[TODO— make intro much shorter; minimal amount of words/info to set up the context for my complaint
-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.
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-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.
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-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):
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-> 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.
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> 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.
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?
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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] (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.
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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?
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff