It seems worth pointing out that dath ilan isn’t just econoliterate and its advantages over earth aren’t supposed to be consequences just of much greater economic literacy. In particular, they depend on 1. a population that is smarter than that of earth, and 2. widespread appreciation among that population of a way of thinking that is mathematically valid and automatically motivates those who understand it to act in better-coordinated ways than we do.
#1 is imaginable but obviously difficult to achieve. I’m not quite sure whether Eliezer thinks the way of thinking in #2 exists (and equals “timeless/updateless/logical/functional decision theory”) or not, but to me it is not at all clear that any way of thinking actually has those properties.
I think part of the deal with Dath Ilan is that there was a deliberate eugenics program to bring about #1 (I’m not sure if the world is supposed to have a single-point-of-departure from earth or be quite different in many ways, and whether the baseline intelligence was higher)
It’s deliberately vague, and there’s a lot of authorial leeway due to that screening off of all but the most recent history in the setting. The continents correspond and the humans are indistinguishable on casual observation from Earth humans physically, medically, and behaviourally, so it should be some sort of alternate history Earth. Whether any divergence is 200 or 20k years ago is hard to say (and Eliezer may not yet have decided).
It seems worth pointing out that dath ilan isn’t just econoliterate and its advantages over earth aren’t supposed to be consequences just of much greater economic literacy. In particular, they depend on 1. a population that is smarter than that of earth, and 2. widespread appreciation among that population of a way of thinking that is mathematically valid and automatically motivates those who understand it to act in better-coordinated ways than we do.
#1 is imaginable but obviously difficult to achieve. I’m not quite sure whether Eliezer thinks the way of thinking in #2 exists (and equals “timeless/updateless/logical/functional decision theory”) or not, but to me it is not at all clear that any way of thinking actually has those properties.
I think part of the deal with Dath Ilan is that there was a deliberate eugenics program to bring about #1 (I’m not sure if the world is supposed to have a single-point-of-departure from earth or be quite different in many ways, and whether the baseline intelligence was higher)
It’s deliberately vague, and there’s a lot of authorial leeway due to that screening off of all but the most recent history in the setting. The continents correspond and the humans are indistinguishable on casual observation from Earth humans physically, medically, and behaviourally, so it should be some sort of alternate history Earth. Whether any divergence is 200 or 20k years ago is hard to say (and Eliezer may not yet have decided).