There’s so much entertainingly bad politics here that I’m just going to cover some of the highlights.

Dath Ilan is a fictional world and civilization invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is a parallel reality of earth where society is much better at coordination and various good policies have been implemented, though technology is only as advanced as earth’s, if not slightly less. It can be thought as a more practical and realistic form of Economist’s Paradise. Eliezer first introduced it in his April Fool’s day post ‘My April Fools Day Confession’, where he claimed that he was an average person from that world and none of his ideas were original.

That line about the Economist’s Paradise is what we call foreshadowing.

Autonomous electric cars in tunnels instead of ICE cars on roads.

Of course he likes Elon Musk’s car tunnels lmao

The average IQ in Earth-equivalent terms is 143, after an unknown number of generations of “heritage optimization” pursued via positive government subsidies.

I think this might be the quickest IQ-to-eugenics pivot I’ve ever seen.

Land Value Tax, positional-goods tax, status-goods tax, marketing-tax, no income tax.

Yud really likes his land value taxes. He fails to consider how this would create trends toward monopoly (hint: it’s much easier to absorb the costs to develop land and the taxes you’ll be paying until it starts turning profit if you already own existing developed land that’s making you money)

There exists a single global civilization, calling itself “Civilization”, with one world government, called “Governance”.

There exists a group called Keepers who undergo much more rigorous rationality training and act as a counterbalance to Governance; the dath ilani equivalent of Leo Szilard eventually told Governance about her idea for nuclear weapons, but she talked to the Keepers first.

The mechanisms of Governance are never explained, nor what levers of power the Keepers have. Knowing Yud, I fully expect the answer would just be West Wing-brained “People listen to the Keepers because they’re the smartest”

Here’s a related tweet from Yud that showcases one of his stunning ideas to “fix” capitalism through the lens of dath ilan:

Example of a correct solution / actually stable social structure out of dath ilan: Assets are overwhelmingly equities that actually vary with their market-expected value, rather than fixed-rate ‘loans’ or ‘bonds’ which have no visible variance 95% of the time and blow up 5% of the time. Rapidly buying and reselling those equities doesn’t have tax consequences because dath ilan runs mainly on land taxes. (Wacky experimental cities with higher taxes have property or consumption taxes; dath ilani know that if you try to tax paper ownerships rather than physical stuff, the paper will twist up into strange shapes.)

People who can’t afford to buy things in cash will usually rent them rather than buying them on loan. “Mortgages” are not a thing. “Car loans” are not a thing because the roads are entirely automated and transportation is a service. Most people don’t need student loans because education is not a guild monopoly on credentialism, but the few who do want expensive training offer Income-Sharing Agreements whose market price is then a signal of whether the market thinks you’ll be able to learn that job. The whole economy is systematically less leveraged compared to Earth: there’s a class of people who made a lot of money and now need to invest it, and a class of people who are starting new companies and need a lot more money than they have; but the average human being in dath ilan is not in debt, and mostly holds shares of bundles of mundane capital assets and concerns like a city waterworks.

And finally, the original AMA thread that spawned this concept. Here we learn that Yudworld is completely fine with child labor:

There’s no minimum age to work, because demanding a higher age isn’t something that the person doing the job actually needs.

Has no mechanism to ensure that your plumber/electrician/doctor won’t kill you via incompetence:

You don’t need a business license because that would, again, be an instance of something they recognize as technical debt / overhead / cruft for the civilization.

No reserve army of labor despite being capitalist:

The economy runs hot enough that there’s generally enough jobs on offer; the Very Serious People would regard it as a huge issue if people had to look for a job instead of choosing which job, and they would ask how we could possibly have gotten into that position when jobs were available 1000 years earlier and the economy had gotten a lot more productive since then.

Citing Silicon Valley as a positive example:

I can speculate about what other conditions contribute to that, but unfortunately it wasn’t my actual field of study before I left. But in general, think of the situation among Silicon Valley programmers: you display the ability to do the work rather than competing on credentials, and it’s as common to find a precious employee through connections as to find a precious job through connections.

And finally, Yudkowsky comes this close to getting it:

If your economic system is that Bill Gates owns all land and permanent installations and doles out scraps of food in exchange for labor, then even if this could look from a libertarian standpoint like a “private property” system in which Bill Gates happens to own all the property, this is not equitable and everyone who isn’t Bill Gates ought to shrug off the consensual hallucination claiming that all the matter in the universe is tagged with a tiny private property tag saying that Bill Gates owns it.