Author: Zack M. Davis
Date: 2023-07-01 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
+Tags: bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, worldbuilding
Status: draft
-> When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
-> The truth is great, and shall prevail,
-> When none cares whether it prevail or not.
+> 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.
>
-> —["Magna Est Vertias" by Coventry Patmore](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9M3ynNuBsRCDfmEsZ/less-wrong-poetry-corner-coventry-patmore-s-magna-est)
+> —Thomas Jefferson, earthling
-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.
+Eliezer Yudkowsky's portrayal of the fictional world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_) purports to be a
-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]
-[^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).
+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. (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]
[^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.
+
+
+
+[OUTLINE—
+ * Introduction and Thesis
+ * Yudkowsky's new fictional universe is dath ilan, a medianworld centered around him (the race of dath ilani humans are called the "eliezera" in Word of God canon); the "joke" is that this is where the rationality tech of the Sequences came from (per the 2014 April Fools' Day post). Yudkowsky even talks this way in other contexts, including a trope of making fun of "Earth people" and presenting an eliezera racial supremacy narrative. (It's still a racial supremacy narrative even if he doesn't _use the verbatim phrase_ "racial supremacy.") One is led to believe that dath ilan represents a canonical rationalist utopia, someplace that readers of the Sequences would be proud of.
+ * And yet, for such a supposed rationalist utopia, it's striking that dath ilan is _lying about everything_, seemingly whenever it "sounds like a good idea" to someone: not just keeping AGI secrets (the way we keep nuclear secrets on Earth), but preventing the idea from coming up as science fiction, keeping Merrin in a Truman-show-like reality where she doesn't know that she's famous, hiding info about sexuality on utilitarian grounds—even bizarre trivial stuff like knives. I discuss these examples in detail later in this essay.
+ * Bluntly, this is not a culture that gives a shit about people being well-informed. This is a culture that has explicitly
+ * 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.
+ * 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.
+ * 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.
+
+ * Interlude: "I can't argue with authorial fiat"
+ * A worldbuilding critic who takes a negative view of some world might be told that they're not allowed to contradict authorial intent. If the narrator says the people of dath ilan are doing something because they're good and smart and cooperative, the critic has to accept that.
+ * But what makes the medianworld exercise interesting is that it's about trying to portray a realistic world, given a shifted distribution of psychological traits. We take the text of the story as a given, but we don't have to take dath ilan's self-image literally, if we think a different world could "project" into the same text and explain it better.
+ * 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.
+
+ * The Merrin Show
+ * Merrin: a reverse Emperor Norton case
+ * Overcoming Bias readers in 2008 would have found this offensive, not cute; Merrin is living a lie, and everyone is in on it.
+ * Rittaen's claim that knowledge of psychology turns you into a psychopath seems dubious.
+ * Exception Handling's Sparashki ruse is still kicking up epistemic dust even if few take it literally
+ * "Everybody knows"
+ * It has to bottom out in someone taking it literally
+ * zero-calorie superstimulus theory
+
+ * Keltham and S/M
+ * "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 ...
+ * 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?
+ * Prediction markets imply that they believe in distributed agency, rather than being benevolent socialists
+ * 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.
+ * 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?
+ * Homosexuality has other correlates (you totally can clock gay men by their voices); it's useful to be able to point to the cluster.
+ * 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_.
+
+ * kitchen knives?!
+ * 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"
+ * "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".
+ * You can't leak to the general public without leaking to crazy people. Where do you think they come from?
+ * 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.
+ * 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.
+ * "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?
+ * "i presume ilani who notice the trope also then deduce the obvious consequence of the trope"
+ * 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.
+ * this is correlated insanity that loves clever deceptions, not actually being smart and doing a neutral policy search
+ * 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?
+
+ * Conclusion: dath ilan doesn't give a shit about public epistemology; you shoudl not be taking it as a rationalist utopia.
+]
+
+-----
+
+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 .
+
+
+
+
+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,
+
+
+
+
+[^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.)
+
+
+
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.
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/).
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."
-[...]
+
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.)
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_ (!!).
-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_.
-
-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.
-
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.
[...]
-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]
-
-[^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.
+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!
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.
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).
-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.
+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.
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.
(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".)
-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.
+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.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff