--------
-[TODO:
+I got a chance to talk to Yudkowsky in person at the 2021 Event Horizon[^event-horizon] Fourth of July party. In accordance with the privacy norms I'm adhering to while telling this Whole Dumb Story, I don't think I should elaborate on what was said. (It felt like a private conversation, even if most of it was outdoors at a party. No one joined in, and if anyone was listening, I didn't notice them.)
- * depressed after talking to him at Independence Day party 2021 (I can mention that, because it was outdoors and probably lots of other people saw us, even if I can't talk about content)
+[^event-horizon]: Event Horizon was the name of a group house in Berkeley.
- * It wouldn't be so bad if he weren't trying to sell himself as a religious leader, and profiting from the conflation of rationalist-someone-who-cares-about-reasoning, and rationalist-member-of-robot-cult
+I will say that it finalized my sense that the vision of rationalism he had preached in the Sequences was dead as a cultural force. I was somewhat depressed for months afterwards.
- * But he does, in fact, seem to actively encourage this conflation (contrast to how the Sequences had a [Litany Against Gurus](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus) these days, with the way he sneers as Earthlings and post-rats)
+It wouldn't be so bad if Yudkowsky weren't trying to sell himself as a _de facto_ religious leader,[^religious-leader] profiting from the conflation of _rationalist_ in the sense of "one who aspires to systematically correct reasoning" and _rationalist_ as member of his fan-club/personality-cult.
- * a specific example that made me very angry in September 2021—
+[^religious-leader]: "Religious leader" continues to seem like an apt sociological description, even if [no supernatural claims are being made](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural).
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
-> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-
-Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the Caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
+But he does seem to actively encourage this conflation. Contrast the [Litany Against Gurus](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus) from the Sequences, to the way he sneers at "post-rationalists"—or even "Earthlings" in general (in contrast to his fictional world of dath ilan). The framing is optimized to delegitimize dissent. [Motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/): someone who's critical of central "rationalists" like Yudkowsky or Alexander; bailey: someone who's moved beyond reason itself.
-Or [as Yudkowsky put it](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228)—
+One example that made me furious came in September 2021. Yudkowsky, replying to Scott Alexander on Twitter, [wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419):
-> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
+> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
+I understand, of course, that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Yudkowsky or Alexander because they're the leaders of the Caliphate. I had just spent more than three and a half years of my life[^years-of-my-life] [explaining in](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water), with math, how Alexander was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Yudkowsky was still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seemed egregiously unfair, in a way that wasn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
-An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
+[^years-of-my-life]: I started outlining ["The Categories Where Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) in January 2018. I would finally finish ["Blood Is Thicker Than Water"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water), following up on the "dolphins are fish" claim later that month of September 2021.
-Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor _only makes sense in the first place_ in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Yudkowsky and Alexander is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. _Nullius in verba_.
+Or [as Yudkowsky had once put it](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228)—
- * the fact that David Xu interpreted criticism of the robot cult as me going "full post-rat" suggests that Yudkowsky's framing had spilled onto others. (The framing is optimized to delegitimize dissent. Motte: someone who's critical of central rationalists; bailey: someone who's moved beyond reason.)
+> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! 6 September 2021
+It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
-> Also: speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat. It was bad enough when QC did it (though to his credit QC still has pretty decent Twitter takes, unlike most post-rats).
+An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
-https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
+Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Yudkowsky and Alexander is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. _Nullius in verba_.
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435856644076830721
-> The error in "Not Man for the Categories" is not subtle! After the issue had been brought to your attention, I think you should have been able to condemn it: "Scott's wrong; you can't redefine concepts in order to make people happy; that's retarded." It really is that simple! 4/6
+I don't think the motte-and-bailey concern is hypothetical, either. When I [indignantly protested](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435059595228053505) the "we're both always right" remark, one David Xu [commented](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482): "speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat"—as if my criticism of Yudkowsky's self-serving bluster itself marked me as siding with the "post-rats"!
I once wrote [a post whimsically suggesting that trans women should owe cis women royalties](/2019/Dec/comp/) for copying the female form (as "intellectual property"). In response to a reader who got offended, I [ended up adding](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=03468d274f5) an "epistemic status" line to clarify that it was not a serious proposal.
From my perspective, such advice would be missing the point. [I'm not trying to force though some particular policy.](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/) Rather, I think I _know some things_ about the world, things I wish I had someone had told me earlier. So I'm trying to tell others, to help them live in _a world that makes sense_.
-]
-
+------
[David Xu writes](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896) (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [Xu] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
I don't doubt Yudkowsky could come up with some clever casuistry why, _technically_, the text he wrote in 2007 and the text he endorsed in 2021 don't contradict each other. But _realistically_ ... again, no.
-[TODO: elaborate on how 2007!Yudkowsky and 2021!Xu are saying the opposite things if you just take a plain-language reading and consider, not whether individual sentences can be interpreted as "true", but what kind of _optimization_ the text is doing to the behavior of receptive readers]
-
I don't, actually, expect people to spontaneously blurt out everything they believe to be true, that Stalin would find offensive. "No comment" would be fine. Even selective argumentation that's _clearly labeled as such_ would be fine. (There's no shame in being an honest specialist who says, "I've mostly thought about these issues though the lens of ideology _X_, and therefore can't claim to be comprehensive; if you want other perspectives, you'll have to read other authors and think it through for yourself.")
What's _not_ fine is selective argumentation while claiming "confidence in [your] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [yourself] before speaking" when you _very obviously have done no such thing_.
-----
+Perhaps for [lack of any world-saving research to do](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy), 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, a smarter, better-coordinated alternate version of Earth steered by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937) who safeguard advanced rationality techniques from a population allegedly too psychologically fragile to handle them.
+
+[^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 mere bargaining and decision-theoretic threats that should be defied.)
-[TODO: bridge—link to pulled-out standalone post, "On the Public Anti-Epistemology of dath ilan"]
+On the topic of dath ilan's rationality training, I appreciated [this passage about the cognitive function of categorization](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1779051#reply-1779051):
-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_.
+> Dath ilani kids get told to not get fascinated with the fact that, in principle, 'bounded-agents' with finite memories and finite thinking speeds, have any considerations about mapping that depend on what they want. It doesn't mean that you get to draw in whatever you like on your map, because it's what you want. It doesn't make reality be what you want.
-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.
+Vindication! This showed that Yudkowsky _did_ understand what was at issue in the dispute over "... Not Man for the Categories", even if he couldn't say "Zack is right and Scott is wrong" for political reasons.
-[...]
+Despite that tidbit, however, the dath ilan mythos overall seemed visibly defective to me compared to the Sequences—particularly regarding how humans should relate to unpleasant truths.
Someone at the 2021 Event Horizon Independence Day party had told me that I had been misinterpreting the "Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" slogan from the Sequences. I had interpreted the slogan as suggesting the importance of speaking the truth _to other people_ (which I think is what "speaking" is usually about), but my interlocutor said it was about, for example, being able to speak the truth aloud in your own bedroom, to yourself. I think some textual evidence for my interpretation can be found in Daria's ending to ["A Fable of Science and Politics"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics), a multiple-parallel-endings story about an underground Society divided into factions over the color of the unseen sky, and one person's reaction when they find a passageway leading aboveground to a view of the sky:
[^other-endings]: Even Eddin's ending, which portrays Eddin as more concerned with consequences than honesty, has him "trying to think of a way to prevent this information from blowing up the world", rather than trying to think of a way to suppress the information, in contrast to how Charles, in his ending, _immediately_ comes up with the idea to block off the passageway leading to the aboveground. Daria and Eddin are clearly written as "rationalists"; the deceptive strategy only comes naturally to the non-rationalist Charles. (Although you could Watsonianly argue that Eddin is just thinking longer-term than Charles: blocking off _this_ passageway and never speaking a word of it to another soul, won't prevent someone from finding some other passage to the aboveground, eventually.)
-In contrast, the culture of dath ilan does not seem to particularly value people _standing under the same sky_.
-
-[...]
-
-On the topic of dath ilan's rationality training, I did appreciate [this passage about the cognitive function of categorization](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1779051#reply-1779051):
-
- > Dath ilani kids get told to not get fascinated with the fact that, in principle, 'bounded-agents' with finite memories and finite thinking speeds, have any considerations about mapping that depend on what they want. It doesn't mean that you get to draw in whatever you like on your map, because it's what you want. It doesn't make reality be what you want.
-
-Vindication! (This showed that Yudkowsky _does_ understand what was at issue in the "... Not Man for the Categories" dispute, even if I can't be credited with winning the argument for political reasons.)
-
-----------
-
-Although Yudkowsky participated in the server, I had reasoned that my participation didn't violate my previous intent not to bother him anymore, because it was a publicly-linked Discord server with hundreds of members. Me commenting on the story for the benefit of the _other_ 499 people in the chat room wouldn't generate a notification _for him_, the way it would if I sent him an email or replied to him on Twitter.
+In contrast, the culture of dath ilan does not seem to particularly value people _standing under the same sky_. It's not just the Keepers; we also see many other cases of the dath ilani covering things up for some alleged greater good with seemingly no regard to the costs of people have less accurate world-models.
-------
-
-
-
-In the #dath-ilan channel of the server, Yudkowsky elaborated on the reasoning for the masochism coverup:
-
-> altruistic sadists would if-counterfactually-fully-informed prefer not to know, because Civilization is capped on the number of happy sadists. even if you can afford a masochist, which requires being very rich, you're buying them away from the next sadist to whom masochists were previously just barely affordable
+In one notable example, Keltham, the protagonist of _Planecrash_, is an obligate sexual sadist, but never discovered this fact about himself during his first life in dath ilan, because dath ilan has arranged to cover up the existence of sadism and masochism, because sadists like Keltham would be sad if they discovered that there weren't enough masochists to go around.
-In response to a question about how frequent sadism is among Keepers, Yudkowsky wrote:
+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_.
-> I think they're unusually likely to be aware, nonpracticing potential sexual sadists. Noticing that sort of thing about yourself, and then not bidding against the next sadist over for the limited masochist supply, and instead just operating your brain so that it doesn't hurt much to know what you can't have, is exactly the kind of cost you're volunteering to take on when you say you wanna be a Keeper.
-> that's archetypally exactly The Sort Of Thing Keepers Do And Are
+The 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.
-> They choose not to, not just out of consideration for the next person in line, but because not harming the next person in line is part of the explicit bargain of becoming a Keeper.
-> Like, this sort of thing is exactly what you're signing up for when you throw yourself on the bounded rationality grenade.
-> Let the truth destroy what it can—but in you, not in other people.
+(I would later adapt my complaints into a standalone post, "On the Public Anti-Epistemology of dath ilan".)
-I objected (to the room, I told myself, not technically violating my prior intent to not bother Yudkowsky himself anymore) that "Let the truth destroy what it can—in yourself, not in other people" is such an _incredibly_ infantilizing philosophy. It's a meme that optimizes for shaping people (I know, _other_ people) into becoming weak, stupid, and unreflective, like Thellim's impression of Jane Austen characters. I expect people on Earth—not even "rationalists", just ordinary adults—to be able to cope with ... learning facts about psychology that imply that there are desirable sexual experiences they won't get to have.
+Although Yudkowsky participated in the server, I had reasoned that my participation didn't violate my previous intent not to bother him anymore, because it was a publicly-linked Discord server with hundreds of members. Me commenting on the story for the benefit of the _other_ 499 people in the chatroom wouldn't generate a notification _for him_, the way it would if I sent him an email or replied to him on Twitter.
-A user called Numendil insightfully pointed out that dath ilani might be skeptical of an Earthling saying that an unpleasant aspect our of existence is actually fine, for the same reason we would be skeptical of a resident of Golarion saying that; it makes sense for people from richer civilizations to look "spoiled" to people from poorer ones.
-
-Other replies were more disturbing. One participant wrote:
+The other chatroom participants mostly weren't buying what I was selling.
-> I think of "not in other people" not as "infantilizing", but as recognizing independent agency. You don't get to do harm to other people without their consent, whether that is physical or pychological.
+When I objected to [Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod)'s identification of the Keeper's credo as "Let the truth destroy what it can—in yourself, not in other people" as an incredibly infantalizing philosophy, someone replied, "I think of 'not in other people' not as 'infantilizing', but as recognizing independent agency. You don't get to do harm to other people without their consent, whether that is physical or pychological."
I pointed out that this obviously applies to, say, religion. Was it wrong to advocate for atheism in a religious Society, where robbing someone of their belief in God might be harming them?
"Every society strikes a balance between protectionism and liberty," someone said. "This isn't news."
-It's not news about _humans_, I conceded. It was just—I thought people who were fans of Yudkowsky's writing in 2008 had a reasonable expectation that the dominant messaging in the local subculture would continue in 2022 to be _in favor_ of telling the truth and _against_ benevolently intended Noble Lies. It ... would be interesting to know why that changed.
-
-Someone else said:
-
-> dath ilan is essentially a paradise world. In a paradise world, people have the slack to make microoptimisations like that, to allow themselves Noble Lies and not fear for what could be hiding in the gaps. Telling the truth is a heuristic for this world where Noble Lies are often less Noble than expected and trust is harder to come by.
-
-I said that I thought people were missing this idea that the reason "truth is better than lies; knowledge is better than ignorance" is such a well-performing [injunction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWTEtgBfFaz6vjwQf/ethical-injunctions) in the real world (despite the fact that there's no law of physics preventing lies and ignorance from having beneficial consequences), is because [it protects against unknown unknowns](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E7CKXxtGKPmdM9ZRc/of-lies-and-black-swan-blowups). Of course an author who wants to portray an ignorance-maintaining conspiracy as being for the greater good, can assert by authorial fiat whatever details are needed to make it all turn out for the greater good, but _that's not how anything works in real life_.
-
-I started a new thread to complain about the attitude I was seeing (Subject: "Noble Secrets; Or, Conflict Theory of Optimization on Shared Maps"). When fiction in this world, _where I live_, glorifies Noble Lies, that's a cultural force optimizing for making shared maps less accurate, I explained. As someone trying to make shared maps _more_ accurate, this force was hostile to me and mine. I understood that "secrets" and "lies" are not the same thing, but if you're a consequentialist thinking in terms of what kinds of optimization pressures are being applied to shared maps, [it's the same issue](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist): I'm trying to steer _towards_ states of the world where people know things, and the Keepers of Noble Secrets are trying to steer _away_ from states of the world where people know things. That's a conflict. I was happy to accept Pareto-improving deals to make the conflict less destructive, but I wasn't going to pretend the pro-ignorance forces were my friends just because they self-identified as "rationalists" or "EA"s. I was willing to accept secrets around nuclear or biological weapons, or AGI, on "better ignorant than dead" grounds, but the "protect sadists from being sad" thing wasn't a threat to anyone's life; it was _just_ coddling people who can't handle reality, which made _my_ life worse.
-
-I wasn't buying the excuse that secret-Keeping practices that wouldn't be okay on Earth were somehow okay on dath ilan, which was asserted by authorial fiat to be sane and smart and benevolent enough to make it work. Alternatively, if I couldn't argue with authorial fiat: the reasons why it would be bad on Earth (even if it wouldn't be bad in the author-assertion paradise of dath ilan) are reasons why _fiction about dath ilan is bad for Earth_.
-
-And just—back in the 'aughts, I said, 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.
-
-(_Overcoming Bias_ had actually been a group blog then, but I was enjoying the æsthetic of saying "Robin Hanson's blog" (when what I had actually loved about _Overcoming Bias_ was Yudkowsky's Sequences) as a way of signaling contempt for the Yudkowsky of the current year.)
-
-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 the truth being 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 needed to 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.
+It's not news about _humans_, I conceded. But I thought people who were fans of Yudkowsky's writing in 2008 had a reasonable expectation that the dominant messaging in the local subculture would continue in 2022 to be _in favor_ of telling the truth and _against_ benevolently intended noble lies. It would be interesting to know why that had changed.
-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 okay 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.
+I started a new thread for my topic (Subject: "Noble Secrets; Or, Conflict Theory of Optimization on Shared Maps"). It died out after a couple days, but I reopened it later in response to more discussion of the masochism coverup.
-On the other hand—given that he 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 chatroom 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/endorsement.)
-
-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 maintain that 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_. I thought 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.
-
----------
-
-A user called ajvermillion asked why I was being so aggressively negative about dath ilan. He compared it to Keltham's remark about how [people who grew up under a Lawful Evil government were disposed to take a more negative view of paternalism](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1874754#reply-1874754) than they do in dath ilan, where paternalism basically works fine because dath ilan is benevolent.
