Forty years ago, Robert Nozick proposed a very strange utopia, which he considered the culmination of libertarian principles.

Ten years ago, Mencius Moldbug proposed the same utopia, considering it the culmination of conservative principles.

Three years ago, unaware of either, I independently invented a role-playing game around the same utopia, considering it the culmination of liberal principles.

Nozick called it Meta-Utopia. Moldbug called it Patchwork. I called it Archipelago.

II.

In 2011 the conworlding experiment I’d been part of for the past ten years, Micras, was starting to wind down. There were lots of reasons, but a big one was the trouble getting everyone working together on a coherent world. Some participants wanted to simulate medieval countries with wizards and dragons. Other people were more into modern nation-states with factories and steel production quotas. Still others wanted to do scifi stuff where they debated the ethics of genetic engineering and maybe built mile-long starships.

All of which were fine, until you tried to stick it together into a coherent world, at which point it made no sense. How come the people with mile-long starships hadn’t invaded the people who were still jousting on horseback? How come the industrialists could spend two hundred years worrying about steel quotas without inventing any new technology beyond steel, let alone stealing or buying the technology from the scifi civilization next door? If magic worked, how come only one or two civilizations were using it?

Solving these problems tended to involve a lot of just-so stories, but the more we came up with, the harder it was to support any kind of interaction at all.

I decided to sweep the whole thing under the carpet with a parallel-running Gritty Reboot. I dug out my old transhuman goddess character Maria Morimoto and had her wipe out civilization, leaving only scattered barbarians and a few groups who had managed to keep the vestiges of civilization together. Her human viceroy, Omi Oitherion, gathered the last remnants of civilization and forged them into a world government called Archipelago whose goal was to create utopia through a process of evolution and experimentation.

The way it worked was that any tribe of surviving civilized humans with a coherent philosophy could apply to become part of Archipelago. Their application would include the location of their desired homeland, and the technological and magical level they found most conducive to human flourishing. Archipelago would then use its transhuman powers to trap their homeland in a telluric field limiting it to exactly that level of technology + magic, and protect them from incursion by any other group.

At first, the conceit worked really well. I granted myself absolute power. Alicorn got elected as the democratic figurehead. The online infrastructure got set up. About two dozen conworlders agreed to participate. New “statelets” sprung up just about weekly. We got everything from inoffensive liberal democracies to monastic religious orders to socialist communes to tribes of violent cannibals to one guy who tried to recreate Plato’s Republic in a giant underground cave.

Pictured: Pelagia, the game world of Archipelago. Click to enlarge.

After about a year or so, it started working less well. By bad luck, a couple of the major players left all at once. Activity died down. Micras, still running in parallel, started doing better and the need for an alternative became less pressing. I tried to shape the backstory and more than some people were comfortable with. Whatever. Archipelago went quiet, we switched off the lights, and activity shifted back to Micras. It became one of those pieces of legend you get in all Internet communities: “Remember that time we tried something kind of cool, but it didn’t work out?”

Freed from the responsibility of running a real game, I started writing more of the story of Archipelago in my head, fleshing out details. Why try to maximize diversity of cultural experiments? What was Omi’s endgame? What precisely were the bylaws of the World Government?

Gradually, some ideas started to take shape.

III.

In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told you to work the job prescribed to you by your caste and gender, to marry who your parents told you to marry or at least someone of the opposite sex, to worship at the proper temples and the proper times, and to talk about proper things as opposed to the blasphemous things said by the tribe over there.

Then we got Liberalism, which said all of that was mostly bunk. Like Wicca, its motto is “Do as you will, so long as it harms none”. Or in more political terms, “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins” or “If you don’t like gay sex, don’t have any” or “If you don’t like this TV program, don’t watch it” or “What happens in the bedroom between consenting adults is none of your business” or “It neither breaks my arm nor picks my pocket”. Your job isn’t to enforce your conception of virtue upon everyone to build the Virtuous Society, it’s to live your own life the way you want to live it and let other people live their own lives the way they want to live them.

This is the much-maligned “atomic individualism”, or at least one definition of such. I’m not sure anyone has a great idea what it means; it seems to be more a bogeyman for conservatives to take potshots at than a position with its own supporters and think tanks or anything.

On the other hand, the Left is starting to get pretty wary of atomic individualism too. Maybe one of the first signs of the trend was tobacco ads. Even though putting up a billboard saying “SMOKE MARLBORO” neither breaks anyone’s arm nor picks their pocket, it shifts social expectations in such a way that bad effects occur. It’s hard to dismiss that with “Well, it’s people’s own choice to smoke and they should live their lives the way they want” if studies show that more people will want to live their lives in a way that gives them cancer in the presence of the billboard than otherwise.

