Cf. “there are no atheists in a foxhole.” Under stress, it’s easy to slip sideways into a world model where things are going better, where you don’t have to confront quite so many large looming problems. This is a completely natural human response to facing down difficult situations, especially when brooding over those situations over long periods of time. Similar sideways tugs can come from (overlapping categories) social incentives to endorse a sacred belief of some kind, or to not blaspheme, or to affirm the ingroup attire when life leaves you surrounded by a particular ingroup, or to believe what makes you or people like you look good/high status.
Epistemic dignity is about seeing “slipping sideways” as beneath you. Living in reality is instrumentally beneficial, period. There’s no good reason to ever allow yourself to not live in reality. Once you can see something, even dimly, there’s absolutely no sense in hiding from that observation’s implications. Those subtle mental motions by which we disappear observations we know that we won’t like down the memory hole … epistemic dignity is about coming to always and everywhere violently reject these hidings-from-yourself, as a matter of principle. We don’t actually have a choice in the matter—there’s no free parameter of intellectual virtue here, that you can form a subjective opinion on. That slipping sideways is undignified is written in thevery mathematics of inference itself.
“Civilization in dath ilan usually feels annoyed with itself when it can’t manage to do as well as gods. Sometimes, to be clear, that annoyance is more productive than at other times, but the point is, we’ll poke at the problem and prod at it, looking for ways, not to be perfect, but not to do that much worse than gods.”
“If you get to the point in major negotiations where somebody says, with a million labor-hours at stake, ‘If that’s your final offer, I accept it with probability 25%’, they’ll generate random numbers about it in a clearly visible and verifiable way. Most dath ilani wouldn’t fake the results, but why trust when it’s so easy to verify? The problem you’ve presented isn’t impossible after all for nongods to solve, if they say to themselves, ‘Wait, we’re doing worse than gods here, is there any way to try not that.’”
Meritxell looks—slightly like she’s having a religious experience, for a second, before she snaps out of it. “All right,” she says quietly.
Cf. “there are no atheists in a foxhole.” Under stress, it’s easy to slip sideways into a world model where things are going better, where you don’t have to confront quite so many large looming problems. This is a completely natural human response to facing down difficult situations, especially when brooding over those situations over long periods of time. Similar sideways tugs can come from (overlapping categories) social incentives to endorse a sacred belief of some kind, or to not blaspheme, or to affirm the ingroup attire when life leaves you surrounded by a particular ingroup, or to believe what makes you or people like you look good/high status.
Epistemic dignity is about seeing “slipping sideways” as beneath you. Living in reality is instrumentally beneficial, period. There’s no good reason to ever allow yourself to not live in reality. Once you can see something, even dimly, there’s absolutely no sense in hiding from that observation’s implications. Those subtle mental motions by which we disappear observations we know that we won’t like down the memory hole … epistemic dignity is about coming to always and everywhere violently reject these hidings-from-yourself, as a matter of principle. We don’t actually have a choice in the matter—there’s no free parameter of intellectual virtue here, that you can form a subjective opinion on. That slipping sideways is undignified is written in the very mathematics of inference itself.
Minor spoilers for mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus (planecrash Book 1).