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," the narrator tells us. The language used here is strikingly similar to that of one of the corrupt executives in _Moral Mazes_: "We lie all the time, but if everyone knows that we're lying, is a lie really a lie?"
+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 it were true that [everyone 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]
+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 real Sparashki, 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).
+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 the eliezera to be cartoon villains who hate knowledge and want people to be ignorant. Just that, 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 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.
+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 that was off-topic and I hadn't 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 has no intention of living up to.
+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?
[TODO: regrets and wasted time
* 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?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff