# Review: Planecrash

Take a stereotypical fantasy novel, a textbook on mathematical logic, and *Fifty Shades of Grey*. Mix them all together and add extra weirdness for spice. The result might look a lot like [Planecrash](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA9hDewwsYgnuscae/projectlawful-com-eliezer-s-latest-story-past-1m-words) (AKA: Project Lawful), a work of fiction co-written by "Iarwain" (a pen-name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and "lintamande".

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d62e620-9183-40a7-8f24-0505f1915e13_295x324.png)

*(image credit: Planecrash)*

Yudkowsky is not afraid to be verbose and self-indulgent in his writing. He previously wrote a [Harry Potter fanfic](https://hpmor.com/) that includes what's essentially an extended Ender's Game fanfic in the middle of it, because why not. In Planecrash, it starts with the very format: it's written as a series of [forum posts](https://www.projectlawful.com/board_sections/703) (though there are [ways to get an ebook](https://www.mikescher.com/blog/29/Project_Lawful_ebook)). It continues with maths lectures embedded into the main arc, totally plot-irrelevant tangents that are just Yudkowsky [ranting about frequentist statistics](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5826), and one instance of Yudkowsky hijacking the plot for a few pages to [soapbox about his pet Twitter feuds](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/6132?page=49) (with transparent in-world analogues for Effective Altruism, TPOT, and the post-rationalists). Planecrash does not aspire to be high literature. Yudkowsky is self-aware of this, and uses it to troll big-name machine learning researchers:

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2144e92-9979-4d2d-ae52-c12af49b3004_952x342.png)

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc82f799f-ecb8-4e42-bd01-1274b61b2f2f_972x276.png)

*(*[*source*](https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1654171832994365475)*)*

why would anyone ever read Planecrash? I read (admittedly—sometimes skimmed) it, and I see two reasons:

1.  The characters are competent in a way that characters in fiction rarely are. Yudkowsky is good at writing [intelligent characters](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing) in a specific way that I haven't seen anyone else do as well. Lintamande writes a uniquely compelling story of determination and growth in an extremely competent character.
2.  More than anyone else I've yet read, Yudkowsky has his own totalising and self-consistent worldview/philosophy, and Planecrash makes it pop more than anything else he's written.

**The setup**
-------------

[Dath ilan](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1773731#reply-1773731) is an alternative quasi-utopian Earth, based (it's at least strongly hinted) on the premise of: what if the average person was Eliezer Yudkowsky? Dath ilan has all the normal quasi-utopian things like world government and land-value taxes and the widespread use of Bayesian statistics in science. Dath ilan also has some less-normal things, like annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow the Government festivals, an order of super-rationalists, and extremely high financial rewards for designing educational curricula that bring down the age at which the average child learns the maths behind the game theory of cooperation.

Keltham is an above-average-selfishness, slightly-above-average-intelligence young man from dath ilan. He dies in the titular plane crash, and wakes up in Cheliax.

Cheliax is a country in a medieval fantasy world in another *plane* of existence to dath ilan's (get it?). (This fantasy world is copied from a role-playing game setting—a fact I discovered when Planecrash literally linked to a Wiki article to explain part of the in-universe setting.) Like every other country in this world, Cheliax is medieval and poor. Unlike the other countries, Cheliax has the additional problem of being ruled by the forces of Hell.

Keltham meets Carissa, a Chelish military wizard who alerts the Chelish government about Keltham. Keltham is kept unaware about the Hellish nature of Cheliax, so he's eager to use his knowledge to start the scientific and industrial revolutions in Cheliax to solve the medieval poverty thing—starting with delivering lectures on first-order logic (why, what else would you first do in a medieval fantasy world?). An elaborate game begins where Carissa and a select group of Chelish agents try to extract maximum science from an unwitting Keltham before he realises what Cheliax really is—and hope that by that time, they'll have tempted him to change his morals towards a darker, more Cheliax-compatible direction.

**The characters**
------------------

Keltham oscillates somewhere between annoying and endearing.

The annoyingness comes from his gift for interrupting any moment with polysyllabic word vomit. Thankfully, this is not random pretentious techno-babble but a coherent depiction of a verbose character who thinks in terms of a non-standard set of concepts. Keltham's thoughts often include an exclamation along the lines of "what, how is {'coordination failure' / 'probability distribution' / 'decision-theoretic-counterfactual-threat-scenario'} so many syllables in this language, how do these people ever talk?"—not an unreasonable question. However, the sheer volume of Keltham's verbosity is still something, especially when it gets in the way of everything else.

The endearingness comes from his manic rationalist problem-solver energy, which gets applied to everything from figuring out chemical processes for magic ingredients to estimating the odds that he's involved in a conspiracy to managing the complicated social scene Cheliax places him in. It's somewhat like *The Martian*, a novel (and movie) about an astronaut stranded on Mars solving a long series of [engineering challenges](https://xkcd.com/1536/), but the problem-solving is much more abstract and game-theoretic and interpersonal, than concrete and physical and man-versus-world.

By far the best and most interesting character in Planecrash is Carissa Sevar, one of the several characters whose point-of-view is written by lintamande rather than Yudkowsky. She's so driven that she accidentally becomes a cleric of the god of self-improvement. She grapples realistically with the large platter of problems she's handed, experiences triumph and failure, and keeps choosing pain over stasis. All this leads to perhaps the greatest arc of grit and unfolding ambition that I've read in fiction.

**The competence**
------------------

I have a memory of once reading some rationalist blogger describing the worldview of some politician as: there's no such thing as competence, only loyalty. If a problem doesn't get solved, it's definitely not because the problem was tricky and there was insufficient intelligence applied to it or a missing understanding of its nature or someone was genuinely incompetent. It's always because whoever was working on it wasn't loyal enough to you. (I thought this was Scott Alexander on Trump, but the closest from him seems to be [this](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/19/book-review-the-art-of-the-deal/), which makes a very different point.)

***EDIT:** it was Scott Alexander on Trump, but in a* [*different post*](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/)*, as helpfully pointed out by* [*a Substack commenter*](https://nosetgauge.substack.com/p/review-planecrash/comment/97802265)*: “He lives in a world where there is no such thing as intelligence, only loyalty. If we haven’t solved all of our problems yet, it’s because the Department of Problem-Solving was insufficiently loyal, and didn’t try hard enough. His only promise is to fill that department with loyal people who really want the problem solved.”*

Whether or not I hallucinated this, the worldview of Planecrash is the opposite.

Consider Queen Abrogail Thrune II, the despotic and unhinged ruler of Cheliax who has a flair for torture. You might imagine that her main struggles are paranoia over the loyalty of her minions, and finding time to take glee in ruling over her subjects. And there's some of those. But more than that, she spends a lot of time being annoyed by how incompetent everyone around her is.

Or consider Aspexia Rugatonn, Cheliax's religious leader and therefore in charge of making the country worship Hell. She's basically a kindly grandmother figure, except not. You might expect her thoughts to be filled with deep emotional conviction about Hell, or disappointment in the "moral" failures of those who don't share her values (i.e. every non-sociopath who isn't brainwashed hard enough). But instead, she spends a lot of her time annoyed that other people don't understand how to act most usefully within the bounds of the god of Hell's instructions. The one time she gets emotional is when a Chelish person finally manages to explain the concept of [corrigibility](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/corrigibility) to her as well as Aspexia herself could. (The gods and humans in the Planecrash universe are in a weird inverse version of the AI alignment problem. The gods are superintelligent, but have restricted communication bandwidth and clarity with humans. Therefore humans often have to decide how to interpret tiny snippets of god-orders through changing circumstances. So instead of having to steer the superintelligence given limited means, the core question is how to let yourself be steered by a superintelligence that has very limited communication bandwidth with you.)

Fiction is usually filled with characters who advance the plot in helpful ways with their emotional fumbles: consider the stereotypical horror movie protagonist getting mad and running into a dark forest alone, or a character whose pride is insulted doing a dumb thing on impulse. Planecrash has almost none of that. The characters are all good at their jobs. They are surrounded by other competent actors with different goals thinking hard about how to counter their moves, and they always think hard in response, and the smarter side tends to win. Sometimes you get the feeling you're just reading the meeting notes of a competent team struggling with a hard problem. Evil is not dumb or insane, but just "unaligned" by virtue of pursuing a different goal than you—and does so very competently. For example: the core values of the forces of Hell are literally tyranny, slavery, and pain. They have a strict hierarchy and take deliberate steps to encourage arbitrary despotism out of religious conviction. And yet: their hierarchy is still mostly an actual competence hierarchy, because the decision-makers are all very self-aware that they can only be despotic to the extent that it still promotes competence on net. Because they're competent.

Planecrash, at its heart, is [competence porn](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CompetencePorn). Keltham's home world of dath ilan is defined by its absence of coordination failures. Neither there nor in Cheliax's world are there really any lumbering bureaucracies that do insane things for inscrutable bureaucratic reasons; all the organisations depicted are all remarkably sane. Important positions are almost always filled by the smart, skilled, and hardworking. Decisions aren't made because of emotional outbursts. Instead, lots of agents go around optimising for their goals by thinking hard about them. For a certain type of person, this is a very relaxing world to read about, despite all the hellfire

**The philosophy**
------------------

"[Rationality is systematized winning](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARtkT3EYox3THYjF/rationality-is-systematized-winning)", writes Yudkowsky in [The Sequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality). All the rest is commentary.

The core move in Yudkowsky's philosophy is:

*   We want to find the general solution to some problem.
    *   for example: fairness—how should we split gains from a project where many people participated
*   Now here are some common-sense properties that this thing should follow
    *   for example:
        *   (1) no gains should be left undivided
        *   (2) if two people both contribute identically to every circumstance (formalised as a set of participating people), they should receive an equal share of the gains
        *   (3) the rule should give the same answer if you combine the division of gains from project A and then project B, as when you use it to calculate the division of gains from project A+B
        *   (4) if one person doesn't add value in any circumstance, their share of the gains is zero
*   Here is The Solution. Note that it's mathematically provable that if you don't follow The Solution, there exists a situation where you will do something obviously dumb.
    *   For example: [Shapely value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_value) is the unique solution that satisfies the axioms above. (The Planecrash walkthrough of Shapely value is roughly [here](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1730444#reply-1730444); see also [here](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1729094#reply-1729094) for more Planecrash about trade and fairness.)
*   Therefore, The Solution is uniquely spotlighted by the combination of common-sense goals and maths as the final solution to this problem, and if you disagree, please read this 10,000 word dialogue.

The centrality of this move is something I did not get from The Sequences, but which is very apparent in Planecrash. A lot of the maths in Planecrash isn't new Yudkowsky material. But Planecrash is the only thing that has given me a *map* through the core objects of Yudkowsky's philosophy, and spelled out the high-level structure so clearly. It's also, as far as I know, the most detailed description of Yudkowsky's quasi-utopian world of dath ilan.

### **Validity, Probability, Utility**

Keltham's lectures to the Chelish—yes, there are actually literal maths lectures within Planecrash—walk through three key examples, at a spotty level of completeness but at a high quality of whatever is covered:

1.  Validity, i.e. logic. In particular, Yudkowksy highlights what I think is some combination of [Lindstrom's theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindstr%C3%B6m%27s_theorem) and [Godel's completeness theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_completeness_theorem), that together imply first-order logic is the unique logic that is both complete (i.e. everything true within it can be proven) and has some other nice properties. However, first-order logic is also not strong enough to capture some things we care about (such as the natural numbers), so this is the least-strong example of the above pattern. Yudkowsky has written out his thoughts on logic in the [mathematics and logic section here](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SqFbMbtxGybdS2gRs), if you want to read his takes in a non-fiction setting.
2.  Probability. So-called [Dutch book theorems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_book_theorems) show that if an agent does not update their beliefs in a Bayesian way, there exists a set of losing bets that they would take despite it leading to a guaranteed loss. So your credences in beliefs should be represented as probabilities, and you should update those probabilities with Bayes' theorem. ([Here](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1750558#reply-1750558) is a list of English statements that, dath ilani civilisation thinks, anyone competent in Probability should be able to translate into correct maths.)
3.  Utility. The behaviour of any agent that is "rational" in a certain technical sense should be describable as it having a "utility function", i.e. every outcome can be assigned a number, such that the agent predictably chooses outcomes with higher numbers over those with lower ones. This is because if an agent violates this constraint, there must exist situations where it would do something obviously dumb. As a shocked Keltham puts it: "I, I mean, there's being chaotic, and then there's being so chaotic that it violates *coherence theorems*".

In Yudkowsky's own words, not in Planecrash but in an [essay he wrote](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RQpNHSiWaXTvDxt6R/coherent-decisions-imply-consistent-utilities) (with much valuable discussion in the comments):

> *We have multiple spotlights all shining on the same core mathematical structure, saying dozens of different variants on, "If you aren't running around in circles or stepping on your own feet or wantonly giving up things you say you want, we can see your behavior as corresponding to this shape. Conversely, if we can't see your behavior as corresponding to this shape, you must be visibly shooting yourself in the foot." Expected utility is the only structure that has this great big family of discovered theorems all saying that. It has a scattering of academic competitors, because academia is academia, but the competitors don't have anything like that mass of spotlights all pointing in the same direction.*
> 
> *So if we need to pick an interim answer for "What kind of quantitative framework should I try to put around my own decision-making, when I'm trying to check if my thoughts make sense?" or "By default and barring special cases, what properties might a sufficiently advanced machine intelligence look to us like it possessed, at least approximately, if we couldn't see it visibly running around in circles?", then there's pretty much one obvious candidate: Probabilities, utility functions, and expected utility.*

### **Coordination**

Next, coordination. There is no single theorem or total solution for the problem of coordination. But the Yudkowskian frame has near-infinite scorn for failures of coordination. Imagine not realising all possible gains just because you're stuck in some equilibrium of agents defecting against each other. Is that winning? No, it's not. Therefore, it must be out.

Dath ilan has a mantra that goes, roughly: if you do that, you will end up there, so if you want to end up somewhere that is not there, you will have to do Something Else Which Is Not That. And the basic premise of dath ilan is that society actually has the ability to collectively say "we are currently going there, and we don't want to, and while none of us can individually change the outcome, we will all coordinate to take the required collective action and not defect against each other in the process even if we'd gain from doing so". Keltham claims that in dath ilan, if there somehow developed an oppressive tyranny, everyone would wait for some [Schelling time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)#:~:text=In%20game%20theory%2C%20a%20focal,Strategy%20of%20Conflict%20(1960).) (like a solar eclipse or the end of the calendar year or whatever) and then simultaneously rise up in rebellion. It probably helps that dath ilan has annual "oops it's time to overthrow the government" exercises. It also helps that everyone in dath ilan knows that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows (...) all the [standard rationalist takes on coordination and common knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge).

Keltham summarises the universality of Validity, Probability, Utility, and Coordination (note the capitals):

> *"I am a lot more confident that Validity, Probability, and Utility are still singled-out mathematical structures whose fragmented shards and overlapping shadows hold power in Golarion \[=the world of Cheliax\], than I am confident that I already know why snowflakes here have sixfold symmetry. And I wanted to make that clear before I said too much about the hidden orders of reality out of dath ilan - that even if the things I am saying are entirely wrong about Golarion, that kind of specific knowledge is not the most important knowledge I have to teach. I have gone into this little digression about Validity and timelessness and optimality, in order to give you some specific reason to think that \[...\] some of the knowledge he has to teach is sufficiently general that you have strong reason for strong hope that it will work \[...\] \[...\] "It is said also in dath ilan that there is a final great principle of Law, less beautiful in its mathematics than the first three, but also quite important in practice; it goes by the name Coordination, and deals with agents simultaneously acting in such fashion to all get more of what they wanted than if they acted separately."*

### **Decision theory**

The final fundamental bit of Yudkowsky's philosophy is decision theories more complicated than causal decision theory.

A short primer / intuition pump: a decision theory specifies how you should choose between various options (it's not moral philosophy, because it assumes that we know already know *what* we value). The most straightforward decision theory is causal decision theory, which says: pick the option that causes the best outcome in expectation. Done, right? No; the devil is in the word "causes". Yudkowsky makes much of [Newcomb's problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality), but I prefer another example: [Parfit's hitchhiker](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/parfits-hitchhiker). Imagine you're a selfish person stuck in a desert without your wallet, and want to make it back to your hotel in the city. A car pulls up, with a driver who knows whether you're telling the truth. You ask to be taken back to your hotel. The driver asks if you'll pay $10 to them as a service. Dying in the desert is worse for you than paying $10, so you'd like to take this offer. However, you obey causal decision theory: if the driver takes you to your hotel, you would go to your hotel to get your wallet, but once inside you have the option between (a) take $10 back to the driver and therefore lose money, and (b) stay in your hotel and lose no money. Causal decision theory says to take option (b), because you're a selfish agent who doesn't care about the driver. And the driver knows you'd be lying if you said "yes", so you have to tell the driver "no". The driver drives off, and you die of thirst in the desert. If only you had spent more time arguing about non-causal decision theories on LessWrong.

Dying in a desert rather than spending $10 is not exactly systematised winning. So causal decision theory is out. (You could argue that another moral of Parfit's hitchhiker is that being a purely selfish agent is bad, and humans aren't purely selfish so it's not applicable to the real world anyway, but in Yudkowsky's philosophy—and decision theory academia—you want a *general* solution to the problem of rational choice where you can take *any* utility function and *win* by *its* lights regardless of which convoluted setup philosophers drop you into.) Yudkowsky's main academic / mathematical accomplishment is co-inventing (with Nate Soares) [functional decision theory](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05060), which says you should consider your decisions as the output of a fixed function, and then choose the function that leads to the best consequences for you. This solves Parfit's hitchhiker, as well as problems like [the smoking lesion problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/smoking-lesion) that [evidential decision theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidential_decision_theory), the classic non-causal decision theory, succumbs to. As far as I can judge, functional decision theory is actually a good idea (if somewhat underspecified), but academic engagement (whether critiques and praises) with it has been limited so there's no broad consensus in its favor that I can point at. (If you want to read Yudkowsky's explanation for why he doesn't spend more effort on academia, it's [here](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1729119#reply-1729119).)

(Now you know what a Planecrash tangent feels like, except you don't, because Planecrash tangents can be *much* longer.)

One big aspect of Yudkowskian decision theory is how to respond to threats. Following causal decision theory means you can neither make credible threats nor commit to deterrence to counter threats. Yudkowsky endorses not responding to threats to avoid incentivising them, while also having deterrence commitments to maintain good equilibria. He also implies this is a consequence of using a sensible functional decision theory. But there's a tension here: your deterrence commitment could be interpreted as a threat by someone else, or visa versa. When the Eisenhower administration's nuclear doctrine threatened massive nuclear retaliation in event of the Soviets taking West Berlin, what's the exact maths that would've let them argue to the Soviets "no no this isn't a threat, this is just a deterrence commitment", while allowing the Soviets keep to Yudkowsky's strict rule to ignore all threats?

My (uninformed) sense is that this maths hasn't been figured out. Planecrash never describes it (though [here](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1770000#reply-1770000) is some discussion of decision theory in Planecrash). Posts in the LessWrong decision theory canon like [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wXbSAKu2AcohaK2Gt/udt-shows-that-decision-theory-is-more-puzzling-than-ever) or [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/brXr7PJ2W4Na2EW2q/the-commitment-races-problem) and [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g8HHKaWENEbqh2mgK/updatelessness-doesn-t-solve-most-problems-1) seem to point to real issues around decision theories encouraging commitment races, and when Yudkowsky pipes up in the comments he's mostly falling back on the conviction that, surely, sufficiently-smart agents will find some way around mutual destruction in a commitment race (systematised winning, remember?). There are also various [critiques of functional decision theory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySLYSsNeFL5CoAQzN/a-critique-of-functional-decision-theory) (see also [Abram Demski's comment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySLYSsNeFL5CoAQzN/a-critique-of-functional-decision-theory?commentId=y8zRwcpNeu2ZhM3yE) on that post acknowledging that functional decision theory is underspecified). Perhaps it all makes sense if you've worked through Appendix B7 of Yudkowsky's big decision theory paper (which I haven't actually read, let alone taken time to digest), but (a) why doesn't he reference that appendix then, and (b) I'd complain about that being hard to find, but then again we are talking about the guy who leaves the clearest and most explicit description of his philosophy scattered across an R-rated role-playing-game fanfic posted in innumerable parts on an obscure internet forum, so I fear my complaint would be falling on deaf ears anyway.

### **The political philosophy of dath ilan**

Yudkowsky has put a lot of thought into how the world of dath ilan functions. Overall it's very coherent.

[Here's a part where Keltham explains dath ilan's central management principle](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1743445#reply-1743445): everything, including every project, every rule within any company, and any legal regulation, needs to have one person responsible for it.

