Title: Comment on a Scene from <em>Planecrash</em>: "Crisis of Faith"
-Date: 2022-06-12 23:00
+Date: 2022-06-12 20:00
Category: commentary
Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, worldbuilding
-Status: draft
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_](https://www.projectlawful.com/board_sections/703), 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.projectlawful.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.projectlawful.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402):
+In [the "Crisis of Faith" thread](https://www.projectlawful.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 middle-aged woman](https://www.projectlawful.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.
To be clear, it makes sense that Keltham feels bad for the women of Orision, who seem so much less self-actualized than the women of his world. It makes sense that he wants to smash the patriarchy, and reform their sexist customs about education and property.
-But the _specific_ way in which he's formulating the problem—that the law should be "_the same for men and women_, and halflings and tieflings and elves too"—seems distinctively American. The idea the government can't discriminate by race or sex as a _principle_ (as contrasted to most laws happening to not refer to race or sex because those categories happen to not be relevant to that specific law) is a specific form of Earth-craziness that only makes sense as a reaction to other Earth-craziness; it's not something you would ever spontaneously invent or think was a good idea if you _actually_ came from a 140 IQ Society that thoroughly educated everyone in probability theory as normative reasoning. Let me explain.
+But the _specific_ way in which he's formulating the problem—that the law should be "_the same for men and women_, and halflings and tieflings and elves too"—seems distinctively American. The idea that the government can't discriminate by race or sex as a _principle_ (as contrasted to most laws happening to not refer to race or sex because those categories happen to not be relevant to that specific law) is a specific form of Earth-craziness that only makes sense as a reaction to other Earth-craziness; it's not something you would ever spontaneously invent or think was a good idea if you _actually_ came from a 140 IQ Society that thoroughly educated everyone in probability theory as normative reasoning. Let me explain.
Keltham is, of course, correct that if you have specific information about an individual's traits, that [screens off](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority) any probabilistic guesses you might have made about those traits knowing only the person's demographic category. Once you measure someone's height, the fact that men are taller than women on average with an effect size of about 1.5 standard deviations is no longer relevant to the question of that person's height. (As the saying goes out of dath ilan, [hug the query](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2jp98zdLo898qExrr/hug-the-query)!) In very many situations, if there's a cost associated with acquiring more specific individuating information that renders information from demographic base rates irrelevant, you should pay that cost in order to get the more specific information and therefore make better decisions.
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, it's not obvious that the law should behave any differently in this respect than a private individual: is Governance supposed to be _less_ Bayesian _because it's Governance_?! (Although, perhaps there's a distinction between the "law" and "public policy" functions of Governance, with the former laying out timeless rights and principles, whereas day-to-days decisions about the empirical world are farmed out to the latter?)
+Furthermore, it's not obvious that the law should behave any differently in this respect than a private individual: is Governance supposed to be _less_ Bayesian _because it's Governance_?! (Although, perhaps there's a distinction between the "law" and "public policy" functions of Governance, with the former laying out timeless rights and principles, whereas day-to-day decisions about the empirical world are farmed out to the latter?)
Some implications: 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.
But more fundamentally, even if you assume strength-testing is free, we haven't yet taken into account all _other_ sex differences that are relevant to military performance. It's not just that any other individual traits (_e.g._, aggression) that you select for will stack multiplicatively, resulting in even more extreme ratios. There are also group-level effects that aren't captured by measuring the traits of individual soldiers: the social dynamics of a squad of fifteen men and one woman are going to be different from those of a squad of sixteen men. Even if you've selected the woman for strength and every martial virtue to equal any man, do the _men_ know that in their subconscious, or are they going to be biased to want to protect her or seek her favor in a way that they wouldn't in an all-male environment?
-You could command them not to—but does that actually _work_? People don't have conscious access to or control of the way their brain takes demographic base rates into account. [Nelson _et al._ 1990](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf) gave people photographs of women and men and asked them to estimate the photo-subjects' heights. The estimates end up reflecting sex as well as actual-height—which is, again, the correct Bayesian behavior given uncertainty in sex-blind estimates. But furthermore, when the researchers prepared a special height-matched set of photos where for every woman of a given height, there was a man of the same height _and_ told the participants about the height-matching _and_ offered cash rewards for accuracy, more than half of the base-rate adjustment _still_ remained! People don't know how to turn it off!
+You could command them not to—but does that actually _work_? People don't have conscious access to or control of the way their brain takes demographic base rates into account. [Nelson _et al._ 1990](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf) gave people photographs of women and men and asked them to estimate the photo-subjects' heights. The estimates end up reflecting sex as well as actual-height—which is, again, the correct Bayesian behavior given uncertainty in sex-blind estimates. But furthermore, when the researchers prepared a special height-matched set of photos (where for every woman of a given height, there was a man of the same height in the photo set) _and_ told the participants about the height-matching _and_ offered cash rewards for accuracy, more than half of the base-rate adjustment _still_ remained! People don't know how to turn it off!
And if they _could_ turn it off, such that you could order your male soldiers not to treat a woman among them any differently than they would a man, and have the verbal instruction have exactly the desired effect on their brain's subconscious quantitative decisionmaking machinery—who is this even _helping_, exactly?
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](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).
+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, sure, you'd want and 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).
-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.projectlawful.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!!
+It's just—wasn't dath ilan's _whole thing_ supposed to be about coordinating to find the optimal multi-agent 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.projectlawful.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 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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