dath ilan ancillary: history screen

diff --git a/content/drafts/on-the-public-anti-epistemology-of-dath-ilan.md b/content/drafts/on-the-public-anti-epistemology-of-dath-ilan.md
index 1be4a6d..70f4d4e 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/on-the-public-anti-epistemology-of-dath-ilan.md
+++ b/content/drafts/on-the-public-anti-epistemology-of-dath-ilan.md
@@ -57,18 +57,28 @@ Similarly, an author who says, "In _my_ medianworld, fully automated luxury gay
 
 Authors, of course, have much more wiggle room than mathematicians to try to salvage their cherished ideas. Rather than being forced back to the drawing board by an unwanted implication, a fiction writer finds it all too easy to simply add another sentence denying it. But the author's total freedom to specify the text necessarily interacts with readers' attempts to imagine a self-consistent universe that "projects into" that text. Short of an explicitly omniscient narrator declaring "And then a miracle occured", discerning readers will tend to reach for interprerations of the text that make sense—even if making sense entails casting doubt on the narrator's editorial spin on the described events.
 
-Yudkowsky's 2009 story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good) is an incisive commentary on how unwary readers' moral compasses can be hijacked by author editorializing. If the story depicts our heroes wantonly slaughtering orcs, readers tend not to worry about the ethics of warfare: if the [designated hero](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesignatedHero) is doing it, it presumably isn't a problem. But living creatures that are depicted as speaking language, having organized armies with complex tools, _&c._ are presumably sapient for the same reasons humans are. It's fundamentally fair game for "The Sword of Good" to point that out—at least, short of the narrator _explicitly_ declaring, "Despite appearances, the orcs are unconscious [philosophical zombies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies); killing them has no moral significance." (But a story that did declare that would be highly unusual, and basically conceding the critic's point about stories that didn't!)
+Yudkowsky's 2009 story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good) is an incisive commentary on how unwary readers' moral compasses can be hijacked by author editorializing. If the story depicts our heroes wantonly slaughtering orcs, readers tend not to worry about the ethics of warfare: if the [designated hero](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesignatedHero) is doing it, it presumably isn't a problem. But living creatures that are depicted as speaking language, having organized armies with complex tools, _&c._ are presumably sapient for the same reasons humans are. It's fair game for "The Sword of Good" to point that out—at least, short of the narrator _explicitly_ declaring, "Despite appearances, the orcs are unconscious [philosophical zombies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies); killing them has no moral significance." (But a story that did declare that would be highly unusual, and basically conceding the critic's point about stories that didn't!)
 
 All I'm doing in this essay is holding the dath ilan mythos to the same standard that "The Sword of Good" holds classic fantasy tropes to. Maybe it's good to run a global conspiracy to keep people ignorant in order to protect their emotional well-being, and maybe those orcs deserved to die. But given a text that _does_ literally describe massive coverups or killing of human-like creatures, it's fundamentally fair game for literary critics to point that out, and prompt readers to rethink whether they should accept "it's good because the good guys are doing it" or "it's good because it's dath ilan, which is not Earth" as an implicit excuse.
 
-### History Screening
+### The History Screen: Who Controls the Past Controls the Future
 
-[TODO—
+One of the distinctive features of dath ilani Civilization is that they've deleted their history. No one except a few specially cleared specialists ["in their own causally isolated bunker"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1688794#reply-1688794) is allowed to learn history before a point in a relatively recent past. (["[D]ecades ago, not millennia ago"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1789110#reply-1789110) as of Keltham's time.)
+
+This is a drastic measure, a civilizational lobotomy. It seems significant that the most famous literary depiction of a Society that deleted its history is George Orwell's _Nineteen-Eighty-Four_, in which a totalitarian state maintains a Society in which "[n]othing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
 
- * Dath ilan placed its history behind a causal screen.
+Dath ilan is depicted as suffering practical consequences from its ignorance: a discussion of the evolution of eliezera's low happiness levels is cut short with ["How'd it happen?  Nobody knows, at this point, they screened their history."](https://glowfic.com/replies/1812613#reply-1812613)
+
+[TODO—
+ * need to figure out how to be more concrete about harms ... https://www.readthesequences.com/Entangled-Truths-Contagious-Lies
  * This is a drastic measure: consider all the costs of deleting history
  * The actual explanation turns out to be incredibly casual—"As long as they were doing that anyways": the assumption that the hoi polloi are better off not knowing where they came from isn't argued for at all
  * Doylist interpretation makes sense (Keltham encountering a mideval monarchy is more interesting if he doesn't know what a Queen is), but if it's that kind of universe, what's with the comments about dath ilan being superior to Earth? Topia-for-storytelling shouldn't be hailed as a eutopia
+ * 1984 https://www.abhafoundation.org/assets/books/html/1984/162.html https://www.abhafoundation.org/assets/books/html/1984/103.html
+
+https://glowfic.com/replies/1688794#reply-1688794
+> "I'm not sure there's literally anybody on my planet who's 'not allowed to do other stuff'.  Maybe some Keepers, if they're holding infohazards so bad that they all have to stay in the same isolated village somewhere?"
+> (And the people who know the true history, in their own causally isolated bunker.  
 
 https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939
 > And so long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well also carry out the less important but still useful operation of putting all of Civilization's past behind the most complete possible causal screen. That part wasn't as important, but still legitimately helpful; and doing it would help to overshadow the other changes, and lead to less attention going to the more dangerous places.
@@ -274,3 +284,7 @@ One might have hoped that dath ilani would be self-aware enough to notice that t
 Aslan / amputation of destiny
 
      * An ethnographer might note that Americans believe themselves to be "the land of the brave and the home of the free", without being obliged for their ethnography to agree with this description. I'm taking the same stance towards dath ilan: as a literary critic, I don't have to share its Society's beliefs about itself.
+
+spoilers for the pleasure of discovering sex for themselves: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812613#reply-1812613
+
+being told eugenics prospects early as self-fulfilling prophecies, as a legitimate infohazard: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812614#reply-1812614