PL-timestamp:  Day 17 (13) / Afternoon

Scroll practice!  How does that go?  Anything explode?

Reading a scroll is sort of like pulling the magic on it off the page like pulling extremely sticky tape off a roll. It is incredibly easy to get it all tangled and stuck to itself, at which point the scroll is wasted, though with the scrolls they got him that's not an explosion, just a waste of a scroll.

...does he succeed at any point?

Yeah! About a tenth of the time, maybe getting a little better with more practice but still very chancy even once he's been practicing for most of the afternoon.

Perhaps he shall try this again when his brain is less tired.

Or if it's just down to practice, then practice it shall be.

PL-timestamp:  Day 17 (13) / Late Afternoon

Keltham takes time to hang a first-level wizard spell, no point in missing any practice there either, and then announces an optional lecture on Civilization's Governance.  The topic came to mind, for some odd reason, though his brain is still too tired for chemistry or real math.

The lecture has perfect attendance despite being optional; that sounds really interesting.

Yeah, he sort of figured that might be the case.  If it goes on being the case it means there's no such thing as an 'optional' lecture really, but, neeeevermind.

The way Civilized kids get introduced to this - or at least the way Keltham's class got introduced to this, on reflection he doesn't really know if that was universal or special to some quality that Keltham had with all the other kids, it's not particularly obvious what that could've been, but it's been a while -

Anyways, the starting question is:  Suppose that some passing superpowerful aliens, on their way through, tapped Civilization with a powerful memetic field that wiped all knowledge about anything resembling a government structure or social organization.  They've still got stuff like Probable Utility and Decision and the Fair-Division algorithm, but they can't remember anything about Legislators, Delegates, elections, or even that such a thing as Governance is possible.  They're just standing around blankly in the middle of everything that Civilization has built, trying to figure out what to do now.

They have to reinvent even the concept of government from scratch, and they don't particularly know that's what they're supposed to be inventing.

But again, though these people are now utterly ignorant of government, they are not ignorant; they already have concepts like cooperation-defection-dilemmas.  They are standing around in a total void of particular social organization, but they are allowed to be very clever and think very quickly about new orders that would be possible to create within this void, so long as they really do that from scratch.

How do they reason?  What would they try?  What are their goals?  What would they invent and from which first principles?

Well, says Gregoria, the first thing you need is law enforcement; otherwise society will descend into chaos immediately. It's probably better to deputize people at complete random to apprehend criminals than to take a really long time deciding, but if you have all your other memories then you can pick particularly Lawful people to be law enforcement. And then you need a minimal set of laws, probably 'no murder' and 'no theft'.

That part about not murdering people sounds like a good idea, but... what sort of power gets granted to the No Murder Enforcers?  Maybe the few people who want to be murderers are much more likely than average to sign up for the No Murder Enforcers so they can secretly compact among themselves to get away with that?  Well, Gregoria did say to pick people at random.  If you pick people at random, and at least half of the people picked agree to serve... then maybe the system works for at least a week or two and isn't immediately blown up by adversarial selection on the candidates applying for the position.

Possibly everybody in the world could immediately agree on the random-number system that said who should be an Enforcer.  Possibly almost everyone except the would-be murderers would decide to respect whatever powers the No Murder Enforcers were given.  These are dath ilani, after all.  They're pretty cooperative.  Most of them.  There's always exceptions.

Still, if this system is going to last for more than a couple of hours, there should probably be some sort of Meta-Enforcers to watch the first set of Enforcers?  There's going to be at least some bad Enforcers randomly picked in the system.  Maybe they can do a disproportionate amount of damage, depending on what powers they have, exactly...

Let's set all that aside for the moment, though, because Gregoria then proceeded to say something really confusing.

'Theft'?  Keltham fails to recognize this concept.  There's a bunch of stuff lying around.  Does 'theft' have something to do with that?

.... do we have no records of who owns any of the stuff.

What's an 'own'?  Keltham can determine the color and shape of the various objects around him but how would he determine the 'own' of it?

Wow okay then Gregoria is grabbing a knife and everything she can carry and getting the fuck out of here before the killing starts. 

Someone ask the Taldor girls that question.

It's dath ilan, Gregoria.  Very few people are going to try to kill anyone, and the ones who do will be swarmed by bystanders after a five-second pause while they reinvent the concept of everybody commits to swarm the killer after 5 other people make the same commitment.

Why is she grabbing a bunch of stuff, though?  Was she planning to use it for something later?  Why would you have to grab something now in order to use it later?  Does this have something to do with that 'own' stuff that nobody has explained to Keltham how to experimentally discern as a perceptible property of objects?

She's grabbing a bunch of stuff because she's pretty sure there's in fact no principled foundation for any distribution of the stuff other than 'people get what they can defend' so she should maintain custody of an amount of stuff that's not worth killing her over and is sufficient for survival.

Dath ilan, Gregoria.  The average Intelligence of everybody involved in this process is 16, possibly 17.  They remember learning about cooperation-defection-dilemmas when they were very young.

As soon as everybody visualizes the awful outcome from what Gregoria is describing, they will all, automatically, because they do remember learning about cooperation-defection-dilemmas as children, ask themselves in unison:  "Can we do something else which is not that, and end up not there?"

But, really they're getting ahead of themselves here.

Gregoria seems to be visualizing a world in which if she's touching something, she gets to use it, and if she's not touching something, she doesn't get to use it.  Why would this be the case?  There's stuff lying around.  Why the expectation that she gets to use it if she was previously touching it, but not if somebody else is touching it?  This is a weird system.  Keltham sees no reason to adopt this system himself.  People who need stuff should use it, obviously.

That seems even more doomed than 'you own what you touch' but she admittedly can't explain why.

"No one will work."

What is this 'work' of which she speaks?

In unrelated news, it looks like there's only enough nonperishable food lying around to feed everybody for a couple of years, after which everyone will starve.  But surely before that time comes around, some genius will imagine up something else to do which is not that, and end up not there; it doesn't seem like an urgent problem.

Yes, the genius solution is credibly telling eighty five percent of the people that if they go work on farms they will get stuff as a result, so they go do that and everyone doesn't starve. Which is why 'you get stuff' needs to mean something.

Seems like they’re skipping a lot of derivation steps here.  Almost as if they somehow secretly knew which ultimate destination they wanted to arrive at, and were using the excuse of imminent starvation to immediately propose that solution as if it were the only possible one.

There is a key skill taught in dath ilan, called in Baseline 'blahblahblah' -

Actually Keltham did queue a Share Language (Communal) today and might as well use it so he can, at the very least, use words like that one, and have people hear the meaning as well as his definition.  Gather round, tap tap tap, you all have Baseline for three hours.

There is a key skill taught in dath ilan, called in Baseline 'perspective-taking', which is about carefully controlling your own mind to operate as if it were somebody else's mind, putting yourself into their own shoes and mirroring them in order to simulate them accurately.  It has a crucial special case 'perspective_taking-of-ignorance'.

In this case, they're being asked to simulate somebody who does not know, who has had forgotten and erased from their mind, what it means to own a thing.  It is not, if you take that perspective properly, like unto the experience of looking at things, seeing no ownership tag on them, and jumping from there to the conclusion that other people might grab those things and own them, or fight over them and own them.  You just see things, they have shapes and colors but no property of being owned, that concept has been erased from you.

We're not asking "how do people reinvent ownership".  They don't know they're trying to invent ownership.  They're just pondering the question of how they might avoid starving in a couple of years.

They might imagine that people need incentivizing to work on the farms.  Why jump straight to the conclusion about rewarding them with 'ownership' of the grain the farms produce?  Maybe all the grain goes into a big grain storageunit, and they guard the perimeters of their land to keep out strangers, and only people who worked on the farms are allowed to wander into the big grain storageunit and take grain from there, but they still have no concept that the grain is tagged with a property of being owned by anyone, even themselves collectively.  They're just working to grow grain, and guarding it.

The idea is not that this is a better solution but that it is a simpler solution that seems to maybe solve the immediate problem of people starving in two years.  Somebody thinking about just that problem, who didn't have a concept in their minds of 'ownership', might come up with this simpler solution that apparently solves the problem of immediate starvation in two years, before they invented anything as complicated as ownership.  It would take some more difficult problem to motivate that one.