Make it a standalone CLI with a `--check` mode that reports each link's disposition, *not* a build hook — no reason to grow the job that owns the 404 window.
+We should also include, corpus links to the _Less Wrong_ version (from posts that were originally _Less Wrong_ exclusives) should be changed to point to our version.
+
**Scope boundary.** Link rewriting is the easy half; your Markdown is not LW's Markdown (footnotes `[^name]`, `~~` via `pymdownx.tilde`, `$...$` MathJax, the `$` entity workaround). "Swap the links" is bounded; "paste without touching" is open-ended. Build the first and let the footnotes say whether the second is needed.
**Incidental:** `SOCIAL = ()` in `pelicanconf.py` is dead — the theme references `LINKS` (`theme/templates/base.html:94`) and never `SOCIAL`. It's `pelican-quickstart` scaffolding, and site-global anyway, so it's not a mechanism for per-post links.
## Embarrassment and Innocence
-
-
-##
-
Sometimes we say things that we think are true—perhaps even things that _are_ true—which end up causing reasonable people to conclude something false. It's tempting to relate to such a situation primarily in terms of maintaining the innocence of one's soul—to say, fine, my readers became more wrong, but I'm not to be [judged](/blog/2025/Oct/the-relationship-between-social-punishment-and-shared-maps/) for it because I believed what I was saying; I wasn't _being misleading_ just because the people who believed me were thereby led into falsehood.
The temptation reflects a confusion as to the nature of the judgment. Mostly, people don't care about judging the innocence of your soul; they care about whether they'll be led into falsehood the next time they take the risk of believing what you say—if there is a next time. If you want there to be a next time and you're going to have social emotions about it, the most productive emotion is _embarrassment_ rather than defensiveness. Visibly embarrassed people can be counted on to work hard to make sure that people won't regret believing them next time. Defensive people won't, because, well, why would they? They didn't do anything wrong.
+[TODO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marit_ayinit and roommate playing videogame; embarrassment]
+
## Two Case Studies About Accidentally Misleading People
Once, I suspected an ideological rival of misrepresenting a citation: they had linked to a webpage featuring an embedded PDF of an essay, but when I used my web browser's "Ctrl-F" search functionality with appropriate search terms to see what in the essay justified their claim, I came up empty. When considering whether to escalate to complaining more loudly about my rival over this (after the rival didn't respond to a blog comment and DM), I mentioned the matter to a third party—who pointed out that the essay _did_ contain my search term! On further testing, it appeared that my web browser's Ctrl-F behavior depended on which page element had focus: if the user had last clicked inside the embedded PDF viewer, the search returned results inside the PDF, but not if the user had last clicked elsewhere on the page.
[When I complained about this to the journalist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P8GuwYdy6foSzyZog/conversations-with-cade-metz-on-the-rationalists#24_June_2025), he didn't seem embarrassed. "I had to boil down what she said to plain English," he said. I said that it hadn't worked. He said it did. He recounted that the source had objected when he said his coverage would represent both views of the public figure. When I continued to insist that it seemed like a bad paraphrase when compared to what the source had told me later, he said, "Is that necessarily what she said to me?"
-And in absolute fairness, maybe it wasn't, _necessarily_. I of course was not present for the conversation between the journalist and the source; I don't have the recording, if there was one. Even if the source can be assumed to be an authority about what she _meant_ to say, I cannot with absolute certainty rule out the scenario where the "somehow prove statistically which side was right" line was a reasonable paraphrase of the words she had literally said at the time and that her reconstruction three years later of what she remembered saying was unintentionally injecting more nuance after the fact. The source hadn't objected during the fact check call. If the journalist had reasonably paraphrased the words that were said to him at the time, then he was innocent in his soul. Even if his readers walked away with a distorted impression of what the source privately believed (but did not manage to successfully communicate in the interview), the miscommunication wasn't his fault.
+And in absolute fairness, maybe it wasn't, _necessarily_. I of course was not present for the years-prior conversation between the journalist and the source; I don't have the recording, if there was one. Even if the source can be assumed to be an authority about what she _meant_ to say, I cannot with absolute certainty rule out the scenario where the "somehow prove statistically which side was right" line was a reasonable paraphrase of the words she had literally said at the time and that her reconstruction three years later of what she remembered saying was unintentionally injecting more nuance after the fact. The source hadn't objected during the fact check call. If the journalist had reasonably paraphrased the words that were said to him at the time, then he was innocent in his soul. Even if his readers walked away with a distorted impression of what the source privately believed (but did not manage to successfully communicate in the interview), the miscommunication wasn't his fault.
I still think this episode _looks bad for him_ and that he should have been _embarrassed_, because there should have been generalizable policy changes that could have prevented this class of error—perhaps, thinking more carefully about whether a paraphrase that makes a subject look unreasonable is truly a fair paraphrase before going to print with it. Potential sources deciding whether they should talk to the journalist are mostly worried about the risk that their views will end up being miscommunicated, not whose fault a miscommunication would be if it happened. Unlucky accidents do not impinge upon the innocence of one's soul under the moral law, but the moral law is unmercifully permissive about everyone else's right to _avoid unlucky people_.
### Higher Innocence
-[TODO]
\ No newline at end of file
+And that's why accidentally misleading people should be embarrassing: because the desire to avoid such embarrassment motivates a counterfactual reduction in such incidents of people being misled, notwithstanding that it was an accident and totally unintentional.
+
+Or was it?
It certainly doesn't make conversation with _me_ impossible. When someone tells me that my understanding of my beliefs and motives should be rejected, I don't take my ball and go home in a huff, muttering that they've made further conversation nearly impossible. Rather, I respond the same way I do to any other disagreement: by supporting my view with reasoning and evidence. Why would the rules be different just because the topic of discussion happens to be my own beliefs and motives?
+## Why It's Possible to Communicate with People Who Think You're Self-Deceived
+
One reason why someone might think it's different is for fear that accusations of self-deception are unfalsifiable. I have privileged introspective access to my beliefs and motivations. On what possible basis could someone else tell me I'm wrong? And what reasoning and evidence could I possibly offer to defend the accuracy of my self-perception? If the accusation or its denial can be made just as well independently of any third-party-accessible evidence, then that inherently does make conversation nearly impossible. What would there be to talk about?
However, I reject the premise that the accusation or its denial can be made just as well independently of any third-party-accessible evidence. I may have privileged introspective access to my beliefs and motivations, but beliefs and motivations aren't epiphenomenal, either. We form beliefs about other entities' beliefs and motivations because such beliefs [let us predict their behavior](https://www.readthesequences.com/Making-Beliefs-Pay-Rent-In-Anticipated-Experiences). An animal that goes to the stream to drink is presumed to be motivated by thirst; the same animal going to the stream depsite it having dried up in the summer heat is presumed to have (falsely) believed that the water would still be there. We don't need to know what it feels like to be the animal in order to speak sensibly of such mental states.
In the same way, people don't need to know what it feels like to be me in order to speak sensibly about rejecting my own understanding of my beliefs and motives. They could claim that my stated beliefs and motives are inconsistent with my behavior (which they can see) while remaining agnostic about how it feels to be me (which they don't have access to). Such a claim [probably wouldn't be based on nothing at all](/blog/2022/May/plea-bargaining/); indeed, the very existence of persistent disagreements (when you'd expect honest rational agents to simply update on each other's evidence and converge on the correct probability) [suggests that hidden motives are common](/blog/2023/Aug/assume-bad-faith/).
-If I buy cookies for the [salon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering)) from a bakery owned by my girlfriend in Australia (at a substantial markup), it kind of makes sense for other salon members to wonder if my choice might have been biased by nepotism rather than reflecting true optimization towards the goal of the salon having the best desserts. At the same time, my belief that I wasn't swayed by nepotism is something I can provide reasoning and evidence for: I could show the other salon members the notes and spreadsheets I compiled while comparison shopping, which justify my true belief that my girlfriend just happens to be the optimal dessert vendor for the salon. The correctness of my understanding of my beliefs and motives is something I can rationally defend to skeptics in front of third parties; it's not something that needs to be assumed as a prerequisite for even talking at all.
+If I buy cookies for the [salon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering)) from a bakery owned by my girlfriend in Australia (at a substantial markup), it kind of makes sense for other salon members to wonder if my choice might have been biased by nepotism rather than reflecting true optimization towards the goal of the salon having the best desserts. At the same time, my belief that I wasn't swayed by nepotism is something I can provide reasoning and evidence for: for example, I could show the other salon members the notes and spreadsheets I compiled while comparison shopping, which justify my true belief that my girlfriend just happens to be the optimal dessert vendor for the salon.
+
+Now, maybe the other salon members don't find my spreadsheets convincing, but it should be clear that the details of the spreadsheets at least give us _something to talk about_. It's not just a deadlock between an unfalsifiable accusation of self-deception and an unfalsifiable denial, because my catering decision (and therefore the beliefs and motives that led to it) was tangled up with empirical realities of the world. The correctness of my understanding of my beliefs and motives is something I can rationally defend to skeptics in front of third parties; it's not something that needs to be assumed as a prerequisite for even talking at all.
+
+## Why the Self-Understanding of Those Who Think It's Impossible Should Be Rejected
+
+But if I'm right about that, it raises the question of why someone would incorrectly believe that self-deception accusations make conversation impossible. It could just be a random, unmotivated mistake: maybe someone found the unfalsifiability objection superficially compelling, didn't really think it through, and would change their minds as soon as the error was pointed out to them.
+
Category: philosophy
Tags: honesty
-I run into a lot of people who consider themselves intellectuals and truthseekers and who are incredibly fussy about what information reaches their eyes. They block at the drop of a hat, derail intellectually substantive discussions into mind-numbing litigation of minutiæ of "tone", and refuse to acknowledge a logical point unless it's been presented to them in the precise way that doesn't offend their (often idiosyncratic) sense of etiquette or "discourse norms."
+I run into a lot of people who consider themselves intellectuals and truthseekers who are also incredibly fussy about what information reaches their eyes. They block at the drop of a hat, derail intellectually substantive discussions into mind-numbing litigation of minutiæ of "tone", and refuse to acknowledge a logical point unless it's been presented to them in the precise way that doesn't offend their (often idiosyncratic) sense of etiquette or "discourse norms."
It would be hard to communicate how much contempt I hold these people in. (Not because I couldn't find the words. Because they'd block me before I could communicate it.) I think they are ineffective and boring people whose pretensions to intellectualism are morally fraudulent; I think they are making the world worse insofar as they manage to trick anyone into conflating intellectual virtue with mastery of their impoverished form of cant.
Crucially, however, I know that me avoiding my mail is _my_ (temporary) reluctance to meet the responsibilities of being a grown-up intellectual. Managing my emotions is _my_ job. I don't expect or want other people to refrain from telling me things that I might find upsetting to read, because the set of things I might find upsetting to read includes a lot of imporant decision-relevant information about the world.
-Although I'm not any kind of superhuman stoic, I think I've developed a certain tolerance and even taste for criticism. The email-avoidance only kicks in when I'm facing particularly heightened social risk when fighting with people whose opinions I have reason to care about. In contrast, being criticized by randos elsewhere on the internet is more amusing than anything else. It's flattering to be hated: it means that someone thinks you're important enough to be worth hating, rather than ignored by default (as almost everything must be in our information-rich, attention-poor world).
+Although I'm not any kind of superhuman stoic, I think I have developed a certain tolerance and even taste for criticism. The email-avoidance behavior only kicks in when I'm facing particularly heightened social risk when fighting with people whose opinions I have reason to care about. In contrast, being criticized by randos elsewhere on the internet is more amusing than anything else. It's flattering to be hated: it means that someone thinks you're important enough to be worth hating, rather than ignored by default (as almost everything must be in our information-rich, attention-poor world).
The people I'm complaining about often point to /r/SneerClub as the epitome of "bad" speech that one shouldn't be so much as tempted to look at, but my main complaint about Sneer Club is that they're just not that smart and rarely come up with any really penetrating criticism. In theory, one might have hoped that a dedicated anti-fan club might be an indispensible source of valuable criticism, as people who hate you are motivated to search hard for all the things you're doing wrong that your friends like you too much to tell you about or even notice. Unfortunately, in practice they mostly just go for the cheap dunks. Thus, /r/SneerClub ends up being mostly pretty boring to me, although the novelty of having dedicated haters is worth enough passing interest that I did make sure to [submit one of my particularly sneerable-seemingly pieces there](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/n44drl/sexual_dimorphism_in_yudkowskys_sequences_in/). (My submission got locked, but [someone else's got 36 karma](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nt37j1/the_rationalist_subcultures_resident_blanchardian/) before the mods decided to delist it because "it feels for once like an actual bullying thing to post".)
----
-Economists call the kind of situation in which it's possible for one type of agent to say something that a different type couldn't just as easily say a _separating equilibrium_. To understand separating equilibria, imagine two types of owners of spherical cats shopping for cat insurance on a frictionless plane: those with healthy cats, and those with sick cats. Insurance companies on the frictionless plane can't tell the difference between healthy and sick cats, and therefore face an [adverse selection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection) problem, where the very fact that someone is willing to buy insurance implies that they're less profitable to insure in expectation (because sick cats are in more need of cat insurance).
+Economists call the kind of situation in which it's possible for one type of agent to say something that a different type couldn't just as easily say a _separating equilibrium_. To understand separating equilibria, imagine two types of owners of spherical cats shopping for cat insurance on a frictionless plane: those with healthy cats, and those with sick cats. Insurance companies on the frictionless plane can't tell the difference between healthy and sick cats, and therefore face an [adverse selection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection) problem where the very fact that someone is willing to buy insurance implies that they're less profitable to insure in expectation (because sick cats are in more need of cat insurance).
Depending on some math that we don't have time for, there can be situations in which the adverse selection problem is solved by the different types of cat owners having incentives to buy different policies. Sick cats face a greater fraction of possible worlds in which they file a claim than healthy cats, so making those worlds worse for the policyholder by decreasing the policy benefit payout decreases the expected value of the policy more for sick cats than healthy cats.
Even he can understand that. "I respect your security posture," he says.
-Because what else could he do? Even if it stings to be so distrusted, it wouldn't make sense to angrily snap, "So you don't trust me?" She doesn't—but he knows that the reason she doesn't isn't an indictment of his soul, but rather has to do with the distribution of souls that look the same as him from the outside. In this world (and in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), there are a lot of men who are happy to act however they need to in order to convince a woman to sleep with them, with no intention to be faithful to her. A man who does intend to be faithful can't ask for feedback because of the adverse selection problem, where the fact of asking implies that it's less safe for her to answer in expectation (because there are more unfaithful men who could also use the answer).
+Because what else could he do? Even if it stings to be so distrusted, it wouldn't make sense to angrily snap, "So you don't trust me?" She doesn't—but he knows that the reason she doesn't isn't an indictment of his soul, but rather has to do with the distribution of souls that look the same as him from the outside. In this world (and in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), there are a lot of men who are happy to act however they need to in order to convince a woman to sleep with them, with no intention to be faithful to her. A man who does intend to be faithful can't ask for feedback because of the adverse selection problem where the fact of asking implies that it's less safe for her to answer in expectation (because there are a greater number of unfaithful men who could also use the answer).
Men who don't intend to be faithful face a greater fraction of possible worlds in which scrutiny reveals a dealbreaker.
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff