Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, worldbuilding
Status: draft
-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?
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"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!
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-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.
(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?"
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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.
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??
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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 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
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