Some cultures used to, and maybe still do, have a solution to the hostile telepaths problem you didn't list: perform rituals even if you don't mean them.

If a child breaks their mom's glasses, the mom doesn't care if they are really sorry or not. All she cares about is if they perform the sorry-I-broke-your-glasses ritual, whatever that looks like. That's all that's required.

The idea is that the meaning comes later. We have some non-central instances of this in Western culture. For example, most US school children recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day (or at least they used to). I can remember not fully understanding what the words meant until I was in middle school, but I just went along with it. And wouldn't you know it, it worked! I do have an allegiance to the United States as a concept.

The world used to be more full of these rituals and strategies for appeasing hostile telepaths, who just chose not to use their telepathy because everyone agreed it didn't matter so long as the rituals were performed. But the spread of Christianity and Islam has brought a demand for internalized control of behaviors to much of the world, and with it we get problems like shame and guilt.

Now I'm not saying that performing rituals even if you don't mean them is a good solution. There are a lot of tradeoffs to consider, and guilt and shame offer some societal benefits that enable higher trust between strangers. But it is an alternative solution, and one that, as my Pledge of Allegiance example suggests, does sometimes work.

Corollaries:

Honesty

• If you want to become more honest and less self-deceiving, acquire power
• If you want to make other people more honest and less self-deceiving, provide them with power (including power to protect themselves from you)
• If you know someone who is more powerful than you but cant guarantee an upper bound on their power (and future power), then occlumency no longer works

Unboundedness

• If you want an unlimited amount of power (such as a utility maximiser), there will almost always be coalitions of people more powerful than you against whom self-deception works
• As long as there exist (hostile) coalitions of people unboundedly more powerful than you, completely removing self-deception from yourself is impossible

More than just yourself

• If you want more examples of honesty and lack of self-deception available to you, ask powerful people to speak about their life experience. If you want these examples to be public, make them public
• If you want two agents hostile to each other to both simultaneously be honest and not self-deceiving, provide them defensive rather than offensive power
• If you want to achieve world peace, consider building defensive but not offensive power for every level of self-organisation - individual, family, ideological group, geographic group, etc etc

Time

• If you don’t want someone to learn skills of dishonesty and self-deception, provide them with power as early as possible
• If you don’t want to learn skills of dishonesty and self-deception, acquire power as early as possible

Hiding

• If you want to acquire power without dishonesty or self-deception, ensure that your mental state and all causally downstream changes to world state are indistinguishable from noise in the eyes of more powerful actors.

I’m sure you can find real world examples of most of these.

Also there might exist edge cases where some of the above corollaries don’t hold, those edge cases are worth exploring.

Also: this post is refreshing because it is not about AI and has the same vibes as Lesswrong 2008 (back when LW was actually good). I made an alt just to reply to it.

I like this a lot! A few scattered thoughts

• This theory predicts and explains "therapy-resistant dissociation", or the common finding that none of the "woo" exercises like focusing, meditation, etc, actually work. (c.f. Scott's experience as described in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/are-woo-non-responders-defective). If there's an active strategy of self-deception, you'd expect people to react negatively (or learn to not react via yet deeper levels of self-deception) to straightforward attempts to understand and untangle one's psychology.
• It matches and extends Robert Trivers' theory of self-deception, wherein he predicts that when your mind is the site of a conflict between two sub-parts, the winning one will always be subconscious, because the conscious mind is visible to the subconscious but not vice versa, and being visible makes you weak. Thus, counterintuitively, the mind we are conscious of - in your phrase the false self - is always the losing part.
• It connects to a common question I have for people doing meditation seriously - why exactly do you want to make the subconscious conscious? Why is it such a good thing to "become more conscious"? Now I can make the question more precise - why do you think it's safe to have more access to your thoughts and feelings than your subconscious gave you? And how exactly do you plan to deal with all the hostile telepaths out there (possibly including parts of yourself?). I expect most people find themselves dealing with (partly) hostile telepaths all the time, and so Occlumency is genuinely necessary unless one lives in an extraordinarily controlled environment such as a monastery.
• Social deception games like Avalon or Diplomacy provide a fertile ground for self- and group experimentation with the ideas in this essay.

This reminds me… maybe muscle tension is a frequent solution to this problem?

Some context: Lately I've been wondering, Why do we often experience feelings as things in the body? For example, why do I feel anxiety in my chest rather than just “knowing” I'm anxious? 

For example, my previous chronic neck pain seemed to be related to information that manifested in my neck: 

I suspect the feeling in my neck represented the information "I have the choice to leave the social situation I'm in right now" and/or "I am disliking/suppressing myself."

Why might this feeling have manifested in my neck?

What if feelings use the body as a screen to communicate information with others? If you have a certain feeling in your chest, maybe others can see that. 

BUT: What if a feeling represents information that your system doesn't want other people to know? Hostile telepaths problem.

Im my case:

The feeling represented the awareness that I was insecure, and there were probably situations (probably social situations) in which it partially benefited me to be partially unaware of the fact that I was insecure. 

Well, in that case, your system could create muscle tension to "jam the signal"…

If the muscles are stiff, maybe they can't be used as a screen anymore.

From the related book Elephant in the Brain:

Here is the thesis we’ll be exploring in this book: We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep “us,” our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others.

Like if there's an email I keep freezing around. I can tell there's something there. I might even have some intuitive guesses about what it is!

…but I do not check. I don't introspect on whether my guesses feel right.

Instead, I hypothesize. What hostile telepath problem might someone in my shoes be trying to solve such that this behavior arises?

I tried doing this and it felt promising, and then I noticed a familiar feeling of wanting tell a person affected by my possible self-deception how I'd now solved the problem and would behave differently from now on. And I remembered that on each previous time when I'd had that feeling and told the other person something like that, my behavior had in fact not changed at all as a consequence.

And now I'm chuckling at myself.

I've been thinking along very [LW(p) · GW(p)] similar [LW(p) · GW(p)] lines [LW(p) · GW(p)] for a while (my inside name for this is "mask theory of the mind": consciousness is a "mask"). But my personal conclusion is very different. While self-deception is a valid strategy in many circumstances, I think that it's too costly when trying to solve an extremely difficult high-stakes problem (e.g. stopping the AI apocalypse). Hence, I went in the other direction: trying to self-deceive little, and instead be self-honest about my^[1] real motivations, even if they are "bad PR". In practice, this means never making excuses to myself such as "I wanted to do A, but I didn't have the willpower so I did B instead", but rather owning the fact I wanted to do B and thinking how to integrate this into a coherent long-term plan for my life.

My solution to "hostile telepaths" is diving other people into ~3 categories:

1. People that are adversarial or untrustworthy, either individually or as representatives of the system on behalf of which they act. With such people, I have no compunction to consciously lie ("the Jews are not in the basement... I packed the suitcase myself...") or act adversarially.
2. People that seem cooperative, so that they deserve my good will even if not complete trust. With such people, I will be at least metahonest: I will not tell direct lies, and I will be honest about in which circumstances I'm honest (i.e. reveal all relevant information). More generally, I will act cooperatively towards such people, expecting them to reciprocate. My attitude towards in this group is that I don't need to pretend to be something other than I am to gain cooperation, I can just rely on their civility and/or (super)rationality.
3. Inner circle: People that have my full trust. With them I have no hostile telepath problem because they are not hostile. My attitude towards this group is that we can resolve any difference by putting all the cards on the table and doing whatever is best for the group in aggregate.

Moreover, having an extremely difficult high-stakes problem is not just a strong reason to self-deceive less, it's also strong reason to become more truth-oriented as a community. This means that people with such a common cause should strive to put each other at least in category 2 above, tentatively moving towards 3 (with the caveat of watching out for bad actors trying to exploit that).

1. ^{^}

   While making sure to use the word "I" to refer to the elephant/unconscious-self and not to the mask/conscious-self.

So in many cases, "trauma processing" can basically mean noticing you're not a child anymore. You have power. So you don't have to appease the hostile telepaths just because they're adults.

Yes, definitely. And this is also why it's often so important for the therapist - if this is done in the context of therapy - to exhibit unconditional positive regard toward the client. If the therapist is genuinely accepting of any thoughts and feelings that the client brings up, then that opens the door for the client's parts to start considering the possibility that maybe they can tell the truth and still be accepted. And once it has become possible to tell the truth to at least one person, it becomes possible to tell it to yourself as well.

(Though maybe I should say that the therapist needs to either experience unconditional positive regard toward the client, or successfully deceive themselves and the client into thinking that they do. Heh.)

One additional tangle is that often the client's issue is less about needing to act in a certain way, and more about needing to be a certain way. At some point, one frequently goes from "it's bad to break something and not be genuinely sorry on that particular instance" to "it's bad to be the kind of person who wouldn't automatically feel sorry and who needed to fake being sorry". 

This makes it harder to get to the point where the therapist could provide evidence that they are fine with you not being sorry in that particular instance, because getting there would require you to reveal that it's possible for you to not automatically feel sorry, and that feels dangerous by itself!

And what you've written also gets to the limitations of therapy - that no matter how much positive regard the therapist might have toward their client, if they are still e.g. living with an abusive partner, just the therapist's warmth and support may not be enough to produce a shift. (I haven't had clients with situations that extreme, but I've certainly noticed times when we started making much more progress once they broke up with a partner or quit a job that they had been trying to force themselves to do, and then suddenly new parts of them came to awareness that could now be convinced they were safe.)

I'm often surprised how little people notice, adapt to, or even punish self deception. It's not very hard to detect when someone's deceiving them self, people should notice more and disincentivise that

By "psychopath" I mean someone with the cluster B personality disorder.

There isn't a cluster B personality disorder called psychopathy. Psychopathy has never been a formal disorder and the only time we've ever been close to it is way back in 1952 when the DSM-1 had a condition called "Sociopathic Personality Disturbance". The closest you'll get these days is Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is a garbage bin diagnosis that covers a fairly broad range of antisocial behaviours, including the thing most people have in mind when they say "psychopath", but also plenty of other personality archetypes that don't seem particularly psychopathic, like adrenaline junkies and people with impulse control issues.

Curated!^[1] 

I think this is an excellent post on a tricky subject. I found here an articulate description of a great many internal experiences and thoughts I've had but have never well-named or seen written down clearly (e.g. 'occlumency' is a skill I have practiced a lot). I find this topic pretty hard to talk and think openly about, in large part due to the adversarial dynamics, so I am especially grateful for this post (and the ensuing discussion section). One of my favorite posts on LW this year, I think.

Personally, I frame the "Having power" solution as "Gaining independence". I think power is a bit goodhartable on in a corruptible way, and the true goal is to be able to think whichever thoughts you'd think if you had no influences on you, not the thoughts you'd think if you had immense power.

1. ^{^}

   "Curated", a term which here means "This just got emailed to 30,000 people, of whom typically half open the email, and it gets shown at the top of the frontpage to anyone who hasn't read it for ~1 week."

it's not information about whether I'm secretly trying to two-box

It's still Bayesian evidence. Someone with a different policy (always deeply investigating themselves), could get Omega-C to have a higher credence of them one-boxing.  We'd have to specify how sure Omega has to be to offer the large payment (and what priors Omega has) to know if the choice of policy matters.

This jogged a lot of thinking about how it fits into various modalities. I think the lack of an actual solution to hostile mind-reading might be a flaw in several modalities I've tried which could be part of why I've struggled to have the progress I made with them stick. Many of these at least point toward alternative methods of dealing with self-deception which could be useful and I think authentic relating suggests at least one idea for an alternative method of occlumency which feels a little more virtuous (definitely felt some aversion to your solutions because of this). 

