--- /dev/null
+Title: Keltham (Title Needed)
+Date: 2021-01-01
+Category: commentary
+Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, worldbuilding
+Status: draft
+
+Realistic worldbuilding is hard: unable to model what someone else would do except by imagining oneself in that position, authors tend to embarrass themselves writing [alleged aliens or AIs that _just happen_ act like humans](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits), or allegedly foreign cultures that _just happen_ to share all of the idiosyncratic taboos of the author's own culture. The manifestations of this can be very subtle, even to authors who know about the trap.
+
+In _Planecrash_, a collaborative roleplaying fiction principally by Iarwain (a pen name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and Lintamande, our protagonist, Keltham, hails from [dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), a more smarter, more rational, and better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. Keltham has somehow survived his apparent death and woken up in the fantasy world of [Golarion](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Golarion), and sets about uplifting the natives using knowledge from his superior civilization.
+
+In [the "Crisis of Faith" thread](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5977), Keltham has just arrived in the country of Osiron. While much better than his last host nation (don't ask), Keltham is dismayed at its patriarchal culture in which women typically are not educated and cannot own property, and is considering his options for reforming the culture in conjunction with sharing his civilization's knowledge.
+
+But some of the _specific_ ways in which Keltham thinks about the problem seem distinctively American, rather than dath ilani. Having been advised to survey what native women think of their plight _before_ seeking to upend their social order, [Keltham asks an old woman](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402):
+
+> Suppose some dreadful meddling foreigner came in and told Osirion that its laws had to be _the same for men and women_, and halflings and tieflings and elves too, but men and women are the main focus here. You can make a law that the person with higher Wisdom gets to be in charge of the household; you can make a law about asking people under truthspell if they've ever gotten drunk and hurt somebody; you can't make any law that talks about whether or not somebody has a penis. You can talk about whether somebody has a child, but not whether that person was mother or father, the child girl or boy.
+
+> She can also suppose things like that truthspells have become cheaper, a tenth of the current cost, say, if that helps her put Osirion back together. If it's absolutely vital that a way exist to determine whether a child belongs to a particular parent, what used to be called a father, she can suppose that a way exists.
+
+It makes sense that Keltham wants to smash the patriarchy in Osiron, but I'm surprised that he generalizes all the way to forbidding _any_ laws that reference sex or race. In contrast, you _could_ just say that women should be educated and hold property, as a specific change to the law that's empirically a good idea.
+
+Of course, here in America on Earth, there are historical reasons that _our_ culture has come to uphold equality under the law as a _principle_, rather than most laws just happening not to treat different groups differently. It's a sensible precaution if you don't trust your government or your culture: if a law that distinguishes demographic groups could be used to oppress one of those groups, don't allow _any_ such laws, even if they come with a purportedly benevolent rationale attached.
+
+But Keltham isn't _from_ America. Everything we've heard about his world says that they educate everyone thoroughly in probability theory as normative reasoning, and that citizens end up trusting the existing government on the basis that they would know about and could overthrow a corrupt government. In _that_ context, equality under the law is much less obvious of a desideratum. Probability theory doesn't say anything about "protected classes." A principle that the law can only refer to lower-dimensional concepts (like "Wisdom") but isn't allowed to [refer to clusters](/2021/Mar/link-see-color/) in [thick subspaces of configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (like "is a halfling") is a principle that _decreases the expressive power of the law_, restricting the ontology that the law is allowed to reason about: effectively, saying that the government has to be _less Bayesian_ because it's the government. That's a totally natural thing to want if you're a 21st century American, but it ... doesn't seem like the first solution you'd expect a dath ilani's mind to go to?
+
+And yet Keltham seems to be committed to this principle to an extent that would not only seem odd in virtually all traditional human cultures, but also seems odd when you just think practically about the numbers. When the woman he's interviewing suggests conscription as a use-case for why the law needs to discriminate by sex, [Keltham suggests](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422):
+
+> Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it. [...]
+>
+> Strength is an _externally visible and measurable_ quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises. That's an example of the sort of idea Keltham was talking about when he asked how to put a country back together, after you stopped being able to measure people's sex and treat them differently based on that.
+
+Okay, but military combat is _the uniquely worst_ example you could choose to showcase your principle of non-discrimination by sex. For most jobs—especially most jobs in an industrialized Society like dath ilan, where a lot of the heavy lifting is done by machines—"always test the individual's aptitude, never use sex as a proxy" is a fine rule, because most jobs primarily rely on human general intelligence. There was no _dentistry_ in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and thus there is little to no reason why women or men should make better dentists.
+
+[
+But war has shaped people both physically and cognitively
+Men are built for war. Men's _emotions_ are built for war.
+https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/EvolutionofWar.pdf
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/
+]
+
+The sex difference in muscle mass is [_2.6 standard deviations_](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf). That means a woman as strong as the average man is at _the 99.5th percentile_ for women. That means if you just select everyone whose strength is greater than one standard deviation _below_ the male mean, you end up excluding 94.5% of women.
+
+You _can_, of course, directly test strength as a quality that determines who you want in your army. But ...
+
+And Keltham just bites the bullet!
+
+neglect of probability (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q7Me34xvSG3Wm97As/but-there-s-still-a-chance-right)
------
Lightwavers on Twitter (who Yudkowsky knew from /r/rational) dissed Charles Murray on Twitter
-
-https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422
-> Strength is an externally visible and measurable quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises.
-
-I'm skeptical that the "But the government can't have different laws for different groups" is something that would exist in dath ilan; it makes sense that we have this hangup in our world, but if you live in a Bayesian utopia in the first place, (a) you wouldn't have a taboo about using demographic categories for decisionmaking, and (b) you wouldn't have a special taboo about the _government_ doing so (that's dictating that the government is not allowed to be Bayesian because it's the government?!); it makes sense for evolutionarily novel things like dentists, but conscription is _the worst_ example
-
-"Different rules for different groups" is a solution to a social design problem; if you rule that out, you're ruling out a lot of the design space. This is still true even if you protest, "But you have to let people _leave_ the group if they don't want to be there; it's unjust to trap them there"
-
-It makes sense for Keltham to disapprove of the status of women in Osiron, but I'd expect the objection to be _concrete_ (women in particular deserve property rights in particular) rather than "principled" (the government can't pass laws based on sex), because the principle is Earth-craziness
-
-so, what I meant was, when you enshrine a principle, "The law can't treat you differently because you're a halfling" (that is, the law can only refer to low-dimensional traits; it's not allowed to use the covariance in the big salient clusters in thick subspaces of configuration space that correspond to "protected classes"), that's decreasing the expressive power of the law, restricting the ontology that the law is about to reason about: effectively saying that Governance has to be _less_ Bayesian _because it's Governance_. That's a totally natural thing to want _if you're a 21st century American_, but seems wildly out-of-character for everything else we know about dath ilan and its cultural assumptions about Bayesian reasoning and the assumption of good-faith governance
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