From there we go into policies like Michael Bloomberg’s ban on giant sodas. While the soda ban itself was probably as much symbolic as anything, it’s hard to argue with the impetus behind it – a culture where everyone gets exposed to the option to buy very very unhealthy food all the time is going to be less healthy than one where there are some regulations in place to make EAT THIS DONUT NOW a less salient option. I mean, I know this is true. A few months ago when I was on a diet I cringed every time one my coworkers would bring in a box of free donuts and place it in, wide-open, in the doctors’ lounge, because there was no way I wasn’t going to take one (or two, or three). I could ask people to stop, but they probably wouldn’t, and then it would be a different place where I encounter the wide-open box of free donuts. I am not proposing that it is ethically wrong to bring in free donuts or that banning them is the correct policy, but I do want to make it clear that stating “it’s your free choice to partake or not” doesn’t eliminate the problem, and that this points to an entire class of serious issues where Liberalism as construed above is at best an imperfect heuristic.

And I would be remiss talking about the left’s turn away from Liberalism without mentioning social justice. The same people who once deployed Liberal arguments against conservatives: “If you don’t like profanity, don’t use it”, “If you don’t like this offensive TV show, don’t watch it”, “If you don’t like pornography, don’t buy it” – are now concerned about people using ethnic slurs, TV shows without enough minority characters, and pornography that encourages the objectification of women. I’ve objected to some of this on purely empirical grounds, but the least convenient possible world is the one where the purely empirical objections fall flat. If they ever discover proof positive that yeah, pornographication makes women hella objectified, is it acceptable to censor or ban misogynist media on a society-wide level?

And if the answer is yes – and if such media like really, really increases the incidence of rape I’m not sure how it couldn’t be – then what about all those conservative ideas we’ve been neglecting for so long? What if strong, cohesive, religious, demographically uniform communities make people more trusting, generous, and cooperative in a way that also decreases violent crime and other forms of misery? We have some good evidence lots of evidence that this is true, and although we can doubt each individual study, we owe conservatives the courtesy of imagining the possible world in which they are right, the same as anti-misogyny leftists. Maybe media glorifying criminals or lionizing nonconformists above those who quietly follow cultural norms has the same kind of erosive effects on “values” as misogynist media. Or, at the very least, we ought to have a good philosophy in place so that we have some idea what to do it if does.

IV.

A while ago, in Part III of this essay, I praised liberalism as the only peaceful answer to Hobbes’ dilemma of the war of all against all.

Hobbes’ point, remember, is that if everyone’s fighting everyone loses out. Even the winners probably end up worse off than if they had just been able to live in peace. He says that governments are good ways to prevent this kind of conflict. Someone – in his formulation a king – tells everyone else what they’re going to do, and then everyone else does it. No fighting necessary. If someone tries to start a conflict by ignoring the king, the king quashes them with such overwhelming force that it doesn’t even count as a fight.

But this replaces the problem of potential warfare with the problem of potential tyranny. So we’ve mostly shifted from absolute monarchies to other forms of government, which is all nice and well except that governments allow a different kind of war of all against all. Instead of trying to kill their enemies and steal their stuff, people are tempted to ban their enemies and confiscate their stuff. Instead of killing the Protestants, the Catholics simply ban Protestantism. Instead of forming vigilante mobs to stone homosexuals, the straights merely declare homosexuality is punishable by death. It might be better than the alternative – at least everyone knows where they stand and things stay peaceful – but the end result is still a lot of pretty miserable people.

Liberalism is a new form of Hobbesian equilibrium where the government enforces not only a ban on killing and stealing from people you don’t like, but also a ban on tyrannizing them out of existence. This is the famous “freedom of religion” and “freedom of speech” and so on, as well as the “freedom of what happens in the bedroom between consenting adults”. The Catholics don’t try to ban Protestantism, the Protestants don’t try to ban Catholicism, and everyone is happy.

Liberalism only works when it’s clear to everyone on all sides that there’s a certain neutral principle everyone has to stick to. The neutral principle can’t be the Bible, or Atlas Shrugged, or anything that makes it look like one philosophy is allowed to judge the others. Right now that principle is the Principle of Harm: you can do whatever you like unless it harms other people, in which case stop. We seem to have inelegantly tacked on an “also, we can collect taxes and use them for a social safety net and occasional attempts at social progress”, but it seems to be working pretty okay too.

The Strict Principle of Harm says that pretty much the only two things the government can get angry at is literally breaking your leg or picking your pocket – violence or theft. The Loose Principle of Harm says that the government can get angry at complicated indirect harms, things that Weaken The Moral Fabric Of Society. Like putting up tobacco ads. Or having really really big sodas. Or publishing hate speech against minorities. Or eroding trust in the community. Or media that objectifies women.

No one except the most ideologically pure libertarians seems to want to insist on the Strict Principle of Harm. But allowing the Loose Principle Of Harm restores all of the old wars to control other people that liberalism was supposed to prevent. The one person says “Gay marriage will result in homosexuality becoming more accepted, leading to increased rates of STDs! That’s a harm! We must ban gay marriage!” Another says “Allowing people to send their children to non-public schools could lead to kids at religious schools that preach against gay people, causing those children to commit hate crimes when they grow up! That’s a harm! We must ban non-public schools!” And so on, forever.

And I’m talking about non-governmental censorship just as much as government censorship. Even in the most anti-gay communities in the United States, the laws usually allow homosexuality or oppose it only in very weak, easily circumvented ways. The real problem for gays in these communities is the social pressure – whether that means disapproval or risk of violence – that they would likely face for coming out. This too is a violation of Liberalism, and it’s one that’s as important or more important than the legal version.

And right now our way of dealing with these problems is to argue them. “Well, gay people don’t really increase STDs too much.” Or “Home-schooled kids do better than public-schooled kids, so we need to allow them.” The problem is that arguments never terminate. Maybe if you’re incredibly lucky, after years of fighting you can get a couple of people on the other side to admit your side is right, but this is a pretty hard process to trust. The great thing about religious freedom is that it short-circuits the debate of “Which religion is correct, Catholicism or Protestantism?” and allows people to tolerate both Catholics and Protestants even if they are divided about the answer to this object-level question. The great thing about freedom of speech is that it short-circuits the debate of “Which party is correct, the Democrats or Republicans?” and allows people to express both liberal and conservative opinions even if they are divided about the object-level question.”

If we force all of our discussions about whether to ban gay marriage or allow home schooling to depend on resolving the dispute about whether they indirectly harm the Fabric of Society in some way, we’re forcing dependence on object-level arguments in a way that historically has been very very bad.

Presumably here the more powerful groups would win out and be able to oppress the less powerful groups. We end up with exactly what Liberalism tried to avoid – a society where everyone is the guardian of the virtue of everyone else, and anyone who wants to live their lives in a way different from the community’s consensus is out of luck.

In Part III, I argued that not allowing people to worry about culture and community at all was inadequate, because these things really do matter.

Here I’m saying that if we do allow people to worry about culture and community, we risk the bad old medieval days where all nonconformity gets ruthlessly quashed.

Right now we’re balanced precariously between the two states. There’s a lot of Liberalism, and people are generally still allowed to be gay or home-school their children or practice their religion or whatever. But there’s also quite a bit of Enforced Virtue, where kids are forbidden to watch porn and certain kinds of media are censored and in some communities mentioning that you’re an atheist will get you Dirty Looks.

It tends to work okay for most of the population. Better than the alternatives, maybe? But there’s still a lot of the population that’s not free to do things that are very important to them. And there’s also a lot of the population that would like to live in more “virtuous” communities, whether it’s to lose weight faster or avoid STDs or not have to worry about being objectified. Dealing with these two competing issues is a pretty big part of political philosophy and one that most people don’t have any principled solution for.

V.

Here is where my meditations on Archipelago took me.

Imagine Dragumve, the only city-state to survive the apocalypse that destroyed Micras relatively intact. Tempered by years of surviving famine and disease and barbarian attack, it’s a pretty grim place. But now the century-long winter has ended, the barbarians have mostly been pushed away behind natural borders, and things are looking up. Its inhabitants start to have some time to philosophize, and they all have some different conceptions of the good life. They start fighting on what the political system of Dragumve should look like.

Omi Oitherion, the absolute ruler of Dragumve, says – Here, we’re doing things my way. But those of you with different ideas, go forth and settle the world, and I won’t stop you. In fact, I’ll protect you. Go found city-states based on your philosophies.

And so the equivalent of our paleoconservatives go out and found communities based on virtue, where all sexual deviancy is banned and only wholesome films can be shown and people who burn the flag are thrown out to be eaten by wolves.

And the equivalent of our social justiciars go out and found communities where all movies have to have lots of strong minority characters in them, and all slurs are way beyond the pale, and nobody misgenders anybody.

And the equivalent of our Objectivists go out and found communities based totally on the Strict Principle of Harm where everyone is allowed to do whatever they want and there are no regulations on business and everything is super-capitalist all the time.

And some people who just really want to lose weight go out and found communities where you’re not allowed to place open boxes of donuts in the doctors’ lounge.

Usually the communities are based on a charter, which expresses some founding ideals and asks only the people who agree with those ideals to enter. The charter also specifies a system of government. It could be an absolute monarch, charged with enforcing those ideals upon a population too stupid to know what’s good for them. Or it could be a direct democracy of people who all agree on some basic principles but want to work out for themselves what direction the principles take them.

After a while, Omi Oitherion, who remember is the viceroy for a transhuman goddess and is kind of omnipotent, decides to formalize and strengthen this system, not to mention work out some of the ethical dilemmas.

The first thing he does is ban communities from declaring war on each other. That’s an obvious gain. He could just smite warmongers, but he thinks it’s more natural and organic to get all the communities into a World Government. Every community donates a certain amount to a military, and the military’s only job is to quash anyone from any community who tries to invade another.

The second thing World Government does is address externalities. For example, if some communities emit a lot of carbon, and that causes global warming which threatens to destroy other communities, the World Government puts a stop to that. If the offending communities refuse to stop emitting carbon, then there’s that military again.

The third thing World Government does is prevent memetic contamination. If one community wants to avoid all media that objectifies women, then no other community is allowed to broadcast women-objectifying media in. If a community wants to live an anarcho-primitivist lifestyle, nobody else is allowed to import TVs. Every community decides exactly how much informational contact it wants to have with the rest of the world, and no one is allowed to force them to have more than that.

The most important job for World Government is to think of the children.

Imagine you’re conservative Christians, and you’re tired of this secular godless world, so you go off with your conservative Christian friends to found a conservative Christian community. You all pray together and stuff and are really happy. Then you have a daughter. Turns out she’s atheist and lesbian. What now?

Well, it might be that your kid would be much happier at the lesbian separatist community down the road. The absolute minimum that the World Government can do is enforce freedom of movement. That is, the second your daughter decides she doesn’t want to be in Christiantopia anymore, she goes to a World Government embassy nearby and asks for a ticket out, which they give her, free of charge. She gets airlifted to Lesbiantopia the next day. If anyone in Christiantopia tries to prevent her from reaching that embassy, or threatens her family if she leaves, or expresses the slightest amount of coercion to keep her around, World Government notices.

Those of my readers who were involved in the Archipelago project may remember that Omi Oitherion is not a good person to offend.

But this is not nearly enough to fully solve the child problem. A child who is abused may be too young to know that escape is an option, or may be brainwashed into thinking they are evil, or guilted into believing they are betraying their families to opt out. And although there is no perfect, elegant solution here, the practical solution is that World Government enforces some pretty strict laws on child-rearing, and every child, no matter what other education they receive, also has to receive a class taught by a World Government representative in which they learn about the other communities participating in Archipelago, receive a basic non-brainwashed view of the world, and are given directions to their nearest World Government representative who they can give their opt-out request to.

The list of communities they are informed about always starts with Dragumve, which is ruled by World Government itself and is considered an inoffensive, neutral option for people who don’t want anywhere in particular. And it always ends with a reminder that if they can gather enough support, World Government will provide them with help for an expedition to go out and found their own community somewhere in the wilderness.

There’s one more problem World Government has to deal with, which is malicious inter-community transfer. Suppose that there is some community which puts extreme effort into educating its children, an education which it supports through heavy taxation. New parents move to this community, reap the benefits, and then when their children grow up they move back to their previous community so they don’t have to pay the taxes to educate anyone else. The communities themselves prevent some of this by immigration restrictions – anyone who’s clearly taking advantage of them isn’t allowed in (except in Dragumve, which has an official committment to let in anyone who wants). But that still leaves the example of people maliciously leaving a high-tax community once they’ve got theirs. I imagine this is a big deal in Archipelago politics, but that in practice World Government asks these people, even in their new homes, to pay higher tax rates to subsidize their old community. Or since that could be morally objectionable (imagine the lesbian separatist having to pay taxes to Christiantopia which oppressed her), maybe they pay the excess taxes to World Government itself, as a way of disincentivizing malicious movement.

Because there are World Government taxes, and most people are happy to pay them. In my fantasy, World Government isn’t an enemy, where the Christians view it as this evil atheist conglomerate trying to steal their kids away from them and the capitalists view it as this evil socialist conglomerate trying to enforce high taxes. The Christians, the capitalists, and everyone else are extraordinarily patriotic about being part of the Archipelago, for its full name is the Archipelago of Civilized Communities, it is the standard-bearer of civilization against the barbarian hordes, and it is precisely the institution that allows them to maintain their distinctiveness in the face of what would otherwise be irresistable pressure to conform. Atheistopia is the enemy of Christiantopia, but only in the same way the Democratic Party is the enemy of the Republican Party – two groups within the same community who may have different ideas but who consider themselves part of the same broader whole, fundamentally allies under a banner of which both are proud.

The banner, by the way, looks a lot like the EU flag. I’m not sure how to feel about that.

VI.

It’s easy to see why Robert Nozick thinks this is a libertarian utopia. World Government does very very little. Other than the part with children and the part with evening out taxation regimes, it just sits around preventing communities from using force against each other. That makes it very very easy for anyone who wants freedom to start a community that grants them the kind of freedom they want – or, more likely, to just start a community organized on purely libertarian principles. The World Government of Archipelago is the perfect minarchist night watchman state, and any additions you make over that are chosen by your own free will.

And it’s easy to see why other people think this is a conservative utopia. Conservativism, when it’s not just Libertarianism Lite, is about building strong cohesive communities of relatively similar people united around common values. Archipelago is obviously built to make this as easy as possible, and it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t pop up a bunch of communities built around the idea of Decent Small-Town God-Fearing People where everyone has white picket fences and goes to the same church and nobody has to lock their doors at night (so basically Utah; I feel like this is one of the rare cases where the US’ mostly-in-name-only Archipelagoness really asserts itself). People who didn’t fit in could go to a Community Of People Who Don’t Fit In and would have no need to nor right to complain, and they wouldn’t have to deal with Those Durned Bureaucrats In Washington telling them what to do.

But to me, this seems like a liberal utopia, even a leftist utopia, for three reasons.

The first reason is that it extends the basic principle of liberalism – solve differences of opinion by letting everyone do their own thing according to their own values, then celebrate the diversity this produces. I like homosexuality, you don’t, fine, I can be homosexual and you don’t have to, and having both gay and straight people living side by side enriches society. This just takes the whole thing one meta-level up – I want to live in a very sexually liberated community, you want to live in a community where sex is treated purely as a sacred act for the purpose of procreation, fine, I can live in the community I want and you can live in the community you want, and having both sexually-liberated and sexually-pure communities living side by side enriches society. It is pretty much saying that the solution to any perceived problems of liberalism is much more liberalism.

The second reason is quite similar to the conservative reason. A lot of liberals have some pretty strong demands about the sorts of things they want society to do. I was recently talking to Ozy about a group who believe that society billing thin people is fatphobic, and that everyone needs to admit obese people can be just as attractive and date more of them, and that anyone who preferentially dates thinner people is Problematic. They also want people to stop talking about nutrition and exercise publicly. I sympathize with these people, especially having recently read a study showing that obese people are much happier when surrounded by other obese, rather than skinny people. But realistically, their movement will fail, and even philosophically, I’m not sure how to determine if they have the right to demand what they are demanding or what that question means. Their best bet is to found a community on these kinds of principles and only invite people who already share their preferences and aesthetics going in.

The third reason is the reason I specifically draw leftism in here. Liberalism, and to a much greater degree leftism, are marked by the emphasis they place on oppression. They’re particularly marked by an emphasis on oppression being a really hard problem, and one that is structurally inherent to a certain society. They are marked by a moderate amount of despair that this oppression can ever be rooted out.

And I think a pretty strong response to this is making sure everyone is able to say “Hey, you better not oppress us, because if you do, we can pack up and go somewhere else.”

Like if you want to protest that this is unfair, that people shouldn’t be forced to leave their homes because of oppression, fine, fair enough. But given that oppression is going on, and you haven’t been able to fix it, giving people the choice to get away from it seems like a pretty big win. I am reminded of the many Jews who moved from Eastern Europe to America, the many blacks who moved from the southern US to the northern US or Canada, and the many gays who make it out of extremely homophobic areas to friendlier large cities. One could even make a metaphor, I think rightly, to telling battered women that they are allowed to leave their husbands, telling them they’re not forced to stay in a relationship that they consider abusive, and making sure that there are shelters available to receive them.

