dath ilan ancillary: finish § on method for worldbuilding criticism

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 03984a2..1be4a6d 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
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@ If you're in the business of coming up with clever plans to solve problems, and
 
 Why wouldn't you? There are more false maps than true maps. If you don't specifically care about [affirmatively telling the truth](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#Intent_to_inform), you mostly end up supplying false maps in order to control people's behavior by means of controling their information, because if you told them the truth, they wouldn't behave the way you want them to. Instrumental convergence is a harsh mistress.
 
-### Interlude: "I Can't Argue With Authorial Fiat"
+### Interlude: Methodology for Worldbuilding Criticism; Or, I Can't Argue With Authorial Fiat
 
 At this point, some readers might object that this kind of "dark" interpretation of a fictional universe oversteps the authority of the literary critic. One imagines that Yudkowsky doesn't particularly think of dath ilan as a world governed by deception. What grounds could I possibly have to argue that it is, given that he's the author and I'm not? Isn't that just making up my own fictional world and substituting it for the "real" dath ilan defined by Yudkowsky's authorial intent?
 
@@ -51,20 +51,15 @@ But the craft of literature isn't a matter of merely conveying a fictional reali
 
 Moreover, a Death of the Author stance seems particularly important for evaluating medianworlds. What makes the exercise of constructing a medianworld interesting is the challenge of envisioning the details of a _realistic_ Society that would result given a population with an alternative [distribution of cognitive repertoires](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/), but where the same generalizations of biology, sociology, and economics that govern our own world are presumed to hold. If the world portrayed by the text [doesn't seem to hold together](/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/) or has [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) that the author doesn't acknowledge, it's the solemn duty of literary critics to point that out to less discerning readers.
 
-In analogy, mathematicians, like authors, are also in the business of creating imaginary worlds, but mathematical objects, once defined, can be examined on their own terms. A mathematician encountering [a deeply unsatisfying theorem about their new definition](https://blog.plover.com/math/major-screwups-4.html) understands that there can be no recourse in protesting, "But that's not how _I_ imagined it working." The response to such an absurd excuse writes itself: if you wanted different behavior, maybe you should have written a better definition!
+In analogy, mathematicians, like authors, are also in the business of creating imaginary worlds, but mathematical objects, once defined, can be examined on their own terms. A mathematician encountering [a deeply unsatisfying theorem about their new definition](https://blog.plover.com/math/major-screwups-4.html) understands that there can be no recourse in protesting, "But that's not how _I_ imagined it working." That would be failing to engage with the real difficulties of mathematical research. If you wanted different behavior, you should have written a better definition!
 
-Worldbuilding critics do well to be similarly merciless with authors. An author who says, "In _my_ medianworld, fully automated luxury gay space communism with central planning just works, because the populace is so smart and nice, unlike _Earth people_, who are so mean and dumb that they have to use _markets_ to allocate scarce resources" is failing to engage with the real complexities of the medianworld exercise, and readers have a right to be skeptical. Maybe the author _is_ 1 standard deviation smarter and nicer than the general population here in the real world. Does that buy you reprieve from the cold equations of the dismal science, really?
+Similarly, an author who says, "In _my_ medianworld, fully automated luxury gay space communism with central planning just works, because the populace is so smart and nice, unlike _Earth people_, who are so mean and dumb that they have to use _markets_ to allocate scarce resources" is failing to engage with the real difficulties of the medianworld exercise. Readers would have a right to be skeptical.
 
-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.
+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.
 
-[TODO: but the rich freedom to specify whatever you want in text is counterbalanced by the rich detail of a real world that wasn't specified in your text; the text is given, but readers trying to imagine a self-consistent world that "projects into" your text are going to have to assume things about the world that you didn't write, in order to make their model add up]
+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 readers' moral compasses can be hijacked by author editorializing. If the story depicts our heroes slaughtering orcs, 
-
-[ TODO—     
-     * We take the text of the story as a given, but we don't have to take dath ilan's self-image literally, if we think a different world could "project" into the same text and explain it better.
-     * 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.
-]
+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
 
@@ -277,3 +272,5 @@ One might have hoped that dath ilani would be self-aware enough to notice that t
 (Yes, I know we've been informed by authorial fiat that dath ilan has a lot of internal diversity, but there are necessarily limits to that if you're going to be a human Society specifically rather than a Solomonff inductor, and it seems clear that any faction that thinks gaslighting Merrin is morally wrong is on the losing end of the counterfactual warfare of democracy.)
 
 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.