1 Title: Consilient Cultural Worldbuilding and the Incoherence of Nondiscrimination: Comment on <em>Planecrash</em>: "Crisis of Faith" Pages 33–34
4 Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, worldbuilding
7 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.
9 [TODO: minimal Planecrash summary]
11 [TODO: Keltham's proposal]
13 ... 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.
15 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.
17 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"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402)—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 a 140 IQ Society that thoroughly educated everyone in probability theory as normative reasoning. Let me explain the principles first, and then dissect the example of military conscription (which is plausibly _the worst_ possible example the authors could have gone with).
19 The issue is that 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_?!
21 (As an aside, it's actually kind of _hilarious_ how far Yudkowsky's "rationalist" movement has succeeded at winning status and mindshare in a Society whose [_de facto_ state religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) is [founded on eliminating "discrimination."](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights) Did—did anyone besides me "get the joke"? I would have expected _Yudkowsky_ to get the joke, but I guess not??)
23 Of course, as Keltham correctly points out, if you have more specific information about an individual that [screens off](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority) information from their demographic category, then you should use the more specific information: once you measure someone's height, the fact that men are taller than women on average with an effect size of 1.7 standard deviations is no longer relevant to the question of that person's height. In very many situations, if there's a cost associated with acquiring more specific individuating information that renders information from demographic group-membership irrelevant, you should pay that cost in order to get the more specific information and therefore make better decisions.
25 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 notice_ someone's race or sex. 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, this just falls out of _ordinary_ Bayesian reasoning, which continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about groups of people.
27 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.
29 But the relationship between "measured traits" and any actual decision you might care about _is also merely statistical_. The reason we have a concept of "Intelligence" is because it turns out that a person's performances on various mental tasks happen to positively correlate with each other, but that's just _on average_: it could easily be the case that this particular Intelligence 18 person is less suited to a particular task than some Intelligence 12 person.
31 If you take probability and expected utility seriously—and everything we've been told about dath ilan says that that's what their Civilization is _all about_—then the quantitative extent to which the statement "It's wrong to make _X_ decision about me just because I'm _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_.
33 As far as principles are concerned, anyway. But 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_?
35 It's an empirical issue—but sure, very often, yes. For most jobs—especially most jobs in an industrialized Society like dath ilan—"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's no reason why women or men should make better dentists.
37 But then it's _bizarre_ that Keltham persists in his no-legal-sex-discrimination stance when his interlocutor brings up _military conscription_ as a potential counterexample. Because—as unpleasant as it is for modern folk to think about—there _was_ war in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
39 Men's bodies are built for war. Men's _emotions_ are built for war. [(Males have more reproductive fitness to gain and less to lose by the prospect of risking death in a war where the victors gain mating opportunities.)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/EvolutionofWar.pdf) 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.
41 Notwithstanding that Keltham grew up in a peaceful Society that [screened off its history](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939) (such that he wouldn't have read histories of some analogue of Genghis Khan), it seems like Keltham should know this stuff? (We're told that dath ilan [has very advanced evolutionary psychology](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140), and there's no apprent reason for them to have spent any of their eugenics bandwidth selecting for reduced sexual dimorphism, which is [slower to evolve than monomorphic traits, anyway](/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf).)
43 But if Keltham _does_ know this stuff,
47 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/
48 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fg9fXrHpeaDD6pEPL/truly-part-of-you
49 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2jp98zdLo898qExrr/hug-the-query
50 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
51 neglect of probability (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q7Me34xvSG3Wm97As/but-there-s-still-a-chance-right)
55 [TODO— make intro much shorter; minimal amount of words/info to set up the context for my complaint
57 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.
59 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.
61 But some of the _specific_ ways in which Keltham thinks about the problem seem distinctively American, rather than dath ilani (given everything else we've been told about dath ilan). 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):
63 > 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.
65 > 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.
67 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.
69 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.
71 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?
76 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.
80 In America, we're used to objecting, "But it's unfair to treat someone as representative of their race or sex, because some people are atypical for their group; you need to look at their individual traits, like Intelligence or Charisma". But really, individual "traits" are _also_ an abstraction that sums over individual differences: someone might be more charming to certain people or in certain contexts in complicated ways that a single Charisma score can't express. In that light, it's not obvious why the objection against using demographic categories as predictors is more compelling than, "But it's unfair to treat someone as representative of their Intelligence or Charisma, because some people are atypical for their trait score, you need to look at individual sub-traits" ... and so on recursively? Are all forms of abstraction-for-statistical-prediction inherently oppressive?
83 use whatever abstractions are best for making relevant predictions for your use-case; use more detailed information when available and cheap, but don't moralize about using higher-level abstractions when convenient
85 But from a perspective of first-principles statistical reasoning, this concern applies recursively at all levels.
86 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?
89 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 military conscription as a use-case for why the law needs to discriminate by sex, [Keltham suggests](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422):
91 > Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it. [...]
93 > 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.
95 And Keltham just bites the bullet!
97 > They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation)
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