+At this point, some readers might object that this kind of "dark" interpretation of a fictional universe oversteps the authority of the literary critic. One imagines that Yudkowsky doesn't particularly think of dath ilan as a world governed by deception. What grounds could I possibly have to argue that it is, given that he's the author and I'm not? Isn't that just making up my own fictional world and substituting it for the "real" dath ilan defined by Yudkowsky's authorial intent?
+
+But the craft of literature isn't a matter of merely conveying a fictional reality that existed fully formed in the author's imagination in advance of writing it down. The craft is about producing text that readers can use to build up their own model of the fictional world. The exacting labor of [converting vague ideas into definite text](http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html) is the difference between writing and daydreaming. We can accept [Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) as supplementary material where the text of a story is ambiguous or silent on a point of interest, but some kind of [Death of the Author](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor) stance is ultimately necessary for making sense of literature in a world in which telepathy doesn't exist and authors do occasionally die. The text is not a mere pointer to the "real" work inside the author's head; the text _is_ the work. That's the only way the technology of writing can function.
+
+Moreover, a Death of the Author stance seems particularly important for evaluating medianworlds. What makes the exercise of constructing a medianworld interesting is the challenge of envisioning the details of a realistic Society that would result given a population with an alternative [distribution of cognitive repertoires](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/), but where the same generalizations of biology, sociology, and economics that govern our own world are presumed to hold. If the world portrayed by the text [doesn't seem to hold together](/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/) or has [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) that the author doesn't acknowledge, it's the solemn duty of literary critics to point that out to less discerning readers.
+
+In analogy, mathematicians, like authors, are also in the business of creating imaginary worlds, but mathematical objects, once defined, can be examined on their own terms. A mathematician encountering [a deeply unsatisfying theorem about their new definition](https://blog.plover.com/math/major-screwups-4.html) understands that there can be no recourse in protesting, "But that's not how _I_ imagined it working." That would be failing to engage with the real difficulties of mathematical research. If you wanted different behavior, you should have written a better definition!
+
+Similarly, an author who says, "In _my_ medianworld, fully automated luxury gay space communism with central planning just works, because the populace is so smart and nice, unlike _Earth people_, who are so mean and dumb that they have to use _markets_ to allocate scarce resources" is failing to engage with the real difficulties of the medianworld exercise. Readers would have a right to be skeptical.
+
+Authors, of course, have much more wiggle room than mathematicians to try to salvage their cherished ideas. Rather than being forced back to the drawing board by an unwanted implication, a fiction writer finds it all too easy to simply add another sentence denying it. But the author's total freedom to specify the text necessarily interacts with readers' attempts to imagine a self-consistent universe that "projects into" that text. Short of an explicitly omniscient narrator declaring "And then a miracle occured", discerning readers will tend to reach for interprerations of the text that make sense—even if making sense entails casting doubt on the narrator's spin on the described events.
+
+Yudkowsky's 2009 story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good) is an incisive commentary on how unwary readers' moral compasses can be hijacked by authorial editorializing. If the story depicts our heroes wantonly slaughtering orcs, readers tend not to worry about the ethics of warfare: if the [designated hero](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesignatedHero) is doing it, it presumably isn't a problem. But living creatures that are depicted as speaking language, having organized armies with complex tools, _&c._ are presumably sapient for the same reasons humans are. It's fair game for "The Sword of Good" to point that out—at least, short of the narrator _explicitly_ declaring, "Despite appearances, the orcs are unconscious [philosophical zombies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies); killing them has no moral significance." (But a story that did declare that would be highly unusual, and basically conceding the critic's point about stories that didn't!)
+
+All I'm doing in this essay is holding the dath ilan mythos to the same standard that "The Sword of Good" holds classic fantasy tropes to. Maybe it's good to run a global conspiracy to keep people ignorant in order to protect their emotional well-being, and maybe those orcs deserved to die. But given a text that _does_ literally describe massive coverups or killing of human-like creatures, it's fundamentally fair game for literary critics to point that out, and prompt readers to think carefully about whether they should accept "it's fine because the good guys are doing it" or "it's fine because it's dath ilan, which is not Earth" as an implicit excuse.
+
+### The History Screen
+
+One of the distinctive features of dath ilani Civilization is that they've deleted their history. No one except a few specially cleared specialists ["in their own causally isolated bunker"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1688794#reply-1688794) is allowed to learn history before a point in a relatively recent past. (["[D]ecades ago, not millennia ago"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1789110#reply-1789110) as of Keltham's time.)