memoir: humility vs. the vaccine gambit

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@@ -659,12 +659,23 @@ https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435856644076830721
 
 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.
 
-But if knowing it was a joke partially mollifies the offended reader who thought I might have been serious, I don't think they should be _completely_ mollified, because the joke (while a joke) reflects something about my thinking when I'm being serious: I don't think sex-based collective rights are inherently a crazy idea; I think _something of value has been lost_ when women who want female-only spaces can't have them, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that something of value has been lost, and the idea that people who have lost something of value are entitled to compensation.
+But if knowing it was a joke partially mollifies the offended reader who thought I might have been serious, I don't think they should be _completely_ mollified, because the joke (while a joke) reflects something about my thinking when I'm being serious: I don't think sex-based collective rights are inherently a suspect idea; I think _something of value has been lost_ when women who want female-only spaces can't have them, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that something of value has been lost, and the idea that people who have lost something of value are entitled to compensation.
 
-At Valinor's 2022 Smallpox Eradication Day party, I remember overhearing[^overhearing] Yudkowsky saying that OpenAI should have used GPT-3 to mass-promote the Moderna COVID vaccine to Republicans and the Pfizer vaccine to Democrats (or vice versa). I assume this was not a serious proposal.
+At Valinor's 2022 Smallpox Eradication Day party, I remember overhearing[^overhearing] Yudkowsky saying that OpenAI should have used GPT-3 to mass-promote the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Republicans and the Pfizer vaccine to Democrats (or vice versa), thereby harnessing the forces of tribalism in the service of public health.
 
-[^overhearing]: Conversations at a party with lots of people are not protected by privacy norms.
+[^overhearing]: I claim that conversations at a party with lots of people are not protected by privacy norms; if I heard it, several other people heard it; no one had a reasonable expectation that I shouldn't blog about it.
 
+I assume this was not a serious proposal. Knowing it was a joke partially mollifies what offense I would have taken if I thought he might have been serious. But I don't think I should be completely mollified, because I think I think the joke (while a joke) reflects something about Yudkowsky's thinking when he's being serious: that he apparently doesn't think corupting Society's shared maps for utilitarian ends is inherently a suspect idea; he doesn't think truthseeking public discourse is a thing in our world, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that public discourse isn't a thing, and the idea that a public that can't reason needs to be manipulated by elites into doing good things rather than bad things.
+
+My favorite Ben Hoffman post is ["The Humility Argument for Honesty"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/). It's sometimes argued the main reason to be honest is in order to be trusted by others. (As it is written, ["[o]nce someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings).) Hoffman points out another reason: we should be honest because others will make better decisions if we give them the best information available, rather than worse information that we chose to present in order to manipulate their behavior. If you want your doctor to prescribe you a particular medication, you might be able to arrange that by looking up the symptoms of an appropriate ailment on WebMD, and reporting those to the doctor. But if you report your _actual_ symptoms, the doctor can combine that information with their own expertise to recommend a better treatment.
+
+If you _just_ want the public to get vaccinated, I can believe that the Pfizer/Democrats _vs._ Moderna/Republicans propaganda gambit would work. You could even do it without telling any explicit lies, by selectively citing the either the protection or side-effect statistics for each vaccine depending on whom you were talking to. One might ask: if you're not _lying_, what's the problem?
+
+The _problem_ is that manipulating people into doing what you want subject to the genre constraint of not telling any explicit lies, isn't the same thing as informing people so that they can make sensible decisions. In reality, both mRNA vaccines are very similar! It would be surprising if the one associated with my political faction happened to be good, whereas the one associated with the other faction happened to be bad. Someone who tried to convince me that Pfizer was good and Moderna was bad would be misinforming me—trying to trap me in a false reality, a world that doesn't quite make sense—with [unforseeable consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) for the rest of my decisionmaking. As someone with an interest in living in a world that makes sense, I have reason to regard this as _hostile action_, even if the false reality and the true reality both recommend the isolated point decision of getting vaccinated.
+
+I'm not, overall, satisfied with the political impact of my writing on this blog. One could imagine someone who shared Yudkowsky's apparent disbelief in public reason advising me that my practice of carefully explaining at length what I believe and why, has been an ineffective strategy—that I should instead clarify to myself what policy goal I'm trying to acheive, and try to figure out some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other in a way that advances my agenda.
+
+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_.
 
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