I sometimes get a little bit melancholic when I read about Dath Ilan. Humanity could be so much better off, but due to economic illiteracy, we can't have nice things.
Better to light a small flame than to curse the darkness. So if you had to build a model econoliterate city on earth, how would you go about it?
There's lots of micronations projects out there. What I'm interested in is:
- How do you keep the city econoliterate, immediately and a hundred years in the future.
- How do you make this practical to achieve - most micronations projects dont go anywhere, and are actively thwarted by governments.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my pen sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Dath Ilan,
In this earths green & pleasant land.
It seems worth pointing out that dath ilan isn't just econoliterate and its advantages over earth aren't supposed to be consequences just of much greater economic literacy. In particular, they depend on 1. a population that is smarter than that of earth, and 2. widespread appreciation among that population of a way of thinking that is mathematically valid and automatically motivates those who understand it to act in better-coordinated ways than we do.
#1 is imaginable but obviously difficult to achieve. I'm not quite sure whether Eliezer thinks the way of thinking in #2 exists (and equals "timeless/updateless/logical/functional decision theory") or not, but to me it is not at all clear that any way of thinking actually has those properties.
It's deliberately vague, and there's a lot of authorial leeway due to that screening off of all but the most recent history in the setting. The continents correspond and the humans are indistinguishable on casual observation from Earth humans physically, medically, and behaviourally, so it should be some sort of alternate history Earth. Whether any divergence is 200 or 20k years ago is hard to say (and Eliezer may not yet have decided).