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Vaniver comments on Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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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?"