Existential Kink

• This is a pretty weird book. Very much not my style but have found it useful on recommendation of Sasha Chapin's post about persistent self-love. Still new to this so might be getting it a little wrong.
• Existential kink is like 'find the desire behind the self-deception and learn to love it, appreciate it. Learn to be ok with the presence of this desire.
• I think it doesn't really have a solution to actually dealing with hostile mindreaders effectively but maybe I haven't got there yet.
• Main practice is something like: Find a pattern which is coming up often (e.g. losing interest in someone quickly after they show interest in you) and then dive into the deep desires underlying that. What is thrilling and great about this pattern, what does it get you? E.g. maybe it allows you to imagine you'll find the perfect person, allows you to think of yourself as superior in some confusing way (i.e. I'd never date someone willing to stoop so low as to date me), helps avoid the potential for rejection (e.g. if I reject them first I'm perfectly safe from rejection and being safe from rejection is NICE).
• So in this case you'd make peace with the desire to avoid rejection and the sense of superiority doing the rejecting gives you. Now you can notice those senses without needing to avoid them.
• When it comes to how you engage with that in the real world... Unclear.
• In many cases it seems like the desire itself recedes somewhat and I'm not sure why.
• E.g. I confronted this and am currently dating someone. I notice sometimes the fear of rejection and the sense of 'I could find someone better' but they feel not that important to me. I want her attention and I get it and that feels nice. I have my uncertainties sure but idk, I guess other things feel more important after having acknowledged these hidden desires?
• Where did the desire to be superior, the desire to find the absolute best go? Why would recognizing it and embodying it reduce it?
• Perhaps now it shares the stage with other emotions and I can recognize that in comparison I care more about those other things? E.g. a stable relationship and someone I enjoy being around just does seem better than being able to avoid rejection and feeling superior to attractive women when they're both in the clear.
• Why would a desire be stronger when it's ONLY in the subconscious?
  • It's got wrong priorities or doesn't understand the situation. E.g. it's optimizing for more of a childhood scenario? Not sure...

Nondual practice

• Coming out of self-deception is a key aspect of nondual practice. Adyashanti talks about a practice of coming to accept all parts of ourselves. Mostly this is through meditation and just being ok with everything that arises. He also has another technique that seems more hands-on but he doesn't really give much a description that I've seen so not really sure what the process is - would like to know!
• Loch Kelly uses IFS as a tool for full self-acceptance and a way to move through self-deception (more on that below).
• When I've been in a nondual state for longer periods on retreat I've noticed that I can find desires which I generally don't acknowledge and feel totally alright with them. The threat of consequences for the belief feel unimportant because I know that I can live with the consequences and still feel this deep sense of okayness.
• E.g. I could be really critical of myself and notice failures and just be like 'wow, so cool that I'm noticing these failures, well done'. And this isn't something I'd practiced it just came along for the ride.
• Unfortunately this hasn't stuck around much and seems to require a lot of steady dedication to re-entering the state. I think probably I could do this somewhat reliably but for some reason I don't want to or don't trust it? I'm not really sure what's going on here but I mostly don't inhabit this state anymore and I'm not entirely sure why. Probably some self-deception going on?

IFS

• IFS talks a lot about protector parts which are often self-deceiving in order to protect some other part. A crucial part of every IFS session is to ask the protector what age they think you are (often, at least in examples, it would say something like 5-12) and then you could reveal to it that actually you're 30 (or whatever). And sometimes this would lift the burden and the protector would suddenly be like 'oh, I guess we don't really need to have all these walls up, we can handle some difficult reactions now'. I think this is basically the power solution to self-deception.
• This sometimes has just worked for me in a clear and discontinuous way. That said, it's usually reverted at least to some extent after a few days or weeks. I never really figured out how to stop the reversion which is why I ended up giving up on IFS (mostly). Could be in part due to lack of solution to hostile telepaths problem. 

TEAM CBT

• This is my current favorite modality (along with existential kink).
• A lot of it is finding a belief that you might not even really believe rationally but which feels true (e.g. I'm worthless) and then exploring that. There are a million different ways to explore the beliefs so I'm finding it a little harder to connect it with hostile mind-reading.
• One of my favorite methods in TEAM CBT is cost-benefit analysis. So with 'I'm worthless' you might set a timer for 5-10min and fill out the positives. Some examples might be:
  • I'm not responsible for anything, I'm worthless so there's no obligation for me to fix the world's problems.
  • If people see that I think I'm worthless then they'll probably want to comfort me and provide support - that can be pretty nice!
• Then you'd do the negatives (e.g. it makes me feel bad all the time, makes work harder, etc) and when looking at them side by side you might recognize that you do care about meeting some of the more hidden desires (e.g. being cared for) but this belief is not the best way to go about that. 

All of these methods have mostly been about self-deception and recognizing it but mostly doesn't deal with the hostile mind-reading aspect. That's perhaps a key reason why they haven't fully worked for me! I've had the feeling that I could accept these things but haven't wanted to admit them. I do think Authentic Relating has a useful solution here though that has helped at least somewhat:

Circling & Authentic Relating:

• Though you're trying to reveal as much as you can about yourself it's not useful to push too far beyond what you're comfortable with. Pushing too far can be somewhat traumatizing and lead to setbacks. Instead you can wholeheartedly welcome some thoughts but decide you don't need to share them. Rather than stonewalling or lying, you can simply say things like 'I'm feeling some shame right now around a thought that's coming up. I'm not quite ready to share it but it feels good to voice that it's there'.
• This idea that one could fully accept something happening inside that might feel shameful to reveal while not sharing it was pretty big for me. It empowered me to feel I could explore more scary stuff. For example, a problem I've had in some circling situations was thoughts like 'wow she's attractive, I notice myself feeling some arousal but it would be weird to share that' or 'I don't find her attractive I want to make clear I'm not interested but this would be really offensive to say out loud'. Both of these are things that, when I first did authentic relating I was really trying to do some Newcomblike self-deception around. I was trying to be someone who doesn't think these thoughts, I would distract myself, latch onto other thoughts arising that I would feel comfortable revealing. Once I felt empowered to have these thoughts without revealing them that became somewhat easier - I could reveal some nervousness and discomfort but not reveal the actual thought. And sometimes I would reveal these thoughts and that would usually go quite well.
• To be fair, I don't think I've fully internalized this and this maybe makes it sound like more of a solved problem than it is. That said, I think this is an important step and seems kinda similar to occlumency but a little more virtuous? (which is my main problem with occlumency as described)

I can secondhand lend some affirmation to the newcomb case. A friend with DID from a childhood with a BPD mom later became a meditator and eventually rendered transparent the shell game that was being played with potentially dangerous preferences and goals to keep them out of consciousness, since the mom was extremely good at telepathy and was hostile for the standard BPD reason: other beings with other goals are inherently threatening to their extremely fragile sense of their own preferences and goals.

Another solution is illegible-ization/orthogonalization of preferences to the hostile telepath so that you don't overlap in anything they might care about or overpower you with. I think this is one of the things to think about in terms of rationalist avoidance of conflict theory.

I'm very glad you wrote this

My experience is very different.  I feel unitary, without any IFS or jungian shadow or other sort of subconscious parts trying to deceive my conscious self.  I violate quite a lot of social norms without feeling any shame or guilt about it, because I've got an 'internal scorecard'.  So long as I'm true to my own values/morality, and I can protect myself with some combination of power / occlumency / disengaging, all three of which come easily to me, social norms don't matter in private.

I think this is a great outline of how these strategies form. A very similar idea is described in The Elephant in the Brain, but this is straightforwardly written and more visceral in a way I felt the book (and most other attempts to describe it) lacked. Kudos!

The drive to be "perfectly rational" and push all slivers of self-deception out with force is, I think, one of the core psychological errors made in rationalist circles (including the writing) for exactly the reasons you lined out. Well explained!

Honesty, and specifically self-honesty, is held as one of the highest virtues. I think it's even cited as the only example of an instrumental good that can and should just be treated as an inherent good. Considering that, I would have loved to see you engage a little more in the discussion of how what you propose interferes with this and the tradeoff there.

Your proposed solution resembles IFS therapy, focusing on not forcing the part of you that tries to do something you might consciously disapprove of, and instead being understanding and accepting of that mechanism as well. The difference is that the intention is to find out what is happening, and not to try to solve it from a distance.

The last point touches on my central issue with your suggestion. The intention of really letting the self-deception sit does make it easier to notice when it happens, but so does investigation when it is done gently and without force. The problem with building up the habit to let self-deception run is that you will notice it more, but it will also continue to happen habitually, or the propensity for it might even grow stronger.

If there were actually plenty of hostile telepaths running around, that might not be a bad thing, but I think it is actually a rare occurrence in adulthood. To be specific, what is rare is a situation in which you really do want to self-deceive in that way and not see the avoided problem instead. Almost all of these situations are cases in which the solution will be "investigating whether the telepaths are in fact hostile and discovering they're not," as you wrote. There are obvious situations in which another person might be dismayed by your true mental state, but keeping that hidden only serves you in situations where the other person does not actually care about your well-being (in the form of your true mental state) anyway, in which case a detectable lie or insincere appeasement will work just as well and does not require the Newcomb-like deception in the first place. Having better information about your own internal state and preferences is a net good in all these situations.

Of course, there are situations in which you really would want to lie, but I would argue that you have to make the distinction between whom you can be honest with and whom to lie to anyway, subconsciously. So if you do, then you can also do that consciously, and rather learn to face the discomfort of confronting conflict. And, in these rare cases, realize and integrate that if someone is truly hostile enough to not just disregard your true preferences, but will even use knowledge of them against you, then you should be consciously aware of that (not just subconsciously, as you have to be in order to pull off Newcomb-like deception in the first place) and treat them appropriately, which includes lying to them with impunity. And if you do not make the distinction between whom you can really be honest with about everything, then that itself poses a significant issue, and bringing that to attention is invaluable in itself.

Another practical problem with the method is that most of the situations in which this would apply in fact do not have a practical solution, not even a concrete emotional one, because the problem is the avoidance of the feeling itself. There can be practical things you can do to make an instance of shame or procrastination less overwhelming, but when the badness of the problem is inherent, then no strategy can ease it enough to make the self-deception superfluous. In most cases, that means that the problem just festers until the urgency forces it out, in which case nothing is learned or gained, just a solution postponed. Or, without a timeline, the deception just stays unaddressed, you never learning what is behind it, which is tragic, considering that there might be something positive in there, and the negative is in fact only in the anticipation, since there are no hostile telepaths raining consequences on you as a result of your self-knowledge. In my experience, being in a safe environment suffices as a prerequisite to the safety of lifting any self-deception, with time and patience. Another person who can assure you that it's okay and safe can be helpful, but also not strictly needed.

I would be curious to hear your thoughts, most of which comes down to the discussion of tradeoffs between solving the problem and the high value of self-honesty and having accurate models over all mentioned above.

What gaslighting goes on in math class?

Organizations and communities can also face hostile telepaths. My pet theory that sort of crystalized while reading this is that p-hacking is academia’s response to a hostile telepath that banned publication of negative results.

This of course sucks for non traditional researchers and especially journalists who don’t even subconsciously know that p=0.05002 r=1e-7 “breakthrough in finding relationship between milk consumption and toenail fungus” is code for “We have conclusively found no effect and want to broadcast to the community that there is no effect here; yet we cannot ever consciously acknowledging that we found nothing because our mortgages depend on fooling a hostile telepath into believing this is something”

This is coherent with my experience. I'm pretty sure there are other problems solved by self-deception other than hostile telepaths. One other such problems solved by self-deception which I'm pretty sure I've seen in people is preserving motivation: if something is really important for me and I need to put in a lot of effort to make it happen and probability of success is very low (let's say epsilon), and if know that the probability of success is epsilon would totally annihilate my motivation to work towards it, then maybe hiding to myself that low probability safeguards my motivation to put in all the work necessary. 

Think here at a situation where there is an natural catastrophe, and someone's loved one is caught below the rubble, the person refusing to believe that the person might be dead and doing everything to remove the rubble as fast as possible.

Maybe this is also where the planning fallacy comes from in some cases. 

An example important in my life is planning: I "couldn't" make long-term plans or complete my to-do list as long as my "to-do list" was just a list of obligations rather than anything I really wanted done. More generally, I think plans "on paper" are especially easy case, since they don't take a telepath. For example, see the planning fallacy [LW · GW] and Robin Hanson's comment that managers prefer the biased estimates [LW(p) · GW(p)]. Getting to a corporate level, there's accounting. A cool related image is in episode two of Twin Peaks when Josie opens the safe and finds two ledgers, one making the mill look profitable and the other tracking the real debts. That's an example of "occlumency" I guess. But how common is it to have two account books like that, one internally and the other for investors? Or two schedules, a real one for real planning and a fake one to project optimism to the higher-ups? Or two to-do lists, one of stuff I plan to really do and the other I'm just saying I'll do to avoid an argument? Like, actually two files or pieces of paper? Certainly in a corporate context there's good legal reasons not to, since liability for fraud often depends on what you can be proven to know, right?

This post does a good job of laying out compelling arguments for thoughts adjacent to areas I've previously already enjoyed thinking about.

For the record, this sentence popped into my head while reading this: "Wait, but what if I'm Omega-V, and [Valentine] is a two boxer?"

(Edit: the context for this thought is my previous thoughts having read other posts by Valentine, which I find both quite elucidating, but also somehow have left me feeling a bit creeped out; that being said, my opinion about this post itself is strongly positive)

It is worth noting that Ziz has already proposed the same idea in False Faces, although I think Valentine did a better job of systematizing and explaining the reasons for its existence.

Another interesting direction of thought is the connection to Gregory Bateson’s theory that double binds cause schizophrenia. Spitballing here: it could be that a double bind triggers an attempt to construct a "false face" (a self-deceptive module), similar to a normal situation involving a hostile telepath. However, because the double bind is contradictory, the internal mechanism that tries to create the false face to appease the hostile telepath malfunctions, resulting in mental chaos.

Very powerful reasoning. I would add that a relevant form of self-deception that should be investigated in this framework is religious faith, given its place as as foundational to societies worldwide. 

Religious faith seems like an optimal form of solution to hostile telepaths problem, in certain contexts it seems like a mixture of the three solutions you outlined. (Newcomblike self-deception, Having power and Occlumency)

Religious faith seems to provide psychological power through feelings of absolute certainty and over-confidence that religious people experience.  At the same time, the conversion to religions is correlated with overcoming PTSD and addiction (step 2 of the 12 steps program: "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.")

I think there is an underlying problem of concept hierarchy which may precede self deception. Maybe we are able to hide concepts and thoughts while they occupy a peripheral part of the mind, this could be also linked to a continuous formulation of the newcomb-like problem in decision theory. I am not sure how this unfolds, will be trying to explore that in the weeks to come. 

Thank you for sharing!

I thought this was going to be an allegory for interpretability.

I like this except for the reference to "Newcomblike" problems, which, I feel, is misleading and obfuscates the whole point of Newcomb's paradox. Newcomb's paradox is about decision theory - If you allow cheating then it is no longer Newcomb's paradox. This article is about psychology (and possibly deceptive AI) - cheating is always a possible solution . 

Regarding this

Such as the moms in the abusive partners example above: each one could acknowledge her self-deception once it was safe for her abusive partner to know too. She got enough power (financial or social) to protect herself and her child, making the telepathic scan no longer a dire threat.

I would add that most abusive people don't really like crushing their loved ones and it is sometimes easy to get them to stop, eg by having a peer of the abuser get a private word with the two parties separately. I think it is common for there to be simple miscommunication/misunderstanding — the abuser does not typically actually benefit from the accusative situation.

Why haven't abuser & abusee already talked and figured this out? Well there is some force field where you can't have a normal conversation with someone who is hitting you (or you are hitting) about the hitting. Although I don't know how to put it in your terms here from this post.

I think this means that if you care both about (a) wholesomeness and (b) ending self-deception, it's helpful to give yourself full permission to lie as a temporary measure as needed. Creating space for yourself so you can (say) coherently build power such that it's safe for you to eventually be fully honest.

The first sentence here, I think, verbalizes something important.

The second [instrumental-power] is a bad justification, to the extent that we're talking about game-theoretic power [as opposed to power over reductionistic, non-mentalizing Nature]. LDT is about dealing with copies of myself. They'll all just do the same thing [lie for power] and create needless problems.

You do give a good justification that, I think, doesn't create any needless aggression between copies of oneself, and which I think suffices to justify "backing self-deception" as promising:

I mean something more wholehearted. If I self-deceive, it's because it's the best solution I have to some hostile telepath problem. If I don't have a better solution, then I want to keep deceiving myself. I don't just tolerate it. I actively want it there. I'll fight to keep it there! [...]

This works way better if I trust my occlumency skills here. If I don't feel like I have to reveal the self-deceptions I notice to others, and I trust that I can and will hide it from others if need be, then I'm still safe from hostile telepaths.

[emphases mine]

"I'm not going to draw first, but drawing second and shooting faster is what I'm all about" but for information theory.

I think this is really along the wrong path and misunderstanding a lot of things, but so far along the incorrect path of thought and misunderstanding so much, that it's hard to untangle

Classic less wrong: this is all completely understood by normies. People build a narrative around their own existence, and justify and rationalize, and those self deceptions (obviously like basically all phycological traits) can sometimes be beneficial.

And then your insight is to apply a variant of normy mindfulness, e.g., cultivate awareness and self acceptance before trying to change.