+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.)
+
+This is an incredibly drastic measure, a civilizational lobotomy. (It perhaps bears worth mentioning that the most famous literary depiction of a Society that deleted its history is George Orwell's _Nineteen-Eighty-Four_, in which a totalitarian state maintains a Society in which "[n]othing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.") The full costs may not be obvious to many readers: if the immediate needs of living in the present don't directly require thinking about the past, what's the harm of not knowing?
+
+The problem is that [facts are causally entangled with each other](https://www.readthesequences.com/Entangled-Truths-Contagious-Lies). Forgetting one fact entails not just having to deal with not knowing that particular thing, but also not knowing everything it implies about other things in the world—which might be of little consequence for any one trivium, but is surely enormous for _all of human history_.
+
+In at least one case, the text depicts dath ilan as suffering practical consequences from its ignorance: a discussion of the eliezera's low happiness levels is cut short with ["How'd it happen? Nobody knows, at this point, they screened their history."](https://glowfic.com/replies/1812613#reply-1812613) (Generally, knowing how something happened is useful for figuring out how to remediate it.) Realistically, we can only surmise that there are many other cases where knowing history would be useful that the narrator hasn't gotten around to telling us.
+
+Given the costs, what could possibly justify the history screen, in an advanced Society that otherwise seems to value knowledge? A fantasy author could easily an invent an answer: maybe a psychic plague that spread through memories such that the infected must be not just physically quarantined, but forgotten. Medianworld authors have a tougher time insofar as we construe their genre as hard science fiction. Psychic plagues aren't real. What could _realistically_ justify the history screen?
+
+The answer the text gives leaves something to be desired. In "But Hurting People Is Wrong", we learn of the birth of modern dath ilan, when the Keepers noticed the AGI alignment problem and propose strict policy measures aimed at surviving the challenge.
+
+For one, dath ilan's eugenics program is to optimize for intelligence even more than it already does. That makes sense: smarter alignment researchers have a better shot at solving the problem.
+
+For another, restrictions on the manufacture of computers are imposed. That makes sense: if computer hardware were too capable and easily available before alignment researchers had the [serial time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FS6NCWzzP8DHp4aD4/do-earths-with-slower-economic-growth-have-a-better-chance) to think the problem through, that would increase the risk of accidentally unleashing an unaligned intelligence explosion.
+
+For another, digital surveilance is imposed. That makes sense: Governance would want to know about any rogue AGI projects, so they can be shut down by force.