-
-This question put me in a somewhat awkward position: it was a legitimate question that I felt I had to answer, that I had no way of answering honestly without at least _alluding_ to my prior greviances against Yudkowsky ... which were off-topic for the server. (Again, I had told myself that I was here to comment on the story, not to prosecute my greviances.)
-
-I tried to explain, briefly. Someone who might be even _more_ paranoid about abuses of power than someone who grew up with a Lawful Evil government, is someone who grew up under a power structure that put on a _good show_ of being clean and nice, but was actually corrupt and mean.
-
-Yudkowsky had this whole marketing image of him being uniquely sane and therefore uniquely benevolent, and because his Sequences were so life-changingly good, I _actually fell for it_. There was a long Dumb Story (this Story) that was off-topic and I hadn't then finished writing up, but basically, I had what I claimed were very strong reasons not to trust the guy anymore; I think he cares a lot about not explicitly _lying_, but what made the Sequences special is that they articulated a vastly higher standard than that, that he had no intention of living up to.
-
-And so, yeah, insofar as fiction about dath ilan functioned as marketing material for Yudkowsky's personality cult that I thought was damaging people like me (in some ways, while simultaneously helping us in other ways), I had an incentive to come up with literary criticism that paints dath ilan negatively?
-
-It was great for ajvermillion to notice this! It _would_ be bad if my brain were configured to come up with dath-ilan-negative literary criticism, and for me to _simultaneously_ present myself as an authority on dath ilan whom you should trust. But if dath-ilan-negative literary criticism was undersupplied for structural reasons (because people who like a story are selected for not seeing things the story is doing that are Actually Bad), and my brain was configured to generate it anyway (because I disliked the person Yudkowsky had become, in contrast to the person he was in 2008), it seemed pro-social for me to post it, for other people to take or leave according to their own judgement?
-
-Yudkowsky soon entered the thread again, initially replying to someone else. (I remarked parenthetically that his appearance made me think I should stop wasting time snarking in his fiction server and just finish my memoir already.) We had a brief back-and-forth:
+Yudkowsky made an appearance. (After he replied to someone else, I remarked parenthetically that his appearance made me think I should stop wasting time snarking in his fiction server and just finish my memoir already.) We had a brief back-and-forth:
> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:33 PM
> the main thing I'd observe contrary to Zack's take here, is that Keltham thought that not learning about masochists he can never have, was obviously in retrospect what he'd have wanted Civilization to do, or do unless and until Keltham became rich enough to afford a masochist and then he could be told
> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:36 PM
> I am sorry that some of the insane people I attracted got together and made each other more insane and then extensively meta-gaslit you into believing that everyone generally and me personally was engaging in some kind of weird out-in-the-open gaslighting that you could believe in if you attached least-charitable explanations to everything we were doing
-It was pretty annoying that Yudkowsky was still attributing my greviances to Michael's malign influence—as if the gender identity revolution was something I would otherwise have just _taken lying down_. In the counterfactual where Michael had died in 2015, I think something like my February 2017 breakdown would have likely happened anyway. (Between August 2016 and January 2017, I sent Michael 14 emails, met with him once, and watched 60% of South Park season 19 at his suggestion, so he was _an_ influence on my thinking during that period, but not a disproportionately large one compared to everything else I was doing at the time.) How would I have later reacted to the November 2018 "hill of meaning" Tweets (assuming they weren't butterfly-effected away in this counterfactual)? It's hard to say. Maybe, if that world's analogue of my February 2017 breakdown had gone sufficiently badly (with no Michael to visit me in the psych ward or help me make sense of things afterwards), I would have already been a broken man, and not even sent Yudkowsky an email. In any case, I feel very confident that my understanding of the behavior of "everyone generally and [Yudkowsky] personally" would not have been _better_ without Michael _et al._'s influence.
+It was pretty annoying that Yudkowsky was still attributing my greviances to Michael's malign influence—as if the gender identity revolution was something I would otherwise have just taken lying down. In the counterfactual where Michael had died in 2015, I think something like my February 2017 breakdown would have likely happened anyway. (Between August 2016 and January 2017, I sent Michael 14 emails, met with him once, and watched 60% of South Park season 19 at his suggestion, so he was _an_ influence on my thinking during that period, but not a disproportionately large one compared to everything else I was doing at the time.) How would I have later reacted to the November 2018 "hill of meaning" Tweets (assuming they weren't butterfly-effected away in this counterfactual)? It's hard to say. Maybe, if that world's analogue of my February 2017 breakdown had gone sufficiently badly (with no Michael to visit me in the psych ward or help me make sense of things afterwards), I would have already been a broken man, and not even sent Yudkowsky an email. In any case, I feel very confident that my understanding of the behavior of "everyone generally and [Yudkowsky] personally" would not have been _better_ without Michael _et al._'s influence.
> [cont'd]
> you may recall that this blog included something called the "Bayesian Conspiracy"
> they won't tell you about it, because it interferes with the story they were trying to drive you insaner with, but it's so
> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:37 PM
-> it's true that the things I don't like about modern Yudkowsky were still there in Sequences-era Yudkowsky, but I think they've gotten _worse_
+> it's true that the things I don't like about modern Yudkowsky were still there in Sequences-era Yudkowsky, but I think they've gotten _worse_
> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:39 PM
-> well, if your story is that I was always a complicated person, and you selected some of my posts and liked the simpler message you extracted from those, and over time I've shifted in my emphases in a way you don't like, while still having posts like Meta-Honesty and so on... then that's a pretty different story than the one you were telling in this Discord channel, like, just now. today.
+> well, if your story is that I was always a complicated person, and you selected some of my posts and liked the simpler message you extracted from those, and over time I've shifted in my emphases in a way you don't like, while still having posts like Meta-Honesty and so on... then that's a pretty different story than the one you were telling in this Discord channel, like, just now. today.
+
+Is it, though? The "always a complicated person [who has] shifted in [his] emphases in a way [I] don't like" story was true, of course, but it elided the substantive reasons _why_ I didn't like the new emphases, which I expect other people to be able to see, too.
-Is it, though? The "always a complicated person [who has] shifted in [his] emphases in a way [I] don't like" story was true, of course, but it elided the substantive reasons _why_ I didn't like the new emphases, which could presumably be evaluated on their own merits.
+(As far as [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fnEWQAYxcRnaYBqaZ/initiation-ceremony) [Bayesian](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZxR8P8hBFQ9kC8wMy/the-failures-of-eld-science) [Conspiracy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xAXrEpF5FYjwqKMfZ/class-project) [stories](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kXAb5riiaJNrfR8v8/the-ritual) [went](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yffPyiu7hRLyc7r23/final-words), I think there's a significant narrative contrast between Brennan _seeking_ knowledge from the master _beisutsukai_, and Keltham, Merrin, and Thellim being _protected from_ knowledge by the Keepers. Neither the Bayesian Conspiracy nor the Keepers are publishing open-access textbooks, but at least the Conspiracy isn't claiming that their secretiveness is _for others' benefit_.)
-It's interesting that Yudkowsky listed "still having posts like Meta-Honesty" as an exculpatory factor here. The thing is, I [wrote a _critique_ of Meta-Honesty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). It was well-received (being [cited as a good example in the introductory post for the 2019 Less Wrong Review](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QFBEjjAvT6KbaA3dY/the-lesswrong-2019-review), for instance). I don't think I could have written a similarly impassioned critique of anything from the Sequences era, because the stuff from the Sequences era still looked _correct_ to me. To me, "Meta-Honesty" was evidence _for_ Yudkowsky having relinquished his Art and lost his powers, not evidence that his powers were still intact.
+It's notable that Yudkowsky listed "still having posts like [Meta-Honesty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases)" as an exculpatory factor here. The thing is, I [wrote a _critique_ of Meta-Honesty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). It was well-received (being [cited as a good example in the introductory post for the 2019 Less Wrong Review](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QFBEjjAvT6KbaA3dY/the-lesswrong-2019-review), for instance). I don't think I could have written a similarly impassioned critique of anything from the Sequences era, because the stuff from the Sequences era still looked correct to me. To me, "Meta-Honesty" was evidence _for_ Yudkowsky having relinquished his Art and lost his powers, not evidence that his powers were still intact.
I didn't have that response thought through in real time. At the time, I just agreed:
(When a literary critic proposes a "dark" interpretation of an author's world, I think it's implied that they're expressing disbelief in the "intended" world; the fact that I was impudently refusing to buy the benevolent interpretation wasn't because I didn't understand it.)
-> Hate-warp like this is bad for truth-perception; my understanding of the situation is that it's harm done to you by the group you say you left. I would read this as being a noninnocent error of that group; that they couldn't get what they wanted from people who still had friends outside their own small microculture, and noninnocently then decided that this outer culture was bad and people needed to be pried loose from it. They tried telling some people that this outer culture was gaslighting them and maliciously lying to them and had to be understood in wholly adversarial terms to break free of the gaslighting; that worked on somebody, and made a new friend for them; so their brain noninnocently learned that it ought to use arguments like that again, so they must be true.
+> Hate-warp like this is bad for truth-perception; my understanding of the situation is that it's harm done to you by the group you say you left. I would read this as being a noninnocent error of that group; that they couldn't get what they wanted from people who still had friends outside their own small microculture, and noninnocently then decided that this outer culture was bad and people needed to be pried loose from it. They tried telling some people that this outer culture was gaslighting them and maliciously lying to them and had to be understood in wholly adversarial terms to break free of the gaslighting; that worked on somebody, and made a new friend for them; so their brain noninnocently learned that it ought to use arguments like that again, so they must be true.
> This is a sort of thing I super did not do because I _understood_ it as a failure mode and Laid My Go Stones Against Ever Actually Being A Cult; I armed people with weapons against it, or tried to, but I was optimistic in my hopes about how much could actually be taught.
> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:20 PM
> Without particularly defending Vassar _et al._ or my bad literary criticism (sorry), _modeling the adversarial component of non-innocent errors_ (as contrasted to "had to be understood in wholly adversarial terms") seems very important. (Maybe lying is "worse" than rationalizing, but if you can't hold people culpable for rationalization, you end up with a world that's bad for broadly the same reasons that a world full of liars is bad: we can't steer the world to good states if everyone's map is full of falsehoods that locally benefitted someone.)
> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:22 PM
> yeah
> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:23 PM
-> It remains something that mortals do, and if you cut off anybody who's ever done that, you'll be left with nobody. And also importantly, people making noninnocent errors, if you accuse them of malice, will look inside themselves and correctly see that this is not how they work, and they'll stop listening to the (motivated) lies you're telling them about themselves.
+> It remains something that mortals do, and if you cut off anybody who's ever done that, you'll be left with nobody. And also importantly, people making noninnocent errors, if you accuse them of malice, will look inside themselves and correctly see that this is not how they work, and they'll stop listening to the (motivated) lies you're telling them about themselves.
> This also holds true if you make up overly simplistic stories about 'ah yes well you're doing that because you're part of $woke-concept-of-society' etc.
> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:24 PM
> I think there's _also_ a frequent problem where you try to accuse people of non-innocent errors, and they motivatedly interpret _you_ as accusing malice
In response to someone positing that dath ilani were choosing to be happier but less accurate predictors, I said that I read a blog post once about why you actually didn't want to do that, linking to [an Internet Archive copy of "Doublethink (Choosing to Be Biased)"](https://web.archive.org/web/20080216204229/https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/doublethink-cho.html) from 2008[^hanson-conceit]—at least, that was _my_ attempted paraphrase; it was possible that I'd extracted a simpler message from it than the author intended.
-[^hanson-conceit]: I was really enjoying the "Robin Hanson's blog in 2008" conceit.
+[^hanson-conceit]: I was enjoying the conceit of referring to Sequences posts as being from "Robin Hanson's blog in 2008", as a way of emphasizing the distinction between my respect for the material and my contempt for the man Yudkowsky had become.
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 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."
-The problem I saw with this is that becoming rich and famous isn't a purely random exogenous event. In order to make an informed decision about whether or not to put in the effort to try to _become_ rich and famous (as contrasted to choosing a lower-risk or more laid-back lifestyle), you need accurate beliefs about the perks of being rich and famous.
-
-The dilemma of whether to make more ambitious economic choices in pusuit of sexual goals was something that _already_ happens to people on Earth, rather than being hypothetical. I once met a trans woman who spent a lot of her twenties and thirties working very hard to get money for various medical procedures. I think she would be worse off under a censorship regime run by self-styled Keepers who thought it was kinder to prevent _poor people_ from learning about the concept of "transsexualism".
-
-Further discussion established that Yudkowsky was (supposedly) already taking into account that class of distortion on individuals' decisions, but that the empirical setting of probabilities and utilities happened to be such that ignorance came out on top.
-
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!"
I wish I had thought to ask if he'd have felt the same way in 2008.
-Ajvermillion was still 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_?
+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."
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 Robin Dawes and Richard Feynman. And if they _did_, I think I would have a false advertising complaint against them.
+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.
-Attempting to illustrate [the mood I thought dath ilan was missing](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html), I quoted (with Discord's click-to-reveal spoiler blocks around the more plot-relevant sentences) the scene from _Atlas Shrugged_ where our heroine Dagny expresses a wish to be kept ignorant for the sake of her own happiness, and gets shut down by John Galt—and Dagny _thanks_ him.[^atlas-shrugged-ref]
-
-> "[...] Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it! If only I could stay here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"
->
-> "You'll have to hear about it," said Galt; it was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. "You'll hear the whole course of the last agony of Taggart Transcontinental. You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. You'll hear about every abandoned line. You'll hear about the collapse of the Taggart Bridge. Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."
->
-> She looked at him, her head lifted, knowing what chance he was rejecting. She thought that no man of the outer world would have said this to her at this moment—she thought of the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy—she felt a stab of revulsion against that code, suddenly seeing its full ugliness for the first time [...] she answered quietly, "Thank you. You're right."
-
-[^atlas-shrugged-ref]: In Part Three, Chapter II, "The Utopia of Greed".
-
-This (probably predictably) failed to resonate with other server participants, who were baffled why 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"? Wasn't that undignified? I didn't think the disdain for "Earth people" (again, as if there were any other kind) was justified, when Earth's philosophy of rationality (as exemplified by Ayn Rand or Robert ["Get the Facts"](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/38764-what-are-the-facts-again-and-again-and-again) Heinlein) was doing better than dath ilan's on this critical dimension.
+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!"
-But if people's souls had been damaged such that they didn't have the "facing reality is virtuous" gear, it wasn't easy to install the gear by talking at them.
+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."
-Why was I so sure _my_ gear was correct?
+"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".
-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 a small, unimportant Truth and the Life of millions, 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 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?
+[^atlas-shrugged-ref]: In Part Three, Chapter II, "The Utopia of Greed".
-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 harms _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".
+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.
-Even if you specified by authorial fiat that "latent sadists could use the information to decide whether or not to try to become rich and famous" didn't tip the utility calculus in itself, [facts are connected to each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies); there were _more consequences_ to the coverup, more ways in which better-informed people could make better decisions than worse-informed people.
+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.
-What about the costs of all the other recursive censorship you'd have to do to keep the secret? (If a biography mentioned masochism in passing along with many other traits of the subject, you'd need to either censor the paragraphs with that detail, or censor the whole book. Those are real costs, even under a soft-censorship regime where people can give special consent to access "Ill Advised" products.) Maybe latent sadists could console themselves with porn if they knew, or devote their careers to making better sex robots, just as people on Earth with non-satisfiable sexual desires manage to get by. (I _knew some things_ about this topic.) What about dath ilan's heritage optimization (read: eugenics) program? Are they going to try to breed more masochists, or fewer sadists, and who's authorized to know that? And so on.
+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.
-Or imagine a world where male homosexuality couldn't be safely practiced due to super-AIDS. (I know very little about BDSM.) I still think men with that underlying predisposition would be better off _having a concept_ of "homosexuality" (even if they couldn't practice it), rather than the concept itself being censored. There are also other systematic differences that go along with sexual orientation (the "feminine gays, masculine lesbians" thing); if you censor the _concept_, you're throwing away that knowledge.
+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?
-(When I had brought up the super-AIDS hypothetical in the chat, Ajvermillion complained that I was trying to bait people into self-cancelling by biting the bullet on suppressing homosexuality. I agreed that the choice of example was engineered to activate people's progressive moral intuitions about gay rights—it was great for him to notice that—but I thought that colliding philosophical intuitions like that was intellectually productive; it wasn't an attempt to gather blackmail material.)
+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?
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 (remembered that 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.
+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).
-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 "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.)
-
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 (143 _vs._ [131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg)), or fiction-writing ability (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_), or contributions to AI alignment (founder of the field _vs._ author of some dubiously relevant blog comments), 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.
+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?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff