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Vaniver comments on Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Are you interested in what the cultures / economics / politics look like, or are you interested in what the technologies look like? It seems to me that stuff like public key cryptography is in some sense the optimal answer to an engineering problem- and so if you have the problem and the engineering skill, then you will find that answer eventually.
For the cultures / economics / politics, then it depends on your view of history. Would the idea of liberty have happened the same way without a New World to expand into? It's really not clear. Could you have an Enlightenment that is politically traditionalist while being culturally and economically radical?
If you're interested in those sorts of questions, it seems like you're better off directly trying to build good models of the cultural / economic / political shifts and memes than you are trying to imagine the outcomes of a general thought experiment.
[Edit] You may be interested in phrasing things as "What would have to change to result in an Enlightenment that is politically traditionalist while being culturally and economically radical?" to build those models and constrain the deviation from reality.
The broader point of the thought experiment is "is [artefact X] an accident of history or is it somehow inevitable that humans will end up with [artefact X]?"
More pointedly, when looking at various academic works and disciplines, I've been using it as an intuition pump for the question "are you describing something present in all human environments, describing aspects of our history, or just making stuff up?"
I have privately been using it to my own satisfaction for about six months. I'm trying to come up with a way of aesthetically presenting it to other people in such a way that they won't get bogged down in how a separate 10,000 years of human history, with different humans, has happened somewhere.
Right, and I think the question (that I put in an edit) of "what would have to change for X to (not) have happened?" is relatively good at answering that question for X. It seems to me like to not get public key cryptography you would need math to be different, but to not get women's lib you would need either biology to be different or the idea of personal autonomy to not have become a cultural hegemon, both of which could have been the case (and point to where to look for why they weren't).
Just because the equations would have to be the same, it does not mean the other society would know them and use them like we do. Maybe they don't have Internet yet. Maybe their version of Internet has some (weaker) form of cryptography in the lower layers, so inventing cryptography for higher layers did not feel so necessary. Maybe they researched quantum physics before Internet, so they use quantum cryptography. Or at least they can use different kinds of functions for private/public key pairs.
This is the sort of reasoning I'm looking to generate.
I think that question is better for more thorough analysis but less good as an intuition pump.
I'm now trying to figure out whether I find the does-the-alternate-human-society-have-it more tractable as a way of thinking about it, or whether I'm simply attached to it. The question "there's another society of humans over there: do they have [x]?" certainly seems a lot easier to me than "what needs to have happened for this counterfactual to be true?"
I recently ran into the question of whether photography would inevitably lead to loss of interest in representational art.
Depends on what you mean by "interest", presumably. I don't think people have necessarily lost interest in live music since the inception of recorded music; they just have a cheaper substitute for it.