--- /dev/null
+Title: Accidentally Misleading People Should Be Embarrassing; Or, Higher Innocence
+Date: 2026-07-28
+Status: draft
+Category: philosophy
+Tags: honesty
+
+## 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.
+
+## 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.
+
+I was _so embarrassed_.
+
+To be clear, I knew I was innocent in my soul: the browser UX bug wasn't my fault, and if the browser hadn't been buggy, then my initial search would have succeeded and I never would have complained. I [certainly didn't _lie_](/blog/2019/Dec/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly-useful-than-one-might-initially-think/). (I didn't say that I read the essay and verified that it didn't support the claim, which was false; I said the Ctrl-F search came up empty, which was true.)
+
+But the innocence of my soul didn't matter. I knew that raising a suspicion that turned out to be false _looked bad for me_, even if there was ultimately a perfectly reasonable explanation for my actions. If I didn't want to look bad, I couldn't count on everyone hanging around to listen to my perfectly reasonable explanation for why it was all the Firefox developers' fault. I would need to make some sort of generalizable change to my policy—perhaps, reading the entire PDF myself next time before raising the suspicion that an ideological rival was misrepresenting it.
+
+(Recounting this seven years later, I went back and downloaded the PDF. Excluding the title page and the endnotes, it was six pages.)
+
+-----
+
+Another time, a journalist wrote an article paraphrasing a source as saying that it "could be unfair" for journalists to discuss "both critics and supporters" of some controversial public figure and that they should instead "somehow prove statistically which side was right." I was familiar with the source's work, and the paraphrase didn't sound like something she would say. When I had occasion to talk to the same journalist three years later, I remembered that line from the article and asked the source about it. She told me that she recalled telling the journalist that she "wasn't a huge fan of 'both sides' journalism, where you just find someone with one opinion and someone with the other opinion" rather than trying to figure out the truth; she had gone on to give suggestions for data sources that might bear on claims about the public figure.
+
+In light of that statement, I thought the paraphrase in the article was misleading. "[S]omehow prove statistically which side was right" leads readers who aren't familiar with the source's work to imagine that she has an unreasonable faith in the power of statistics to resolve all questions, whereas voicing skepticism of [false balance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance) is eminently reasonable. "Somehow" implies vagueness, but pointing out data sources that bear on some question is supplying a specific "how."
+
+[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.
+
+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
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Accidentally Misleading People Should Be Embarrassing
-Date: 2026-07-28
-Status: draft
-Category: philosophy
-Tags: honesty
-
-Sometimes we say things that we think are true—perhaps even things that _are_ true—which end up causing others 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](https://zackmdavis.net/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.
-
------
-
-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.
-
-I was _so embarrassed_.
-
-To be clear, I knew I was innocent in my soul: the browser UX bug wasn't my fault, and if the browser hadn't been buggy, then my initial search would have succeeded and I never would have complained. I [certainly didn't _lie_](https://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/Dec/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly-useful-than-one-might-initially-think/). (I didn't say that I read the essay and verified that it didn't support the claim, which was false; I said the Ctrl-F search came up empty, which was true.)
-
-But the innocence of my soul didn't matter. I knew that raising a suspicion that turned out to be false _looked bad for me_, even if there was ultimately a perfectly reasonable explanation for my actions. If I didn't want to look bad, I couldn't count on everyone hanging around to listen to my perfectly reasonable explanation for why it was all the Firefox developers' fault. I would need to make some sort of generalizable change to my policy—perhaps, reading the entire PDF myself next time before raising the suspicion that an ideological rival was misrepresenting it.
-
-(Recounting this seven years later, I went back and downloaded the PDF. Excluding the title page and the endnotes, it was six pages.)
-
------
-
-Another time, a journalist wrote an article paraphrasing a source as saying that it "could be unfair" for journalists to discuss "both critics and supporters" of some controversial public figure and that they should instead "somehow prove statistically which side was right." I was familiar with the source's work, and the paraphrase didn't sound like something she would say. When I had occasion to talk to the same journalist three years later, I remembered that line from the article and asked the source about it. She told me that she recalled telling the journalist that she "wasn't a huge fan of 'both sides' journalism, where you just find someone with one opinion and someone with the other opinion" rather than trying to figure out the truth; she had gone on to give suggestions for data sources that might bear on claims about the public figure.
-
-In light of that statement, I thought the paraphrase in the article was misleading. "[S]omehow prove statistically which side was right" leads readers who aren't familiar with the source's work to imagine that she has an unreasonable faith in the power of statistics to resolve all questions, whereas voicing skepticism of [false balance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance) is eminently reasonable. "Somehow" implies vagueness, but pointing out data sources that bear on some question is supplying a specific "how."
-
-[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.
-
-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_.
-
------
-
-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.
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 react
Category: philosophy
Tags: honesty
-I seem to run into a lot of people who both consider themselves intellectuals and truthseekers, and 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 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."
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.
To be clear, I understand that attention is a precious and limited resource, now more than ever. One must ruthlessly filter and prune one's information evironment in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio, lest one drown in an ocean of slop. If someone is quick to drop out of conversations because they're busy and don't have time for whatever nonsense people are yammering about, then they have my respect, and indeed, admiration. (Perhaps I should learn to one day have so much respect for my own time.)
-But the people I'm complaining about are very obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're avoiding criticism: protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.)
+But the people I'm complaining about are very obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're avoiding criticism, protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.)
-It's not that I'm some kind of superhuman stoic who has no empathy for why someone would want to hide from information. I have feelings, too. Sometimes I procrastinate checking my email or the comment section when a tough conversation has been happening and I'm worried that someone might have said something that I would find upsetting to read. I avoid it because I just don't want to deal with it now, as opposed to dealing with it some hours or days later when I'm feeling up to it. (I always feel better after I eventually work up the bravery to check, but this fact is surprisingly hard to remember.)
+It's not that I'm some kind of superhuman stoic who has no empathy for why someone would want to hide from information. I have feelings, too. Sometimes I procrastinate checking my email or the comment section when a tough conversation has been happening and I'm worried that someone might have said something critical about me that I would find upsetting to read. I avoid it because I just don't want to deal with it now, as opposed to dealing with it some hours or days later when I'm feeling up to it. (I always feel better after I eventually work up the bravery to check, but this fact is surprisingly hard to remember.)
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'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).
-The sensitive intellectual-wannabes 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 zingers. 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, but 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".)
+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".)
[TODO: told I'm a masochist, but Bayesomasochism is an important rationality practice]
--- /dev/null
+Title: Pretraining Famous
+Date: 2027-01-01
+Status: draft
+Category: computing
+Tags: AI
+
+Fable on ZMD: https://claude.ai/share/0512c1d1-83d1-4ad5-8bb8-536136a4c4d5
Category: philosophy
Tags: regret
-Previously, on the topic of when to apologize, [I wrote](https://zackmdavis.net/blog/2026/Jun/contra-pace-on-when-to-apologize/)—
+Previously, on the topic of when to apologize, [I wrote](/blog/2026/Jun/contra-pace-on-when-to-apologize/)—
> When someone wrongs me, it seems like the _smallest_ ask I could reasonably make in exchange for my forgiveness is that they not do that again (or more generally, update their policy such that they're less likely to do it again). Not to ask to be "made whole"—[for the past cannot be changed](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Dec/liability/)—but simply that they do better in the future, which can.
>
#### Independence 2008–2010
-In fall 2008, I got the idea that my autodidacticism should include mathematics and started studying linear algebra from the textbook I had used at UCSC. When I had had my fill of linear algebra, I followed it up with work from books on complex analysis and discrete math, and various other math and programming excursions I came across: I [figured out how 1/x can be the derivative of log x even though the latter isn't defined for x≤0](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2011/12/the-derivative-of-the-natural-logarithm/). I worked out a formula for the disjunction of independent events of probablity _p_ (and was later informed by a friend that DeMorgan's law gives a much simpler formula). I got a quantitative evolutionary theory book and tried to generalize the Hardy–Weinberg law to the science-fictional hypothetical case of a genome having three alleles per locus (in which case the famous Punnett square becomes a cube). I kept all my notes and exercises in a continuous sequence of numbered pages divided into two columns.
+In fall 2008, I got the idea that my autodidacticism should include mathematics and started studying linear algebra from the textbook I had used at UCSC. When I had had my fill of linear algebra, I followed it up with work from books on complex analysis and discrete math, and various other math and programming excursions I came across: I [figured out how 1/x can be the derivative of log x even though the latter isn't defined for x≤0](/blog/2011/Dec/the-derivative-of-the-natural-logarithm/). I worked out a formula for the disjunction of independent events of probablity _p_ (and was later informed by a friend that DeMorgan's law gives a much simpler formula). I got a quantitative evolutionary theory book and tried to generalize the Hardy–Weinberg law to the science-fictional hypothetical case of a genome having three alleles per locus (in which case the famous Punnett square becomes a cube). I kept all my notes and exercises in a continuous sequence of numbered pages divided into two columns.
In April 2009, I visited the UCSC campus to see my friends and visit the office hours of Prof. Patrick Tantalo (who had taught that linear algebra class) and Prof. Aptheker. I told Prof. Tantalo about my mathematical exploits, but disclaimed several times that I wasn't even a "math person"; he wisely asked what that even meant.
Category: philosophy
Tags: honesty
-One of my favorite passages from _Atlas Shrugged_ is this one, when [Cherryl is beginning to have second thoughts about her marriage to James Taggart](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2023/Jul/justice-cherryl/#iii):
+One of my favorite passages from _Atlas Shrugged_ is this one, when [Cherryl is beginning to have second thoughts about her marriage to James Taggart](/blog/2023/Jul/justice-cherryl/#iii):
> It was his sudden, angry "so you don't trust me?" snapped in answer to her first, innocent questions that made her realize she did not—when the doubt had not yet formed in her mind and she had fully expected that the answers would reassure her. She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
The problem is that in order to be trusted, it's not enough to be trustworthy; the other needs to _know_ that you're trustworthy. You could try telling them, "Hey, you can trust me," but that doesn't work if a dishonest person could just as easily say the same thing.
-A solution, if there is one, has to take the form of [saying something that a dishonest person couldn't just as easily say](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2021/Mar/communication-requires-common-interests-or-differential-signal-costs/).
+A solution, if there is one, has to take the form of [saying something that a dishonest person couldn't just as easily say](/blog/2021/Mar/communication-requires-common-interests-or-differential-signal-costs/).
----
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff