It does not seems like there will be straight answers to that:
It’s the story of Keltham, from the world of dath ilan; a place of high scientific achievement but rather innocent in some ways. For mysterious reasons they’ve screened off their own past, and very few now know what their prescientific history was like.
There’s actually quite a bit about dath ilan exposed in planecrash—they’ve screened off their history from their citizens, not from readers. Also many of the ways dath ilan is good doesn’t depend on its history, and many of the rationality lessons in planecrash aren’t directly about dath ilan.
There are a few principles I’d be interested in people extracting, but two things I’d be particularly excited about (minor spoilers):
“Lawfulness” and its facets: Bayes, expected utility, the ability to coordinate and trade, etc.
How Keltham analyzes everything to try to understand it as an equilibrium between rational actors, whether this works in real life, and how to do it (partially covered in Inadequate Equilibria)
It does not seems like there will be straight answers to that:
There’s actually quite a bit about dath ilan exposed in planecrash—they’ve screened off their history from their citizens, not from readers. Also many of the ways dath ilan is good doesn’t depend on its history, and many of the rationality lessons in planecrash aren’t directly about dath ilan.
There are a few principles I’d be interested in people extracting, but two things I’d be particularly excited about (minor spoilers):
“Lawfulness” and its facets: Bayes, expected utility, the ability to coordinate and trade, etc.
How Keltham analyzes everything to try to understand it as an equilibrium between rational actors, whether this works in real life, and how to do it (partially covered in Inadequate Equilibria)