+Something that annoyed me about the portrayal of dath ilan was their incredibly casual attitude towards hiding information for some alleged greater good, seemingly without considering that [there are benefits and not just costs to the public knowing things](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/).
+
+You can, of course, make up any number of sensible [Watsonian](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) rationales for this. (For example, a world with much smarter people is more "volatile"; with more ways to convert knowledge into danger, maybe you _need_ more censorship just to hold Society together.)
+
+I'm more preoccupied by a [Doylistic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) interpretation—that dath ilan's obsessive secret-keeping reflects something deep about how the Yudkowsky of the current year relates to information, in contrast to the Yudkowsky who wrote the Sequences. The Sequences had encouraged you—yes, _you_, the reader—to be as rational as possible. In contrast, the dath ilan mythos seems to portray advanced rationality as dangerous knowledge that people need to be protected from.
+
+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):
+
+> Daria, once Green, tried to breathe amid the ashes of her world. _I will not flinch_, Daria told herself, _I will not look away_. She had been Green all her life, and now she must be Blue. Her friends, her family, would turn from her. _Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles_, her father had told her; but her father was dead now, and her mother would never understand. Daria stared down the calm blue gaze of the sky, trying to accept it, and finally her breathing quietened. _I was wrong_, she said to herself mournfully; _it's not so complicated, after all_. She would find new friends, and perhaps her family would forgive her ... or, she wondered with a tinge of hope, rise to this same test, standing underneath this same sky? "The sky is blue," Daria said experimentally, and nothing dire happened to her; but she couldn't bring herself to smile. Daria the Blue exhaled sadly, and went back into the world, wondering what she would say.
+
+Daria takes it as a given that she needs to be open about her new blue-sky belief, even though it's socially costly to herself and to her loved ones; the rationalist wisdom from her late father did _not_ say to go consult a Keeper to check whether telling everyone about the blue sky is a good idea.[^other-endings] I think this reflects the culture of the _Overcoming Bias_ in 2006 valuing the existence of a shared social reality that reflects actual reality: the conviction that it's both possible and desirable for people to rise to the same test, standing underneath the same 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. Daria and Eddin are clearly written as "rationalists"; the deceptive strategy only comes naturally to the non-rationalist Charles.
+
+In contrast, the culture of dath ilan does not seem to particularly value people _standing underneath the same sky_.
+
+For example, we are told of an Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, centered around a famous medical technician with a psychological need to feel unimportant, of whom ["everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1764946#reply-1764946) that her achievements are nothing special, which is deemed to be kindness to her. It's like a reverse [Emperor Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton) situation. (Norton was ordinary, but everyone around him colluded to make him think he was special; Merrin is special, but everyone around her colludes to make her think she's ordinary.)
+
+And _as_ a rationalist, I condemn the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy as _morally wrong_, for the same [reasons I condemn the Emperor Norton Conspiracy](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton). As [it was taught to me on _Overcoming Bias_ back in the 'aughts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality): what's true is already so. Denying it won't make it better. Acknowledging it won't make it worse. And _because_ it is true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, _because they are already doing so_.
+
+In [the story about how Merrin came to the attention of Exception Handling](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263), we see the thoughts of a Keeper, Rittaen, who talks to Merrin. We're told that the discipline of modeling people mechanistically rather than through sympathy is restricted to Keepers because it runs the risk of ["turning into an exceptionally dangerous psychopath"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1862201#reply-1862201). Rittaen [uses his person-as-machine Sight](https://glowfic.com/replies/1862204#reply-1862204) to infer that Merrin was biologically predisposed to learn to be afraid of having too much status.
+
+Notwithstanding that Rittaen can be Watsonianly assumed to have detailed neurology skills that the author Doylistically doesn't know how to write, I am entirely unimpressed by the assertion that this idea is somehow _dangerous_, a secret that only Keepers can bear, rather than something _Merrin herself should be clued into_. We're told that "[i]t's not [Rittaen's] place to meddle just because he knows Merrin better than Merrin does"—reflecting an attitude that revealing information is _meddling_, rather than talking being a free action.
+
+[ TODO—
+ * I think there's even a part (find it) where the Keeper says it's nice that they live in a world where not everyone has to be a Keeper just for the world to survive, portraying rationality, knowledge as a burden