If we believe that IQ research validates the "Jews are clever" stereotype, I wonder if there's a distinct (albeit probably correlated) "enjoying deception" trait that validates the "Jews are sneaky" stereotype?
-[TODO: link "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"]
+"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"
+https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
(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".)
Anyway, if dath ilan is very high in the sneakiness trait (relative to Earth), that would help explain all the conspiracies!
-Not-actually-plausible conspiracies that everyone is in on (like "Spatahski are real") are a superstimulus like zero-calorie sweetener: engineered to let everyone enjoy the thrill of lying, without doing any real damage to shared maps.
-
-[TODO: sp alien alien name?]
+Not-actually-plausible conspiracies that everyone is in on (like "Sparashki are real") are a superstimulus like zero-calorie sweetener: engineered to let everyone enjoy the thrill of lying, without doing any real damage to shared maps.
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.
-[TODO: exact language ]
-
(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.)
It's very striking to me that one of the corrupt executives in _Moral Mazes_ uses very similar language to the narrator of the Merrin thread: "We lie all the time, but if everyone knows that we're lying, is a lie really a lie?"
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)
-[TODO: link to "teeth" earlier in the thread commenting on it'd be funnier if I didn't]
-
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??
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.
In 2021, _the same person_ says she feels "disgusted and complicit" for having talked to me.
-[TODO: find Devi commment and quote exactly without linking]
+> 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
+
+> above exchanges did in retrospect cause me emotional pain, stress, and contributed to internalizing sexism and transphobia.
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."
-[TODO: wrap-up dath ilan is fictional
+wrap-up dath ilan is fictional
the reason I'm paranoid and humorless about
(natural language is very flexible, you can _come up with_ some interpretation)
-]
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.
Keltham contradicts himself _in the same tag_
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1865236#reply-1865236
+
+> The sneakiest thing dath ilan did was covertly shape him to never notice he was a sadist
+> [...]
+> 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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff