We might say that the algorithm that designed dath ilan's Civilization can be seen as systematically preferring deception. When I speak of an algorithm preferring deception, [what I mean is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) that given a social problem, candidate solutions that involve deceiving the populace seem to be higher in dath ilani Civilization's implicit search ordering than solutions that involve informing the populace. Solutions that work by means of telling the truth will be implemented only when solutions that work by means of deception are seen to fail.
-Crucially, these are [functionalist criteria](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) of "preference" and "deception". It's about how Civilization is structured in a way that systematically encourages divergences between popular belief and reality. I'm _not_ positing that Civilization's Keepers and Legislators and Chief Executive are laughing maniacally and consciously telling each other, "I personally love it when non-Keepers have false beliefs; we need to do as much of that as possible—as a terminal value!"
+Crucially, these are [functionalist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) [criteria](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/) of "preference" and "deception". It's about how Civilization is structured in a way that systematically encourages divergences between popular belief and reality. I'm _not_ positing that Civilization's Keepers and Legislators and Chief Executive are laughing maniacally and telling each other out loud, "I personally love it when non-Keepers have false beliefs; we need to do as much of that as possible—as a [terminal value](https://www.readthesequences.com/Terminal-Values-And-Instrumental-Values)!"
Rather, I'm positing that they don't care about non-Keepers having false beliefs. (They might care about [not technically lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PrXR66hQcaJXsgWsa/not-technically-lying), but that [turns out to be a weak constraint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).)
If you're in the business of coming up with clever plans to solve problems, and you don't care about people having false beliefs, you mostly end up with clever plans that work by means of giving people false beliefs that trick them into doing what you want them to do (perhaps without technically lying).
-Why wouldn't you? There are more false maps than true maps. If you don't specifically care about affirmatively telling the truth, you mostly end up supplying false maps in order to control people's behavior by means of controling their information, because if you told them the truth, they wouldn't behave the way you want them to. Instrumental convergence is a harsh mistress.
+Why wouldn't you? There are more false maps than true maps. If you don't specifically care about [affirmatively telling the truth](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#Intent_to_inform), you mostly end up supplying false maps in order to control people's behavior by means of controling their information, because if you told them the truth, they wouldn't behave the way you want them to. Instrumental convergence is a harsh mistress.
-### Interlude: "I Can't Argue With Authorial Fiat"
+### Interlude: Methodology for Worldbuilding Criticism; Or, I Can't Argue With Authorial Fiat
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.
-[ TODO—
+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!
-https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor
+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.
- * A worldbuilding critic who takes a negative view of some world might be told that they're not allowed to contradict authorial intent. If the narrator says the people of dath ilan are doing something because they're good and smart and cooperative, the critic has to accept that.
- * But what makes the medianworld exercise interesting is that it's about trying to portray a realistic world, given a shifted distribution of psychological traits. We take the text of the story as a given, but we don't have to take dath ilan's self-image literally, if we think a different world could "project" into the same text and explain it better.
- * Mathematicians are also in the business of creating imaginary worlds.
- * An ethnographer might note that Americans believe themselves to be "the land of the brave and the home of the free", without being obliged for their ethnography to agree with this description. I'm taking the same stance towards dath ilan: as a literary critic, I don't have to share its Society's beliefs about itself.
+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 editorial 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 author 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!)
-### History Screening
+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 rethink whether they should accept "it's good because the good guys are doing it" or "it's good because it's dath ilan, which is not Earth" as an implicit excuse.
-[TODO—
+### The History Screen: Who Controls the Past Controls the Future
+
+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 a drastic measure, a civilizational lobotomy. It seems significant 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."
+
+Dath ilan is depicted as suffering practical consequences from its ignorance: a discussion of the evolution of 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)
- * Dath ilan placed its history behind a causal screen.
+[TODO—
+ * need to figure out how to be more concrete about harms ... https://www.readthesequences.com/Entangled-Truths-Contagious-Lies
* This is a drastic measure: consider all the costs of deleting history
* The actual explanation turns out to be incredibly casual—"As long as they were doing that anyways": the assumption that the hoi polloi are better off not knowing where they came from isn't argued for at all
* Doylist interpretation makes sense (Keltham encountering a mideval monarchy is more interesting if he doesn't know what a Queen is), but if it's that kind of universe, what's with the comments about dath ilan being superior to Earth? Topia-for-storytelling shouldn't be hailed as a eutopia
+ * 1984 https://www.abhafoundation.org/assets/books/html/1984/162.html https://www.abhafoundation.org/assets/books/html/1984/103.html
+
+https://glowfic.com/replies/1688794#reply-1688794
+> "I'm not sure there's literally anybody on my planet who's 'not allowed to do other stuff'. Maybe some Keepers, if they're holding infohazards so bad that they all have to stay in the same isolated village somewhere?"
+> (And the people who know the true history, in their own causally isolated bunker.
https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939
> And so long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well also carry out the less important but still useful operation of putting all of Civilization's past behind the most complete possible causal screen. That part wasn't as important, but still legitimately helpful; and doing it would help to overshadow the other changes, and lead to less attention going to the more dangerous places.
(Yes, I know we've been informed by authorial fiat that dath ilan has a lot of internal diversity, but there are necessarily limits to that if you're going to be a human Society specifically rather than a Solomonff inductor, and it seems clear that any faction that thinks gaslighting Merrin is morally wrong is on the losing end of the counterfactual warfare of democracy.)
Aslan / amputation of destiny
+
+ * An ethnographer might note that Americans believe themselves to be "the land of the brave and the home of the free", without being obliged for their ethnography to agree with this description. I'm taking the same stance towards dath ilan: as a literary critic, I don't have to share its Society's beliefs about itself.
+
+spoilers for the pleasure of discovering sex for themselves: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812613#reply-1812613
+
+being told eugenics prospects early as self-fulfilling prophecies, as a legitimate infohazard: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812614#reply-1812614
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff