> in other words, Keltham thought he was obviously being treated the way that counterfactual fully-informed Keltham would have paid Governance to treat not-yet-informed Keltham
> that this obeys the social contract that Keltham thought he had, is part of why Keltham is confident that the logic of this particular explanation holds together
> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:35 PM
-> the level of service that Keltham is expecting is not the thing I learned from Robin Hanson's blog in 2008
+> the level of service that Keltham is expecting is _not the thing I learned from Robin Hanson's blog in 2008_
> **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.
-> [cont'd]
+> [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
+> 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.
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.
-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. 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 mostly 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 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.
I didn't have that response thought through in real time. At the time, I just agreed:
> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:44 PM
> it looks from outside here like they stomped really heavy footprints all over your brain that have not healed or been filled in
> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:49 PM
-> it looks from inside here that the thing I'm not healed from is the thing where, as Oliver Habryka put it, I "should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY), and Michael and Ben and Jessica were really helpful for orienting me to that particular problem, even if I disagree with them about a lot of other things and they seem crazy in other ways
+> it looks from inside here that the thing I'm not healed from is the thing where, as Oliver Habryka put it, I "should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false" ([https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY)), and Michael and Ben and Jessica were _really_ helpful for orienting me to that particular problem, even if I disagree with them about a lot of other things and they seem crazy in other ways
> (rule thinkers in, not out)
I was pleased to get the link to Habryka's comment in front of Yudkowsky, if he hadn't already seen it.
> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:55 PM
> the most harm they did you was to teach you to see malice where you should have seen mortality
> noninnocent error is meaningfully different from innocent error; and noninnocent error is meaningfully different from malice
-> Keltham deduced the lack of masochists in dath ilan by asking the question, "Why would Civilization have kept this information from me?", ruling out or actually not even thinking of such ridiculous hypotheses as "Because it was fun", and settling on the obvious explanation that explained why Keltham would have wanted Civilization to do that for him - masochists not existing or being incredibly rare and unaffordable to him. You looked at this and saw malice everywhere; you couldn't even see the fictional world the author was trying to give you direct description about. You didn't say that you disbelieved in the world; you could not see what was being described.
+> Keltham deduced the lack of masochists in dath ilan by asking the question, "Why would Civilization have kept this information from me?", _ruling out_ or actually not even thinking of such ridiculous hypotheses as "Because it was fun", and settling on the obvious explanation that explained _why Keltham would have wanted Civilization to do that for him_—masochists not existing or being incredibly rare and unaffordable to him. You looked at this and saw malice everywhere; you couldn't even see _the fictional world_ the author was trying to give you _direct description about_. You didn't say that you disbelieved in the world; you could not see what was being _described_.
>
> 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.
+> 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.)
+> 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.)
> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:22 PM
> Rationalization sure is a huge thing! That's why I considered important to discourse upon the science of it, as was then known; and to warn people that there were more complicated tangles than that, which no simple experiment had shown yet.
> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:22 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.
> 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
+> 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
> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:25 PM
> Then invent new terminology. I do that all the time when existing terminology fails me.
> Like I literally invented the term 'noninnocent error' right in this conversation.
> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:27 PM
> I've tried this, but maybe it wasn't good enough, or I haven't been using it consistently enough: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)
> I should get ready for bed
-> I will endeavor to edit out the hate-warp from my memoir before publishing, and probably not talk in this server
+> I will endeavor to edit out the hate-warp from my memoir before publishing, and _probably_ not talk in this server
> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:31 PM
> I think you should worry first about editing the hate-warp out of yourself, but editing the memoir might be useful practice for it. Good night.
Yudkowsky clarified his position:
-> My exact word choices often do matter: I said that you should always be trying to infer the truth. With the info you already have. In dath ilan if not in Earth, you might decline to open a box labeled "this info will make you permanently dissatisfied with sex" if the box was labeled by a prediction market.
+> My exact word choices often do matter: I said that you should always be trying to _infer_ the truth. With the info you already have. In dath ilan if not in Earth, you might decline to open a box labeled "this info will make you permanently dissatisfied with sex" if the box was labeled by a prediction market.
> Trying to avoid inferences seems to me much more internally costly than declining to click on a spoiler box.
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."
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 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!"
+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!"
-And to the extent that I was the only person jumping out of my chair, and there was a party-line response of the form, "Ah, but if it's been decreed by authorial fiat that these-and-such probabilities and utilities take such-and-these values, then in this case, self-knowledge is actually bad under the utilitarian calculus," I wasn't disputing the utilitarian calculus. I was wondering—here I used the "bug" emoji customarily used on Glowfic and adjacent servers to indicate uncertainty about the right words to use—_who destroyed your souls?_
+And to the extent that I was the only person jumping out of my chair, and there was a party-line response of the form, "Ah, but if it's been decreed by authorial fiat that these-and-such probabilities and utilities take such-and-these values, then in this case, self-knowledge is actually bad under the utilitarian calculus," I wasn't disputing the utilitarian calculus. I was wondering—here I used the "🐛" bug emoji customarily used in Glowfic culture to indicate uncertainty about the right words to use—_who destroyed your souls?_
Yudkowsky replied:
-> it feels powerfully relevant to me that the people of whom I am saying this are eliezera. I get to decide what they'd want because, unlike with Earth humans, I get to put myself in their shoes. it's plausible to me that the prediction markets say that I'd be sadder if I was exposed to the concept of sadism in a world with no masochists. if so, while I wouldn't relinquish my Art and lose my powers by trying to delude myself about that once I'd been told, I'd consider it a friendly act to keep the info from me—because I have less self-delusional defenses than a standard Earthling, really—and a hostile act to tell me; and if you are telling me I don't get to make that decision for myself because it's evil, and if you go around shouting it from the street corners in dath ilan, then yeah I think most cities don't let you in.
+> it feels powerfully relevant to me that the people of whom I am saying this _are eliezera_. I get to decide what they'd want because, unlike with Earth humans, I get to put myself in their shoes. it's plausible to me that the prediction markets say that I'd be sadder if I was exposed to the concept of sadism in a world with no masochists. if so, while I wouldn't relinquish my Art and lose my powers by trying to delude myself about that once I'd been told, I'd consider it a friendly act to keep the info from me—_because_ I have less self-delusional defenses than a standard Earthling, really—and a hostile act to tell me; and if you are telling me I don't get to make that decision for myself because it's evil, and if you go around shouting it from the street corners in dath ilan, then yeah I think most cities don't let you in.
I wish I had thought to ask if he'd have felt the same way in 2008.
(Yudkowsky retorted, "...you realize you're describing like half the alien planets in comic books? when did Superman ever get depicted as studying kung fu?" I wish I had thought to admit that, yes, I _did_ hold Eliezer Yudkowsky to a higher standard of consilient worldbuilding than DC Comics. Would he rather I _didn't_?)
-Something about innate _kung fu_ world seems fake in a way that seems like a literary flaw. It's not just about plausibility. Innate _kung fu_ skills are scientifically plausible[^instinct] in a way that faster-than-light travel is not. Fiction incorporates unrealistic elements in order to tell a story that has relevace to real human lives. Throwing faster-than-light travel into the universe so that you can do a space opera doesn't make the _people_ fake in the way that Superman's fighting skills are fake.
+Something about innate _kung fu_ world seems fake in a way that seems like a literary flaw. It's not just about plausibility. Innate _kung fu_ skills are scientifically plausible[^instinct] in a way that faster-than-light travel is not. Fiction incorporates unrealistic elements in order to tell a story that has relevace to real human lives. Throwing faster-than-light travel into the universe so that you can do a [space opera](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceOpera) doesn't make the _people_ fake in the way that Superman's fighting skills are fake.
[^instinct]: All sorts of other instinctual behaviors exist in animals; I don't se why skills humans have to study for years as a "martial art" couldn't be coded into the genome.
✓ scuffle on "Yes Requires the Possibility" [pt. 4]
✓ "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" [pt. 4]
✓ Eliezerfic fight: will-to-Truth vs. will-to-happiness [pt. 6]
+- Eliezerfic fight: Ayn Rand and children's morals [pt. 6]
- regrets, wasted time, conclusion [pt. 6]
- "Lesswrong.com is dead to me" [pt. 4]
-_ Eliezerfic fight: Ayn Rand and children's morals [pt. 6]
_ AI timelines scam [pt. 4]
_ secret thread with Ruby [pt. 4]
_ progress towards discussing the real thing [pt. 4]
it was actually "wander onto the AGI mailing list wanting to build a really big semantic net" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9HGR5qatMGoz4GhKj/above-average-ai-scientists)
With internet available—
-_ space opera TVTrope?
-_ Word of God TVTropes page
-_ March 2017 Blanchard Tweeting my blog?
-_ bug emoji
+_ hate-warp tag
+_ "around plot relevant sentences" ... only revealing, which, specifically?
_ what was I replying to, re: "why you actually don't want to be a happier but less accurate predictor"?
-_ Meta-Honesty critique well-received: cite 2019 review guide
-_ https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/2Ses9aB8jSDZtyRnW/duncan-sabien-on-moderating-lesswrong#comment-aoqWNe6aHcDiDh8dr
-_ https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/trvFowBfiKiYi7spb/open-thread-july-2019#comment-RYhKrKAxiQxY3FcHa
_ relevant screenshots for Eliezerfic play-by-play
-_ correct italics in quoted Eliezerfic back-and-forth
_ lc on elves and Sparashki
_ Nate would later admit that this was a mistake (or ask Jessica where)
_ Michael Bailey's new AGP in women study
-_ "gene drive" terminology
-_ double-check "All rates" language
_ footnote "said that he wishes he'd never published"
-_ hate-warp tag
_ replace "Oh man oh jeez" Rick & Morty link
_ Nevada bona fides
_ Parfit's Hitchhiker
"but the ideological environment is such that a Harvard biologist/psychologist is afraid to notice blatantly obvious things in the privacy of her own thoughts, that's a really scary situation to be in (insofar as we want society's decisionmakers to be able to notice things so that they can make decisions)",
+In October 2016, I messaged an alumna of my App Academy class of November 2013 (back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted), effectively asking to consult her expertise on feminism. "Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"
+if [...] wrote her own 10,600 draft Document explaining why she thought [...] is actually a girl, that would be really interesting!—but rather that no one else seemed _interested in having a theory_, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
-In October 2016, I messaged an alumna of my App Academy class of November 2013 (back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted), effectively asking to consult her expertise on feminism. "Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824 re "malinformation"
+> If we don't have the concept of an attack performed by selectively reporting true information - or, less pleasantly, an attack on the predictable misinferences of people we think less rational than ourselves - the only socially acceptable counter is to say the info is false.
+Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017
+https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160
+https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528
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