1 Title: On the Public Anti-Epistemology of dath ilan
5 Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
8 > When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
9 > The truth is great, and shall prevail,
10 > When none cares whether it prevail or not.
12 > —[Coventry Patmore](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9M3ynNuBsRCDfmEsZ/less-wrong-poetry-corner-coventry-patmore-s-magna-est)
14 Perhaps for lack of any world-saving research to do, 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 (capitalization _sic_). Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from a smarter, saner alternate version of Earth where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge.
16 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, which inspired a new worldbuilding trope, the [_medianworld_](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639), a setting where the average person is like the author along important dimensions.[^medianworlds]
18 [^planecrash-title]: The title is a pun, referring to both 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).
20 [^medianworlds]: You might think that the thought experiment of imagining what someone's medianworld is like would only be interesting for people who are "weird" in our own world, thinking that our world is a medianworld for people who are normal in our world. But [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit-hypervolume probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's vastly _more_ hypervolume in the hyperspace around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too.
22 Everyone in dath ilan receives rationality training from childhood, but knowledge and training deemed psychologically hazardous to the general population is safeguarded by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). AGI research takes place in a secret underground city; some unspecified form of social engineering steers the _hoi polloi_ away from thinking about the possibility of AI.
24 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 people knowing things](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/).
26 You can, of course, make up a sensible [Watsonian](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) rationale for this. A world with much smarter people is more "volatile"; with more ways for criminals and terrorists to convert knowledge into danger, maybe you _need_ more censorship just to prevent Society from blowing itself up.
28 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 speech and 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. ["The universe is not so dark a place that everyone needs to become a Keeper to ensure the species's survival,"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1861879#reply-1861879) we're told. "Just dark enough that some people ought to."
32 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.)
34 But _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_.
36 In ["For No Laid Course Prepare"](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263), the story about how Merrin came to the attention of dath ilan's bureau of Exception Handling, 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 empathy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds) is restricted to Keepers to prevent 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.
38 Notwithstanding that Rittaen can be Watsonianly assumed to have detailed neuroscience 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_. "It's not [Rittaen's] place to meddle just because he knows Merrin better than Merrin does," we're told.
40 In the same story, Merrin is dressed up as a member of a fictional alien species, the Sparashki, due to having been summoned to the hospital from a fan convention with no time to change outfits. An agent from Exception Handling [tells Merrin that the bureau's Fake Conspiracy section is running an operation to plant evidence that Sparashki are real](https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952), and asks Merrin not to contradict this, and Merrin just ... goes along with it.
42 It's in-character for Merrin to go along with it, because she's a pushover. My question is, why is it okay that Exception Handling explicitly has a Fake Conspiracies section (!), any more than it would have been if FTX or Enron explicitly had a Fake Accounting department?
44 Is it okay because the idea of humanoid aliens walking around in real life is sufficiently implausible that no one is "really fooled"? But this seems to be contradicted by the text, in which [the narrator tells us that Exception Handling deliberately does things that wouldn't otherwise make sense in order to make it harder to understand what's actually going on in Civilization](https://glowfic.com/replies/1860955#reply-1860955) (presumably, in order to protect the secret underground AGI alignment project). Even if very few dath ilani take the "Sparashki are real" ruse literally, it's still portrayed as successfully _kicking up epistemic dust_. If it were really the case that no one was being fooled about anything, then Exception Handling wouldn't have a strategic reason to do it.
46 Is it okay because dath ilan are the [designated good guys](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesignatedHero)? Well, [so was FTX](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sdjcH7KAxgB328RAb/ftx-ea-fellowships).
48 As another notable example of dath ilan hiding information for the alleged greater good, in Golarion, Keltham discovers that he's a sexual sadist, and deduces that Civilization has deliberately prevented him from realizing this, because there aren't enough corresponding masochists to go around in dath ilan. Having concepts for "sadism" and "masochism" as variations in human psychology would make sadists like Keltham sad about the desirable sexual experiences they'll never get to have, so Civilization arranges for them to _not be exposed to knowledge that would make them sad, because it would make them sad_ (!!).
50 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_.
52 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.
54 What happens, I asked, to the occasional dath ilani free speech activists, with their eloquent manifestos arguing that Civilization would be better off coordinating on maps that reflect the territory, rather than coordinating to be a Keeper-managed zoo? (They _had_ to exist: in a medianworld centered on Yudkowsky, there are going to be a few weirdos who are +2.5 standard deviations on "speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" and −2.5 standard deivations on love of clever plots; this seems less weird than negative utilitarians, who were [established to exist](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1789623#reply-1789623).) I _assumed_ they get dealt with somehow in the end (exiled from most cities? ... involuntarily cryopreserved?), but there had to be an interesting story about someone who starts out whistleblowing small lies (which Exception Handling allows; they think it's cute, and it's "priced in" to the game they're playing), and then just keeps _escalating and escalating and escalating_ until Governance decides to unperson him.
56 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.
58 In the #dath-ilan channel of the server, Yudkowsky elaborated on the reasoning for the masochism coverup:
60 > 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
62 In response to a question about how frequent sadism is among Keepers, Yudkowsky wrote:
64 > 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.
65 > that's archetypally exactly The Sort Of Thing Keepers Do And Are
67 > 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.
68 > Like, this sort of thing is exactly what you're signing up for when you throw yourself on the bounded rationality grenade.
69 > Let the truth destroy what it can—but in you, not in other people.
71 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.
73 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.
75 Other replies were more disturbing. One participant wrote:
77 > 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.
79 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?
81 "Every society strikes a balance between protectionism and liberty," someone said. "This isn't news."
83 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.
87 > 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.
89 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_.
91 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.
93 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_.
95 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.
97 (_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.)
99 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—
101 "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)."
103 —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).
105 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.
107 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.
109 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.
111 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_.
113 The other chatroom participants mostly weren't buying what I was selling.
115 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.)
117 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.
119 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.
121 [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_.
123 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.
125 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:
127 > 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.
129 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.
131 If we believe that [IQ research validates the "Jews are clever" stereotype](https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf), I wondered if there's a distinct (albeit probably correlated) "enjoying deception" trait that validates the "Jews are sneaky" stereotype? If dath ilan is very high in this "sneakiness" trait (relative to Earth Jews), that would help explain all the conspiracies![^edgy-anti-semitism]
133 [^edgy-anti-semitism]: It probably would have been possible to bring up the sneakiness-trait hypothesis in a less edgy way, but I didn't care to.
135 Not-actually-plausible conspiracies that everyone is in on (like "Sparashki are real") are a [superstimulus](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization) like zero-calorie sweetener: engineered to let everyone enjoy the thrill of lying, without doing any real damage to shared maps.
137 In "For No Laid Course Prepare", Merrin's coworkers falsely maintain to outsiders that Merrin always cosplays as a Sparashki while on duty. ["This is not considered a lie, in that it would be universally understood and expected that no one in this social circumstance would tell the truth,"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1857346#reply-1857346) the narrator tells us. The language used here is strikingly similar to that of one of the corrupt executives in [_Moral Mazes_](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/quotes-from-moral-mazes/): "We lie all the time, but if everyone knows that we're lying, is a lie really a lie?"
139 But if [everyone really knew](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/), what would be _function_ of saying the false thing? On dath ilan (if not in Earth boardrooms), one supposes the answer is "Because it's fun"? But that just prompts the followup question: but what is the function of the brain giving out a "fun" reward in this context? It seems like at _some_ point, there has to be the expectation of _some_ cognitive system (although possibly not an entire "person") taking the signals literally.[^funny-or-powerful-falsehood]
141 [^funny-or-powerful-falsehood]: This is why, when I notice myself misrepresenting my actual beliefs or motivations because I think it's funny or rhetorically powerful, I often take care to disclaim it immediately, precisely because I _don't_ think that "everybody knows"; I'm not going to give up on humor or powerful rhetoric, but I'm also not going to delude myself into thinking it's "zero-calorie": people who don't "get the joke" _are_ going to be misled, and I don't think it's unambigously "their fault" for not being able to read my "intent" to arbitrary precision. But maybe dath ilan is (by authorial fiat) sufficiently good at achieving common knowledge in large groups that they _can_ pull off a zero-calorie "everyone knows" conspiracy without damaging shared maps?
143 The existence of such a widespread sneakiness/"taste for deception" trait among the eliezera, in conjunction with their culture just not particularly valuing public knowledge (because they assume everything important is being handled by the Keepers), explains the recurring conspiracies and coverups, like the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, Exception Handling's fabrication of evidence for Sparashki being real, the sadism/masochism coverup, and [the village that deliberately teaches anti-redhead bigotry to children in order to test the robustness of dath ilan's general humanism indoctrination](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uyBeAN5jPEATMqKkX/lies-told-to-children-1).
145 I stress (at least now, even if I didn't do a good job of explaining it at the time) that this hypothesis _doesn't_ require dath ilani to be cartoon villains who hate knowledge and want people to be ignorant. Just that, as a result of the widespread sneakiness trait and their outsourcing information-process to the Keepers, in the course of trying to accomplish other things, plans-that-involve-conspiracies are often higher in their search ordering than plans-that-involve-keeping-people-informed.
147 I claimed that there was a hidden-core-of-rationality thing about a culture that values living in truth, that the dath ilani didn't have. In previous discussion of the Sparashki example, a user called lc had written, "If you see someone wearing an elf costume at work and conclude elves are real and make disastrous decisions based on that conclusion you are mentally deranged". And indeed, you would be mentally deranged if you did that _on Earth_, because we don't have an elves-are-real conspiracy on Earth.
149 In elves-are-real conspiracy-world, you (Whistleblower) see someone (Conspirator) wearing an elf costume at work and say, "Nice costume." They say, "What costume?" You say, "I see that you're dressed like an elf, but elves aren't real." They say, "What do you mean? Of course elves are real. I'm right here." You say, "You know exactly what I mean."
151 It would appear that there's a conflict between Conspirator (who wants to maintain a social reality in which they're an elf, because it's fun, and the conspiracy is sufficiently outlandish that it's assumed that no one is "really" being deceived) and Whistleblower (who wants default social reality to map to actual reality; make-believe is fine at a designated fandom convention which has designated boundaries, but let's be serious at work, where your coworkers are trying to make a living and haven't opted-in to this false social reality).
153 I was skeptical that a culture where people collude to maintain a fake social reality at their job in a hospital, and everyone else is expected to play along because it's fun, really has this living-in-truth thing. People play those social-reality games on Earth, too, and when _they_ say no one is being deceived, they're _definitely_ lying about that, and I doubted that the eliezera were actually built that differently.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob