One is given the sense that from a dath ilani moral perspective, this is heartwarming. Merrin doesn't want to feel important, so everyone in her world colludes to conceal evidence from her than she's important. Isn't that thoughtful?
-From the moral perspective of an _Overcoming Bias_ reader in 2008 "on Earth" (_i.e._, in real life) who places value on authenticity and truth in human affairs, this is unsettling and even immoral, for the same reason [the Emperor Norton Conspiracy was immoral](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton). Merrin is living a lie, and everyone she trusts is in on it!
+From the moral perspective of an _Overcoming Bias_ reader in 2008 "on Earth" (_i.e._, in real life) who places value on authenticity and truth in human affairs, this is unsettling and immoral, for the same reason [the Emperor Norton Conspiracy was immoral](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton). Merrin is living a lie, and everyone she trusts is in on it!
The deception by the people in Merrin's life is especially galling in light of the fact that the situation that Merrin needs to be protected from is one of their own making. EMTs can't become famous on accident. If Merrin doesn't like attention, she should not have a TV show with a million viewers! (We can assume that most unusually skilled workers aren't celebrities in dath ilan, as in real life, not because their work is particularly secret, but because recording and editing it for public consumption is a cost that no one has particular reason to pay.) One almost wonders whether the deception is the point—that people in dath ilan enjoy "coordinating to pretend around" someone, and Merrin's psychological hangup presented them with a golden opportunity to put someone in a [_The Truman Show_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show)-like psuedo-reality.
That's not an accusation of hypocrisy. The dath ilani are being consistent. In a Society that prizes freedom-from-infohazards over freedom-of-speech, it makes sense that telling people things would be meddling, but colluding to not tell them, isn't.
-### Keltham and S/M
+### Keltham and the Sadism/Masochism Coverup
+
+The story of Keltham's sexuality provides another case study on dath ilani Civilization's predilection for deception. In Golarion, Keltham discovers that he's a sexual sadist, and infers that ["not many sadists in dath ilan know what they are and Civilization tries to prevent us from finding out, because dath ilan does _not_ have masochists."](https://glowfic.com/replies/1735044#reply-1735044) (The notion of an evolved organism preferring pain in any context strikes him as implausible.) Word of God clarifies that masochists do exist at low frequencies, but that Keltham's guess is otherwise correct; there is a deliberate effort (by the Keepers?—the exact agency responsible isn't clear) to prevent public knowledge that sadism and masochism even exist.
+
+The naïve utilitarian case for the coverup is straightforward. There aren't enough masochists to go around. People with a latent inclination towards sadism are better off not being self-aware about it, because if they knew what they wanted, they would feel sad about not being able to have it.
+
+The non-naïve utilitarian case is less straightforward, when you consider the second-order effects of censoring scientific information about psychology. The existence of sadism and masochism are facts about the world that you would expect to be mentioned in the sexuality section of psychology textbooks. If dath ilan is censoring real conditions from its psychology textbooks in order to avoid emotional harm to people with those conditions, that's a constraint on the extent to which their Society is in touch with reality.
+
+Again, [facts are connected to each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), which both
[TODO—
- * "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 ...
+ * They do manage to censor sex information for children, but "age" is a Schelling cateogry in human Society; you can limit epistemic damage somewhat
-* 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?
+ * What about the costs of all the other recursive censorship you'd have to do to keep the secret? (If a biography mentioned masochism in passing along with many other traits of the subject, you'd need to either censor the paragraphs with that detail, or censor the whole book. Those are real costs, even under a soft-censorship regime where people can give special consent to access "Ill Advised" products.) Maybe latent sadists could console themselves with porn if they knew, or devote their careers to making better sex robots, just as people on Earth with non-satisfiable sexual desires manage to get by. (I _knew some things_ about this topic.) What about dath ilan's heritage optimization (read: eugenics) program? Are they going to try to breed more masochists, or fewer sadists, and who's authorized to know that? And so on.
- * 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.
+ * transsexualism example
-It would be one thing if BDSM orientation was a self-fulfilling propehecy.
+ * "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?
+
+ * Word of God talks about "affording" a masochist—suggesting not just that classism and sex work are legal, but institutionalized??
-You can't miss an addictive drug.
+ * the empirical setting of probabilities and utilities just happening to settle such that ignorance is the best policy
+ * Keltham thought evolutionary psychology ruled out the possibility of masochists;
+
+ * It would be one thing if BDSM orientation was a self-fulfilling propehecy. You can't miss an addictive drug. 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.
Comparisons to other possible non-practicable minority sexualities may be instructive on the perils of deleting concepts. Imagine a world where homosexuality couldn't be safely practiced because [an engineered plague made it amount to certain death](https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/MORAL/Moral.html). Would we then approve of censoring the concept itself, forbidding the knowledge that same-sex attraction was ever a thing? And homosexuality has other correlates. [(The stereotypes of masculine lesbians and feminine gay men are empirically grounded.)](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) Given the plague, would it be better not to notice the clusters—for gay people to possibly be left with some vague sense that there's something not normal about them, and not have a concept to name it?
-Or consider how our Society handles pedophilia. This is a sexuality that we do not want to be practiced, so we stigmatize it and criminalize its practice. We do not censor the concept. Given that the tendency exists (and is not merely a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy that wouldn't exist if it weren't named), it's better to have a concept about it that can be reasoned about, rather than a blank spot on our map. Imagine a young man noticing he's attracted to children—or for that matter, an abused child—having _no idea what was happening to them_, because Society's benevolent censors decided that it was better that people not have concepts for this aspect of reality. Is that going to end well? How do you get help for a problem you don't have a word for?
+Or consider how our Society handles pedophilia. This is a sexuality that we do not want to be practiced, so we stigmatize it and criminalize its practice. We do not censor the concept. Given that the tendency exists (and is not merely a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy that wouldn't exist if it weren't named), it's better to have a concept about it that can be reasoned about, rather than a blank spot on our map. Imagine a young man noticing he's attracted to children—or for that matter, an abused child—having _no idea what was happening to them_, because Society's benevolent censors decided that it was better that people not have concepts for this aspect of reality. Is that going to end well? How do you get help for a problem you're not supposed to have a word for?
]
### Replies to Objections
-[TODO—
- * Counterargument: dath ilan lets you immigrate to infohazardville. Reply: sure, I agree that a Society that marginalizes truth-tellers is better than one than executes them. It's still fundamentally fair game for me to point out that it's not consilient with the values of _Overcoming Bias_ readers in 2008.
- * Counterargument: as a reductio, am I opposed to movie and homework exercise spoilers, too? Reply: No, I recognize spoiler protection as a legitimate class of infohazard. (And AGI/nuclear as an social exfohazard, and threats as a legitimate infohazard.)
- * Counterargument: the text says that regular dath ilani do believe "that which can be destroyed" eventually, just not immediately. Reply: this would be more believable with a timetable; I can understand "I don't want to deal with this yet", but there's no indication that Merrin or Keltham are supposed to figure it out.
- * Counterargument: but the gaslighting is supposed to inculcate distrust of authority. Reply: clearly it doesn't work, given how much everyone trusts the government that is lying to them all the time?
-]
-
-### Conclusion
-
-
--------
-
-[OUTLINE—
- * the race of dath ilani humans are called the "eliezera" in Word of God canon
- presenting an eliezera racial supremacy narrative. (It's still a racial supremacy narrative even if he doesn't _use the verbatim phrase_ "racial supremacy.")
- * 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.
-
-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.)
-
-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.
-
-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.
-
-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_ (!!).
-
-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!
-
-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 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.
-
-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."
-
-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).
-
-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.
-
-"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"
-
-(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".)
+This essay has had some negative things to say about dath ilani culture.
-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.)
-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.
+#### Infohazardville
-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)
-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 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
+####
-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.
-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".
-
-In 2021, _the same person_ says she feels "disgusted and complicit" for having talked to me.
-
-> 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."
-
-wrap-up dath ilan is fictional
-
-the reason I'm paranoid and humorless about
-
-positive-valence fictional depictions of
-
-"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_
-
-I certainly don't think Yudkowsky is consciously "lying"
-
-(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.
-
-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
-
-people who try to claim that no one is being deceived because "everyone knows"
-
-_are also lying_.
-
-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.
-
-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).
-
-_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!
-
-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 ...
-
-(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.)
-
-Aslan / amputation of destiny
-
- * 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.
-
-spoilers for the pleasure of discovering sex for themselves: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812613#reply-1812613
-
-being told eugenics prospects early as self-fulfilling prophecies, as a legitimate infohazard: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812614#reply-1812614
-
-sex and classical mechanics spoilers (spoilers are not the same thing as conspiracies/secrets; Keltham and Carissa arne't supposed to find out): https://glowfic.com/replies/1718168#reply-1718168
-
-https://glowfic.com/replies/1788890#reply-1788890
-> He likes confusing people. Supposedly it's to train strong minds that don't weakly rely on being told how reality works. I think it may be what dath ilan does with all its repressed sadism.
-
-https://glowfic.com/replies/1801463#reply-1801463
-> "I really think all y'all don't give dath ilan enough credit on some dimensions, if not others. They didn't tell me about my sexual sadism because there would have been no good way for me to satisfy it, Pilar, not because they wanted to deny me my utilityfunction. Or did you have something else in mind?"
-
-(masochism search tags)
-https://glowfic.com/replies/search?board_id=&author_id=366&template_id=&character_id=&subj_content=masochism&sort=created_old&condensed=on&commit=Search
-
-https://glowfic.com/replies/1735044#reply-1735044
-> "But yes, or rather, my suspicion is that not many sadists in dath ilan know what they are and Civilization tries to prevent us from finding out, because dath ilan does not have masochists.
+[TODO—
+ * Counterargument: dath ilan lets you immigrate to infohazardville. Reply: sure, I agree that a Society that marginalizes truth-tellers is better than one than executes them. It's still fundamentally fair game for me to point out that it's not consilient with the values of _Overcoming Bias_ readers in 2008.
+ * Counterargument: as a reductio, am I opposed to movie and homework exercise spoilers, too? Reply: No, I recognize spoiler protection as a legitimate class of infohazard. (And AGI/nuclear as an social exfohazard, and threats as a legitimate infohazard.) And the concealing eugenics predictions, self-fulfilling prophecy
+ * Counterargument: the text says that regular dath ilani do believe "that which can be destroyed" eventually, just not immediately. Reply: this would be more believable with a timetable; I can understand "I don't want to deal with this yet", but there's no indication that Merrin or Keltham are supposed to figure it out.
+ * Counterargument: but the gaslighting is supposed to inculcate distrust of authority. Reply: clearly it doesn't work, given how much everyone trusts the government that is lying to them all the time?
+ * Numendil's point: dath ilani should look spoiled to us, for the same reason we look spoiled to Golarionites
+]
-> His Lawful Good world tried to make sure he never found out about that. Keltham thinks that's because dath ilan has no masochists. He thinks masochism itself is unlikely
-https://glowfic.com/replies/1788845#reply-1788845
+### Conclusion
+> That's the point where it starts to look like somebody is trying to hide something, or fool future generations, and not just respond to a strange threat in a way where they're happy to let you take all the precautions required to make sure nobody's fooling anybody.
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1813073#reply-1813073
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff