Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
Status: draft
-> When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
-> The truth is great, and shall prevail,
-> When none cares whether it prevail or not.
+> All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.
>
-> —["Magna Est Vertias" by Coventry Patmore](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9M3ynNuBsRCDfmEsZ/less-wrong-poetry-corner-coventry-patmore-s-magna-est)
+> —Thomas Jefferson, earthling
+
+[OUTLINE—
+ * Introduction and Thesis
+ * Yudkowsky's new fictional universe is dath ilan, a medianworld centered around him (the race of dath ilani humans are called the "eliezera" in Word of God canon); the "joke" is that this is where the rationality tech of the Sequences came from (per the 2014 April Fools' Day post). Yudkowsky even talks this way in other contexts, including a trope of making fun of "Earth people" and presenting an eliezera racial supremacy narrative. (It's still a racial supremacy narrative even if he doesn't _use the verbatim phrase_ "racial supremacy.") One is led to believe that dath ilan represents a canonical rationalist utopia, someplace that readers of the Sequences would be proud of.
+ * And yet, for such a supposed rationalist utopia, it's striking that dath ilan is _lying about everything_, seemingly whenever it "sounds like a good idea" to someone: not just keeping AGI secrets (the way we keep nuclear secrets on Earth), but preventing the idea from coming up as science fiction, keeping Merrin in a Truman-show-like reality where she doesn't know that she's famous, hiding info about sexuality on utilitarian grounds—even bizarre trivial stuff like knives. I discuss these examples in detail later in this essay.
+ * Bluntly, this is not a culture that gives a shit about people being well-informed. This is a culture that has explicitly
+ * In more detail: the algorithm that designed dath ilani Civilization is one that systematically favors plans that involve deception, over than plans that involve being honest.
+ * This is not a normative claim or a generic slur that dath ilani are "evil" or "bad"; it's a positve claim about systematic deception. If you keep seeing plans for which social-deception-value exceeds claimed-social-benefit value, you should infer that the plans are being generated by a process that "values" (is optimizing for) deception, whether it's a person or a conscious mind.
+ * Watsonian rationale: with smarter people, knowledge actually is dangerous. I'm more interested in a Doylist interpretation, that this reflects authoritarian tendencies in later Yudkowsky's thought.
+
+ * Interlude: "I can't argue with authorial fiat"
+ * A worldbuilding critic who takes a negative view of some world might be told that they're not allowed to contradict authorial intent. If the narrator says the people of dath ilan are doing something because they're good and smart and cooperative, the critic has to accept that.
+ * But what makes the medianworld exercise interesting is that it's about trying to portray a realistic world, given a shifted distribution of psychological traits. We take the text of the story as a given, but we don't have to take dath ilan's self-image literally, if we think a different world could "project" into the same text and explain it better.
+ * An ethnographer might note that Americans believe themselves to be "the land of the brave and the home of the free", without being obliged for their ethnography to agree with this description. I'm taking the same stance towards dath ilan: as a literary critic, I don't have to share its Society's beliefs about itself.
+
+ * The Merrin Show
+ * Merrin: a reverse Emperor Norton case
+ * Overcoming Bias readers in 2008 would have found this offensive, not cute; Merrin is living a lie, and everyone is in on it.
+ * Rittaen's claim that knowledge of psychology turns you into a psychopath seems dubious.
+ * Exception Handling's Sparashki ruse is still kicking up epistemic dust even if few take it literally
+ * "Everybody knows"
+ * It has to bottom out in someone taking it literally
+ * zero-calorie superstimulus theory
+
+ * Keltham and S/M
+ * "They're better off not knowing about masochists that they can't have" disregards other ways of dealing with it: fantasy, porn, inventing in better sex robots, implications for eugenic policy ...
+ * Difficulties of recursive censorship; do the people who can afford it have to stay in the closet for the benefit of people like Keltham? You could claim that they're so good at coordinating that they negotiated this, but how does the negotiation work when the people the deal allegedly benefits don't know about it?
+ * Prediction markets imply that they believe in distributed agency, rather than being benevolent socialists
+ * The text seems to suggest that "obligate sadism" is a real thing that already exists. It's not analogous to a drug that you can't miss if no one ever invents it.
+ * Compare homosexuality. If it couldn't be practiced because super-AIDS (the Shawcross virus from Greg Egan's "The Moral Virologist") made it too dangerous, would we approve of censoring the concept?
+ * Homosexuality has other correlates (you totally can clock gay men by their voices); it's useful to be able to point to the cluster.
+ * Compare how we handle pedophilia in our world. We criminalize and stigmatize it. We don't _censor the concept_. Given that the tendency exists (it's not merely a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy), we do better by reasoning about it. Imagine an abused child or MAP person who had _no idea what was going on_.
+
+ * kitchen knives?!
+ * Word of God says, "there's also a deliberate semiconspiracy whereby movies make standard kitchen knives look much deadlier and easier to wield than they actually are, so that people who suddenly go nuts won't improvise much more dangerous weapons than that"
+ * "too nuts to see past cached thoughts" presupposes a specific model of mental illness that I think is importantly backwards; while I was psychotic, my problem was the _opposite_ of not being able to "see past cached thoughts": on the contrary, I was having _lots_ of new ideas that I had never thought of before (<http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/cognitive-bayesian-therapy-i/>), and would never have thought of in my normal state—it's just that, after I got some sleep, I decided that all of my new ideas were clearly false, _which is why_ we call the psychotic state "crazy", and the normal state "sane".
+ * You can't leak to the general public without leaking to crazy people. Where do you think they come from?
+ * the mechanism by which the plan positively contributes to the goal, is deception: the plan works _because_ if people who want to commit violence have _less accurate beliefs_ about how to effectively commit violence, they will be less effective at their goal of committing violence.
+ * If you were just trying to reduce murders, is this hte plan you would pick? Obviously not. (Think about how you would solve the problem "on Earth"!) Making it easier to commit people is a much more direct mechanism. The algorithm that promoted the movie-misportrayal to your attention is one that favors deception.
+ * "It's targeted at crazy people" excuse suggests that it's OK to lie to people you've labeled as crazy. But Yudkowsky infamously says this about all Earthlings. What should we infer about whether we should trust him?
+ * "i presume ilani who notice the trope also then deduce the obvious consequence of the trope"
+ * If anything, "there's a deliberate conspiracy to mislead people about the difficulty of murder by stabbing" is the kind of thought that someone is _more likely_ to have as a paranoid delusion than otherwise! It's as if dath ilan is an exotic environment where mind-states that are tuned to hypothesize conspiracies everywhere are _adaptive_, in contrast to how on Earth, people who see conspiracies everywhere are wrong.
+ * this is correlated insanity that loves clever deceptions, not actually being smart and doing a neutral policy search
+ * A much larger cost is the frustration of ornery, nitpicky nerds who _want realistic fiction_, and don't want their favorite artform perverted to _manipulate extremely rare criminal-insanity cases_. Earth has Andy Weir fans and Greg Egan fans! When Andy Weir or Greg Egan sit down to write a novel or a screenplay, they are trying to paint a picture of _a world that makes sense_. They are not trying to manipulate rare social outcomes. Is that that kind of respect-for-reality just _not a thing_ in dath ilani art? Are they so uniformly, monomanically obsessed with trolling their perceived inferiors, that the voice of, "Knives Don't Actually Work That Way; Knives Don't Actually Work That Way _Even When Saying That Out Loud Increases Murders_; Knives Don't Actually Work That Way _Even When a Prediction Market Says That Saying That Out Loud Increases Murders_", has no power in the movie industry whatsoever?
+
+ * Conclusion: dath ilan doesn't give a shit about public epistemology; you shoudl not be taking it as a rationalist utopia.
+]
+
+-----
Perhaps for lack of any world-saving research to do, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_). Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from a smarter, saner alternate version of Earth where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge.
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