook says to do it, it's not because I would be _sad about the state of the world_ if I looked at the textbook; it's because the temporary ignorance of working it out myself results in a stronger state of final knowledge.
-That is, the difference between "spoilers" (sometimes useful) and "coverups" (bad) had to do with whether the ignorant person is expected to eventually uncover the hidden information, and whether the ignorant person knows that there's hidden information that they're expected to uncover. In the case of the sadism/masochism coverup (in contrast to the cases of movie spoilers or homework exercises), it seemed like neither of these conditions pertained. (Keltham knows that the Keepers are keeping secrets, but he seems to actively have beliefs about human psychology that imply masochism is implausible; it seems more like he has a false map, rather than a blank spot on his map for the answer to the homework exercise to be filled in.) I thought that was morally relevant.
+That is, the difference between "spoiler protections" (sometimes useful) and "coverups" (bad) had to do with whether the ignorant person is expected to eventually uncover the hidden information, and whether the ignorant person knows that there's hidden information that they're expected to uncover. In the case of the sadism/masochism coverup (in contrast to the cases of movie spoilers or homework exercises), it seemed like neither of these conditions pertained. (Keltham knows that the Keepers are keeping secrets, but he seems to actively have beliefs about human psychology that imply masochism is implausible; it seems more like he has a false map, rather than a blank spot on his map for the answer to the homework exercise to be filled in.) I thought that was morally relevant.
(Additionally, I would have hoped that my two previous mentions in the thread of supporting keeping nuclear, bioweapon, and AI secrets should have already made it clear that I wasn't against _all_ cases of Society hiding information, but to further demonstrate my ability to generate counterexamples, I mentioned that I would also admit _threats_ as a class of legitimate infohazard: if I'm not a perfect decision theorist, I'm better off if Tony Soprano just doesn't have my email address to begin with, if I don't trust myself to calculate when I "should" ignore his demands.)
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" 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.
+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_.
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.")
+[("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).
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 (he left an emoji-reaction in the relevant timespan of messages) and took pity on me.
+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.)
-[TODO: summarize teacher feedback]
+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."
-[TODO: summarize my admitting that it did have something to do with my state of mind; I would have done better by giving the 11th grade English class algorithm more compute; Peranza's username was 'not-looking-there'!; proposed revision]
+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
-> see also C. S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", which I keep thinking I ought to rewrite and have an unfinished draft in whose voice I was speaking
-> now, this is not to say that you should not notice when other people are falling down about things
-> nor that you should not speak of it when you notice
-... and you know, that was 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 odious chore of criticizing "the community", and just go directly do the thing that I thought "the community" was for. (In the time we have left.)
+... 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?_
+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
+**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.
+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: Yudkowsky's story: the story is about Keltham trusting Cheliax wrongly; leaving that part out is politicized; other commenters pick up on "But you're still saying to trust awesome institutions"]
+[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??
+]
[TODO: I think there's a bit of question-substitution going on; the reason the virtue of evenness is important is because if you only count arguments for and not against the hypothesis, you mess up your beliefs about the hypothesis; if you substitute a different question "Is Yudkowsky bad?"/"Am I a good coder?", that's a bucket error—or was he "correctly" sensing that the real question was "Is Yudkowsky bad?"]
[TODO: I express my fully-updated grievance (this doesn't seem to be in the transcript I saved??); I hadn't consciously steered the conversation this way, but the conversation _bounced_ in a way that made it on-topic; that's technically not my fault, even if the elephant in my brain was optimizing for this outcome.
-The fact that Yudkowsky had been replying to me at length—explaining why my literary criticism was nuts, but in a way that respected my humanity and expected me to be able to hear it—implied that I was apparently in his "I can cheaply save him (from crazy people like Michael)" bucket, rather than the "AI timelines and therefore life is too short" bucket.]
+The fact that Yudkowsky had been replying to me at length—explaining why my literary criticism was nuts, but in a way that respected my humanity and expected me to be able to hear it—implied that I was apparently in his "I can cheaply save him (from crazy people like Michael Vassar)" bucket, rather than the "AI timelines and therefore life is too short" bucket.]
It was disappointing that Yudkowsky's reaction to my complaints was (verbatim!) "that's insane", rather than something more like, "OK, I totally see why you see this as a betrayal, but unfortunately for you, I don't actually consider myself bound by what you thought I was promising."
[TODO: Linta says I'm impossible to talk to and the anticipation of my pouncing stiffles discussion. (I almost wonder if this is a good thing, from a _realpolitik_ perspective? I'd prefer to argue people out of bad ideas, but if the threat of an argument disincentivizes them from spreading ...? Game theory goes both ways—I've been self-censoring, too.)]
-[TODO: I agreed that this was good feedback about my social behavior; I don't intellectually disagree that different cultures are different; I'm super-fighty because I'm super-traumatized; the thing I'm trying to keep on Society's shared map is, Biological Sex Actually Exists and Is Sometimes Decision-Relevant; Biological Sex Actually Exists and is Sometimes Decision-Relevant Even When It Makes People Sad; Biological Sex Actually Exists Even When a Prediction Market Says It Will Make People Sad; Linta agrees; Eliezer responds with a +1 emoji]
+I said that Lintamande was giving me a lot of good feedback about my social behavior. I was super-fighty because I was super-traumatized, and I should plausibly work on fixing that, whereas I didn't intellectually disagree that different cultures are different, different people are different. The reason I was super-fighty is because there was social–political territory I was trying to defend.
+
+The thing I was trying to keep on Society's shared map was, Biological Sex Actually Exists and Is Sometimes Decision-Relevant; Biological Sex Actually Exists and is Sometimes Decision-Relevant _Even When It Makes People Sad_; Biological Sex Actually Exists and is Sometimes Decision-Relevant _Even When a Prediction Market Says It Will Make People Sad_.
+
+Lintamande said they agreed with these claims. Yudkowsky replied with a "+1" emoji.
+
+
+[TODO: Linta saying "intersex condition" was just semantics was emblematic of a disagreement-minimizing culture?]
[TODO: "like, if you just went and found Eliezer!2004 and were like 'hey, weird sci fi hypothetical'
_speaking of the year 2004_; the thing I'm at war with is that I don't think he would _dare_ publish the same essay today
+ ...
]
-[TODO: someone said "the word in their language doesn't match the word in yours"; and got a +1 emoji; I resisted the temptation to say "So ... I can define a word any way I want"; I made a few more comments about kitchen knife deception (and let my friends talk me down from making more). I'm not worried about what he thinks about me anymore.]
+
+The 2004 mailing list post was almost _mocking_ the guy, for being so naïve, for not seeing the type mismatch between the deep structure of reality, and mentalistic fantasies vaguely gestured at with English words.
+
+And the 2016–2021 posts _couldn't even acknolwedge that Biological Sex Actually Exists_. Did Yudkowsky expect us not to _notice_?? Coming from anyone else in the world, I wouldn't have minded. But the _conjunction_ of these political games and the eliezera racial supremacy rhetoric was just _insulting_.
+
+April said she didn't think the "Changing Emotions" argument was making claims relevant to trans people. The only claim you really needed was that it was reasonable for cis men and trans men, and cis women and trans women, to be in the same category for the purposes of general social interaction; whether you would need post-Singularity tech to make a biological male indistinguishable from a cis woman had little bearing on what we should make of trans women.
+
+That was interesting. April's profile said she was 19 years old and transfeminine.
+
+
+[TODO: April saying that the essay wasn't making claims relevant to trans people; but _I_ thought it was relevant in 2008]
+
+
+[TODO: bridge ...]
+
+[TODO: someone said "the word in their language doesn't match the word in yours"; and got a +1 emoji; I resisted the temptation to say "So ... I can define a word any way I want"; I call a killthread.]
+
+[TODO: I made a few more comments about kitchen knife deception (and let my friends talk me down from making more). I'm not worried about what he thinks about me anymore.]
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff