1 Title: On the Public Anti-Epistemology of dath ilan
5 Tags: bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, worldbuilding
8 > All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.
10 > —Thomas Jefferson, earthling
12 Eliezer Yudkowsky's fiction about the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_) aims to portray a smarter, saner, better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. 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 dath ilan, where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge. (This likely inspired the trope of a [_medianworld_](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639), a setting where the average person is like the author along important dimensions.)[^medianworlds]
14 [^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. (Or they could, if the normies of our world were into worldbuilding.)
16 Dath ilan's cognitive superiority to the real world is a recurring theme in modern Yudkowsky's work. In the fictional canon, it's a focus of the story ["But Hurting People is Wrong"](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), but even when not discussing fiction, Yudkowsky often makes sneering comments about "Earth" or "Earth people", apparently meant to disparage all actually existing humans for not living up to his fiction.
18 One is led to believe that people who were deeply inspired by Yudkowsky's [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) (a series of influential posts about rationality published on the _Overcoming Bias_ blog largely between 2007 and 2009) should regard dath ilan as a rationalist utopia. After all, on the terms of the 2014 April Fools' Day joke, that's where the knowledge came from.
20 And yet, for such a supposed rationalist utopia, it's remarkable the extent to which dath ilan's Society is portrayed as being organized around conspiracies to lie or otherwise cover up the truth—not just when forced to by dire matters of planetary security (as when keeping nuclear or AGI secrets), but seemingly for any somewhat plausible excuse whatsoever, including protecting the feelings of people who would be happier if kept ignorant. Evidently, there are _many_ truths existing which dath ilan fears and would wish unknown to the whole world.
22 The contrast to the [sense of life](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sense_of_life.html) portrayed in the Sequences is striking. The Sequences emphasized that you—yes, you, the reader—had an interest in having an accurate world-model. On the subject of confronting unpleasant hypotheses, the Sequences [gave this advice](https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points) (bolding mine):
24 > When you're doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and **deliberately think about whatever hurts the most**. Don't rehearse standard objections whose standard counters would make you feel better. Ask yourself what _smart_ people who disagree would say to your first reply, and your second reply. Whenever you catch yourself flinching away from an objection you fleetingly thought of, drag it out into the forefront of your mind. **Punch yourself in the solar plexus. Stick a knife in your heart, and wiggle to widen the hole.** In the face of the pain, rehearse only this:
26 > What is true is already so.
27 > Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
28 > Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
29 > And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
30 > People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
32 Meanwhile, the dath ilan mythos depicts rationality itself as hazardous knowledge that people need to be protected from. Dath ilani Civilization is steered by a secretive order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). ["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." Ordinary dath ilani do receive rationality training, but it's implied to be deliberately crippled, featuring ["signposts around the first steps [towards becoming a Keeper], placed to warn dath ilani off starting down that path unless they mean it."](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1799590#reply-1799590) The maxim that "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is described as being ["remembered as much for how it's false, as for how it's true, because among the things that truths can destroy is people."](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1687922#reply-1687922)
34 Clearly, this is not a culture that cares about ordinary people being well-informed. Apparently, they believe that owning up to it _does_ make it worse, that the untrue _is_ there to be lived (for non-Keepers).
36 We might say that the algorithm that designed dath ilan's Civilization can be seen as systematically preferring deception. When I speak of an algorithm preferring deception, [what I mean is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) that given a social problem, candidate solutions that involve deceiving the populace seem to be higher in dath ilani Civilization's implicit search ordering than solutions that involve informing the populace. Solutions that work by means of telling the truth will be implemented only when solutions that work by means of deception are seen to fail.
38 Crucially, these are [functionalist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) [criteria](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/) of "preference" and "deception". It's about how Civilization is structured in a way that systematically encourages divergences between popular belief and reality. I'm _not_ positing that Civilization's Keepers and Legislators and Chief Executive are laughing maniacally and telling each other out loud, "I personally love it when non-Keepers have false beliefs; we need to do as much of that as possible—as a [terminal value](https://www.readthesequences.com/Terminal-Values-And-Instrumental-Values)!"
40 Rather, I'm positing that they don't care about non-Keepers having false beliefs. (They might care about [not technically lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PrXR66hQcaJXsgWsa/not-technically-lying), but that [turns out to be a weak constraint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).)
42 If you're in the business of coming up with clever plans to solve problems, and you don't care about people having false beliefs, you mostly end up with clever plans that work by means of giving people false beliefs that trick them into doing what you want them to do (perhaps without technically lying).
44 Why wouldn't you? There are more false maps than true maps. If you don't specifically care about [affirmatively telling the truth](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#Intent_to_inform), you mostly end up supplying false maps in order to control people's behavior by means of controling their information, because if you told them the truth, they wouldn't behave the way you want them to. Instrumental convergence is a harsh mistress.
46 ### Interlude: Methodology for Worldbuilding Criticism; Or, I Can't Argue With Authorial Fiat
48 At this point, some readers might object that this kind of "dark" interpretation of a fictional universe oversteps the authority of the literary critic. One imagines that Yudkowsky doesn't particularly think of dath ilan as a world governed by deception. What grounds could I possibly have to argue that it is, given that he's the author and I'm not? Isn't that just making up my own fictional world and substituting it for the "real" dath ilan defined by Yudkowsky's authorial intent?
50 But the craft of literature isn't a matter of merely conveying a fictional reality that existed fully formed in the author's imagination in advance of writing it down. The craft is about producing text that readers can use to build up their own model of the fictional world. The exacting labor of [converting vague ideas into definite text](http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html) is the difference between writing and daydreaming. We can accept [Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) as supplementary material where the text of a story is ambiguous or silent on a point of interest, but some kind of [Death of the Author](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor) stance is ultimately necessary for making sense of literature in a world in which telepathy doesn't exist and authors do occasionally die. The text is not a mere pointer to the "real" work inside the author's head; the text _is_ the work. That's the only way the technology of writing can function.
52 Moreover, a Death of the Author stance seems particularly important for evaluating medianworlds. What makes the exercise of constructing a medianworld interesting is the challenge of envisioning the details of a _realistic_ Society that would result given a population with an alternative [distribution of cognitive repertoires](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/), but where the same generalizations of biology, sociology, and economics that govern our own world are presumed to hold. If the world portrayed by the text [doesn't seem to hold together](/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/) or has [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) that the author doesn't acknowledge, it's the solemn duty of literary critics to point that out to less discerning readers.
54 In analogy, mathematicians, like authors, are also in the business of creating imaginary worlds, but mathematical objects, once defined, can be examined on their own terms. A mathematician encountering [a deeply unsatisfying theorem about their new definition](https://blog.plover.com/math/major-screwups-4.html) understands that there can be no recourse in protesting, "But that's not how _I_ imagined it working." That would be failing to engage with the real difficulties of mathematical research. If you wanted different behavior, you should have written a better definition!
56 Similarly, an author who says, "In _my_ medianworld, fully automated luxury gay space communism with central planning just works, because the populace is so smart and nice, unlike _Earth people_, who are so mean and dumb that they have to use _markets_ to allocate scarce resources" is failing to engage with the real difficulties of the medianworld exercise. Readers would have a right to be skeptical.
58 Authors, of course, have much more wiggle room than mathematicians to try to salvage their cherished ideas. Rather than being forced back to the drawing board by an unwanted implication, a fiction writer finds it all too easy to simply add another sentence denying it. But the author's total freedom to specify the text necessarily interacts with readers' attempts to imagine a self-consistent universe that "projects into" that text. Short of an explicitly omniscient narrator declaring "And then a miracle occured", discerning readers will tend to reach for interprerations of the text that make sense—even if making sense entails casting doubt on the narrator's editorial spin on the described events.
60 Yudkowsky's 2009 story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good) is an incisive commentary on how unwary readers' moral compasses can be hijacked by author editorializing. If the story depicts our heroes wantonly slaughtering orcs, readers tend not to worry about the ethics of warfare: if the [designated hero](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesignatedHero) is doing it, it presumably isn't a problem. But living creatures that are depicted as speaking language, having organized armies with complex tools, _&c._ are presumably sapient for the same reasons humans are. It's fair game for "The Sword of Good" to point that out—at least, short of the narrator _explicitly_ declaring, "Despite appearances, the orcs are unconscious [philosophical zombies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies); killing them has no moral significance." (But a story that did declare that would be highly unusual, and basically conceding the critic's point about stories that didn't!)
62 All I'm doing in this essay is holding the dath ilan mythos to the same standard that "The Sword of Good" holds classic fantasy tropes to. Maybe it's good to run a global conspiracy to keep people ignorant in order to protect their emotional well-being, and maybe those orcs deserved to die. But given a text that _does_ literally describe massive coverups or killing of human-like creatures, it's fundamentally fair game for literary critics to point that out, and prompt readers to rethink whether they should accept "it's good because the good guys are doing it" or "it's good because it's dath ilan, which is not Earth" as an implicit excuse.
64 ### The History Screen: Who Controls the Past Controls the Future
66 One of the distinctive features of dath ilani Civilization is that they've deleted their history. No one except a few specially cleared specialists ["in their own causally isolated bunker"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1688794#reply-1688794) is allowed to learn history before a point in a relatively recent past. (["[D]ecades ago, not millennia ago"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1789110#reply-1789110) as of Keltham's time.)
68 This is a drastic measure, a civilizational lobotomy. It seems significant that the most famous literary depiction of a Society that deleted its history is George Orwell's _Nineteen-Eighty-Four_, in which a totalitarian state maintains a Society in which "[n]othing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
70 Dath ilan is depicted as suffering practical consequences from its ignorance: a discussion of the evolution of eliezera's low happiness levels is cut short with ["How'd it happen? Nobody knows, at this point, they screened their history."](https://glowfic.com/replies/1812613#reply-1812613)
73 * need to figure out how to be more concrete about harms ... https://www.readthesequences.com/Entangled-Truths-Contagious-Lies
74 * This is a drastic measure: consider all the costs of deleting history
75 * The actual explanation turns out to be incredibly casual—"As long as they were doing that anyways": the assumption that the hoi polloi are better off not knowing where they came from isn't argued for at all
76 * Doylist interpretation makes sense (Keltham encountering a mideval monarchy is more interesting if he doesn't know what a Queen is), but if it's that kind of universe, what's with the comments about dath ilan being superior to Earth? Topia-for-storytelling shouldn't be hailed as a eutopia
77 * 1984 https://www.abhafoundation.org/assets/books/html/1984/162.html https://www.abhafoundation.org/assets/books/html/1984/103.html
79 https://glowfic.com/replies/1688794#reply-1688794
80 > "I'm not sure there's literally anybody on my planet who's 'not allowed to do other stuff'. Maybe some Keepers, if they're holding infohazards so bad that they all have to stay in the same isolated village somewhere?"
81 > (And the people who know the true history, in their own causally isolated bunker.
83 https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939
84 > And so long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well also carry out the less important but still useful operation of putting all of Civilization's past behind the most complete possible causal screen. That part wasn't as important, but still legitimately helpful; and doing it would help to overshadow the other changes, and lead to less attention going to the more dangerous places.
90 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.)
92 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_.
94 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.
96 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.
98 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.
100 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?
102 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.
104 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).
108 * Merrin: a reverse Emperor Norton case
109 * Overcoming Bias readers in 2008 would have found this offensive, not cute; Merrin is living a lie, and everyone is in on it.
110 * Rittaen's claim that knowledge of psychology turns you into a psychopath seems dubious.
111 * Exception Handling's Sparashki ruse is still kicking up epistemic dust even if few take it literally
113 * It has to bottom out in someone taking it literally
114 * zero-calorie superstimulus theory
120 * "They're better off not knowing about masochists that they can't have" disregards other ways of dealing with it: fantasy, porn, inventing in better sex robots, implications for eugenic policy ...
121 * Difficulties of recursive censorship; do the people who can afford it have to stay in the closet for the benefit of people like Keltham? You could claim that they're so good at coordinating that they negotiated this, but how does the negotiation work when the people the deal allegedly benefits don't know about it?
122 * Prediction markets imply that they believe in distributed agency, rather than being benevolent socialists
123 * The text seems to suggest that "obligate sadism" is a real thing that already exists. It's not analogous to a drug that you can't miss if no one ever invents it.
124 * Compare homosexuality. If it couldn't be practiced because super-AIDS (the Shawcross virus from Greg Egan's "The Moral Virologist") made it too dangerous, would we approve of censoring the concept?
125 * Homosexuality has other correlates (you totally can clock gay men by their voices); it's useful to be able to point to the cluster.
126 * Compare how we handle pedophilia in our world. We criminalize and stigmatize it. We don't _censor the concept_. Given that the tendency exists (it's not merely a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy), we do better by reasoning about it. Imagine an abused child or MAP person who had _no idea what was going on_.
133 * Word of God says, "there's also a deliberate semiconspiracy whereby movies make standard kitchen knives look much deadlier and easier to wield than they actually are, so that people who suddenly go nuts won't improvise much more dangerous weapons than that"
134 * "too nuts to see past cached thoughts" presupposes a specific model of mental illness that I think is importantly backwards; while I was psychotic, my problem was the _opposite_ of not being able to "see past cached thoughts": on the contrary, I was having _lots_ of new ideas that I had never thought of before (<http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/cognitive-bayesian-therapy-i/>), and would never have thought of in my normal state—it's just that, after I got some sleep, I decided that all of my new ideas were clearly false, _which is why_ we call the psychotic state "crazy", and the normal state "sane".
135 * You can't leak to the general public without leaking to crazy people. Where do you think they come from?
136 * the mechanism by which the plan positively contributes to the goal, is deception: the plan works _because_ if people who want to commit violence have _less accurate beliefs_ about how to effectively commit violence, they will be less effective at their goal of committing violence.
137 * If you were just trying to reduce murders, is this hte plan you would pick? Obviously not. (Think about how you would solve the problem "on Earth"!) Making it easier to commit people is a much more direct mechanism. The algorithm that promoted the movie-misportrayal to your attention is one that favors deception.
138 * "It's targeted at crazy people" excuse suggests that it's OK to lie to people you've labeled as crazy. But Yudkowsky infamously says this about all Earthlings. What should we infer about whether we should trust him?
139 * "i presume ilani who notice the trope also then deduce the obvious consequence of the trope"
140 * If anything, "there's a deliberate conspiracy to mislead people about the difficulty of murder by stabbing" is the kind of thought that someone is _more likely_ to have as a paranoid delusion than otherwise! It's as if dath ilan is an exotic environment where mind-states that are tuned to hypothesize conspiracies everywhere are _adaptive_, in contrast to how on Earth, people who see conspiracies everywhere are wrong.
141 * this is correlated insanity that loves clever deceptions, not actually being smart and doing a neutral policy search
142 * A much larger cost is the frustration of ornery, nitpicky nerds who _want realistic fiction_, and don't want their favorite artform perverted to _manipulate extremely rare criminal-insanity cases_. Earth has Andy Weir fans and Greg Egan fans! When Andy Weir or Greg Egan sit down to write a novel or a screenplay, they are trying to paint a picture of _a world that makes sense_. They are not trying to manipulate rare social outcomes. Is that that kind of respect-for-reality just _not a thing_ in dath ilani art? Are they so uniformly, monomanically obsessed with trolling their perceived inferiors, that the voice of, "Knives Don't Actually Work That Way; Knives Don't Actually Work That Way _Even When Saying That Out Loud Increases Murders_; Knives Don't Actually Work That Way _Even When a Prediction Market Says That Saying That Out Loud Increases Murders_", has no power in the movie industry whatsoever?
151 * the race of dath ilani humans are called the "eliezera" in Word of God canon
152 presenting an eliezera racial supremacy narrative. (It's still a racial supremacy narrative even if he doesn't _use the verbatim phrase_ "racial supremacy.")
153 * Bluntly, this is not a culture that gives a shit about people being well-informed. This is a culture that has explicitly
154 * In more detail: the algorithm that designed dath ilani Civilization is one that systematically favors plans that involve deception, over than plans that involve being honest.
155 * This is not a normative claim or a generic slur that dath ilani are "evil" or "bad"; it's a positve claim about systematic deception. If you keep seeing plans for which social-deception-value exceeds claimed-social-benefit value, you should infer that the plans are being generated by a process that "values" (is optimizing for) deception, whether it's a person or a conscious mind.
156 * Watsonian rationale: with smarter people, knowledge actually is dangerous. I'm more interested in a Doylist interpretation, that this reflects authoritarian tendencies in later Yudkowsky's thought.
158 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 .
160 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,
162 [^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 bargaining and decision-theoretic threats that should be defied.)
164 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.
166 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/).
168 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.
170 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.
175 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_ (!!).
177 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.
182 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!
184 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.
186 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?"
188 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]
190 [^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?
192 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).
194 I stress 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.
196 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.
198 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."
200 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).
202 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.
204 "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"
206 (I was tempted to tag that as "epistemic status: low-confidence speculation", but that's _frequentist_ thinking—as if "Jews and gentiles are equally sneaky" were a "null hypothesis" that could only be rejected by data that would be sufficiently unlikely assuming that the null was true. Ha ha, that would be _crazy!_ Obviously, I should have a _prior_ on the effect size difference between the Jew and gentile sneakiness distributions, that can be updated as sneakiness data comes in. I think the mean of my prior distribution is at, like, _d_ ≈ 0.1? So it's not "low confidence"; it's "low confidence of the effect size being large enough to be of much practical significance".)
209 For context on why I have no sense of humor about this, on Earth (which _actually exists_, unlike dath ilan), when someone says "it's not lying, because no one _expected_ me to tell the truth in that situation", what's usually going on, [as Zvi Mowshowitz explains](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/), is that is that conspirators benefit from deceiving outsiders, and the claim that "everyone knows" is them lying to _themselves_ about the fact that they're lying.
211 (If _you_ got hurt by not knowing, well, it's not like anyone got hurt, because if you didn't know, then you weren't anyone.)
215 Okay, but if it were _actually true_ that everyone knew, what would be _function_ of saying the false thing? On dath ilan (if not in Earth boardrooms), I suppose the answer is "Because it's fun"? Okay, but what is the function of your 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.
217 That's why, when I _notice_ myself misrepresenting my actual beliefs or motivations because I think it's funny or rhetorically powerful (and it takes a special act of noticing; humans aren't built to be honest by default), I often take care to disclaim it immediately (as was observed in the message this is one a reply to), 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)
219 But maybe dath ilan is sufficiently good at achieving common knowledge in large groups that they _can_ pull off a zero-calorie "everyone knows" conspiracy without damaging shared maps??
222 I'm still skeptical, especially given that we see them narratizing it as "not lying" (in the same words that corrupt executives on Earth use!), rather than _explicitly_ laying out the evopysch logic of sneakiness superstimuli, and the case that they know how to pull it off in a zero-calorie (trivial damage to shared maps) way.
224 In general, I think that "it's not lying because no one expected the truth" is something you would say as part of an attempted nearest-unblocked-strategy end run around a deontological constraint against "lying" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly); I don't think it's something you would say if you _actually cared_ about shared maps being accurate
226 What I see on Earth (which, again, _actually exists_, unlike dath ilan, which _does not exist_), is that people mostly drink their own Kool-Aid; lying to the world without lying to yourself is just not psychologically sustainable.
228 I had some insightful discussion with someone in 2017, in which I was saying that I wanted something to be public knowledge, that was frequently denied for political reasons. (The object-level topic doesn't matter in this context.) This person said, "I don't particularly care about this being commonly recognized. C'mon! It's fun to have some secrets that are not public knowledge".
230 In 2021, _the same person_ says she feels "disgusted and complicit" for having talked to me.
232 > At some point during this time I started treating this as a hidden truth that I was proud of myself for being able to see, which I in retrospect I feel disgusted and complicit to have accepted
234 > above exchanges did in retrospect cause me emotional pain, stress, and contributed to internalizing sexism and transphobia.
236 I think it's very significant that she _didn't_ say that she encountered _new evidence_ that made her _change her mind_, and decided that she was _actually wrong_ in 2017. The claim is just that the things we said in 2017 are "harmful."
238 wrap-up dath ilan is fictional
240 the reason I'm paranoid and humorless about
242 positive-valence fictional depictions of
244 "but, but, information can _hurt people_, and hurting people is wrong" and "it's not lying if 'everybody knows'" memes, is because I _actually see this stuff destroying people's minds in real life_
246 I certainly don't think Yudkowsky is consciously "lying"
248 (natural language is very flexible, you can _come up with_ some interpretation)
251 You can cosplay an elf _at a designated fandom convention_, where people have temporarily _opted in_ to that false social reality. But I don't think you can cosplay an elf _at work_ (in "real life") and have everyone play along for extended periods of time, without dealing damage to real-life shared maps.
253 Similarly, I cosplay female characters at fandom conventions, and that's fun, and I'm glad that conventions exist, but I can't transition in "real life", because I don't expect anyone in real life to believe that I'm female, because it's _very obviously not true_. People will _pretend_ to believe it because they're terrified of being accused of transphobia, but _they are lying_, and the
255 people who try to claim that no one is being deceived because "everyone knows"
259 oh, I thought of a stronger test case: pedophilia.
261 On Earth, our mechanism for protecting children from sexual abuse
263 is to heavily stigmatize pedophilia:
265 we don't have the option of covering up the existence of the concept
267 But if we could drive
269 Keltham contradicts himself _in the same tag_
270 https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1865236#reply-1865236
272 > The sneakiest thing dath ilan did was covertly shape him to never notice he was a sadist
274 > Obviously past-Keltham was shaped in all sorts of ways as a kid, but those shaping-targets are matters of public documentation on the Network. They're not _covert_ intended effects of the alien technology.
276 I mean, it's worth noting that their concept of a "good reason" literally includes "prediction markets think people will be happier this way". This is not a Society that gives a shit (as a terminal value) about non-Keepers having accurate information (or they wouldn't, _e.g._, gaslight Merrin about how famous she is).
278 _Of course_ a Society that prizes freedom-from-infohazards as a core value is going to have lots of "good reasons" for the systematically-misleading-representations they make, that will seem genuinely compelling to the people of that Society who are in on it!
280 One might have hoped that dath ilani would be self-aware enough to notice that things that seem like a "good reason" for a conspiracy _to dath ilani_, would not seem like a "good reason" to people from a Society that prizes freedom-of-speech? But if they've screened off their history (for the greater good, of course), they might not have a concept of what other Societies are like ...
282 (Yes, I know we've been informed by authorial fiat that dath ilan has a lot of internal diversity, but there are necessarily limits to that if you're going to be a human Society specifically rather than a Solomonff inductor, and it seems clear that any faction that thinks gaslighting Merrin is morally wrong is on the losing end of the counterfactual warfare of democracy.)
284 Aslan / amputation of destiny
286 * An ethnographer might note that Americans believe themselves to be "the land of the brave and the home of the free", without being obliged for their ethnography to agree with this description. I'm taking the same stance towards dath ilan: as a literary critic, I don't have to share its Society's beliefs about itself.
288 spoilers for the pleasure of discovering sex for themselves: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812613#reply-1812613
290 being told eugenics prospects early as self-fulfilling prophecies, as a legitimate infohazard: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812614#reply-1812614
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