+Title: Comments on the Conspiracies of dath ilan
+Date: 2023-01-01 20:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, worldbuilding
+Status: draft
+
+If we believe that IQ research validates the "Jews are clever" stereotype, I wonder if there's a distinct (albeit probably correlated) "enjoying deception" trait that validates the "Jews are sneaky" stereotype?
+
+[TODO: link "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"]
+
+(I was tempted to tag that as "epistemic status: low-confidence speculation", but that's _frequentist_ thinking—as if "Jews and gentiles are equally sneaky" were a "null hypothesis" that could only be rejected by data that would be sufficiently unlikely assuming that the null was true. Ha ha, that would be _crazy!_ Obviously, I should have a _prior_ on the effect size difference between the Jew and gentile sneakiness distributions, that can be updated as sneakiness data comes in. I think the mean of my prior distribution is at, like, _d_ ≈ 0.1? So it's not "low confidence"; it's "low confidence of the effect size being large enough to be of much practical significance".)
+
+Anyway, if dath ilan is very high in the sneakiness trait (relative to Earth), that would help explain all the conspiracies!
+
+Not-actually-plausible conspiracies that everyone is in on (like "Spatahski are real") are a superstimulus like zero-calorie sweetener: engineered to let everyone enjoy the thrill of lying, without doing any real damage to shared maps.
+
+[TODO: sp alien alien name?]
+
+For context on why I have no sense of humor about this, on Earth (which _actually exists_, unlike dath ilan), when someone says "it's not lying, because no one _expected_ me to tell the truth in that situation", what's usually going on (as Zvi Mowshowitz explains: <https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/>) is that is that conspirators benefit from deceiving outsiders, and the claim that "everyone knows" is them lying to _themselves_ about the fact that they're lying.
+
+[TODO: exact language ]
+
+(If _you_ got hurt by not knowing, well, it's not like anyone got hurt, because if you didn't know, then you weren't anyone.)
+
+It's very striking to me that one of the corrupt executives in _Moral Mazes_ uses very similar language to the narrator of the Merrin thread: "We lie all the time, but if everyone knows that we're lying, is a lie really a lie?"
+
+Okay, but if it were _actually true_ that everyone knew, what would be _function_ of saying the false thing? On dath ilan (if not in Earth boardrooms), I suppose the answer is "Because it's fun"? Okay, but what is the function of your brain giving out a "fun" reward in this context? It seems like at _some_ point, there has to be the expectation of _some_ cognitive system (although possibly not an entire "person") taking the signals literally.
+
+That's why, when I _notice_ myself misrepresenting my actual beliefs or motivations because I think it's funny or rhetorically powerful (and it takes a special act of noticing; humans aren't built to be honest by default), I often take care to disclaim it immediately (as was observed in the message this is one a reply to), precisely because I _don't_ think that "everybody knows"; I'm not going to give up on humor or powerful rhetoric, but I'm also not going to delude myself into thinking it's "zero-calorie" (people who don't "get the joke" _are_ going to be misled, and I don't think it's unambigously "their fault" for not being able to read my "intent" to arbitrary precision)
+
+[TODO: link to "teeth" earlier in the thread commenting on it'd be funnier if I didn't]
+
+But maybe dath ilan is sufficiently good at achieving common knowledge in large groups that they _can_ pull off a zero-calorie "everyone knows" conspiracy without damaging shared maps??
+
+I'm still skeptical, especially given that we see them narratizing it as "not lying" (in the same words that corrupt executives on Earth use!), rather than _explicitly_ laying out the evopysch logic of sneakiness superstimuli, and the case that they know how to pull it off in a zero-calorie (trivial damage to shared maps) way.
+
+In general, I think that "it's not lying because no one expected the truth" is something you would say as part of an attempted nearest-unblocked-strategy end run around a deontological constraint against "lying" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly); I don't think it's something you would say if you _actually cared_ about shared maps being accurate
+
+What I see on Earth (which, again, _actually exists_, unlike dath ilan, which _does not exist_), is that people mostly drink their own Kool-Aid; lying to the world without lying to yourself is just not psychologically sustainable.
+
+I had some insightful discussion with someone in 2017, in which I was saying that I wanted something to be public knowledge, that was frequently denied for political reasons. (The object-level topic doesn't matter in this context.) This person said, "I don't particularly care about this being commonly recognized. C'mon! It's fun to have some secrets that are not public knowledge".
+
+In 2021, _the same person_ says she feels "disgusted and complicit" for having talked to me.
+
+[TODO: find Devi commment and quote exactly without linking]
+
+I think it's very significant that she _didn't_ say that she encountered _new evidence_ that made her _change her mind_, and decided that she was _actually wrong_ in 2017. The claim is just that the things we said in 2017 are "harmful."
+
+[TODO: wrap-up dath ilan is fictional
+
+the reason I'm paranoid and humorless about
+
+positive-valence fictional depictions of
+
+"but, but, information can _hurt people_, and hurting people is wrong" and "it's not lying if 'everybody knows'" memes, is because I _actually see this stuff destroying people's minds in real life_
+
+I certainly don't think Yudkowsky is consciously "lying"
+
+(natural language is very flexible, you can _come up with_ some interpretation)
+
+]
+
+You can cosplay an elf _at a designated fandom convention_, where people have temporarily _opted in_ to that false social reality. But I don't think you can cosplay an elf _at work_ (in "real life") and have everyone play along for extended periods of time, without dealing damage to real-life shared maps.
+
+Similarly, I cosplay female characters at fandom conventions, and that's fun, and I'm glad that conventions exist, but I can't transition in "real life", because I don't expect anyone in real life to believe that I'm female, because it's _very obviously not true_. People will _pretend_ to believe it because they're terrified of being accused of transphobia, but _they are lying_, and the
+
+people who try to claim that no one is being deceived because "everyone knows"
+
+_are also lying_.
+
+oh, I thought of a stronger test case: pedophilia.
+
+On Earth, our mechanism for protecting children from sexual abuse
+
+is to heavily stigmatize pedophilia:
+
+we don't have the option of covering up the existence of the concept
+
+But if we could drive
+
+
+Keltham contradicts himself _in the same tag_
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