“maximally competent” there calls for a sense of possiblity and how I read it makes it starkly contrast with specifying that the tech level would be 1980. They would just instantly jump to atleast 2020. Part of the speculation with the “Planecrash” continuity is about how Keltham being put in a medival setting would be starkly transformative ie injecting outside setting competence is setting breaking.
Dath ilani are still human and make errors and need to partly rely on their clever coordination schemes. I think I am using a heuristic about staying in your powerlevel even if the powerlevel is high. You should be in a situation where you could not predict the directions of your updates. And the principle that if you can expect to be convinced you can just be convinced now. So if you currently do not have a technology you can’t expect to have it. “If I knew what I was doing it would not be called research”. You don’t know what you don’t know.
On the flipside if the civilization is competent to survive for millenia then almost any question will be cracked. But then I could apply that logic to predict that they will crack time travel. For genuine future technologies we are almost definitionally ignorant about them. So anything outside the range of 40-60% is counterproductive hubris (in my lax, I don’t actually know how to take probabilities that seriously scale).
There’s a difference between “technology that we don’t know how to do but it’s fine in theory”, “technology that we don’t even know if it’s possible in principle” and “technology that we believe isn’t possible at all”. Uploading humans is the former; we have a good theoretical model for how to do it and we know physics allows objects with human brain level computing power.
Time travel is the latter.
It’s perfectly reasonable for a civilisation to estimate that problems of the first type will be solved without becoming thereby committed to believing in time travel. Being ignorant of a technology isn’t the same as being ignorant of the limits of physics.
“maximally competent” there calls for a sense of possiblity and how I read it makes it starkly contrast with specifying that the tech level would be 1980. They would just instantly jump to atleast 2020. Part of the speculation with the “Planecrash” continuity is about how Keltham being put in a medival setting would be starkly transformative ie injecting outside setting competence is setting breaking.
Dath ilani are still human and make errors and need to partly rely on their clever coordination schemes. I think I am using a heuristic about staying in your powerlevel even if the powerlevel is high. You should be in a situation where you could not predict the directions of your updates. And the principle that if you can expect to be convinced you can just be convinced now. So if you currently do not have a technology you can’t expect to have it. “If I knew what I was doing it would not be called research”. You don’t know what you don’t know.
On the flipside if the civilization is competent to survive for millenia then almost any question will be cracked. But then I could apply that logic to predict that they will crack time travel. For genuine future technologies we are almost definitionally ignorant about them. So anything outside the range of 40-60% is counterproductive hubris (in my lax, I don’t actually know how to take probabilities that seriously scale).
There’s a difference between “technology that we don’t know how to do but it’s fine in theory”, “technology that we don’t even know if it’s possible in principle” and “technology that we believe isn’t possible at all”. Uploading humans is the former; we have a good theoretical model for how to do it and we know physics allows objects with human brain level computing power.
Time travel is the latter.
It’s perfectly reasonable for a civilisation to estimate that problems of the first type will be solved without becoming thereby committed to believing in time travel. Being ignorant of a technology isn’t the same as being ignorant of the limits of physics.