drafting "Heads I Win ..."

I just noticed that one of my assumptions is bonkers and will have to
rewrite that paragraph (the punishment criterion can't be "less than
50% green", because it needs to be safe to mostly report gray rolls).

blatant_cherry-picking_is_the_best_kind.md

@@ -28,13 +28,20 @@ Let's make another toy model to try to understand the resulting distortions on t
 
 [^triangle]: For lack of an appropriate [Platonic solid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid) in three-dimensional space, maybe imagine tossing a triangle in two-dimensional space??
 
-Suppose each faction enforces consensus internally. [Without loss of generality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_loss_of_generality), take the Greens.[^choice] 
+Suppose each faction has social-punishment mechanisms enforcing consensus internally. [Without loss of generality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_loss_of_generality), take the Greens (with the understanding that everything that follows goes just the same if you swap "Green" for "Blue" and _vice versa_).[^choice] People observe rolls of the die of Reality, and can freely choose what rolls to report—except a resident of a Green city who reports fewer than 50% green rolls is assumed to be a secret Blue Bad Guy, and faces increasing social punishment as their percentage of green rolls reported falls farther below 50%. The punishment is typically _informal_: there's no _official_ censorship from the government, just a visible incentive gradient made out of social-media pile-ons, denied promotions, lost friends and mating opportunities, increased risk of being involuntarily committed to psychiatric prison,[^prison] _&c._
 
-[^choice]: As an author, I'm facing some conflicting desiderata in my color choices here. I want to say "Blues and Greens" _in that order_ for compatibility with "A Fable of Science and Politics" (and other [classics from the Sequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uaPc4NHi5jGXGQKFS/blue-or-green-on-regulation)). Then when making an arbitrary choice to talk in terms of one of the factions in order to avoid cluttering the exposition when it's understood that all the same considerations apply exactly the same to the other faction, you might have expected me to say "Without loss of generality, take the Blues," because the _first_ item in a sequence ("Blues" in "Blues and Greens") is a more of a [Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equilibria-and-schelling-points) than the second or last item. But I don't _want_ to take the Blues, because that color choice [has other associations](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) that I'm trying to avoid right now: if I said "take the Blues", I fear many readers would assume that I'm trying to directly push a partisan point about [soft censorship](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/) and [preference-falsification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification) social pressures in liberal/left-leaning subcultures in the contemporary United States. And, I mean, it's _true_ that soft censorship and preference-falsification social pressures in liberal/left-leaning subcultures in the contemporary United States are, historically, what _inspired_ me, personally, to write this post. It's okay for you to notice that! But I'm _trying_ to talk about the _general mechanisms_ that generate this _class_ of distortions on a Society's collective epistemology, independently of which faction or which ideology happens to be "on top" in a particular time and place. If I'm _doing my job right_, then my analogue in a ["nearby" Everett branch](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WqGCaRhib42dhKWRL/if-many-worlds-had-come-first) whose local subculture was as "right-polarized" as my Berkeley environment is "left-polarized", would have written the exact same blog post, up to some of the details in this footnote. If you have any suggestions on how I can write differently in order to come closer to meeting that (very high) standard, feel free to PM me.
+This scenario presents a dilemma for people who live in Green cities who want to make _and share_ accurate models of reality. It's impossible to report _every_ die roll (the only _1:1 scale_ map of the territory, is the territory itself), but it seems clear that the most generally useful models—the ones you would expect arbitrary AIs to come up with—aren't going to be sensitive to which facts are "blue" or "green". The reports of epistemic rationalists who are _just trying to make sense of the world_ will end up being about one-third blue, one-third green, and one-third gray, matching the distribution of the Reality die.
 
+From the perspective of ordinary nice smart Green citizens who have not been trained in the Way, these reports look _unthinkably_ Blue—only 30% green is _way_ below the 50%-green edge of the Overton window. 
 
 
-Anyone who's actually [paying attention](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/) can easily distinguish Green partisans from truthseekers, but the [social-punishment machinery](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blame-games/) can't process more than [five words at a time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words)
+who's actually [paying attention](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general-intelligences/) can easily distinguish Blue partisans from actual truthseekers, but the [social-punishment machinery](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blame-games/) can't process more than [five words at a time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words)
+
+
+[^choice]: As an author, I'm facing some conflicting desiderata in my color choices here. I want to say "Blues and Greens" _in that order_ for consistency with "A Fable of Science and Politics" (and other [classics from the Sequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uaPc4NHi5jGXGQKFS/blue-or-green-on-regulation)). Then when making an arbitrary choice to talk in terms of one of the factions in order to avoid cluttering the exposition, you might have expected me to say "Without loss of generality, take the Blues," because the _first_ item in a sequence ("Blues" in "Blues and Greens") is a more of a [Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equilibria-and-schelling-points) than the second, or last, item. But I don't _want_ to take the Blues, because that color choice [has other associations](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) that I'm trying to avoid right now: if I said "take the Blues", I fear many readers would assume that I'm trying to directly push a partisan point about [soft censorship](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/) and [preference-falsification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification) social pressures in liberal/left-leaning subcultures in the contemporary United States. To be fair, it's _true_ that soft censorship and preference-falsification social pressures in liberal/left-leaning subcultures in the contemporary United States are, historically, what _inspired_ me, personally, to write this post. It's okay for you to notice that! But I'm _trying_ to talk about the _general mechanisms_ that generate this _class_ of distortions on a Society's collective epistemology, independently of which faction or which ideology happens to be "on top" [in a particular place and time](TODO: linky chronophone). If I'm _doing my job right_, then my analogue in a ["nearby" Everett branch](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WqGCaRhib42dhKWRL/if-many-worlds-had-come-first) whose local subculture was as "right-polarized" as my Berkeley environment is "left-polarized", would have written the exact same post, up to some of the details in this footnote. If you have any suggestions on how I can write differently in order to come closer to meeting that (very high) standard, feel free to PM me.
+
+[^prison]: Okay, they market themselves as psychiatric "hospitals", but let's not be confused by [misleading labels](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZXuqNhMDcs6mYtb6i/the-american-system-and-misleading-labels).
+
 
 everyone knows
 
@@ -46,4 +53,4 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality/how-much-evidence-does-it-take
 
 the meta-hill is a Schelling point for dying on
 
-[The Correct Contrarian Cluster](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster)
+[The Correct Contrarian Cluster](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster)