Okay, being scared was entirely appropriate, but what I mean is that I was scared, and concluded that shaping the Singularity was _not my problem_, as contrasted to being scared, then facing up to the responsibility anyway. After a 2013 sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic episode which [featured](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) [futurist](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/)-[themed](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relativity/) [delusions](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relevance/), I wrote to Anna, Michael, and some MIRI employees who had been in my contacts for occasional contract work, that "my current plan [was] to just try to forget about _Less Wrong_/MIRI for a long while, maybe at least a year, not because it isn't technically the most important thing in the world, but because I'm not emotionally stable enough think about this stuff anymore" (Subject: "to whom it may concern"). When I got a real programming job and established an income for myself, I [donated to CfAR rather than MIRI](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/), because public rationality was something I could be unambiguously enthusiastic about, and doing anything about AI was not.
-At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally-stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl[ing] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to [his] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI specifically, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
+At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally-stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl\[ing\] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to \[his\] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI specifically, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
But fighting for public epistemology is a long battle; it makes more sense if you have _time_ for it to pay off. Back in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, it looked like we had time. We had these abstract philosophical arguments for worrying about AI, but no one really talked about _timelines_. I believed the Singularity was going to happen in the 21st century, but it felt like something to expect in the _second_ half of the 21st century.
Now it looks like we have—less time? Not just tautologically because time has passed (the 21st century is one-fifth over—closer to a quarter over), but because of new information from the visible results of the deep learning revolution.[^second-half] Yudkowsky seemed particularly [spooked by AlphaGo](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=gQzA8a989ZyGvhWv2) [and AlphaZero](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/20/alphago/) in 2016–2017, not because superhuman board game players were dangerous, but because of what it implied about the universe of algorithms.
-There had been a post in the Sequences that made fun of "the people who just want to build a really big neural net." These days, it's increasingly looking like just building a really big neural net ... [actually works](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis)?—which seems like bad news; if it's "easy" for non-scientific-genius engineering talent to shovel large amounts of compute into the birth of powerful minds that we don't understand and don't know how to control, then it would seem that the world is soon to pass outside of our understanding and control.
+In part of the Sequences, Yudkowsky had been [dismissive of people who aspired to build AI without understanding how intelligence works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence)—for example, by being overly impressed by the [surface analogy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ByPxcGDhmx74gPSm/surface-analogies-and-deep-causes) between artificial neural networks and the brain. He conceded the possibility of brute-forcing AI (if natural selection had eventually gotten there with no deeper insight, so could we) but didn't consider it a default and especially not a desirable path. (["If you don't know how your AI works, that is not good. It is bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence))
+
+These days, it's increasingly looking like making really large neural nets ... [actually works](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis)?—which seems like bad news; if it's "easy" for non-scientific-genius engineering talent to shovel large amounts of compute into the birth of powerful minds that we don't understand and don't know how to control, then it would seem that the world is soon to pass outside of our understanding and control.
[^second-half]: In an unfinished slice-of-life short story I started writing _circa_ 2010, my protagonist (a supermarket employee resenting his job while thinking high-minded thoughts about rationality and the universe) speculates about "a threshold of economic efficiency beyond which nothing human could survive" being a tighter bound on future history than physical limits (like the heat death of the universe), and comments that "it imposes a sense of urgency to suddenly be faced with the fabric of your existence coming apart in ninety years rather than 10<sup>90</sup>."
I pointed out that that's exactly what one would expect if the Vassar/breakdown correlation was mostly a selection effect rather than causal—that is, if the causal graph was the fork "prone-to-psychosis ← underlying-bipolar-ish-condition → gets-along-with-Michael".
-I had also had a sleep-deprivation-induced-psychotic-break-with-hospitalization in February 2013, and shortly thereafter, I remember Anna remarking that I was sounding a lot like Michael. But I hadn't been talking to Michael at all beforehand! (My previous email conversation with him had been in 2010.) So what could Anna's brain have been picking up on, when she said that? My guess: there was some underlying dimension of psychological variation (psychoticism? bipolar?—you tell me; this is supposed to be Scott's professional specialty) where Michael and I were already weird/crazy in similar ways, and sufficiently bad stressors could push me further along that dimension (enough for Anna to notice). Was Scott also going to blame Yudkowsky for making people autistic?
+I had also had a sleep-deprivation-induced-psychotic-break-with-hospitalization in February 2013, and shortly thereafter, I remember Anna remarking that I was sounding a lot like Michael. But I hadn't been talking to Michael at all beforehand! (My previous email conversation with him had been in 2010.) So what could Anna's brain have been picking up on, when she said that? My guess: there was some underlying dimension of psychological variation (psychoticism? bipolar?—you tell me; this is supposed to be Scott's professional specialty) where Michael and I were already weird/crazy in similar ways, and sufficiently bad stressors could push me further along that dimension (enough for Anna to notice). Was Scott also going to blame Yudkowsky for making people [autistic](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1633396201427984384)?
Concerning the lightning parable, Scott said that from his perspective, the point of "Kolmogorov Complicity" was that, yes, people can be crazy, but that we have to live in Society without spending all our time freaking out about it. If, back in the days of my ideological anti-sexism, the first ten Yudkowsky posts I had read had said that men and women are psychologically different for biological reasons and that anyone who denies this is a mind-killed idiot—which Scott assumed Yudkowsky did think—he could imagine me being turned off. It was probably good for me and the world that that wasn't my first ten experiences of the rationalist community.
(I asked Anna how Yudkowsky could stand the Glowfic people. She said she thought Eliezer could barely stand anyone. That makes sense, I said.)
-Everyone in dath ilan receives rationality training from childhood, but knowledge and training deemed psychologically hazardous to the general population is safeguarded by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). AGI research takes place in a secret underground city; some unspecified form of social engineering steers the _hoi polloi_ away from thinking about the possibility of AI.
+Everyone in dath ilan receives rationality training from childhood,[^category-vindication] but knowledge and training deemed psychologically hazardous to the general population is safeguarded by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). AGI research takes place in a secret underground city; some unspecified form of social engineering steers the _hoi polloi_ away from thinking about the possibility of AI.
+
+[^category-vindication]: On the topic of dath ilan's rationality training, I did appreciate [this passage about the cognitive function of categorization](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1779051#reply-1779051):
+
+ > Dath ilani kids get told to not get fascinated with the fact that, in principle, 'bounded-agents' with finite memories and finite thinking speeds, have any considerations about mapping that depend on what they want. It doesn't mean that you get to draw in whatever you like on your map, because it's what you want. It doesn't make reality be what you want.
+
+ Vindication! (This showed that Yudkowsky _does_ understand what was at issue in the "... Not Man for the Categories" dispute, even if I can't be credited with winning the argument for political reasons.)
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/).
> **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.
+> 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.
+> 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
It turned out that I was lying about probably not talking in the server anymore. (Hedging with 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 of "obligate romantic sadism"), better off having a _less accurate world-model_ (thinking that masochism isn't real).
+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 out 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 of "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.
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.
+Further discussion established that Yudkowsky was (supposedly) already taking into account that class of 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.
+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!"
(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.
+Something about innate _kung fu_ world seems fake in a way that seems like a literary flaw. It's not just about plausibility. Fiction often incorporates unrealistic elements in order to tell a story that has relevance to real human lives. Innate _kung fu_ skills are scientifically plausible[^instinct] in a way that faster-than-light travel is not, but 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.
+Maybe it was okay for Superman's fighting skills to be fake from a literary perspective (because realism along that dimension is not what Superman is _about_), but if the Yudkowskian ethos exulted intelligence as ["the power that cannot be removed without removing you"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXK87NgEPszhWkvQm/mundane-magic), readers had grounds to demand that the dath ilani's thinking skills be real, and 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)
+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 was 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.
"[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 (with Discord's click-to-reveal spoiler blocks around the more plot-relevant sentences) the scene from _Atlas Shrugged_ where our heroine Dagny expresses a wish to be kept ignorant for the sake of her own happiness and gets shut down by Galt—and Dagny _thanks_ him.
+Attempting to illustrate [the mood I thought dath ilan was missing](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html), I quoted (with Discord's click-to-reveal spoiler blocks around the more plot-relevant sentences) the scene from _Atlas Shrugged_ where our heroine Dagny expresses a wish to be kept ignorant for the sake of her own happiness, and gets shut down by John Galt—and Dagny _thanks_ him.[^atlas-shrugged-ref]
> "[...] 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!"
>
>
> 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"? Wasn't that undignified? 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 (as exemplified by Ayn Rand or Robert ["Get the Facts"](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/38764-what-are-the-facts-again-and-again-and-again) Heinlein) was doing better than dath ilan's on this critical dimension.
+[^atlas-shrugged-ref]: In Part Three, Chapter II, "The Utopia of Greed".
+
+This (probably predictably) failed to resonate with other server participants, who were baffled why I seemed to be appealing to Ayn Rand's authority.
+
+I was actually going for a _reverse_ appeal-to-authority: if _Ayn Rand_ understood that facing reality is virtuous, why didn't the 2020s "rationalists"? Wasn't that undignified? 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 (as exemplified by Ayn Rand or Robert ["Get the Facts"](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/38764-what-are-the-facts-again-and-again-and-again) Heinlein) 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.
The problem was that, in my view, the people who weren't talking about Truth as if it were a sacred value were being _wildly recklessly casual_ about harms from covering things up, as if they didn't see the non-first-order harms _at all_. I felt I had to appeal to the lessons for children about how Lying Is Bad, because if I tried to make a more sophisticated argument about it being _quantitatively_ crazy to cover up psychology facts that make people sad, I would face a brick wall of "authorial fiat declares that the probabilities and utilities are specifically fine-tuned such that ignorance is good".
-Even if you specified by authorial fiat that "latent sadists could use the information to decide whether or not to try to become rich and famous" didn't tip the utility calculus in itself, [facts are connected to each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), there were _more consequences_ to the coverup, more ways in which better-informed people could make better decisions than worse informed people.
+Even if you specified by authorial fiat that "latent sadists could use the information to decide whether or not to try to become rich and famous" didn't tip the utility calculus in itself, [facts are connected to each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies); there were _more consequences_ to the coverup, more ways in which better-informed people could make better decisions than worse-informed people.
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.
-A user called RationalMoron asked if I was appealing to a terminal value. Did I think people should have accurate self-models even if they don't want to?
+Or imagine a world where male homosexuality couldn't be safely practiced due to super-AIDS. (I know very little about BDSM.) I still think men with that underlying predisposition would be better off _having a concept_ of "homosexuality" (even if they couldn't practice it), rather than the concept itself being censored. There are also other systematic differences that go along with sexual orientation (the "feminine gays, masculine lesbians" thing); if you censor the _concept_, you're throwing away that knowledge.
+
+(When I had brought up the super-AIDS hypothetical in the chat, Ajvermillion complained that I was trying to bait people into self-cancelling by biting the bullet on suppressing homosexuality. I agreed that the choice of example was engineered to activate people's progressive moral intuitions about gay rights—it was great for him to notice that—but I thought that colliding philosophical intuitions like that was intellectually productive; it wasn't an attempt to gather blackmail material.)
+
+A user called RationalMoron asked if I was appealing to a terminal value. Did I think people should have accurate self-models even if they didn't want to?
-Obviously I wasn't going to use a universal quantifier over all possible worlds and all possible minds, but in human practice, yes: people who prefer to believe lies about themselves are doing the wrong thing; people who lie to their friends to keep them happy are doing the wrong thing. People can stand what is true, because they are already doing so. I realized this was a children's lesson without very advanced math, but I thought it was a better lesson than, "Ah, but what if a _prediction market_ says they can't???" That the eliezera prefer not to know that there are desirable sexual experiences that they can't have, contradicted April's earlier claim (which had received a Word of God checkmark-emoji) that "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".
+Obviously I wasn't going to use a universal quantifier over all possible worlds and all possible minds, but in human practice, yes: people who prefer to believe lies about themselves are doing the wrong thing; people who lie to their friends to keep them happy are doing the wrong thing. People can stand what is true, because they are already doing so. I realized that this was a children's lesson without very advanced math, but I thought it was a better lesson than, "Ah, but what if a _prediction market_ says they can't???"
+
+I maintained that the fact that the eliezera prefer not to know that there are desirable sexual experiences that they can't have, contradicted April's earlier claim (which had received a Word of God checkmark-emoji) that "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".
Apparently I struck a nerve. Yudkowsky started "punching back":
> It's noticeably more extreme than the _Invention of Lying_ aliens, who can still have nudity taboos
> I'd also note that I think in retrospect (only after having typed it) that Zack could not have generated these examples of other places where society refrains from observation, and that I think this means I am tracking the thing Zack fears in a way that Zack cannot because his thinking is distorted and he is arguing rather than seeing; and this, not verbally advocating for "truth", is more what respect for truth really is.
-I thought the "you could not have generated the answer I just told you" gambit was a pretty dirty argumentative trick on Yudkowsky's part. (Given that I could, how would I be able to prove it?—this was itself a good use-case for spoilers.)
+I thought the "you could not have generated the answer I just told you" gambit was a pretty dirty argumentative trick on Yudkowsky's part. (Given that I could, how would I be able to prove it?—this was itself a good use-case for concealing spoilers.)
-As it happened, however, I _had_ already considered the case of spoilers as a class of legitimate infohazards, and was prepared to testify that I had already thought of it, and explain why hiding spoilers were relevantly morally different from coverups in my view. The previous night, 7 December 2022, I had had a phone call with Anna Salamon,[^evidence-of-independent-generation] in which (I pretty distinctly remember) citing dath ilan's practice of letting children figure out heliocentrism for themselves as not being objectionable in the way the sadism/masochism coverup was.
+As it happened, however, I _had_ already considered the case of spoilers as a class of legitimate infohazards, and was prepared to testify that I had already thought of it, and explain why I thought hiding spoilers were relevantly morally different from the coverups I was objecting to. The previous night, 7 December 2022, I had had a phone call with Anna Salamon,[^evidence-of-independent-generation] in which I (remembered that I) had cited dath ilan's [practice of letting children figure out heliocentrism for themselves](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1777588#reply-1777588) as not being objectionable in the way the sadism/masochism coverup was.
-[^evidence-of-independent-generation]: I was lucky to be able to point to Anna as a potential witness to defend myself against the "could not have generated" trick—as a matter of principle, not because I seriously expected anyone to go ask Anna if she remembered the conversation the same way.
+[^evidence-of-independent-generation]: I was lucky to be able to point to Anna as a potential witness to defend myself against the "could not have generated" trick—as a matter of principle, not because I seriously expected anyone to care enough to go ask Anna if she remembered the conversation the same way.
- I also mentioned that when I had used spoiler blocks on the _Atlas Shrugged_ quote I had posted upthread, I had briefly considered including some kind of side-remark noting that the spoiler blocks were also a form of information-hiding, but couldn't think of anything funny or relevant enough (which, if my self-report could be trusted, showed that I had independently generated the idea spoilers being an example of hiding information—but I didn't expect other people to uncritically believe my self-reports).
+ I also mentioned that when I had used spoiler blocks on the _Atlas Shrugged_ quote I had posted upthread, I had briefly considered making some kind of side-remark noting that the spoiler blocks were also a form of information-hiding, but couldn't think of anything funny or relevant enough (which, if my self-report could be trusted, showed that I had independently generated the idea of spoilers being an example of hiding information—but I didn't expect other people to uncritically believe my self-reports).
-It seemed like the rationale for avoiding spoilers of movie plots or homework exercises had to do with the outcome being different if you got spoiled: you have a different æsthetic experience if you experience the plot twist in the 90th minute of the movie rather than the fourth paragraph of the _Wikipedia_ article; you learn more by working out the answer to the homework exercise yourself. Dath ilan's sadism/masochism coverup didn't seem to have the same structure: when I try to prove a theorem myself before looking at how the textbook says to do it, it's not because I would be _sad about the state of the world_ if I looked at the textbook; it's because the temporary ignorance of working it out myself results in a stronger state of final knowledge.
+It seemed like the rationale for avoiding spoilers of movie plots or homework exercises had to do with the outcome being different if you got spoiled: you have a different æsthetic experience if you experience the plot twist in the 90th minute of the movie rather than the fourth paragraph of the _Wikipedia_ article. Dath ilan's sadism/masochism coverup didn't seem to have the same structure: when I try to prove a theorem myself before looking at how the textbook says to do it, it's not because I would be _sad about the state of the world_ if I looked at the textbook; it's because the temporary ignorance of working it out myself results in a stronger state of final knowledge.
