At dinner, there was a moment when Koios bit into a lemon and made a funny face, to which a bunch of the grown-ups said "Awww!" A few moments later, he went for the lemon again. Alicorn speculated that Koios had noticed that the grown-ups found it cute the first time, and the grown-ups were chastened. "Aww, baby, we love you even if you don't bite the lemon."
-It was very striking to me how, in the case of the baby biting a lemon, Alicorn _immediately_ formulated the hypothesis that what-the-grownups-thought-was-cute was affecting the baby's behavior, and everyone _immediately just got it_. I was tempted to say something caustic about how no one seemed to think a similar mechanism could have accounted for some of the older child's verbal behavior the previous year, but I kept silent; that was clearly outside the pervue of my double-dog promise.
+It was very striking to me how, in the case of the baby biting a lemon, Alicorn _immediately_ formulated the hypothesis that what-the-grownups-thought-was-cute was affecting the baby's behavior, and everyone _immediately just got it_. I was tempted to say something caustic about how no one seemed to think a similar mechanism could have accounted for some of the older child's verbal behavior the previous year, but I kept silent; that was clearly outside the purview of my double-dog promise.
There was another moment when Mike made a remark about how weekends are socially constructed. I had a lot of genuinely on-topic cached witty philosophy banter about [how the social construction of concepts works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), that would have been completely innocuous if anyone _else_ had said it, but I kept silent because I wasn't sure if it was within my double-dog margin of error if _I_ said it.
What do I mean by "someone like her"? Definitely not race _per se_. Rather ... non-nerds?—normies. I know how to talk to _the kinds of women I meet in "rationalist"/EA circles_, and even (very rarely) ask them on a date.[^romantic-poem] That doesn't feel fake, because they're just peers who happen to be female. (I may have renounced [the ideological psychological sex difference denialism of my youth](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), but I'm not _sexist_.)
-What I don't know how to do without the moral indulgence of money changing hands is to ask out a beautiful woman _because she's a beautiful woman_. I won't say it's morally wrong, exactly; it's just not how I was raised. (I mean, I wasn't raised to hire escorts, either, but somehow the transactionality of it puts it outside some of the ethical constraints of ordinary courtship.)
+What I don't know how to do without the moral [indulgence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence) of money changing hands is to ask out a beautiful woman _because she's a beautiful woman_. I won't say it's morally wrong, exactly; it's just not how I was raised. (I mean, I wasn't raised to hire escorts, either, but somehow the transactionality of it puts it outside some of the ethical constraints of ordinary courtship.)
[^romantic-poem]: Though the meter is occasionally a little bit bizarre, I'm very proud of [the poem I wrote in 2016 depicting a woman I was interested in eradicating malaria by wiping out all the mosquitos using CRISPR gene drive](/ancillary/megan-and-the-anopheles-gambiae/), although our one date didn't amount to anything. She later married Scott Alexander.
I got to meet my neoreactionary Twitter mutual, who held the distinction of having been banned from the _Slate Star Codex_ comment section ["for reasons of total personal caprice"](https://archive.md/sRfBj#selection-1633.27-1633.64). I wore my _Quillette_ T-shirt. He offered to buy me a drink. I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that getting drunk was the ritual by which men established trust. I couldn't argue with that, and ended up having a glass and a half of wine while we talked for a couple hours.
-So much of my intellectual life for the past five years had been shaped by the fight to keep mere heresies on the shared map, that it was a nice change to talk to an out-and-out _apostate_, with whom none of none of my ingrained defensive motions were necessary. (I just want to restore the moral spirit of 2008 liberalism but with better epistemology; he wants to bring back _coveture_ on the grounds that women of the Eurasian subspecies of humanity haven't exercised mate choice in 10,000 years and aren't being helped by starting now.) There was one moment when I referred to the rationalists as my guys, and instinctively disclaimed, "and of course, we're mostly guys." He pointed out that I didn't need to tell _him_ that.
+So much of my intellectual life for the past five years had been shaped by the fight to keep mere heresies on the shared map, that it was a nice change to talk to an out-and-out _apostate_, with whom none of none of my ingrained defensive motions were necessary. (I just want to restore the moral spirit of 2008 liberalism but with better epistemology; he wants to bring back [_coverture_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture) on the grounds that women of the Eurasian subspecies of humanity haven't exercised mate choice in 10,000 years and aren't being helped by starting now.) There was one moment when I referred to the rationalists as my guys, and instinctively disclaimed, "and of course, we're mostly guys." He pointed out that I didn't need to tell _him_ that.
------
I _did_, I admitted, have some specific, nuanced concerns—especially since the December 2020 psychiatric disaster, with some nagging doubts beforehand—about ways in which being an inner-circle "Vassarite" might be bad for someone, but at the moment, I was focused on rebutting Scott's story, which was _silly_. A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes that the incompetent prosecution can't prove.
-When Scott expressed concern about the group-yelling behavior that [Ziz had described in a blog comment](https://sinceriously.fyi/punching-evil/#comment-2345) and [Yudkowsky had described on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494768960798720), I clarified that that thing was very different from what it was like to actually be friends with them. The everyone-yelling operation seemed like a new innovation (that I didn't like) that they wield as a psychological weapon only against people who they think are operating in bad faith? In the present conversation with Scott, I had been focusing on rebutting the claim that my February–April 2017 (major) and March 2019 (minor) psych problems were caused by the "Vassarites", because with regard to those _specific_ incidents, the charge was absurd and false. But, well ... my January 2021 (minor) psych problems actually _were_ the result of being on the receiving end of the everyone-yelling thing. I briefly described the December 2020 "Lenore" disaster, and in particular the part where Michael/Jessica/Jack yelled at me.
+When Scott expressed concern about the group-yelling behavior that [Ziz had described in a blog comment](https://sinceriously.fyi/punching-evil/#comment-2345) ("They spent 8 hours shouting at me, gaslighting me") and [Yudkowsky had described on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494768960798720) ("When MichaelV and co. try to run a 'multiple people yelling at you' operation on me, I experience that as 'lol, look at all that pressure' instead _feeling pressured_"), I clarified that that thing was very different from what it was like to actually be friends with them. The everyone-yelling operation seemed like a new innovation (that I didn't like) that they wield as a psychological weapon only against people who they think are operating in bad faith? In the present conversation with Scott, I had been focusing on rebutting the claim that my February–April 2017 (major) and March 2019 (minor) psych problems were caused by the "Vassarites", because with regard to those _specific_ incidents, the charge was absurd and false. But, well ... my January 2021 (minor) psych problems actually _were_ the result of being on the receiving end of the everyone-yelling thing. I briefly described the December 2020 "Lenore" disaster, and in particular the part where Michael/Jessica/Jack yelled at me.
Scott said that based on my and others' testimony, he was updating away from Vassar being as involved in psychotic breaks than he thought, but towards thinking Vassar was worse in other ways than he thought. He felt sorry for my bad December 2020/January 2021 experience—so much that he could feel it through the triumphant vindication at getting conifrmation that the Vassarites were behaving badly in ways he couldn't previously prove.
Leaving a personality cult is hard. As I struggled to write, I noticed that I was wasting a lot of cycles worrying about what he'd think of me, rather than saying the things I needed to say. I knew it was pathetic that my religion was so bottlenecked on _one guy_—particularly since the holy texts themselves (written by that one guy) [explicitly said not to do that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus)—but unwinding those psychological patterns was still a challenge.
-An illustration of the psychological dynamics at play: on an EA Forum post about demandingness objections to longtermism, Yudkowsky [commented that](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY) he was "broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism [...] as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seem[ed] to be the main alternative."
+An illustration of the psychological dynamics at play: on an August 2021 EA Forum post about demandingness objections to longtermism, Yudkowsky [commented that](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY) he was "broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism [...] as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seem[ed] to be the main alternative."
I found the comment reassuring regarding the extent or lack thereof of my own contributions to the great common task—and that's the problem: I found the _comment_ reassuring, not the _argument_. It would make sense to be reassured by the claim (if true) that human psychology is such that I don't realistically have the option of devoting more than 25% of myself to the great common task. It does _not_ make sense to be reassured that _Eliezer Yudkowsky said he's broadly fine with it_. That's just being a personality-cultist.
In January 2022, in an attempt to deal with my personality-cultist writing block, I sent him one last email asking if he particularly _cared_ if I published a couple blog posts that said some negative things about him. If he actually _cared_ about potential reputational damage to him from my writing things that I thought I had a legitimate interest in writing about, I would be _willing_ to let him pre-read the drafts before publishing and give him the chance to object to anything he thought was unfair ... but I'd rather agree that that wasn't necessary. I explained the privacy norms that I intended to follow—that I could explain _my_ actions, but had to Glomarize about the content of any private conversations that may or may not have occurred.
-It had taken me a while (with apologies for my atrocious sample-efficiency), but I was finally ready to give up on him; I thought the efficient outcome was that I should just tell my Whole Dumb Story on my blog and never bother him again. Since he probably _didn't_ particularly care (because it's not AGI alignment and therefore unimportant) and it would be psychologically easier on me if I knew he diidn't hold it against me, could I please have his advance blessing to just write and publish what I was thinking so I can get it all out of my system and move on with my life?
+It had taken me a while (with apologies for my atrocious [sample efficiency](https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/5247)), but I was finally ready to give up on him; I thought the efficient outcome was that I should just tell my Whole Dumb Story on my blog and never bother him again. Since he probably _didn't_ particularly care (because it's not AGI alignment and therefore unimportant) and it would be psychologically easier on me if I knew he diidn't hold it against me, could I please have his advance blessing to just write and publish what I was thinking so I can get it all out of my system and move on with my life?
If it helped—as far as _I_ could tell, I was only doing what _he_ taught me to do in 2007–2009: [carve reality at the joints](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [speak the truth even if your voice trembles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth), and [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) when you've got [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) (Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?").
On 1 April 2022, Yudkowsky published ["MIRI Announces New 'Death With Dignity' Strategy"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy), a cry of despair in the guise of an April Fool's Day post. MIRI didn't know how to align a superintelligence, no one else did either, but AI capabilities work was continuing apace. With no credible plan to avert almost-certain doom, the most we could do now was to strive to give the human race a more dignified death, as measured in log-odds of survival: an alignment effort that doubled the probability of a valuable future from 0.0001 to 0.0002 was worth one information-theoretic bit of dignity.
-In a way, "Death With Dignity" isn't really an update. Yudkowsky had always refused to give a probability of success, while maintaining that Friendly AI was ["impossible"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible). Now, he says the probability is approximately zero.
+In a way, "Death With Dignity" isn't really an update. Yudkowsky had always refused to name a "win" probability, while maintaining that Friendly AI was ["impossible"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible). Now, he says the probability is approximately zero.
Paul Christiano, who has a much more optimistic picture of humanity's chances, nevertheless said that he liked the "dignity" heuristic. I like it, too. It—takes some of the pressure off. I [made an analogy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy?commentId=R59aLxyj3rvjBLbHg): your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don't know how far. The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we'll probably make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we've swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is "Swim west as far as you can."
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/).
-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 up.
+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. ["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."
-Someone at the 2021 Event Horizon Independence Day party had told me that I had been misinterpreting the "Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" slogan from the Sequences. I had interpreted the slogan as suggesting the importance of speaking the truth _to other people_ (which I think is what "speaking" is usually about), but my interlocutor said it was about, for example, being able to speak the truth aloud in your own bedroom, to yourself. I think some textual evidence for my interpretation can be found in Daria's ending to ["A Fable of Science and Politics"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics):
+Someone at the 2021 Event Horizon Independence Day party had told me that I had been misinterpreting the "Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" slogan from the Sequences. I had interpreted the slogan as suggesting the importance of speaking the truth _to other people_ (which I think is what "speaking" is usually about), but my interlocutor said it was about, for example, being able to speak the truth aloud in your own bedroom, to yourself. I think some textual evidence for my interpretation can be found in Daria's ending to ["A Fable of Science and Politics"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics), a multiple-parallel-endings story about an underground Society divided into factions over the color of the unseen sky, and one person's reaction when they find a passageway leading aboveground to a view of the sky:
> Daria, once Green, tried to breathe amid the ashes of her world. _I will not flinch_, Daria told herself, _I will not look away_. She had been Green all her life, and now she must be Blue. Her friends, her family, would turn from her. _Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles_, her father had told her; but her father was dead now, and her mother would never understand. Daria stared down the calm blue gaze of the sky, trying to accept it, and finally her breathing quietened. _I was wrong_, she said to herself mournfully; _it's not so complicated, after all_. She would find new friends, and perhaps her family would forgive her ... or, she wondered with a tinge of hope, rise to this same test, standing underneath this same sky? "The sky is blue," Daria said experimentally, and nothing dire happened to her; but she couldn't bring herself to smile. Daria the Blue exhaled sadly, and went back into the world, wondering what she would say.
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_.
-In [the story about how Merrin came to the attention of dath ilan's bureau of Exception Handling](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263), 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.
+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.
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.
-In the same story, an agent from Exception Handling [tells Merrin that the bureau's Fake Conspiracy section is running an operation to plant evidence that Sparashki (the fictional alien Merrin happens to be dressed up as) are real](https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952), and asks Merrin not to contradict this, and Merrin just ... goes along with it. 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 has a Fake Conspiracies section, any more than it would have been if FTX or Enron explicitly had a Fake Accounting department? (Because dath ilan are the designated good guys? Well, so was FTX.)
+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.
+
+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?
+
+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.
+
+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).
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 masochism coverup as my central example.
+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 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 got 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.
+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.
-Although Yudkowsky participated in the server, I had reasoned that my participation didn't violate my previous intent not to bother him anymore, because it was a publicly-linked Discord server with hundreds of members. Me criticizing the story for the benefit of the _other_ 499 people in the chat room wouldn't generate a notification _for him_, the way it would if I sent him an email or replied to him on Twitter.
+Although Yudkowsky participated in the server, I had reasoned that my participation didn't violate my previous intent not to bother him anymore, because it was a publicly-linked Discord server with hundreds of members. Me commenting on the story for the benefit of the _other_ 499 people in the chat room wouldn't generate a notification _for him_, the way it would if I sent him an email or replied to him on Twitter.
In the #dath-ilan channel of the server, Yudkowsky elaborated on the reasoning for the masochism coverup:
> dath ilan is essentially a paradise world. In a paradise world, people have the slack to make microoptimisations like that, to allow themselves Noble Lies and not fear for what could be hiding in the gaps. Telling the truth is a heuristic for this world where Noble Lies are often less Noble than expected and trust is harder to come by.
-I said that I thought people were missing this idea that the reason "truth is better than lies; knowledge is better than ignorance" is such a well-performing injunction in the real world (despite the fact that there's no law of physics preventing lies and ignorance from having beneficial consequences), is because it protects against unknown unknowns. Of course an author who wants to portray an ignorance-maintaining conspiracy as being for the greater good, can assert by authorial fiat whatever details are needed to make it all turn out for the greater good, but _that's not how anything works in real life_.
+I said that I thought people were missing this idea that the reason "truth is better than lies; knowledge is better than ignorance" is such a well-performing [injunction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWTEtgBfFaz6vjwQf/ethical-injunctions) in the real world (despite the fact that there's no law of physics preventing lies and ignorance from having beneficial consequences), is because [it protects against unknown unknowns](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E7CKXxtGKPmdM9ZRc/of-lies-and-black-swan-blowups). Of course an author who wants to portray an ignorance-maintaining conspiracy as being for the greater good, can assert by authorial fiat whatever details are needed to make it all turn out for the greater good, but _that's not how anything works in real life_.
-I started a new thread to complain about the attitude I was seeing (Subject: "Noble Secrets; Or, Conflict Theory of Optimization on Shared Maps"). When fiction in this world, _where I live_, glorifies Noble Lies, that's a cultural force optimizing for making shared maps less accurate, I explained. As someone trying to make shared maps _more_ accurate, this force was hostile to me and mine. I understood that secrets and lies are different, but if you're a consequentialist thinking in terms of what kinds of optimization pressures are being applied to shared maps, it's the same issue: I'm trying to steer _towards_ states of the world where people know things, and the Keepers of Noble Secrets are trying to steer _away_ from states of the world where people know things. That's a conflict. I was happy to accept Pareto-improving deals to make the conflict less destructive, but I wasn't going to pretend the pro-ignorance forces were my friends just because they self-identify as "rationalists" or "EA"s. I was willing to accept secrets around nuclear or biological weapons, or AGI, on "better ignorant than dead" grounds, but the "protect sadists from being sad" thing was _just_ coddling people who can't handle the truth, which made _my_ life worse.
+I started a new thread to complain about the attitude I was seeing (Subject: "Noble Secrets; Or, Conflict Theory of Optimization on Shared Maps"). When fiction in this world, _where I live_, glorifies Noble Lies, that's a cultural force optimizing for making shared maps less accurate, I explained. As someone trying to make shared maps _more_ accurate, this force was hostile to me and mine. I understood that "secrets" and "lies" are not the same thing, but if you're a consequentialist thinking in terms of what kinds of optimization pressures are being applied to shared maps, [it's the same issue](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist): I'm trying to steer _towards_ states of the world where people know things, and the Keepers of Noble Secrets are trying to steer _away_ from states of the world where people know things. That's a conflict. I was happy to accept Pareto-improving deals to make the conflict less destructive, but I wasn't going to pretend the pro-ignorance forces were my friends just because they self-identified as "rationalists" or "EA"s. I was willing to accept secrets around nuclear or biological weapons, or AGI, on "better ignorant than dead" grounds, but the "protect sadists from being sad" thing wasn't a threat to life; it was _just_ coddling people who can't handle reality, which made _my_ life worse.
-I wasn't buying the excuse that secret-Keeping practices that wouldn't be OK on Earth were somehow OK on dath ilan, which was asserted by authorial fiat to be sane and smart and benevolent enough to make it work. Or if I couldn't argue with authorial fiat: the reasons why it would be bad on Earth (even if it wouldn't be bad on dath ilan) are reasons why _fiction about dath ilan is bad for Earth_.
+I wasn't buying the excuse that secret-Keeping practices that wouldn't be okay on Earth were somehow okay on dath ilan, which was asserted by authorial fiat to be sane and smart and benevolent enough to make it work. Alternatively, if I couldn't argue with authorial fiat: the reasons why it would be bad on Earth (even if it wouldn't be bad in the author-assertion paradise of dath ilan) are reasons why _fiction about dath ilan is bad for Earth_.
-And just—back in the 'aughts, I said, Robin Hanson had this really great blog called _Overcoming Bias_. (You probably haven't heard of it.) I wanted that _vibe_ back, of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008—the will to _just get the right answer_, without all this galaxy-brained hand-wringing about who the right answer might hurt.
+And just—back in the 'aughts, I said, Robin Hanson had this really great blog called _Overcoming Bias_. (You probably haven't heard of it.) I wanted that _vibe_ back, of Robin Hanson's blog[^overcoming-bias] in 2008—the will to _just get the right answer_, without all this galaxy-brained hand-wringing about who the right answer might hurt.
-I would have expected a subculture descended from the memetic legacy of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 to respond to that tripe about protecting people from being destroyed by the truth as a form of "recognizing independent agency" with something like—
+[^overcoming-bias]: _Overcoming Bias_ had actually been a group blog then, but I was enjoying the æsthetic of saying "Robin Hanson's blog" (when what I had actually loved about _Overcoming Bias_ was Yudkowsky's Sequences) as a way of signaling contempt for the Yudkowsky of the current year.
+
+I would have expected a subculture descended from the memetic legacy of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 to respond to that tripe about protecting people from the truth being a form of "recognizing independent agency" with something like—
"Hi! You must be new here! Regarding your concern about truth doing harm to people, a standard reply is articulated in the post ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased). Regarding your concern about recognizing independent agency, a standard reply is articulated in the post ["Your Rationality Is My Business"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business)."
-—or _something like that_. Not that the reply needed to use those particular Sequences links, or _any_ Sequences links; what's important is that someone needs counter to this very obvious [anti-epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology).
+—or _something like that_. Not that the reply needed to use those particular Sequences links, or _any_ Sequences links; what's important is that someone needed to counter to this very obvious [anti-epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology).
And what we actually saw in response to the "You don't get to do harm to other people" message was ... it got 5 "+1" emoji-reactions.
Yudkowsky [chimed in to point out that](/images/yudkowsky-it_doesnt_say_tell_other_people.png) "Doublethink" was about _oneself_ not reasonably being in the epistemic position of knowing that one should lie to oneself. It wasn't about telling the truth to _other_ people.
-On the one hand, fair enough. My generalization from "you shouldn't want to have false beliefs for your own benefit" to "you shouldn't want other people to have false beliefs for their own benefit" (and the further generalization to it being OK to intervene) was not in the text of the post itself. It made sense for Yudkowsky to refute my misinterpretation of the text he wrote.
+On the one hand, fair enough. My generalization from "you shouldn't want to have false beliefs for your own benefit" to "you shouldn't want other people to have false beliefs for their own benefit" (and the further generalization to it being okay to intervene) was not in the text of the post itself. It made sense for Yudkowsky to refute my misinterpretation of the text he wrote.
-On the other hand—given that Yudkowsky was paying attention to this #overflow thread anyway, I might have naïvely hoped that he would appreciate what I was trying to do?—that, after the issue had been pointed out, he would decided that he _wanted_ his chatroom to be a place where we don't want other people to have false beliefs for their own benefit?—a place that approves of "meddling" in the form of _telling people things_.
+On the other hand—given that he was paying attention to this #overflow thread anyway, I might have naïvely hoped that he would appreciate what I was trying to do?—that, after the issue had been pointed out, he would decided that he _wanted_ his chatroom to be a place where we don't want other people to have false beliefs for their own benefit?—a place that approves of "meddling" in the form of _telling people things_.
-The other participants mostly weren't buying what I was selling.
+The other chatroom participants mostly weren't buying what I was selling.
-A user called April wrote that "the standard dath ilani has internalized almost everything in the sequences": "it's not that the standards are being dropped[;] it's that there's an even higher standard far beyond what anyone on earth has accomplished". (This received a checkmark emoji-react from Yudkowsky, an indication of his agreement.)
+A user called April wrote that "the standard dath ilani has internalized almost everything in the sequences": "it's not that the standards are being dropped[;] it's that there's an even higher standard far beyond what anyone on earth has accomplished". (This received a checkmark emoji-react from Yudkowsky, an indication of his agreement/endorsement.)
-Someone else said he was "pretty leery of 'ignore whether models are painful' as a principle, for Earth humans to try to adopt," and went on to offer some thoughts for Earth. I continued to think it was ridiculous that we were talking of "Earth humans" as if there were any other kind—as if rationality in the Yudkowskian tradition wasn't something to aspire to in real life.
+Someone else said he was "pretty leery of 'ignore whether models are painful' as a principle, for Earth humans to try to adopt," and went on to offer some thoughts for Earth. I continued to maintain that it was ridiculous that we were talking of "Earth humans" as if there were any other kind—as if rationality in the Yudkowskian tradition wasn't something to aspire to in real life.
-Dath ilan [is _fiction_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional), I pointed out. Dath ilan _does not exist_. It was a horrible distraction to try to see our world through Thellim's eyes and feel contempt over how much better things must be on dath ilan (which, to be clear, again, _does not exist_), when one could be looking through the eyes of an ordinary reader of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 (the _real_ 2008, which _actually happened_), and seeing everything we've lost.
+Dath ilan [is _fiction_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional), I pointed out. Dath ilan _does not exist_. I thought it was a horrible distraction to try to see our world through Thellim's eyes and feel contempt over how much better things must be on dath ilan (which, to be clear, again, _does not exist_), when one could be looking through the eyes of an ordinary reader of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 (the _real_ 2008, which _actually happened_), and seeing everything we've lost.
[As it was taught to me then](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iiWiHgtQekWNnmE6Q/if-you-demand-magic-magic-won-t-help): if you demand Keepers, _Keepers won't help_. If I'm going to be happy anywhere, or achieve greatness anywhere, or learn true secrets anywhere, or save the world anywhere, or feel strongly anywhere, or help people anywhere—I may as well do it _on Earth_.
Despite the fact that there was no point in wasting any more time on Discord, I decided not to resist the temptation to open up the thread again and dump some paragraphs from my notes on the conspiracies of dath ilan.
-[TODO: explain my sneakiness theory, shove the anti-semitism into a footnote]
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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?"
+
+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]
+
+[^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?
+
+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 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.
+
+A user called ajvermillion asked why I was being so aggressively negative about dath ilan. He compared it to Keltham's remark about how [people who grew up under a Lawful Evil government were disposed to take a more negative view of paternalism](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1874754#reply-1874754) than they do in dath ilan, where paternalism basically works fine because dath ilan is benevolent.
+
+This question put me in a somewhat awkward position: it was a legitimate question that I felt I had to answer, that I had no way of answering honestly without at least _alluding_ to my prior greviances against Yudkowsky ... which were off-topic for the server. (Again, I had told myself that I was here to comment on the story, not to prosecute my greviances.)
+
+I tried to explain, briefly. Someone who might be even _more_ paranoid about abuses of power than someone who grew up with a Lawful Evil government, is someone who grew up under a power structure that put on a _good show_ of being clean and nice, but was actually corrupt and mean.
+
+Yudkowsky had this whole marketing image of him being uniquely sane and therefore uniquely benevolent, and because his Sequences were so life-changingly good, I _actually fell for it_. There was a long Dumb Story (this Story) that was off-topic and I hadn't then finished writing up, but basically, I had what I claimed were very strong reasons not to trust the guy anymore; I think he cares a lot about not explicitly _lying_, but what made the Sequences special is that they articulated a vastly higher standard than that, that he had no intention of living up to.
+
+And so, yeah, insofar as fiction about dath ilan functioned as marketing material for Yudkowsky's personality cult that I thought was damaging people like me (in some ways, while simultaneously helping us in other ways), I had an incentive to come up with literary criticism that paints dath ilan negatively?
+
+It was great for ajvermillion to notice this! It _would_ be bad if my brain were configured to come up with dath-ilan-negative literary criticism, and for me to _simultaneously_ present myself as an authority on dath ilan whom you should trust. But if dath-ilan-negative literary criticism was undersupplied for structural reasons (because people who like a story are selected for not seeing things the story is doing that are Actually Bad), and my brain was configured to generate it anyway (because I disliked the person Yudkowsky had become, in contrast to the person he was in 2008), it seemed pro-social for me to post it, for other people to take or leave according to their own judgement?
+
+Yudkowsky soon entered the thread again, initially replying to someone else. (I remarked parenthetically that his appearance made me think I should stop wasting time snarking in his fiction server and just finish my memoir already.) We had a brief back-and-forth:
+
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:33 PM
+> the main thing I'd observe contrary to Zack's take here, is that Keltham thought that not learning about masochists he can never have, was obviously in retrospect what he'd have wanted Civilization to do, or do unless and until Keltham became rich enough to afford a masochist and then he could be told
+> in other words, Keltham thought he was obviously being treated the way that counterfactual fully-informed Keltham would have paid Governance to treat not-yet-informed Keltham
+> that this obeys the social contract that Keltham thought he had, is part of why Keltham is confident that the logic of this particular explanation holds together
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:35 PM
+> the level of service that Keltham is expecting is _not the thing I learned from Robin Hanson's blog in 2008_
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:36 PM
+> I am sorry that some of the insane people I attracted got together and made each other more insane and then extensively meta-gaslit you into believing that everyone generally and me personally was engaging in some kind of weird out-in-the-open gaslighting that you could believe in if you attached least-charitable explanations to everything we were doing
+
+It was pretty annoying that Yudkowsky was still attributing my greviances to Michael's malign influence—as if the gender identity revolution was something I would otherwise have just _taken lying down_. In the counterfactual where Michael had died in 2015, I think something like my February 2017 breakdown would have likely happened anyway. (Between August 2016 and January 2017, I sent Michael 14 emails, met with him once, and watched 60% of South Park season 19 at his suggestion, so he was _an_ influence on my thinking during that period, but not a disproportionately large one compared to everything else I was doing at the time.) How would I have later reacted to the November 2018 "hill of meaning" Tweets (assuming they weren't butterfly-effected away in this counterfactual)? It's hard to say. Maybe, if that world's analogue of my February 2017 breakdown had gone sufficiently badly (with no Michael to visit me in the psych ward or help me make sense of things afterwards), I would have already been a broken man, and not even sent Yudkowsky an email. In any case, I feel very confident that my understanding of the behavior of "everyone generally and [Yudkowsky] personally" would not have been _better_ without Michael _et al._'s influence.
+
+> [cont'd]
+> you may recall that this blog included something called the "Bayesian Conspiracy"
+> they won't tell you about it, because it interferes with the story they were trying to drive you insaner with, but it's so
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:37 PM
+> it's true that the things I don't like about modern Yudkowsky were still there in Sequences-era Yudkowsky, but I think they've gotten _worse_
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:39 PM
+> well, if your story is that I was always a complicated person, and you selected some of my posts and liked the simpler message you extracted from those, and over time I've shifted in my emphases in a way you don't like, while still having posts like Meta-Honesty and so on... then that's a pretty different story than the one you were telling in this Discord channel, like, just now. today.
+
+Is it, though? The "always a complicated person [who has] shifted in [his] emphases in a way [I] don't like" story was true, of course, but it elided the substantive reasons _why_ I didn't like the new emphases, which could presumably be evaluated on their own merits.
+
+It's interesting that Yudkowsky listed "still having posts like Meta-Honesty" as an exculpatory factor here. The thing is, I [wrote a _critique_ of Meta-Honesty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). It was well-received (being [cited as a good example in the introductory post for the 2019 Less Wrong Review](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QFBEjjAvT6KbaA3dY/the-lesswrong-2019-review), for instance). I don't think I could have written a similarly impassioned critique of anything from the Sequences era, because the stuff from the Sequences era still looked _correct_ to me. To me, "Meta-Honesty" was evidence _for_ Yudkowsky having relinquished his Art and lost his powers, not evidence that his powers were still intact.
+
+I didn't have that response thought through in real time. At the time, I just agreed:
+
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:39 PM
+> It is!
+> I'm not done working through the hate-warp
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:40 PM
+> so one thing hasn't changed: the message that you, yourself, should always be trying to infer the true truth, off the information you already have.
+> if you know you've got a hate-warp I don't know why you're running it and not trying to correct for it
+> are you in fact also explicitly aware that the people who talk to you a lot about "gaslighting" are, like, insane?
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:42 PM
+> I'm not really part of Vassar's clique anymore, if that's what you mean
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:44 PM
+> it looks from outside here like they stomped really heavy footprints all over your brain that have not healed or been filled in
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:49 PM
+> it looks from inside here that the thing I'm not healed from is the thing where, as Oliver Habryka put it, I "should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false" ([https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY)), and Michael and Ben and Jessica were _really_ helpful for orienting me to that particular problem, even if I disagree with them about a lot of other things and they seem crazy in other ways
+> (rule thinkers in, not out)
+
+I was pleased to get the link to Habryka's comment in front of Yudkowsky, if he hadn't already seen it.
+
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:55 PM
+> the most harm they did you was to teach you to see malice where you should have seen mortality
+> noninnocent error is meaningfully different from innocent error; and noninnocent error is meaningfully different from malice
+> Keltham deduced the lack of masochists in dath ilan by asking the question, "Why would Civilization have kept this information from me?", _ruling out_ or actually not even thinking of such ridiculous hypotheses as "Because it was fun", and settling on the obvious explanation that explained _why Keltham would have wanted Civilization to do that for him_—masochists not existing or being incredibly rare and unaffordable to him. You looked at this and saw malice everywhere; you couldn't even see _the fictional world_ the author was trying to give you _direct description about_. You didn't say that you disbelieved in the world; you could not see what was being _described_.
+>
+> Hate-warp like this is bad for truth-perception; my understanding of the situation is that it's harm done to you by the group you say you left. I would read this as being a noninnocent error of that group; that they couldn't get what they wanted from people who still had friends outside their own small microculture, and noninnocently then decided that this outer culture was bad and people needed to be pried loose from it. They tried telling some people that this outer culture was gaslighting them and maliciously lying to them and had to be understood in wholly adversarial terms to break free of the gaslighting; that worked on somebody, and made a new friend for them; so their brain noninnocently learned that it ought to use arguments like that again, so they must be true.
+> This is a sort of thing I super did not do because I _understood_ it as a failure mode and Laid My Go Stones Against Ever Actually Being A Cult; I armed people with weapons against it, or tried to, but I was optimistic in my hopes about how much could actually be taught.
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:20 PM
+> Without particularly defending Vassar _et al._ or my bad literary criticism (sorry), _modeling the adversarial component of non-innocent errors_ (as contrasted to "had to be understood in wholly adversarial terms") seems very important. (Maybe lying is "worse" than rationalizing, but if you can't hold people culpable for rationalization, you end up with a world that's bad for broadly the same reasons that a world full of liars is bad: we can't steer the world to good states if everyone's map is full of falsehoods that locally benefitted someone.)
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:22 PM
+> Rationalization sure is a huge thing! That's why I considered important to discourse upon the science of it, as was then known; and to warn people that there were more complicated tangles than that, which no simple experiment had shown yet.
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:22 PM
+> yeah
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:23 PM
+> It remains something that mortals do, and if you cut off anybody who's ever done that, you'll be left with nobody. And also importantly, people making noninnocent errors, if you accuse them of malice, will look inside themselves and correctly see that this is not how they work, and they'll stop listening to the (motivated) lies you're telling them about themselves.
+> This also holds true if you make up overly simplistic stories about 'ah yes well you're doing that because you're part of $woke-concept-of-society' etc.
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:24 PM
+> I think there's _also_ a frequent problem where you try to accuse people of non-innocent errors, and they motivatedly interpret _you_ as accusing malice
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:25 PM
+> Then invent new terminology. I do that all the time when existing terminology fails me.
+> Like I literally invented the term 'noninnocent error' right in this conversation.
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:27 PM
+> I've tried this, but maybe it wasn't good enough, or I haven't been using it consistently enough: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)
+> I should get ready for bed
+> I will endeavor to edit out the hate-warp from my memoir before publishing, and _probably_ not talk in this server
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:31 PM
+> I think you should worry first about editing the hate-warp out of yourself, but editing the memoir might be useful practice for it. Good night.
+
+It turned out that I was lying about probably not talking in the server anymore. (Hedging the word "probably" didn't make the claim true, and of course I wasn't _consciously_ lying, but that hardly seems exculpatory.)
+
+The next day, I belatedly pointed out that "Keltham thought that not learning about masochists he can never have, was obviously in retrospect what he'd have wanted Civilization to do" seemed to contradict "one thing hasn't changed: the message that you, yourself, should always be trying to infer the true truth". In the first statement, it didn't sound like Keltham thinks it's good that Civilization didn't tell him so that he could figure it how for himself (in accordance with the discipline of "you, yourself, always trying to infer the truth"). It sounded like he was better off not knowing—better off having a _less accurate self-model_ (not having the concept fo "obligate romantic sadism"), better off having a _less accurate world-model_ (thinking that masochism isn't real).
+
+In response to someone positing that dath ilani were choosing to be happier but less accurate predictors, I said that I read a blog post once about why you actually didn't want to do that, linking to [an Internet Archive copy of "Doublethink (Choosing to Be Biased)"](https://web.archive.org/web/20080216204229/https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/doublethink-cho.html) from 2008[^hanson-conceit]—at least, that was _my_ attempted paraphrase; it was possible that I'd extracted a simpler message from it than the author intended.
+
+[^hanson-conceit]: I was really enjoying the "Robin Hanson's blog in 2008" conceit.
+
+A user called Harmless explained the loophole. "Doublethink" was pointing out that decisions that optimize the world for your preferences can't come from nowhere: if you avoid painful thoughts in your map, you damage your ability to steer away from painful outcomes in the territory. However, there was no rule that all the information-processing going into decisions that optimize the world for your preferences had to take place in _your brain_ ...
+
+I saw where they were going and completed the thought: you could build a Friendly AI or a Civilization to see all the dirty things for you, that would make you unhappy to have to see yourself.
+
+Yudkowsky clarified his position:
+
+> My exact word choices often do matter: I said that you should always be trying to _infer_ the truth. With the info you already have. In dath ilan if not in Earth, you might decline to open a box labeled "this info will make you permanently dissatisfied with sex" if the box was labeled by a prediction market.
+> Trying to avoid inferences seems to me much more internally costly than declining to click on a spoiler box.
+
+I understood the theory, but I was still extremely skpetical of the practice, assuming the eliezera were even remotely human. Yudkowsky described the practice of "keeping BDSM secret and trying to prevent most sadists from discovering what they are—informing them only when and if they become rich enough or famous enough that they'd have a high probability of successfully obtaining a very rare masochist" as a "basically reasonable policy option that [he] might vote for, not to help the poor dear other people, but to help [his] own counterfactual self."
+
+The problem I saw with this is that becoming rich and famous isn't a purely random exogenous event. In order to make an informed decision about whether or not to put in the effort to try to _become_ rich and famous (as contrasted to choosing a lower-risk or more laid-back lifestyle), you need accurate beliefs about the perks of being rich and famous.
+
+The dilemma of whether to make more ambitious economic choices in pusuit of sexual goals was something that _already_ happens to people on Earth, rather than being hypothetical. I once met a trans woman who spent a lot of her twenties and thirties working very hard to get money for various medical procedures. I think she would be worse off under a censorship regime run by self-styled Keepers who thought it was kinder to prevent _poor people_ from learning about the concept of "transsexualism".
+
+Further discussion established that Yudkowsky was (supposedly) already taking into account the distortion on individuals' decisions, but that the empirical setting of probabilities and utilities happened to be such that ignorance came out on top.
+
+I wasn't sure what my wordcount and diplomacy budget limits for the server were, but I couldn't let go; I kept the thread going on subsequent days. There was something I felt I should be able to convey, if I could just find the right words.
+
+When [Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) says, "trying to prevent most [_X_] from discovering what they are [...] continues to strike me as a basically reasonable policy option", then, separately from the particular value of _X_, I expected people to jump out of their chairs and say, "No! This is wrong! Morally wrong! People can stand what is true about themselves, because they are already doing so!"
+
+And to the extent that I was the only person jumping out of my chair, and there was a party-line response of the form, "Ah, but if it's been decreed by authorial fiat that these-and-such probabilities and utilities take such-and-these values, then in this case, self-knowledge is actually bad under the utilitarian calculus," I wasn't disputing the utilitarian calculus. I was wondering—here I used the "🐛" bug emoji customarily used in Glowfic culture to indicate uncertainty about the right words to use—_who destroyed your souls?_
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> it feels powerfully relevant to me that the people of whom I am saying this _are eliezera_. I get to decide what they'd want because, unlike with Earth humans, I get to put myself in their shoes. it's plausible to me that the prediction markets say that I'd be sadder if I was exposed to the concept of sadism in a world with no masochists. if so, while I wouldn't relinquish my Art and lose my powers by trying to delude myself about that once I'd been told, I'd consider it a friendly act to keep the info from me—_because_ I have less self-delusional defenses than a standard Earthling, really—and a hostile act to tell me; and if you are telling me I don't get to make that decision for myself because it's evil, and if you go around shouting it from the street corners in dath ilan, then yeah I think most cities don't let you in.
+
+I wish I had thought to ask if he'd have felt the same way in 2008.
+
+Ajvermillion was still baffled at my skepticism: if the author specifies that the world of the story is simple in this-and-such direction, on what grounds could I _disagree_?
+
+I admitted, again, that there was a sense in which I couldn't argue with authorial fiat. But I thought that an author's choice of assumptions reveals something about what they think is true in our world, and commenting on that should be fair game for literary critics. Suppose someone wrote a story and said, "in the world portrayed in this story, everyone is super-great at _kung fu_, and they could beat up everyone from our Earth, but they never have to practice at all."
+
+(Yudkowsky retorted, "...you realize you're describing like half the alien planets in comic books? when did Superman ever get depicted as studying kung fu?" I wish I had thought to admit that, yes, I _did_ hold Eliezer Yudkowsky to a higher standard of consilient worldbuilding than DC Comics. Would he rather I _didn't_?)
+
+Something about innate _kung fu_ world seems fake in a way that seems like a literary flaw. It's not just about plausibility. Innate _kung fu_ skills are scientifically plausible[^instinct] in a way that faster-than-light travel is not. Fiction incorporates unrealistic elements in order to tell a story that has relevace to real human lives. Throwing faster-than-light travel into the universe so that you can do a [space opera](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceOpera) doesn't make the _people_ fake in the way that Superman's fighting skills are fake.
+
+[^instinct]: All sorts of other instinctual behaviors exist in animals; I don't se why skills humans have to study for years as a "martial art" couldn't be coded into the genome.
+
+Similarly, a world that's claimed by authorial fiat to be super-great at epistemic rationality, but where the people don't have a will-to-truth stronger than their will-to-happiness, felt fake to me. I couldn't _prove_ that it was fake. I agreed with Harmless's case that, _technically_, as far as the Law went, you could build a Civilization or a Friendly AI to see all the ugly things that you preferred not to see.
+
+But if you could—would you? And more importantly, if you would—could you?
+
+It was possible that the attitude I was evincing here was just a difference between the eliezera out of dath ilan and the Zackistani from my medianworld, and that there's nothing more to be said about it. But I didn't think the thing was a _genetic_ trait of the Zackistani! _I_ got it from spending my early twenties obsessively re-reading blog posts that said things like, ["I believe that it is right and proper for me, as a human being, to have an interest in the future [...] One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth [...] I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in this generation."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business)
+
+There were definitely communities on Earth where I wasn't allowed in because of my tendency to shout things from street corners, and I respected those people's right to have a safe space for themselves.
+
+But those communities ... didn't call themselves _rationalists_, weren't _pretending_ be to be inheritors of the great tradition of E. T. Jaynes and Robin Dawes and Richard Feynman. And if they _did_, I think I would have a false advertising complaint against them.
+
+"[The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues) ... unless a prediction market says that would make you less happy," just didn't have the same ring to it. Neither did "The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. But higher than both of those, is trusting your Society's institutions to tell you which kinds of knowledge will make you happy"—even if you stipulated by authorial fiat that your Society's institutions are super-competent, such that they're probably right about the happiness thing.
+
+Attempting to illustrate the mood I thought dath ilan was missing, I quoted the scene from _Atlas Shrugged_ where Dagny expresses a wish to be kept ignorant for the sake of her own happiness and get shut down by Galt—and Dagny _thanks_ him. (I put Discord's click-to-reveal spoiler blocks around plot-relevant sentences—that'll be important in a few moments.)
+
+> "[...] Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it! If only I could stay here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"
+>
+> "You'll have to hear about it," said Galt; it was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. "You'll hear the whole course of the last agony of Taggart Transcontinental. You'll hear about every wreck. You'll hear about every discontinued train. You'll hear about every abandoned line. You'll hear about the collapse of the Taggart Bridge. Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."
+>
+> She looked at him, her head lifted, knowing what chance he was rejecting. She thought that no man of the outer world would have said this to her at this moment—she thought of the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy—she felt a stab of revulsion against that code, suddenly seeing its full ugliness for the first time [...] she answered quietly, "Thank you. You're right."
+
+This (probably predictably) failed to resonate with other server participants, who were baffled why I seemed to be appealing to Ayn Rand's authority. But I was actually going for a _reverse_ appeal-to-authority: if _Ayn Rand_ understood that facing reality is virtuous, why didn't the 2020's "rationalists"? I didn't think the disdain for "Earth people" (again, as if there were any other kind) was justified, when Earth's philosophy of rationality was doing better than dath ilan's on this critical dimension.
+
+But if people's souls had been damaged such that they didn't have the "facing reality is virtuous" gear, it wasn't easy to install the gear by talking at them.
+
+Why was I so sure _my_ gear was correct?
+
+I wondered if the issue had to do with what Yudkowsky had identified as [the problem of non-absolute rules](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases#5__Counterargument__The_problem_of_non_absolute_rules_).
+
+Technically, as a matter of decision theory, "sacred values" are crazy.
+
+[TODO: finish § Atlas Shrugged quote and children's morals
+ * why sacred values fail
+ * examples of ways I think reality is complicated that makes the BDSM coverup bad
+]
+
+[TODO: Yudkowsky tests me]
+
+[TODO: derail with Lintamande]
+
+[TODO: knives, and showing myself out]
+
+------
+
+Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the Whole Dumb Story about how I wasted the last seven years of my life. It's probably not that interesting? Life goes on—for now. My dayjob contract expired at the end of 2022. In 2023, I've been finishing up this memoir, and posting some other ideas to _Less Wrong_. (I got into another slapfight about me being un-collaborative, which is not interesting enough to summarize.)
+
+After this, the AI situation is looking worrying enough, that I'm thinking I should try to do some more direct xrisk-reduction work, although I haven't definitely selected any particular job or project. (It probably won't matter, but it will be dignified.) Now that the shape of the threat is on the horizon, I think I'm less afraid of being directly involved. Something about having large language models to study in the 'twenties is—grounding, compared to the superstitious fears of the paperclip boogeyman of my nightmares in the 'teens.
-A user called ajvermillion asked why I was being so aggressively negative about dath ilan. He compared it to Keltham's speech about how [people who grew up under a Lawful Evil government were disposed to take a more negative view of paternalism](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1874754#reply-1874754) than they do in dath ilan, where paternalism works fine because dath ilan is basically benevolent.
+Like all intellectuals, as a teenager I imagined that I would write a book. It was always going to be about gender, but I was vaguely imagining a novel, which never got beyond vague imaginings. That was before the Sequences. I'm 35 years old now. I think my intellectual life has succeeded in ways I didn't know how to imagine, before. I think my past self would be proud of this blog—140,000 words of blog posts stapled together is _morally_ a book—once he got over the shock of heresy.
-[TODO: regrets and wasted time
+[TODO conclusion, cont'd—
* Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surely—it's been a lot of wasted time. But it's also hard to say what I should have done differently; I could have listened to Ben more and lost faith Yudkowsky earlier, but he had earned a lot of benefit of the doubt?
+ * even young smart AGPs who can appreciate my work have still gotten pinkpilled
* less drama (in my youth, I would have been proud that at least this vice was a feminine trait; now, I prefer to be good even if that means being a good man)
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff