Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles—unless adding that truth to our map would make it x% harder for our coalition to compete for Imperial grant money
Why do you assume that this is the only negative consequence of speaking the truth? In the real world (that I think I live in), speaking some truths might get your child bullied in school (including by the teachers or administrators), or get you unemployed, jailed, or killed. Is this post supposed to have applications in that world?
I actually feel okay about letting readers fill in this kind of generalization for themselves? Similarly, in the real world, punishable truths aren’t about literal naked Emperors, but I tend to assume most readers are familiar with (or can figure out) the trope of the famous Hans Christian Andersen story being used as an allegory for politically-unfavorable truths in general.
I guess you could argue that my choice of illustrative fictitious examples is algorithmically-dishonestly “rigged”: that, as a result of my ongoing “People should be braver about saying stuff!” meta-political campaign, the elephant in my brain knew to generate an example (applying for grants) that would make forthrightness seem like the right choice (piggybacking off of traditional “money is corrupting” moral intuitions), rather than an example that would make conformity seem like the right choice (like protecting one’s family)?
I’m not sure what my response to this charge is. The most reliable way of removing such biases would plausibly be to pose everything as an abstract math problem without any illustrative examples, but that seems like it would decrease reading comprehension a lot (and maybe still suffer from the “encouraging hidden agendas” problem, only in the form of assumption choices rather than illustrative-example choices).
I guess in future posts, I could try harder to actively look for illustrative examples that don’t narratively support my agenda? (I think I’m already unusually good at this when pursuing what I think of as an “object-level” agenda, but it feels less necessary when pursuing something that I construe as an obvious common interest of many causes, like free speech.) But people often do this social move where they say “I should have tried harder” as a way of accepting blame in exchange for not doing work, so you should only give me credit if you actually see me include counter-narrative examples in future posts; I don’t get credit (or as much credit) for merely this comment noticing the problem.
Why do you assume that this is the only negative consequence of speaking the truth? In the real world (that I think I live in), speaking some truths might get your child bullied in school (including by the teachers or administrators), or get you unemployed, jailed, or killed. Is this post supposed to have applications in that world?
I actually feel okay about letting readers fill in this kind of generalization for themselves? Similarly, in the real world, punishable truths aren’t about literal naked Emperors, but I tend to assume most readers are familiar with (or can figure out) the trope of the famous Hans Christian Andersen story being used as an allegory for politically-unfavorable truths in general.
I guess you could argue that my choice of illustrative fictitious examples is algorithmically-dishonestly “rigged”: that, as a result of my ongoing “People should be braver about saying stuff!” meta-political campaign, the elephant in my brain knew to generate an example (applying for grants) that would make forthrightness seem like the right choice (piggybacking off of traditional “money is corrupting” moral intuitions), rather than an example that would make conformity seem like the right choice (like protecting one’s family)?
I’m not sure what my response to this charge is. The most reliable way of removing such biases would plausibly be to pose everything as an abstract math problem without any illustrative examples, but that seems like it would decrease reading comprehension a lot (and maybe still suffer from the “encouraging hidden agendas” problem, only in the form of assumption choices rather than illustrative-example choices).
I guess in future posts, I could try harder to actively look for illustrative examples that don’t narratively support my agenda? (I think I’m already unusually good at this when pursuing what I think of as an “object-level” agenda, but it feels less necessary when pursuing something that I construe as an obvious common interest of many causes, like free speech.) But people often do this social move where they say “I should have tried harder” as a way of accepting blame in exchange for not doing work, so you should only give me credit if you actually see me include counter-narrative examples in future posts; I don’t get credit (or as much credit) for merely this comment noticing the problem.