That is, the difference between "spoilers" (sometimes useful) and "coverups" (bad) had to do with whether the ignorant person is expected to eventually uncover the hidden information, and whether the ignorant person knows that there's hidden information that they're expected to uncover. In the case of the sadism/masochism coverup (in contrast to the cases of movie spoilers or homework exercises), it seemed like neither of these conditions pertained. (Keltham knows that the Keepers are keeping secrets, but he seems to actively have beliefs about human psychology that imply masochism is implausible; it seems more like he has a false map, rather than a blank spot on his map for the answer to the homework exercise to be filled in.) I thought that was morally relevant.
-(I would have hoped that my two previous mentions in the thread of supporting keeping nuclear, bioweapon, and AI secrets should have already made it clear that I wasn't against _all_ cases of Society hiding information, but to further demonstrate my ability to generate counterexamples, I mentioned that I would also admit _threats_ as a class of legitimate infohazard: if I'm not a perfect decision theorist, I'm better off if Tony Soprano just doesn't have my email to begin with, if I don't trust myself to calculate when I "should" ignore his demands.)
+(Additionally, I would have hoped that my two previous mentions in the thread of supporting keeping nuclear, bioweapon, and AI secrets should have already made it clear that I wasn't against _all_ cases of Society hiding information, but to further demonstrate my ability to generate counterexamples, I mentioned that I would also admit _threats_ as a class of legitimate infohazard: if I'm not a perfect decision theorist, I'm better off if Tony Soprano just doesn't have my email address to begin with, if I don't trust myself to calculate when I "should" ignore his demands.)
As for the claim that my thinking was distorted and I was arguing instead of seeing, it was definitely true that I was _motivated to look for_ criticisms of Yudkowsky and dath ilan, for personal reasons outside the scope of the server, and I thought it was great for people to notice this and take it into account. I hoped to nevertheless be competent to only report real criticisms and not fake criticisms. (Whether I succeeded, of course, was up to the reader to decide.)
-[TODO: Yudkowsky tests me]
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> only half the battle even if you could do it. you're also not reporting any facts/arguments on the other side, which is a much larger and visible gap to me, and has a lot to do with why I'm not presently considering this criticism from a peer despite your spoken adherence to virtues I value. **QUESTION FOR ZACK ONLY, NOBODY ELSE ANSWER OR SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT IN THIS MAIN CHANNEL:** What are some of the ways that Planecrash valorizes truth, as you, yourself, see that virtue?
+
+I didn't ask why it was relevant whether or not I was a "peer." If we're measuring IQ (143 _vs._ [131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg)), or fiction-writing ability (several [highly-acclaimed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8) [stories](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good) [including the world's most popular _Harry Potter_ fanfiction](https://www.hpmor.com/) _vs._ a [_My Life as a Teenage Robot_ fanfiction](https://archive.ph/WdydM) with double-digit favorites and a [few](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/05/living-well-is-the-best-revenge/) [vignettes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dYspinGtiba5oDCcv/feature-selection) here and there), or contributions to AI alignment (founder of the field _vs._ author of some dubiously relevant blog comments), I'm obviously _not_ his peer. It didn't seem like that was necessary when one could just [evaluate my arguments about dath ilan on their own merits](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority). But I wasn't going to be so impertinent to point that out when the master was testing me (!) and I was eager to pass the test.
+
+I said that I'd like to take an hour to compose a _good_ answer. (It was 10:26 _p.m._) If I tried to type something off-the-cuff on the timescale of five minutes, it wasn't going to be of similar quality as my criticisms, because, as I had just admitted, I had _totally_ been running a biased search for criticisms—or did the fact that I had to ask that mean I had already failed the test?
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> I mean, yeah, in fact the greater test is already having that info queued, but conversely it's even worse if you think back or reread and people are not impressed with the examples you find. I cannot for politeness lie and deny that if you did it in five minutes it would be _more_ impressive, but I think that it is yet the correct procedure to take your time.
+
+(As an aside—this isn't something I thought or said at the time—I _do_ think it makes sense to run an asymmetric search for flaws in some contexts, even though it would be disastrous to only look on one side of the argument when considering a belief you're uncertain about. Code reviewers often only comment in detail on flaws or bugs that they find, and say only "LGTM" (looks good to me) when they don't find any. Why? Because the reviewers aren't necessarily trying to evaluate "This code is good" as an abstract belief[^low-stakes]; they're trying to improve the code, and there's an asymmetry in payoffs where eliminating a flaw is an improvement, whereas identifying something the code does right just means the author was doing their job. If you didn't trust a reviewer's competence and thought they were making spurious negative reviews, you might legitimately test them by asking them to argue what's _good_ about a pull request that they just negatively reviewed, but I don't think it should be concerning if they asked for some extra time.)
+
+[^low-stakes]: For typical low-stakes business software in the "move fast and break things" regime. In applications where bugs are more costly, you do want to affirmatively verify "the code is good" as a belief.
+
+I said that I also wanted to propose a reframing: the thing that the present thread was complaining about was a lack of valorization of truth-_telling_, honesty, wanting _other_ people to have accurate maps. Or maybe that was covered by "as you, yourself, see that virtue"?
+
+Yudkowsky said that he would accept that characterization of what the thread was about if my only objection was that dath ilan didn't tell Keltham about BSDM, and that I had no objection to Keltham's judgement that in dath ilan, he would have preferred not to know.
+
+I expounded for some more paragraphs about why I _did_ object to Keltham's judgement, and then started on my essay exam—running with my "truth-telling" reframing.
+
+I wanted to nominate the part where the Conspiracy is unveiled—I thought I remembered Keltham saying something about how Carissa's deception was the worst thing anyone could have done to him—that is, the fact that someone he trusted was putting him in a fake reality was _itself_ considered a harm, separately from the fact that Cheliax is evil. I re-read pages 74 onwards of the ["What the Truth Can Destroy"](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5930) thread, and didn't see Keltham saying the thing I thought he said (maybe it happened in the next thread, or I had misremembered), but found two more things to submit as answers to my lit exam, which I posted at 12:30 _a.m._ (so I had actually taken two hours rather than the one I had asked for).
+
+First, I liked how [Snack Service intervenes to stage](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1811461#reply-1811461) a "truth and reconciliation commission" for Keltham and his paramours, on the grounds that it's necessary for Asmodeus and Cayden Caliean and Adabar and Keltham to make their best decisions. People testifying in public (with the Chelaxians and Oririons present, as one would at a trial) reflects a moral about the importance of common knowledge, _shared_ maps. The testimony being public ensured that not just that Keltham got to know what's been done to him, but that his paramours and counterparties _know that he knows_. There was something honorable about getting things on the public record like that, in the end, even while Snack Service was willing to participate in the conspiracy _before_ the jig was up.
+
+Second, I liked Korva's speech about why she hates Keltham, and how Keltham not only takes it in stride, but also asks to buy the right to take Korva with him to Osirion. When Abrogail expresses surprise that Keltham would want Korva, Keltham cites a dath ilani proverb about advice that's easier to get from people who aren't friends with you. This reflects an understanding that your friends wanting to be nice to you can be a source of distortions; Keltham specifically values Korva _as a critic_.
+
+The next day, I added that I realized that I had missed a huge opportunity to successfully reply on a five-minute time scale (to pass "the greater test [of] already having that info queued"): the "in _Planecrash_" part of the prompt made me think I had to find something in Keltham's story (which is why I took another two hours to hand in my essay), but other threads within the dath ilan Glowfic continuity should obviously count for the purpose of the test, and I did in fact already have cached thoughts about how Thellim's contempt for Jane Austen characters beautifully mirrored my contempt for protecting people from psychology facts that would hurt their feelings. I could _prove_ that I already had it cached (if not queued, as evidenced by my remembering it the next day), because I had mentioned it both in the conversation leading to the present thread, and in my memoir draft.
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> so I think that you're looking an awful lot at what _characters say_ and nearly not at all at what the universe does. this plausibly reflects a deep flaw in your art, because it sure does seem to me that you are a lot better at noticing what people say about truth in words, detecting whose monkey-side they seem to be on, than you are imo at carefully weighing up both sides of things as is the art of finding-truth-in-reality. it plausibly also reflects some people who ill-shaped you, pointing you at the fictional characters and angering you at their spoken words and verbal thoughts, as was advantageous to them, and not pointing you towards, like, looking at the messages in the fiction itself rather than the words spoken by characters, because that would not have served their ill purpose of alienating you and turning you into an angry thing more useful for their purposes. (I would not ordinarily use language like this but I regret that it is the language you have now seemingly been ill-shaped to speak, for another's usefulness.)
+> if I ask you, not what any _character says_, not even what any _societies say_, but _what happens in Planecrash_ and what the _causal process_ there seems to think about matters important to you, what do you see?
+
+As a _quick_ reply to the followup question (posted within 19 minutes of it being asked), I said that Cheliax was at a structural disadvantage in its conflict with the forces of Good, because learning how to think inevitably turns mortals away from Asmodeus's will.
+
+But I was _more_ interested in replying to the part about me being ill-shaped to another's purpose. (I said that I wouldn't have considered that on-topic for the fiction server, but if _he_ thought it was on-topic, then it made sense for me to reply—and I did so at 12:26 _p.m._ the next day, after some time to think. Discord lends itself quite well to a mix of synchronous and asynchronous communication, depending on when people happen to be at their computers.)
+
+I said that he seemed _really_ stuck on this hypothesis that it was Michael Vassar's fault that I'd been shaped into an alienated and angry thing.
+
+To be clear, I totally agreed that I had been shaped into an alienated and an alienated and angry thing. Obviously. But speaking of people "look[ing] inside themselves and correctly see[ing] that this is not how they work" (as Yudkowsky had said earlier), I thought he was getting the causality all wrong.
+
+It seemed to _me_ that the reason I had become an alienated and angry thing is because I had been shaped by [making an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) since 2016 to respond to a class of things that included Yudkowsky "mak[ing] up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false"—again referencing Oliver Habryka's comment on "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal."
+
+That's the context in which it wasn't surprising that my Art had involved some amount of specialization in "detecting whose monkey-side they seem to be on." In a world where monkeys are trying to cover up otherwise-obvious truths, successfully blowing the whistle on them involves being sensitive to their monkey games; figuring out the truth they're trying to cover up is the easy part. The whistleblowing-skill of of promoting otherwise-obvious things to _common_ knowledge in opposition to a Power trying to prevent common knowledge, is different from the science-skill of figuring out organically-nonobvious things from scratch. It _makes sense_ for Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Kolmogorov—or for that matter, John Galt and Robert Stadler—to have developed different crystalized skills.
+
+(Indeed, it even makes sense for Kolmogorov and Stadler to _not_ develop some skills, because the skills would show up under Detect Thoughts.)
+
+If it was all Michael's fault for "extensively meta-gas[lighting me] into believing that everyone generally and [him] personally [were] engaging in some kind of weird out-in-the-open gaslighting", I asked, echoing Yudkowsky's language from earlier (with appropriate quotation marks and brackets),[^gaslighting] then _how come Oli could see it, too?_
+
+[^gaslighting]: In particular, Yudkowsky was the one who introduced the word _gaslighting_ into the conversation; I hadn't previously used the word myself.
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> I think if you asked Oli about the state of reality with respect to this whole affair, he'd have a very different take from your take, _if you're still able to hear differences instead of only those similarities you demand._
+
+That sounded like an easy enough experimental test! I wrote Habryka an email explaining the context, and asking him what "very different take" he might have, if any. (I resisted the temptation to start a [Manifold market](https://manifold.markets/) first.) As I mentioned in the email, I didn't expect to have a very different take from Habryka _about the state of reality_. ("Zack is (still?!) very upset about this, but Oli mostly doesn't care" isn't a disagreement about the state of reality.) I didn't think I disagreed with _Yudkowsky_ much about the state of reality.
+
+He didn't reply. (I might have guessed the wrong email address, out of the two I had on file for him?) I don't blame him. It might have been timelessly ungrateful of me to ask. (The reason people are reluctant to make on-the-record statements in politically charged contexts is because they're afraid the statements will be _used_ to drag them into more political fights later. He had already done me a huge favor by being brave enough to state the obvious in March; I had no right to demand anything more of him.)
+
+Regarding my quick reply about Cheliax's structural disadvantage, Yudkowsky said it was "okay as one element", but complained that the characters had already observed it out loud, and that I "didn't name any concrete sequence of events that bore it out or falsified it." He continued:
+
+> I think you could find a lot more than this if your brain were still able to see incongruent facts as well as only congruent facts. what does the underlying reality of Planecrash think about your Most Important Issues? what is shown, but maybe never even told at all? you gave the reply of somebody who can _only_ see social realities and _only_ what people say and not what _just happens, at all_, even inside a story, you didn't say _a thing that happened._
+
+At this point, I was a bit suspicious that _any_ answer that wasn't exactly whatever he was thinking of would be dismissed as too social or too inferentially close to something one of the characters had said. What did it mean for the _universe_ to say something about valorizing truth?
+
+The original prompt ("What are some of the ways _Planecrash_ valorizes truth") had put me into 11th-grade English class mode; the revision "if I ask you, not what any _character_ says [...]" made me think the 11th-grade English teacher expected a different answer. The revised–revised prompt "what does the underlying reality of _Planecrash_ think about your Most Important Issues?", with the previous rebukes in my context window, made me think I should be reaching for an act of philosophical [Original Seeing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing), rather than trying to be a diligent schoolstudent playing the 11th-grade English class game. I pondered the matter ... and I _thought of something_.
+
+_Thesis_: the universe of _Planecrash_ is saying that virtue ethics—including, as a special case, my virtue ethics about it being good to tell the truth and reveal information—are somewhat unnatural.
+
+In the story, the god Adabar values trading fairly, even with those who can't verify their partners are keeping up their end of the deal, and also wants to promote fair trading _elsewhere_ in Reality (as contrasted to just being fair Himself).
+
+Adabar is kind of a weirdo. He's not a vanishly rare freak (whose specification would require lots of uncompressible information); there _is_ a basin of attraction in the space of pre-gods, where creatures who develop a computationally efficient "fairness" heuristic in their ancestral environment, reify that into their utilityfunction when they ascend, but it's not a _huge_ basin of attraction; most gods aren't like Adabar.
+
+It's the same thing with honesty. Generic consequentialists have no reason to "tell the truth" to agents with different utility functions when they're not under compact and being compensated for the service. Why _would_ you emit signals that other agents can interpret as a map that reflects the territory? [You can't get more paperclips that way!](https://arbital.com/p/not_more_paperclips/)
+
+I had previously written about this in ["Commucation Requires Common Interests or Differential Signal Costs"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybG3WWLdxeTTL3Gpd/communication-requires-common-interests-or-differential); you needed some common interests in order for flexible, "digital" language to exist at all. ("Digital" language where the relationship between signals and meaning can be arbitrary, in contrast to costly signaling, where me expending resources at least tell you that I could afford those resources.)
+
+It's _possible_ for imperfectly deceptive social organisms to develop a taste for "honesty" as a computationally efficient heuristic for navigating to Pareto improvements in the ancestral environment, which _might_ get reified into the utilityfunction as they ascend—but that's an Adabar-class weird outcome, not the default outcome.
+
+So—insofar as my Most Important Issues revolved around an obsession with motivational transparency, wanting to live in a world that wasn't lying to me, wanting to _reveal information_ as an end in itself, unilaterally rather than only as part of a coordinated negotiation scheme, without necessarily being _paid_ for it, but just because it is _right_ ...
+
+It seems like my answer to the question of, "What does the underlying causal process of _Planecrash_ think about your Most Important Issues; what are some the ways that _Planecrash_ valorizes truth-telling as you, yourself, see that virtue?" is, "It doesn't" (!). Truth-telling is a virtue ethic, and _Planecrash_ depicts a universe ruled by consequentialist gods who only implement virtue ethics insofar as that made it into their utilityfunction.
+
+I realized, of course, that this certainly wasn't the answer Yudkowsky was looking for. But it seemed like a _better_ answer than me trying to play the schoolstudent. He asked what I saw when I looked at what the fictional universe was saying about _my_ problems, and I looked, and _I saw something_. (Something philosophically substantive, not just a social reality.) It seemed more honest to just report that, rather than try to [guess the teacher's password](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password). So, after sleeping on it first, I posted the explanation of what I saw to the channel (including the parts about how the original prompts steered me, and that I realized that this wasn't the answer he was looking for).
+
+[TODO:
+ * third bluebook didn't get a response
+ * I was feeling kind of glum about my poor performance; I had reasons that made sense to me for why I said the things I said, but that _wasn't what I was being tested on_; I definitely _didn't_ say "Nothing, because Big Yud and Linta are lying liars who hate truth"; I moped in Alicorner #drama
+ * Big Yud saw it (I know this because he left an emoji react in the relevant section of messages) and took pity on me
+]
[TODO: derail with Lintamande]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff