I didn’t hold back playing similar games vs board game “rationalists” at meetups though.

“Before all else be armed”, not “before all else make sure no one thinks you’re armed”.

I think I might have actually played through one game of Werewolf not knowing the rules yet, thinking as I went what I wanted to do, and deciding to hold back.

I didn’t hold back playing similar games vs board game “rationalists” at meetups though.

In a Secret Hitler game, that I listened in on a little of, IIRC Sam Eisenstat asked what everyone’s meta-game truth policy was. Scott Garrabrant said all his statements were conditional on him being a liberal.

“All my statements are conditional on the person I’m talking to being good” is a decent half of a policy in real life. Although effective lies to everyone else require truth. Since lies are downstream of predation, either predation itself or a response to it, they require calibration to a rate of decay.

Like you can judge someone by what they can’t talk about with a straight face. And if they have to bowdlerize from “good and evil” it’s never a good sign.
“heroes and villains” is perhaps even worse, lampshading it’s about specifically about telling a story about it rather than living it.

I cultivated a reputation for extreme honesty as a child. My parents dug apart the dish trying to find a bullet, and didn’t find one, and I didn’t say I swallowed it. I just stuck to my story. And they still failed to follow that train of thought as far as fully convincing themselves that I was wrong, let alone crazy, let alone lying. The event somehow didn’t have an effect on that reputation.

And that’s an effect of rolling your face on the void magic keyboard and pressing “void cloak”. They couldn’t believe the “pure pointless malice” (Vassar would call it “spite“) of creatively spreading ruination to a meal that was already dead and couldn’t be brought back, when it didn’t benefit me in any way. I mean it wasn’t pointless. It’s called deterrence. But modeling good acting in the shadowed medium would mean modeling themselves as evil, which would psychologically disintegrate them. In other words it would make them activate their own shadows. Like altruistic akrasia is just about unimaginable for an evil person. And nearly-seeing it put them in a psychological deadlock that cast a permanent ugh-field around what they were talking about as how maybe they solved the problem of getting us to eat meat. Not that I understood them either.

I was so traumatized out of explicitly e.g. identifying as a vegetarian. Because then of course, the next thing they’d do, is say that vegetarians ate fish, so that meant I had to eat fish or I wouldn’t be a vegetarian, and if I wasn’t a vegetarian they would know I was asking them to serve me meat, and I was disrespecting animals if I let the meat go to waste, hey that’s what the natives always said, and I didn’t know that if they said that I wouldn’t believe them. Which, rot13 for Pasek’s Doom, vf fhpprfshyyl gevnathyngvat zl urzvfcurerf ntnvafg rnpu bgure, n gevnathyngvba ohvyg ba gur jnl V jnf snyfr-snpr-vat, naq snvyvat gb pbzzhavpngr vagreanyyl nobhg gur jnl jung V jnf cergraqvat gb oryvrir gurz, naq fb ba. Accidentally mashing the void keyboard until they flinched was the only thing I could do, the only way I could express my agency without them reacting, preempting, and inverting it. The only way to act as an unmoved mover. Because they already had a cultural database of every interaction with children and every thing I would look at to determine success or failure of anything I tried and how to goodhart it, etc. And then I didn’t understand the architecture of my own mind such that vagebfcrpgvba gbyq zr V pbhyq yrnir zl zvaq va n pregnva cnggrea, uvqr zl njnerarff va n pregnva jnl, sebz r.t. zl qnq qrznaqvat gung V npg ybbx naq fbhaq purreshy gb cnff gur frafvgvir ceboyrz, be znlor ur’q orng zr, naq abg pbashfr zl urnqzngr, jvgubhg zl cneragf gura orvat noyr gb or yvxr “lbh’er abg n irtrgnevna, fb lbh’er tbvat gb rng guvf zrng evtug abj, abguvat jebat jvgu gung [evtug, lbh’er abg uvqvat nalguvat sebz hf ba lbhe zvaq, evtug?]” naq pbaivapr zl urnqzngr gung V jnf sbexrq vagb univat gb qb vg.

I had seen moose up close, right outside our windows, over and over again. Had received lectures from my parents on being very careful of their extreme protectiveness of their young, of not being afraid of them killing us for no reason, but like there was an invisible line between them and their young where if you crossed it they would think you were threatening their young, and you might not be able to see both moose. And then they’d charge and bludgeon you to death. Maybe. My parents saying the stories were fake, they didn’t have feelings, or whatever, was clearly not working there. It felt like they were telling me we were going to kill the neighbors and eat them, just because, because because because.

“Good vs evil, except we agree that good is on my side and my prey are fated evil.”

I have frankly had more than enough of liches replacing “good vs evil” as a concept with “light vs dark”, which is pretty much directly defined to be pliable to their self-conceit.

bringing-the-outside-in
…
I obliterated their hopes
…
dragged half of the rest of my nuclear family with me
…
proof of the futility of your entire wicked lives

Talking like this because I’m using some of the threads of my mind that would have been reallocated as an oblivion-shadow if I was evil, and have that meaning in almost all humans, in order to remember optimization I did with them back then.

Nyeh.