> *Keltham is informed, though he doesn't think he's ever been tempted to make that mistake himself, that overthinky people setting up corporations sometimes ask themselves 'But wait, what if this person here can't be trusted to make decisions all by themselves, what if they make the wrong decision?' and then try to set up more complicated structures than that. This basically never works. If you don't trust a power, make that power legible, make it localizable to a single person, make sure every use of it gets logged and reviewed by somebody whose job it is to review it. If you make power complicated, it stops being legible and visible and recordable and accountable and then you actually are in trouble.*

[Here's a part where Keltham talks about how dath ilan solves the problem of who watches the watchmen](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1772752#reply-1772752):

> *If you count the rehearsal festivals for it, Civilization spends more on making sure Civilization can collectively outfight the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military, than Civilization spends on its actual military.*

[Here's a part where dath ilan's choice of political system is described](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1773754#reply-1773754), which I will quote at length:

> *Conceptually and to first-order, the ideal that Civilization is approximating is a giant macroagent composed of everybody in the world, taking coordinated macroactions to end up on the multi-agent-optimal frontier, at a point along that frontier reflecting a fair division of the gains from that coordinated macroaction -*
> 
> *Well, to be clear, the dath ilani would shut it all down if actual coordination levels started to get anywhere near that. Civilization has spoken - with nearly one voice, in fact - that it does not want to turn into a hivemind.*
> 
> *\[...\]*
> 
> *Conceptually and to second-order, then, Civilization thinks it should be divided into a Private Sphere and a Public Shell. Nearly all the decisions are made locally, but subject to a global structure that contains things like "children may not be threatened into unpaid labor"; or "everybody no matter who they are or what they have done retains the absolute right to cryosuspension upon their death"; \[...\]*
> 
> *\[...\]*
> 
> *Directdemocracy has been tried, from time to time, within some city of dath ilan: people making group decisions by all individually voting on them. It can work if you try it with fifty people, even in the most unstructured way. Get the number of direct voters up to ten thousand people, and no amount of helpfully-intended structure in the voting process can save you.*
> 
> *\[...\]*
> 
> *Republics have been tried, from time to time, within some city of dath ilan: people making group decisions by voting to elect leaders who make those decisions. It can work if you try it with fifty people, even in the most unstructured way. Get the number of voters up to ten thousand people, and no amount of helpfully-intended structure in the voting process Acan save you.*
> 
> *\[...\]*
> 
> *There are a hundred more clever proposals for how to run Civilization's elections. If the current system starts to break, one of those will perhaps be adopted. Until that day comes, though, the structure of Governance is the simplest departure from directdemocracy that has been found to work at all.*
> 
> *Every voter of Civilization, everybody at least thirteen years old or who has passed some competence tests before then, primarily exerts their influence through delegating their vote to a Delegate.*
> 
> *A Delegate must have at least fifty votes to participate in the next higher layer at all; and can retain no more than two hundred votes before the marginal added influence from each additional vote starts to diminish and grow sublinearly. Most Delegates are not full-time, unless they are representing pretty rich people, but they're expected to be people interested in politics \[...\]. Your Delegate might be somebody you know personally and trust, if you're the sort to know so many people personally that you know one Delegate. \[...\]*
> 
> *If you think you've got a problem with the way Civilization is heading, you can talk to your Delegate about that, and your Delegate has time to talk back to you.*
> 
> *That feature has been found to not actually be dispensable in practice. It needs to be the case that, when you delegate your vote, you know who has your vote, and you can talk to that person, and they can talk back. Otherwise people feel like they have no lever at all to pull on the vast structure that is Governance, that there is nothing visible that changes when a voter casts their one vote. Sure, in principle, there's a decision-cohort whose votes move in logical synchrony with yours, and your cohort is probably quite large unless you're a weird person. But some part of you more basic than that will feel like you're not in control, if the only lever you have is an election that almost never comes down to the votes of yourself and your friends.*
> 
> *The rest of the electoral structure follows almost automatically, once you decide that this property has to be preserved at each layer.*
> 
> *The next step up from Delegates are Electors, full-time well-paid professionals who each aggregate 4,000 to 25,000 underlying voters from 50 to 200 Delegates. Few voters can talk to their Electors \[...\] but your Delegate can have some long conversations with them. \[...\]*
> 
> *Representatives aggregate Electors, ultimately 300,000 to 3,000,000 underlying votes apiece. There are roughly a thousand of those in all Civilization, at any given time, with social status equivalent to an excellent CEO of a large company or a scientist who made an outstanding discovery \[...\]*
> 
> *And above all this, the Nine Legislators of Civilization are those nine candidates who receive the most aggregate underlying votes from Representatives. They vote with power proportional to their underlying votes; but when a Legislator starts to have voting power exceeding twice that of the median Legislator, their power begins to grow sublinearly. By this means is too much power prevented from concentrating into a single politician's hands.*
> 
> *Surrounding all this of course are numerous features that any political-design specialist of Civilization would consider obvious:*
> 
> *Any voter (or Delegate or Elector or Representative) votes for a list of three possible delegees of the next layer up; if your first choice doesn't have enough votes yet to be a valid representor, your vote cascades down to the next person on your list, but remains active and ready to switch up if needed. This lets you vote for new delegees entering the system, without that wasting your vote while there aren't enough votes yet.*
> 
> *Anyone can at any time immediately eliminate a person from their 3-list, but it takes a 60-day cooldown to add a new person or reorder the list. The government design isn't meant to make it cheap or common to threaten your delegee with a temporary vote-switch if they don't vote your way on that particular day. The government design isn't meant to make it possible for a new brilliant charismatic leader to take over the entire government the next day with no cooldowns. It is meant to let you rapidly remove your vote from a delegee that has sufficiently ticked you off.*
> 
> *Once you have served as a Delegate, or delegee of any other level, you can't afterwards serve in any other branches of Governance. \[...\]*
> 
> *This is meant to prevent a political structure whose upper ranks offer promotion as a reward to the most compliant members of the ranks below, for by this dark-conspiratorial method the delegees could become aligned to the structure above rather than their delegators below.*
> 
> *(Most dath ilani would be suspicious of a scheme that tried to promote Electors from Delegates in any case; they wouldn't think there should be a political career ladder \[...\] Dath ilani are instinctively suspicious of all things meta, and much more suspicious of anything purely meta; they want heavy doses of object-level mixed in. To become an Elector you do something impressive enough, preferably something entirely outside of Governance, that Delegates will be impressed by you. You definitely don't become an Elector by being among the most ambitious and power-seeking people who wanted to climb high and knew they had to start out a lowly Delegate, who then won a competition to serve the system above them diligently enough to be selected for a list of Electors fed to a political party's captive Delegates. If a dath ilani saw a system like this, that was supposedly a democracy set in place by the will of its people, they would ask what the captive 'voters' even thought they were supposedly trying to do under the official story.)*

Dath ilani Legislators have a programmer's or engineer's appreciation for simplicity:

> *\[...\] each \[regulation\] must be read aloud by a Legislator who thereby accepts responsibility for that regulation; and when that Legislator retires a new Legislator must be found to read aloud and accept responsibility for that regulation, or it will be stricken from the books. Every regulation in Civilization, if something goes wrong with it, is the fault of one particular Legislator who accepted responsibility for it. To speak it aloud, it is nowadays thought, symbolizes the acceptance of this responsibility.*
> 
> *Modern dath ilani aren't really the types in the first place to produce literally-unspeakable enormous volumes of legislation that no hapless citizen or professional politician could ever read within their one lifetime let alone understand. Even dath ilani who aren't professional programmers have written enough code to know that each line of code to maintain is an ongoing cost. Even dath ilani who aren't professional economists know that regulatory burdens on economies increase quadratically in the cost imposed on each transaction. They would regard it as contrary to the notion of a lawful polity with law-abiding citizens that the citizens cannot possibly know what all the laws are, let alone obey them. Dath ilani don't go in for fake laws in the same way as Golarion polities with lots of them; they take laws much too seriously to put laws on the books just for show.*

Finally, the Keepers are an order of people trained in all the most hardcore arts of rationality, and who thus end up with inhuman integrity and even-handedness of judgement. They are used in many ways, for example:

> *There are also Keeper cutouts at key points along the whole structure of Governance - the Executive of the Military reports not only to the Chief Executive but also to an oathsworn Keeper who can prevent the Executive of the Military from being fired, demoted, or reduced in salary, just because the Chief Executive or even the Legislature says so. It would be a big deal, obviously, for a Keeper to fire this override; but among the things you buy when you hire a Keeper is that the Keeper will do what they said they'd do and not give five flying fucks about what sort of 'big deal' results. If the Legislators and the Chief Executive get together and decide to order the Military to crush all resistance, the Keeper cutout is there to ensure that the Executive of the Military doesn't get a pay cut immediately after they tell the Legislature and Chief Executive to screw off.*

Also, to be clear, absolutely none of this is plot-relevant.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcaa2b347-2669-4294-b3c4-d4ed7ca67c9b_400x400.png)

*Above: the icon of dath ilan in Planecrash. When Yudkowsky really wants to monologue, he stops even pretending to do it through a character, and instead we get this talking globe. Hello, globe. Nice political philosophy you got there.*

**A system of the world**
-------------------------

Yudkowsky proves that ideas matter: if you have ideas that form a powerful and coherent novel worldview, it doesn't matter if your main method for publicising them is ridiculously-long fanfiction, or if you dropped out of high school, or if you wear fedoras. People will still listen, and you might become (so far) the 21st century's most important philosopher.

Why is Yudkowsky so compelling? There are intellectuals like [Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/about/) who are most-strongly identified by a particular *method* (an even-handed, epistemically-rigorous, steelmaning-focused treatment of a topic), or intellectuals like [Robin Hanson](https://overcoming-bias-anthology.com/) who are most-strongly identified by a particular *style* (eclectic irreverence about incentive mechanisms). But Yudkowsky's hallmark is delivering an entire system of the world that covers everything from logic to what correct epistemology looks like to the maths behind rational decision-making and coordination, and comes complete with identifying the biggest threat (misaligned AI) and the structure of utopia (dath ilan). None of the major technical inventions (except some in decision theory) are original to Yudkowsky. But he's picked up the pieces, slotted them into a big coherent structure, and presented it in great depth. And Yudkowsky's system claims to come with *proofs* for many key bits, in the literal mathematical sense. No, you can't crack open a textbook and see everything laid out, step-by-step. But the implicit claim is: read this long essay on coherence theorems, these papers on decision theory, this 20,000-word dialogue, these sequences on LessWrong, and ideally a few fanfics too, and then you'll get it.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb60a4faf-39e0-4dd6-9e5e-9009c9befadb_1212x330.png)

*After reading Yudkowsky, you're perfectly inoculated against any philosophy so lazy that it doesn't even come with mathematical proofs. (*[*source*](https://x.com/robinhanson/status/810281385852276736)*)*

Does he deliver? To an impressive extent, yes. There's a lot of maths that *is* laid out step-by-step and *does* check out. There are many takes that are correct, and big structures that point in the right direction, and what seems wrong at least has depth and is usefully provocative. But dig deep enough, and there are cracks: [arguments](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCuzmCsE86BTu9PfA/there-are-no-coherence-theorems) about how much [coherence theorems](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NxF5G6CJiof6cemTw/coherence-arguments-do-not-entail-goal-directed-behavior) really imply, [critiques](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySLYSsNeFL5CoAQzN/a-critique-of-functional-decision-theory) of the decision theory, and [good counterarguments](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer) to the most extreme versions of Yudkowsky's AI risk thesis. You can chase any of these cracks up towers of LessWrong posts, or debate them endlessly at those parties where people stand in neat circles and exchange thought experiments about [acausal trade](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/acausal-trade). If you have no interaction with rationalist/LessWrong circles, I think you'd be surprised at the fraction of our generation's top mathematical-systematising brainpower that is spent on this—or that is bobbing in the waves left behind, sometimes unknowingly.

As for myself: Yudkowsky's philosophy is one of the most impressive intellectual edifices I've seen. Big chunks of it—in particular the stuff about empiricism, naturalism, and the art of genuinely trying to figure out what's true that [The Sequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality) especially focus on—were very formative in my own thinking. I think it's often proven itself directionally correct. But Yudkowsky's philosophy makes a claim for near-mathematical correctness, and I think there's a bit of trouble there. While it has impressive mathematical depth and gets many things importantly right (e.g. Bayesianism), despite much effort spent digesting it, I don't see it meeting the rigour bar it would need for its predictions (for example about AI risk) to be more like those of a tested scientific theory than those of a framing, worldview, or philosophy. However, I'm also very unsympathetic to a certain straitlaced science-cargo-culting attitude that recoils from Yudkowsky's uncouthness and is uninterested in speculation or theory—they would do well to study the [actual history](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JAAHjm4iZ2j5Exfo2/the-copernican-revolution-from-the-inside) of [science](https://www.benlandautaylor.com/p/looking-beyond-the-veil). I also see in Yudkowsky's philosophy choices of framing and focus that seem neither forced by reason nor entirely natural in my own worldview. I expect that lots more great work will come out within the Yudkowskian frame, whether critiques or patches, and this work could show it to be anywhere from impressive but massively misguided to almost prophetically prescient. However, I expect even greater things if someone figures out a new, even grander and more applicable system of the world. Perhaps that person can then describe it in a weird fanfic.