-Title: Consilient Cultural Worldbuilding and the Incoherence of Nondiscrimination: Comment on a Scene from <em>Planecrash</em>: "Crisis of Faith"
+Title: Comment on a Scene from <em>Planecrash</em>: "Crisis of Faith"
Date: 2021-01-01
Category: commentary
Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, worldbuilding
Realistic worldbuilding is a difficult art: unable to model what someone else would do except by the ["empathic inference"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) of 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 more advanced civilization.
+In [_Planecrash_](https://www.glowfic.com/boards/215), 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 more advanced civilization.
In [the "Crisis of Faith" thread](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5977), Keltham has just arrived in the country of Osirion. 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. 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.
-In the conversation that follows, the woman suggests military conscription as a legitimate reason for why the law might need to descriminate on sex. Keltham suggests, "Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it."
+In the conversation that follows, the woman suggests military conscription as a legitimate reason for why the law might need to discriminate on sex. Keltham suggests, "Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it."
... and that's the part that broke my suspension of disbelief in Keltham being a realistic portrayal of someone who grew up in dath ilan as it has been described to us, rather than being written by people who live in Berkeley in the current year who don't know how to think outside of their own culture's assumptions.
But crucially, getting individuating information is an [instrumental rather than a terminal value](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values); you should do it _when and because_ it improves your decisions, not because of some alleged principle that you're not allowed to make probabilistic inferences off someone's race or sex. Probability theory doesn't have any built-in concept of "protected classes." On pain of paradox, Bayesians _must_ condition on all available information. If groups differ in decision-relevant traits, _of course_ you should treat members of those groups differently! What we call "discrimination" in America on Earth is actually just Bayesian reasoning; P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E) doesn't _stop being true_ when H happens to be "I should hire this candidate" and E happens to be "The candidate is a halfling". Furthermore, there's no reason for the law to behave differently in this respect than a private individual: is Governance supposed to be _less_ Bayesian _because it's Governance_?!
-Thus, if there's a _cost_ associated with taking individual measurements, and the cost exceeds the amount you would save by making better decisions, then you shouldn't take the measurements. If your measurements have _error_, then your estimate of the true value of the trait being measured [regresses to the group mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) to some quantitative exent. Again, all this just falls out of _ordinary_ Bayesian decision theory, which continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about groups of people.
+Thus, if there's a _cost_ associated with taking individual measurements, and the cost exceeds the amount you would save by making better decisions, then you shouldn't take the measurements. If your measurements have _error_, then your estimate of the true value of the trait being measured [regresses to the group mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) to some quantitative extent. Again, all this just falls out of _ordinary_ Bayesian decision theory, which continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about groups of people.
If this still seems counterintuitive, it may help to consider that from the standpoint of Just Doing Bayesian Decision Theory, the distinction between "information from demographic group membership" and "information from individual measurements" isn't fundamental. The reason it seems unjust to notice race when you can just look at an individual's Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores, is because the relationship between race and any actual decision you might care about is merely statistical: it's not fair to always look to the orc if you need someone in your party to lift a fallen tree, just because orcs are stronger than other races _on average_, because it could easily be the case that this _particular_ orc is less suited to the task than other party members.
But Keltham isn't _from_ America; you'd expect his thoughts to optimized for _solving problems_, not disallowing Shenanigans. Everything we've been told about dath ilan emphasizes that they should be collectively smart enough not to fall into this _crazy_ trap of political incentives making a certain class of correct Bayesian updates socially taboo in order to avert other social ills; the Keepers should have pre-emptively done the analysis in the preceding paragraph _without_ having to empirically see it eat their Society's sanity, and incorporated the appropriate counter-memes in their rationality training for children. To the dath ilani intuition, then, the quantitative extent to which the statement "It's wrong to make _X_ decision about someone just because they're _Y_" makes sense, depends quantitatively on how strongly _Y_ predicts the outcomes of _X_. Whether _Y_ is an "individual trait" like having Intelligence 18 or a demographic category like being female _does not matter_.
-This is also how American people's intuitions work, too, in contexts where their [paranoid egalitarian meliorist](TODO: linky) memetic antibodies haven't been activated. Consider how the text of _Planecrash_ itself repeatedly contrasts Keltham to everyone else in the world of Golarion. No one (neither Watsonianly in the text, nor Doylistically in various discussions of the text on Discord) is shy about saying that Keltham is special in this setting _because he's dath ilani_. We don't insist on talking about how Keltham is smart _and_ knows about probability theory _and_ knows about chemistry _and_ doesn't know about Golarionian theology _and_ is accustomed to a high material standard of living _and_ is squeamish about seeing slave markets, as if these were separate, isolated facts about Keltham as an idiosyncratic individual. We connect these facts to Keltham's nationality even though, if you look, there are surely _also_ natives of Golarion who are smart (to some quantitative extent) and know about chemistry (to some quantitative extent) and disapprove of slavery (to some quantitative extent), because our whole high-dimensional picture of what Keltham _is_—comprising many, many traits to their respective quantitative extents—is, in fact, [_causally downstream_ of the "essential" fact](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) of his having grown up in another world. It's either not bigoted to _notice_, or a cognitive system requires some amount of "bigotry" in order to function.
+This is also how American people's intuitions work, too, in contexts where their [paranoid egalitarian meliorist](https://quillette.com/2018/02/07/equalitarianism-progressive-bias/) memetic antibodies haven't been activated. Consider how the text of _Planecrash_ itself repeatedly contrasts Keltham to everyone else in the world of Golarion. No one (neither Watsonianly in the text, nor Doylistically in various discussions of the text on Discord) is shy about saying that Keltham is special in this setting _because he's dath ilani_. We don't insist on talking about how Keltham is smart _and_ knows about probability theory _and_ knows about chemistry _and_ doesn't know about Golarionian theology _and_ is accustomed to a high material standard of living _and_ is squeamish about seeing slave markets, as if these were separate, isolated facts about Keltham as an idiosyncratic individual. We connect these facts to Keltham's nationality even though, if you look, there are surely _also_ natives of Golarion who are smart (to some quantitative extent) and know about chemistry (to some quantitative extent) and disapprove of slavery (to some quantitative extent), because our whole high-dimensional picture of what Keltham _is_—comprising many, many traits to their respective quantitative extents—is, in fact, [_causally downstream_ of the "essential" fact](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) of his having grown up in another world. It's either not bigoted to _notice_, or a cognitive system requires some amount of "bigotry" in order to function.
However, just because noticing group differences is theoretically sound, doesn't mean it's always the right thing to focus on. Pragmatically, might it not be the case in practice, that statistical group differences are small enough, and that individual trait measurements are cheap and reliable enough, such that "don't discriminate by race or sex" is a useful _heuristic_?
Keltham expresses doubt whether it's worse for a woman to be conscripted than a man, and when his interlocutor gestures at harms to a woman from living among men (not trusted family members, but men unselected from the general public), Keltham understands that she's talking about the possibility of intercourse, including rape (!), and he immediately generates "cheap truthspells" as a way to mitigate that problem while maintaining sex-integrated military units.
-And, sure, I agree that truthspells would help, given the settled assumption that you need to have sex-integrated military units. But—why is that a decideratum? We're told that dath ilan's beliefs about evolutionary psychology [include the idea that](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=14):
+And, sure, I agree that truthspells would help, given the assumption that you need to have sex-integrated military units. But—why is that a desideratum, at all? We're told that dath ilan's beliefs about evolutionary psychology [include the idea that](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1591440#reply-1591440):
> The untrained male has an instinct to seize and guard a woman's reproductive capacity, instinctively using violence to stop her from interacting with other men at the same that he instinctively displays other forms of commitment to try to earn her acquiescence. The untrained female has adaptations that assume an environment in which men will try to pressure her into more sex than is optimal for her own reproductive fitness, so her adaptations push her to instinctively resist that pressure while also instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her.
-And just—if you _actually believe that_, it seems like there's this very obvious policy of _not forcing females to fight in close quarters alongside the people with an instinct to sieze and guard female reproductive capacity_?! (Come to think of it, the "instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her" part seems like it could cause other kinds of problems, too??) Even if you have cheap truthspells, there's this concept of 'securitymindset', where you want to design systems that are robust against unexpected things happening, and the "Just don't conscript women in the first place" policy neatly sidesteps entire classes of potential social pathologies that you don't want to have to deal with at all in the organization you're using to keep your country from getting conquered?! If someone asks whether it's worse for a woman or a man to be put in the situation of having to fight in close quarters alongside the people with _an instinct to sieze and guard female reproductive capacity_, I don't think it should be hard to admit the obvious correct answer that that's worse for a woman?!
+And just—if you _actually believe that_, it seems like there's this very obvious policy of _not forcing females to fight in close quarters alongside the people with an instinct to seize and guard female reproductive capacity_?! (Come to think of it, the "instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her" part seems like it could cause other kinds of problems, too??) Even if you have cheap truthspells, there's this concept of ['securitymindset'](https://intelligence.org/2017/11/25/security-mindset-ordinary-paranoia/), where you want to design systems that are robust against unexpected things happening, and the "Just don't conscript women in the first place" policy neatly sidesteps entire classes of potential social pathologies that you don't want to have to deal with at all in the organization you're using to keep your country from getting conquered?! If someone asks whether it's worse for a woman or a man to be put in the situation of having to fight in close quarters alongside people with _an instinct to seize and guard female reproductive capacity_, I don't think it should be hard to admit the obvious correct answer that that's worse for a woman?!
-I mean, it's not worse _with Probability One_.
+I mean, it's not worse _with [Probability One](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities)_. Like any dath ilani or religiously devout American, I cherish diversity and exceptions, and want to treat people who are unusual for their demographic with the same care and respect as anyone else! (More, actually.) It's just—it seems like it should be possible to do that _without_ trashing our ability to have conventions that perform well in the average case?? To the extent that there _is_ a minority of women who want nothing more than to die gloriously in battle in service to their country, then you'd expect the country to be able to make use of that—and whether you want to induct them into the regular army, or have a [special women's corps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Army_Corps) is a complicated policy question that you'd want to make after appropriately weighing all of the trade-offs (like the unit-cohesion objection _vs._ less skill transfer due to not having cross-sex mentorships).
-[TODO: okay, we want to accomodate exceptions; that's important. (We also want to accomodate exceptions like people without college degrees: college _or_ have an awesome portfolio is fine.) If there are women who really want to fight to defend their homeland, then either induct them or set up a special women's company depending on the empirical social design trade-offs (lower cohesion _vs._ lost skills due to no cross-sex mentorship). But "draft men, but accept women volunteers" is a _Pareto improvement_ over "Draft everyone based on strength"; it's not ilani to _ignore Pareto improvements_ because of American taboos.]
+It's just—wasn't dath ilan's _whole thing_ supposed to be about coordinating to find the optimal policy using evidence and quantitative reasoning?! And suddenly Keltham is casually proposing ["stopp[ing] being able to measure people's sex and treat them differently based on that"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422) without noticing that this is _excluding huge swathes of policyspace_ (such as "Conscript males, but accept female volunteers") for ideological reasons!? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!!
-... maybe there's just no way to explain this in a way that makes sense to American ears? I _still_ feel guilty writing this stuff.
-
-It's just—[I was trained, long ago back in the 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), in an Art of [TODO: rationality plea]
+Maybe there's just no way to explain this in a way that makes sense to American ears? I _still_ feel guilty writing this stuff. It's just—[I was trained, long ago back in the 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), in a certain Art, and I'm _pretty sure_ we were taught that being able to measure things and make different decisions based on the measurements was a good thing _in full generality_, without there being any special exception that specific cluster-membership measurements are actually bad?!
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