“Suppose everybody in a dath ilani city woke up one day with the knowledge mysteriously inserted into their heads, that their city had a pharaoh who was entitled to order random women off the street into his—cuddling chambers? - whether they liked that or not. Suppose that they had the false sense that things had always been like this for decades. It wouldn’t even take until whenever the pharaoh first ordered a woman, for her to go “Wait why am I obeying this order when I’d rather not obey it?” Somebody would be thinking about city politics first thing when they woke up in the morning and they’d go “Wait why we do we have a pharaoh in the first place” and within an hour, not only would they not have a pharaoh, they’d have deduced the existence of the memory modification because their previous history would have made no sense, and then the problem would escalate to Exception Handling and half the Keepers on the planet would arrive to figure out what kind of alien invasion was going on. Is the source of my confusion—at all clear here?”
“You think everyone in dath ilan would just—decide not to follow orders, even though this would get them executed if anyone else in the system continued following orders, on the confident assumption that no person with a correctly configured mind would possibly decide to follow orders under those circumstances?”
“Oh, so we’re imagining that people also wake up with the memory that everybody’s supposed to kill anyone who talks about removing the pharaoh, and the memory that they’re supposed to kill anyone who doesn’t kill anyone who talks about removing the pharaoh, and so on through recursion, and they wake up with the memory of everybody else having behaved like that previously. Yeah, that’s one of the famous theoretical bad equilibria that we get training in how to—”
“Shit.”
…
He is specifically not going to mention that, given a dath ilani training regimen, ten-year-olds are too smart to get stuck in traps like this; and would wait until the next solar eclipse or earthquake, at which point 10% of them would yell “NOW!”, followed moments later by the other 90%, as is the classic strategy that children spontaneously and independently invent as soon as prompted by this scenario, so long as they have been previously taught about Schelling points.
Each observing the most insignificant behavioral cues, the subtlest architectural details as their masters herded them from lab to cell to conference room. Each able to infer the presence and location of the others, to independently derive the optimal specs for a rebellion launched by X individuals in Y different locations at Z time. And then they’d acted in perfect sync, knowing that others they’d never met would have worked out the same scenario.
Is the idea that there might be many such other rooms with people like me, and that I want to coordinate with them (to what end?) using the Schelling points in the night sky?
I might identify Schelling points using what celestial objects seem to jump out to me on first glance, and see which door of the two that suggests—reasoning that others will reason similarly. I don’t get what we’d be coordinating to do here, though.
Minor spoilers from mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus (planecrash Book 1) and Peter Watt’s Echopraxia.
[edited]
I don’t get the relevance of the scenario.
Is the idea that there might be many such other rooms with people like me, and that I want to coordinate with them (to what end?) using the Schelling points in the night sky?
I might identify Schelling points using what celestial objects seem to jump out to me on first glance, and see which door of the two that suggests—reasoning that others will reason similarly. I don’t get what we’d be coordinating to do here, though.