My April Fools' Day Confession

My April Fools’ Day Confession

I have a confession to make. It’s something which has been weighing on my mind for a long, long time - since late 2000, actually.

I did not invent timeless decision theory.

I did not invent the rationality techniques I’ve claimed as my own.

I’m not any kind of genius. I wasn’t slated for a technical job. If only I had learned the math and the background theory instead of reading popularizations, I’ve wished that I don’t know how many times, all too late. Everything I’ve tried to do here would have gone much faster, if I’d learned the math before. I had to try to reconstruct the math behind timeless decision theory from scratch, knowing only in vague terms what results I was supposed to get, and what popular accounts described in intuitive terms as the reason. I remember seeing the equations written down, but I didn’t know the definitions of the terms, and was at a loss to remember them later. If I had studied the theory behind the training I received as a child, the art of rationality I’ve tried to teach would be far more advanced. All I have left are scraps and shadows and the stuff that everyone learns before they’re 23.

There as here, I’d never heard the slightest hint that this sort of thing happens to people (and I still don’t know how, or why, or anything). I didn’t prepare to come here, and nobody else tried to prepare me for it. I wasn’t on a… career track, I guess you’d say… to be a scientist. Maybe a writer, though I have no idea how to calibrate my reception in this world against my probable reception at home. The character of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres isn’t original to me, he’s the result of my attempt to set a completely cliche protagonist of the you-don’t-have-a-word genre in the setting of J. K. Rowling, and Harry has a cliche relationship with his cliche you-don’t-have-a-word Defense Professor, even if it all seems new enough here that people call it original. It’s not like I was reading highbrow literature where I came from. I was only a couple of years older than Eliezer Yudkowsky was, when I woke up in his body and with access to his previous memory.

I’m writing this on April 1st because it’s the day when nobody in this world will take it seriously, no matter how much about me it explains.

My… homeworld, I guess… was called “dath ilan”. Which I am not capitalizing, because by our conventions dath ilan is the name of a civilization, and doesn’t get the emphasis-marks that would signify a personal name, which matters because a civilization is not a person. Before anyone asks, everyone in dath ilan looked human so far as I remember (it’s not like I studied biology there), yes I was male, the continents were in the same places, and even in Earth’s polluted sky I recognize the shan codra, what you would call the Pleiades. I’d say that dath ilan was “a nearby Everett branch”, if not for the fact that everything I’ve ever read about quantum mechanics, there or here, indicates that you absolutely can’t have that kind of communication. And if you’re going to hypothesize that rule breaking, you may as well not appeal to quantum mechanics at all. Maybe I’d believe I was from a nearby Everett branch, if I hadn’t gone through the same training in “do not make stuff up, especially when you are very confused” that everyone on dath ilan gets somewhere in the 11-13 age range, with a reinforcement ordeal at 17.

The beisutsukai, the master rationalists who’ve appeared recently in some of my writing, set in a fantasy world which is not like dath ilan at all, are based on the de'a'na est shadarak. I suppose “aspiring rationalist” would be a decent translation, if not for the fact that, by your standards, or my standards, they’re perfect enough to avoid any errors that you or I could detect. Jeffreyssai’s real name was Gora Vedev, he was my grand-aunt’s mate, and if he were here instead of me, this world would already be two-thirds optimized.

So now, on April 1st, I will tell you of the world of dath ilan. I will tell you what I still miss the most from my home, even now that I’ve managed to exude enough half-remembered-popularized shadarak culture into my environment that I’m not completely starved for conversation or people who understand me. What I miss most viscerally of dath ilan is not food that doesn’t poison you, or the night sky in the darkest hour when every light must be switched off or sealed behind shutters. It’s not the evidence-based massage therapists who’ve been iterating their art with randomized experiments and competitions for 350 years (I was too young to have had sex-with-an-expert in dath ilan, which is a bittersweet thing to be grateful for).

It should already be obvious that dath ilan had better rationality training than here, and that I’d read some popular stuff on their version of decision theory. To keep you interested, I suppose, I should tell you about an aspect of dath ilan that hasn’t already appeared in my writing. So I’ll tell you about the thing that I notice every single day of living on Earth, that would be easy to do with this Earth’s technology level, but which apparently nobody here has ever thought of. And this isn’t going to sound important at first, but bear with me, because it ends up being a lot more important to dath ilan’s culture than it sounds.

Why is it that your Earth mostly doesn’t have electric cars? Answer: Because someone *might* need to make a 200-mile trip and the batteries for a 200-mile range are expensive. As has already been observed, you could solve that problem by using automatically piloted cars as a public transit network, with long-range cars only summoned for long-range journeys. So it is already understood, on Earth, that robotic cars are the key to electric cars.

So why doesn’t Earth have autopiloted cars? In the US one obvious answer is screwed-up liability laws, but not all countries are so hesitant. The real answer is that Earth only recently started to reach the AI level required to deal with other humans on the road, pedestrians randomly walking into the middle of the street, deer bounding across the avenues, whatever. But, and this I have not yet heard suggested here, you could solve that problem by having tunnels underground, instead of streets above, and all the cars auto-piloted. Then the AI problem would become vastly easier and could have been solved in the early 2000s of this Earth, if not earlier.

Current cars do not already travel through underground tunnels. Because your cars run on gasoline and would have filled the tunnels with choking fumes, without either (1) a big expensive ventilation system, or (2) expensive electrified rails that would…impose friction costs? Make it too expensive to keep the tunnels in repair? I know that dath ilan just used battery-powered cars in underground tunnels and didn’t bother with electrified rails.

So there is a circular dependency between electric cars that require autopilots, autopiloted cars that require closed predictable tunnels, and tunnels that require electric cars.

This Earth cannot resolve circular dependencies and almost always gets stuck in Nash equilibria.

In the world of dath ilan, everyone learns at age 9 about Nash equilibria, and there is a concept of a making a collective and virtuous effort to get past them. So as soon as computers and batteries were good enough to autopilot electric cars in a system of tunnels, the thing was done.

The vehicles of dath ilan moved at… I think it works out to 125kph, based on my best effort to convert to metric… and they were self-piloting, there were no traffic lights, with tunnel connections designed to handle wide turns at speed. I grew up being 5 minutes and zero effort away from anywhere in an 8-km radius.

And there was another technology that was synergetic with that one, so keep listening. Yeah, I know, April 1st, but if you suspend your disbelief for a moment, I’m not doing gosh-wow futurism about one super-fun change that lets you do your existing highway commute but faster. I’m telling you about the way these things worked in a real world, where changes cause other changes and the great system of differential equations propagates marginal effects, as the proverb goes in dath ilan.

Around 50 years ago in dath ilan before I came here, our shadarak-trained economists judged plausible the proposition put forth by Sinyelt that the economic friction involved in moving house - e.g. packing and unpacking all your things - was responsible for the economy being slow-to-adapt to shocks. That the friction costs of moving house were a primary reason why people wouldn’t move fast enough to places where the economy was booming, or leave old jobs that weren’t good for them. My home civilization, as you might guess, makes a huge deal out of the virtue of being fast to adapt: fast to respond to facts, fast to update and change policies. And if Sinyelt was right, the cost of people moving geographically was interfering with that virtue. So they built a test city - dath ilan had a concept of “let’s build a test city” - where houses were mated to modular foundations.

You then ask how you move houses from foundation to foundation, especially if, as in nowadays, instead of roads you have underground tunnels built for cars rather than houses. This will take a moment to describe, but keep in mind, there is no technology that this Earth couldn’t handle easily. Imagine the city is divided into a grid of squares 3 and a quarter kilometers on a side. All the grid points have tall narrow posts rising up from the ground, thoroughly anchored in the rock below. All the north-south lines of the grid have strong cables, like the cables this Earth uses to hold up suspension bridges, stretched between each grid point. (The cables are painted blue-reflective so that they mostly fade out against the sky, likewise the tower-posts.) Between two north-south cables, you can stretch east-west cables, side-by-side, attached by movable motors to points along the north-south cables, so the east-west cables can slide along the north-south cables. From points on the east-west cables, you can drop down nine vertical cables, again attached by motors so the vertical cables can slide along the east-west cables. The nine vertical cables pick up a house from its modular foundations, draw it upward, and then the vertical cables and east-west cables slide to convey the house to a grid point. This takes you to an avenue large enough to move houses, which can convey that house to the next grid point. The cables are designed to move gently, and furniture is designed to be stable. Storage things inside the house are designed to allow flexible balloons to inflate inside them to keep their contents secure, and so on.

The upshot is that when you’re moving to a new city, you don’t need to find a house that’s sort of tolerable in a location that’s sort of tolerable. You buy a house you really like, and you put it on a (say) Type 2 modular foundation, in the next Type 2 location that goes up for rent that’s *really* close to where you want to be. It means that instead of houses being built by Earth’s small construction companies, houses are made by you-don’t-have-a-word-let’s-call-them-corporations which are large enough to spend money on R&D. So the houses have features like windows that shutter to keep out every trace of light if dawn arrives too early, or stained glass murals on the walls that glow with lighting beneath. The reduced marginal costs of having more house on a foundation, means that houses are larger.

The fact that people can bid on locations means that the land-rents of central locations also rise, but since dath ilan has operated on land value taxes for the last 200 years, this is revenue of the let’s-call-it-a-government and it just reduces other taxes like the positional-goods tax, status-goods tax, marketing-tax, and so on. I’ve worked out what I pay in Berkeley in land value rent (vs. the interest on the material cost of a house this size), and it’s just about exactly what I pay to the state and federal governments; *not* having land value taxes, in other words, is like paying tax to two governments at once. I am reminded of this every time my monthly paycheck is deposited with tax already deducted, and then I pay rent on top of that.

When autopiloted cars were developed 20 years before I left, and the modular house system was already in place because that just required big cables, there was coordination to pick the largest stretch of land on Earth which had good year-round weather. And then that became ‘the great city’ and pretty much everyone who wasn’t farming, mining, or otherwise tied to a particular location moved house there.

The autopiloted cars went straight to the basements of each house, there were no visible roads on the surface. No roads and no parking lots meant room for more houses in every square kilometer, so population densities could be high without looking crowded. The autopiloted cars meant that there were a lot of houses within 10 minutes of you and that people didn’t find it inconvenient to travel. No matter how weird your special interest was, it wasn’t hard to find 20 other people with that interest who lived within 10 minutes and almost no effort of travel. Most of dath ilan used the technology of the autopiloted cars and the movable houses to form their own little villages all over the great city, people who worked together on a common project or had common interests. You *lived near your friends* in dath ilan.

The sturdiest type of house foundation (Type 3) would support houses that could attach modular rooms. The 'house’ was a central kitchen and dining place and hot tub and maybe a pillow-pit or whatever personal extra features you bought, attached to at most six modular complexes, each with a bedroom plus bathroom plus personal workroom. People could move their personal modules from group household to group household. If you were the sort of person who wanted to, you lived *with* your friends in dath ilan. And if friendships changed, you didn’t have to pack up everything and find another sorta-tolerable house in a sorta-tolerable location in order to move.

There were central skyscraper structures for people who wanted to live in a very dense and walkable area, and a cable system for moving house-modules that slotted into the skyscraper-structure fittings. (So it was easy to tear down one skyscraper-structure and build a taller one on the same ground. They put a lot of effort into preventing the rents from getting too damn high.) My family in dath ilan didn’t live in a skyscraper - that was for people who were tightly tied into huge multi-person endeavors, like unusually polymathy researchers; or people who had eclectic complicated interests and needed to be near many other interest-centers simultaneously.

There were no skyscrapers in our part of the great city. I’m still calling it that because it’s a direct translation, but it didn’t *look* like a great city at all. You stepped outside and you saw a green landscape full of trees, dotted with houses decorated as vegetation (which was a rule where we lived, and easy to do because our houses were centrally manufactured so we could have nice things). At night there were no street lights, just soft red lights that glowed along the walkways. Except for a 45-minute span, after all the last vestiges of sunlight had disappeared from the sky, when even the red lights went out so everyone could see the stars *perfectly*. Once a year on the winter solstice, on the Night of Stars, every light stayed out all night, so that those who wished could clearly see the constellations that appear before dawn.

The air smelled like grass and trees, because things were powered by electricity instead of internal combustion engines. I remember seeing movies of the tunnel-diggers on the edge of civilization expanding the great city, and they would have cables stretching out behind them. There were places in dath ilan where they burned things, but this was not done near a city, where it would blot out the sight of the stars.

More minor things I miss. The walkways were paved with bouncy material that people could run on without destroying their knees. There were central sidewalk-avenues, moving walkways that ran at morning and dusk when people were busiest. People *walked* places in dath ilan, because they lived near the places they wanted to be, because there weren’t cars or stoplights to get in the way, because the great city was located somewhere it didn’t rain too often, and because we had sidewalks that weren’t gratuitously made of hard concrete.

Nobody used bicycles or skateboards. They weren’t a thing. I don’t really know why, since they seem like perfectly good ideas to me. Maybe any journey distant enough for a bicycle was distant enough for a car, and if you didn’t want to use a car you lived close enough to walk, or something like that.

Instead of closed offices, most of people worked or learned under the sunlight, shielded by a glass screen overhead that kept out the rain and ultraviolet, with your own space concealed by curtains that could be opened or shut to indicate botherability. If you needed silence for concentration, you used earplugs. People who needed to have loud conversations without disturbing others would have enclosed rooms with doors and glass ceilings and air conditioning. If you showed the serious people a world where most people never saw the sun while they worked, they’d flip out and then correct the problem. Skyscrapers weren’t much built in dath ilan until we had extremely bright artificial light that could mostly substitute for sunlight, and hey were all put in locations where skyscrapers were explicitly allowed. Blocking out someone else’s sun would be a serious transgression, and symbolic.

We had laser zappers and other measures that destroyed bugs and mosquitos and wasps and bees - these were considered far more annoying in dath ilan than Earth, and our civilization put a lot of effort and technology into rooting them out, or preventing them from getting a foothold within the great city. On the “beware of trivial inconveniences” scale, I suspect that an absence of little flying bugs, to say nothing of bugs that bit and stung and made noises, might be part of why people did their daily work beneath sunlight, in open air. I think there was a variety of butterfly that was bred to pollinate flowers and such within cities, in place of bees - at least I know that we weren’t supposed to crush butterflies. I say this not so that you go “oh, how nice” but so that you realize that the civilization of dath ilan put a lot of effort into eliminating trivial inconveniences, if they happened to enough people, and that this effort really mattered. There’s a parable about a fool who thought that dust specks were trivial things, and so the air grew so full of dust specks that people learned to stay inside because if they stepped outside they would blink and feel small moments of pain, and so they grew pale for lack of sun. I probably should have told the original version instead of trying to adapt it, but I’m not sure it would have the same resonance in Earth culture.

Food in dath ilan was made by people who were very good at making a particular variety of food, and they’d pick a few dishes and make a huge amount of it on any given day. There’d be many places like that within 2 miles of you, and a small courier-carlike-thing would attach itself to another car and arrive with the food you liked within 2 minutes. Yes, it was still hot. And it didn’t cost insane amounts, either. It wasn’t so much cheaper to make that food with your own labor, because there were land value taxes instead of income taxes. If you wanted to prepare food and sell it to someone, you just did. Our economists would have screamed down the heavens if anyone tried to insert obstacles to that, and people actually listened to economists in dath ilan.

And now I’m talking about how the economy worked, so I’ll go ahead and talk about some other things that dath ilan considered obvious. The medical profession was divided into junior diagnosticians, whose main job was to diagnose the obvious and know when the obvious had been called into doubt; and senior diagnosticians, who were highly paid and high-IQ and shadarak-trained, who could apply Bayes’s Rule in their sleep, and memorized all the prior probabilities, and had computers, and were graded on their probability calibrations. And treatment planners, who specialized in particular illnesses, and kept up with the literature, and could notice when things weren’t working and change their minds. And what I guess I’ll call surgeons, who were usually people with very high dexterity and conscientiousness and who always got plenty of sleep; more recently some titled surgeons were reliable machine operators whose virtue was that they never had bad days. They were *just* surgeons, and they just learned and practiced surgery. The pathologists monitored the whole thing and rated outcomes and assigned credit, and were shadarak-trained in the virtues of evenhandedness and diligence.

The separation of diagnosticians from treatment planners and surgeons meant that the pathologists could say how well a treatment planner did, relative to the prior prognosis of a patient; and of course the surgeons with the highest relative survival rates commanded premiums. There was none of the Earth idiom where there’s this great checklist that reduces fatalities by 70%, but nobody has an incentive to use it. The civilization of dath ilan understood the power of incentives, and the power of professional specialization. We wouldn’t have tried to have one “doctor” have all the talents and learn all the skills; still less, without their being graded on it.

You’ve probably guessed that dath ilan did not have universities with sit-down classes where a professor lectured for three months. We took education seriously in dath ilan, which in our world meant using professional specialization and economies of scale and large prizes and fast iteration. One hour of instruction on a widely-used subject got the same kind of attention in dath ilan that an hour of prime-time TV gets on Earth. By which I mean that there would be centralized development of movies you watched on your own, and the training-games you played in what I won’t insult by calling it a school, and experiments to find out which variations worked. Tell a real educator about how Earth classes are taught in three-month-sized units, and they would’ve sputtered and asked how you can iterate fast enough to learn how to teach that. Tell them that the same universities that taught were also responsible for certifying that teaching had occurred successfully - that the performance of education, and the verification and certification of education, were carried out by the same financial entity - and they would have just turned and walked away. Tell them that students paid up front whether the university succeeded or failed at training them, and they’d turn around and start yelling about dishonorable fraud. *Everyone* understood that much economics where I come from.

So that you don’t think I’m being completely prejudiced or remembering home through rose-colored glasses, I’ll mention two places where Earth did far better than dath ilan, namely BDSM and macroeconomics.

BDSM didn’t exist in dath ilan. I don’t really know why. Maybe everyone in dath ilan who realized that they wanted to be hurt, categorized themselves as having the stereotypically nonvirtuous quality of self-destructiveness, and kept quiet about it, or met only other people who thought the same thing. I’m very worried, in retrospect, that they all managed to cure themselves via standard self-modification techniques. It’s *very* obvious that if I’d realized in dath ilan that I was a sexual sadist, I would have treated this as an error and probably not told anyone before I fixed it. It would not have occurred to me that sexual masochists were a thing or that I could find a willing victim to be sadistic at, I would have thought I was being sick and selfish. Having been to Earth, this strikes me as a genuine failure of dath ilan culture, and even worse, I have to confess it’s the sort of thing that Earth’s Hollywood Vulcan stereotype might lead someone to expect of a shadarak-influenced culture.

The other way that the Earth science I’ve learned has a significant advantage over dath ilan is in macroeconomics, at least among the few fields I’ve learned (it’s not like I know all of Earth’s science, either). I think - I’m trying to figure history out at a distance here - that when it was realized in dath ilan that business cycles were a thing, the economists probably said “This is a coordination problem”, the shadarak backed them, and the serious people got together and coordinated to try to avoid business cycles. Fractional reserve banking definitely wasn’t a thing I remember hearing about, you bought equity in things and that was how you stored value, and when you bought something the corresponding shares were automatically sold in the background. I expect loans were discouraged in favor of equity because bonds they seem to pay steady interest until they suddenly don’t, and a shadarak-trained economist persuaded everyone to remove the black swan generators from the system. Keynesian notions of aggregate demand as a commons problem were not a thing I remember hearing about in dath ilan. NGDP level targeting definitely wasn’t a thing. It was more like, we spotted coordination problems and then the serious people would get together and try not to have them be so bad. Whereas Earth assumes you can’t do that and so Earth actually develops the economic technology needed to make the good outcome be a Nash equilibrium. If somehow, someday, I jump back to dath ilan, I will introduce the idea that serious people don’t need to coordinate to avoid crashes if there is NGDP level targeting because then everything happens automatically, and the shadarak-adjudicated peer review system will be swift to recognize this as a good idea and run experiments, and then, having stolen credit for Scott Sumner’s ideas as I have stolen credit for so many others, I will be recognized enough to talk openly about BDSM.

For obvious reasons, the civilization of dath ilan never thought of itself being smart. We were reaching about the same tech level as Earth. We didn’t have laptops yet, computers were the bulky towers you remember, and I remember our computers being a little slower than the computers I found when I woke up on Earth. There were still newspapers in dath ilan, delivered through the tunnel system, and the newspapers talked about stupidity and slowness-to-adapt and fearsome agency failures (aka corruption scandals) and prestigious people dishonoring their professions, and generally painted a picture of a civilization that was just barely keeping up with a tolerable rate of scientific and economic progress, with coordination always on the brink of failure. I used to be very indignant about that until I came to Earth.

I don’t know what dath ilan’s nuclear power plants ran on; I suspect it was thorium. The price of electricity was often in the news but it wasn’t something you worried about as an individual. Electricity prices were just this key figure of industry and how well the planet was doing, and I think some of that was historical tradition rather than electricity being the limiting resource.

I mention those thorium power plants, if they were in fact thorium, because besides the laser bug zappers, those thorium power plants are pretty much the *only* technology I remember dath ilan having that isn’t already on Earth or wouldn’t be trivial to develop on Earth.

The rest of the distance between Earth and dath ilan - so far as I know, not being an engineer here or there - is just Earth being stupid.

And even with respect to thorium power plants, China could offer a billion dollars in prize money to whichever group submitted a workable design for a liquid flouride thorium reactor, and another billion to the best iteration of that design, and another billion dollars divided up among people who found bugs, and then Earth’s civilization would have effective nuclear power plants. It was a bit more complicated than that in dath ilan, though it’s not like I was ever wise enough to look up the details. But I know that dath ilan had an established system for dividing prize money among contributors and checking for errors. It was understood that most money and prestige had to flow from a prize system open to everyone, rather than being given as patronage, if our civilization wasn’t going to ossify (or as the newspapers would have had it, ossify even further). Our world understood the principle that to get results you pay for results, rather than paying prestigious people to work in offices. Here on Earth, I know that a model thorium plant was built at Oak Ridge in the 1960s. China could have thorium power plants in five years if their technocratic leadership understood *how to buy* the design for one, if they just offered a large enough prize.

Though even the cost of electricity from Earth’s natural gas plants, as I understand from my current reading, should still be enough to make autopiloted underground electric cars with short-range batteries cheaper than gasoline cars *right now*.

Earth could be dath ilan, if it wanted to be, *right now*.

We could have big houses, with windows that shutter in the summer mornings to keep out every bit of the too-early light of dawn, or shutter in the night to leave the stars absolutely untouched. We could have roofs that let in the sun. We could have stained glass mural walls that glow in many colors by day, and red-orange colors by night when it’s time to approach sleep. We could step into autopiloted cars and be almost any of our favorite places in five minutes, with almost no effort. That’s the thing that I miss every day, every time I know that I’m separated from my workplace and my friends by travel time, every time I eat Earth’s horrible food instead of having hot food delivered by a saner tax system that doesn’t tax-privilege me cooking for myself. The roads could be tunnels, and the air could be clean; this Earth has the technology to do tht straightforwardly. We could live in hilly forests, dotted by houses like enormous bushes, with soft walkways that glow red in the evening, until even those go out and all the houses with lights firmly shutter their windows, and the Milky Way glows overhead, the great sky river.

But this Earth is lost, and it does not know the way. And it does not seem to have occurred to anyone who didn’t come from dath ilan that this Earth could use its experimental knowledge of how the human mind works to develop and iterate and test on ways of thinking until you produce the de'a'na est shadarak. Nobody from dath ilan thought of the shadarak as being the great keystone of our civilization, but people *listened* to them, and they *were* trustworthy because they developed tests and ordeals and cognitive methods to make themselves trustworthy, and now that I’m on Earth I understand all too horribly well what a difference that makes.

I say this to complete the circle which began with my arrival: The world of dath ilan did *not* talk about existential risk. I strongly hypothesize that this is one of those things that the serious people and the shadarak had decided would not get better if everyone was talking about it. Nobody talked about nanotechnology, or superviruses, or advanced machine intelligence, and since I’m *damned* sure that our serious people had imaginations good enough to include that, the silence is conspicuous in retrospect. There was also a surprising amount of publicity about reflective consistency in decision theory and “imagine an agent which can modify itself”; I think, in retrospect, that this was to make sure that the basic theory their AI developers were using was exposed to as many eyes as possible. (That’s how I know about timeless decision theory in the first place, though the tiling agents stuff is being reconstructed from much dimmer recollections.) Our computing technology development stalled around 10 years before I came to Earth, and again, now that I’m on Earth, I’m reasonably certain that dath ilan could have built faster computer chips if that had been deemed wise by the serious people.

When I found myself in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s body, with new memories of all this rather important stuff that was somehow not talked about where I came from, I made my best guess that, if there was any purpose or meaning to my being here, it was handling Earth’s intelligence explosion. So that’s where I focused my efforts, and that’s why I haven’t tried to bring to this world any of the other aspects of dath ilan civilization… though I was rather dismayed, even given Yudkowsky’s memories, on how slow Earth’s support was for the mission I did try to prosecute, and I had to quixotically try to start Earth down the 200-year road to the de'a'na est shadarak before any kind of support developed at all for not having the intelligence explosion go entirely awry. And no, after I arrived I didn’t waste a lot of time on being upset or complaining about impossibility. It *is* impossible and it *was* upsetting, but rapid adaptation to the realities of a situation was a talked-up virtue where I came from.

I’ll close with this observation. People were not tortured to death by doctors in dath ilan, when they became sufficiently sick or grew too old. The treatment planner would say that hope was gone. The person would say that it was hurting too much and they didn’t think they had anything to do that was worth staying alive for another few months, and that they didn’t want to cost anyone any more money, which was considered a respectable thing to say. And then they would be cooled down and pumped full of a protectant solution whose formula I don’t know, and stored at what I guess is -120C, judging by how cryonics works in this world. That happened for everyone. Everyone that *might* be sentient. We did it for infant children, even though it was considered probable that infant children were not bearers of subjective experiences. The chimpanzees in their reserve were cryopreserved when they died.

That started happening 80 years ago in dath ilan, and you do not talk, you do not have the right to speak one word, in front of your great-grandparents whose own parents are never coming back. If you want to listen to a sad song about it, you do it in the privacy of your room where nobody else might hear, in case they’re one of those rare people whose sister’s head was tragically crushed in a plane crash. Which doesn’t get printed in the newspapers, because it’s too horrible, and too traumatizing, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you could look it up for yourself if you really wanted. Here’s one very grim song that I can remember, composed in the time just after cryonics was first introduced and people realized they could have done it *five years earlier* if they’d only thought faster - though the song loses a lot in my translation:

Even if the stars should die in heaven
Our sins can never be undone
No single death will be forgiven
When fades at last the last lit sun.
Then in the cold and silent black
As light and matter end
We’ll have ourselves a last look back
And toast an absent friend.

That’s the sentiment which was taken for granted in the world where I grew up, which was not big on cultural relativism either, and I have perhaps understated the extent to which the people of Earth often appear to me as evil rather than only foolish. It’s not something I dwell on, because I don’t think it will make me feel better if I do.

And now comes the part where I remind you that none of this is true, and it’s just an April Fool’s Day jape, because things like that don’t happen in real life. Is it more likely that something would happen which apparently violates the reductionist order of the universe? Or that I’m just some guy who happened to have good ideas leading to ongoing mathematical work in timeless decision theory and tiling agents, who also happened to invent a whole lot of ideas about rationality techniques, and successfully created a small saner community around himself, who happened to arrive at different moral priorities about the value of life and the desirable course of future civilization on his own despite growing up on Earth, who was also able to write fictional literature from what looks like an entirely different literary tradition, and who put a few old things in philosophy like theories of truth on a more reductionist grounding, and who can describe how to combine existing feats that would be straightforward using Earth’s present technology into a better system of material cities along with better ways of organizing medicine and education, which is merely coincidentally just what you would expect of a non-technically-trained refugee from another civilization that had developed along different lines than yours and specialized in different things? Obviously, the non-miraculous explanation is far more likely, because violations of reductionism like the one that brought me here just don’t happen in real life.

Anyone in dath ilan would tell you that. They’ve read the real stuff and been through the real training, not the horrible mangled mess I could manage to remember and write up into the Sequences.

No, I’m actually from this Earth’s future, not from a different Earth. Ha ha! April Fools!

I miss my home.