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RolfAndreassen comments on Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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It's not clear to me why you don't just appeal to Many Worlds, or more generally to alternate histories. These are fairly well-understood concepts among the sort of people who'd be interested in such a thought experiment. Why not simply say "Imagine Carthage had won the Punic Wars" and go from there?
I'm beginning to doubt my motives for this line of thinking, but I'm not abandoning it altogether.
The trouble with alternate histories is as soon as you say "imagine so-and-so won such-a-war", people start coming up with stories that lead them to a very specific idea about what such a world would be like. I imagine your appeal to imagine Carthage winning the Punic Wars would involve someone picturing a world practically identical to ours, only retro-fitted with Carthaginian influences instead of Roman ones.
I also feel (and it is a feeling I have trouble substantiating) that when posed with a question like "there's another society of humans over there; do they have [x]?", it's a much more straightforward pragmatic question to address than "in an alternate history where such-a-thing happened, do they have [x]?"
I see your point. Perhaps you could try to appeal to non-specific alternate histories? Not "imagine Carthage wins" but "imagine a butterfly zigged instead of zagging on August 3rd, 5823 BCE".
Does that not sound like a super-abstract question to you?
I recognise it as asking pretty much exactly the same question as "an alternate several-thousand years of human history has taken place concurrent to, but separate from, our own; what's it like?", but the Many Worlds appeal is like saying "here is a blank canvas where anything can happen", while the equatorial wall or counter-earth scenario is like saying "here is a situation: how do you deal with it?"
I think that's what I meant by Many Worlds being too open-ended in my response to drethelin.