If any person who feels oppressed can leave whenever they like, to the point of being provided a free plane ticket by the government, how long can oppression go on before the oppressors give up and say “Yeah, guess we need someone to work at these factories now that all our workers have gone to the communally-owned factory down the road, we should probably at least let people unionize or something so they will tolerate us”?

This is pretty funny, because the idea I’m pushing is rather explicitly reactionary. Like, I think it would be fair to call this the single core idea of reaction. All that stuff about kings and gender roles and ethno-nationalism is to some degree idle speculation about what kind of Archipelagian community would end up most successful, in the same way transhumanists sometimes speculate about how things should be run after the Singularity.

Yet I think its liberal credentials are impeccable. A commenter in the latest Asch thread mentioned an interesting quote by Frederick Douglass:

The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us [black people]. I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!

It sounds like, if Frederick Douglass had the opportunity to go to some other community, or even found a black ex-slave community, no racists allowed, he probably would have taken it [edit: or not, or had strict conditions]. If the people in slavery during his own time period had had the chance to leave their plantations for that community, I bet they would have taken it too. And if you believe there are still people today whose relationship with society are similar in kind, if not in degree, to that of a plantation slave, you should be pretty enthusiastic about the ability of exit rights and free association to disrupt those oppressive relationships.

VII.

We lack Archipelago’s big advantage – a vast frontier of unsettled land.

Which is not to say that people don’t form communes. They do. Some people even have really clever ideas along these lines, like the seasteaders. But the United States isn’t going to become Archipelago any time soon.

There’s another problem too, which I describe in my Anti-Reactionary FAQ. Discussing ‘exit rights’, I say:

Exit rights are a great idea and of course having them is better than not having them. But I have yet to hear Reactionaries who cite them as a panacea explain in detail what exit rights we need beyond those we have already.

The United States allows its citizens to leave the country by buying a relatively cheap passport and go anywhere that will take them in, with the exception of a few arch-enemies like Cuba – and those exceptions are laughably easy to evade. It allows them to hold dual citizenship with various foreign powers. It even allows them to renounce their American citizenship entirely and become sole citizens of any foreign power that will accept them.

Few Americans take advantage of this opportunity in any but the most limited ways. When they do move abroad, it’s usually for business or family reasons, rather than a rational decision to move to a different country with policies more to their liking. There are constant threats by dissatisfied Americans to move to Canada, and one in a thousand even carry through with them, but the general situation seems to be that America has a very large neighbor that speaks the same language, and has an equally developed economy, and has policies that many Americans prefer to their own country’s, and isn’t too hard to move to, and almost no one takes advantage of this opportunity. Nor do I see many people, even among the rich, moving to Singapore or Dubai.

Heck, the US has fifty states. Moving from one to another is as easy as getting in a car, driving there, and renting a room, and although the federal government limits exactly how different their policies can be you better believe that there are very important differences in areas like taxes, business climate, education, crime, gun control, and many more. Yet aside from the fascinating but small-scale Free State Project there’s little politically-motivated interstate movement, nor do states seem to have been motivated to converge on their policies or be less ideologically driven.

What if we held an exit rights party, and nobody came?

Even aside from the international problems of gaining citizenship, dealing with a language barrier, and adapting to a new culture, people are just rooted – property, friends, family, jobs. The end result is that the only people who can leave their countries behind are very poor refugees with nothing to lose, and very rich jet-setters. The former aren’t very attractive customers, and the latter have all their money in tax shelters anyway.

So although the idea of being able to choose your country like a savvy consumer appeals to me, just saying “exit rights!” isn’t going to make it happen, and I haven’t heard any more elaborate plans.

I guess I still feel that way. So although Archipelago is an interesting exercise in political science, a sort of pure case we can compare ourselves to, it doesn’t look like a practical solution for real problems.

On the other hand, I do think it’s worth becoming more Archipelagian on the margin rather than less so, and that there are good ways to do it.

One of the things that started this whole line of thought was an argument on Facebook about a very conservative Christian law school trying to open up in Canada. They had lots of rules like how their students couldn’t have sex before marriage and stuff like that. The Canadian province they were in was trying to deny them accreditation, because conservative Christians are icky. I think the exact arguments being used were that it was homophobic, because the conservative Christians there would probably frown on married gays and therefore gays couldn’t have sex at all. Therefore, the law school shouldn’t be allowed to exist. There were other arguments of about this caliber, but they all seemed to boil down to “conservative Christians are icky”.

This very much annoyed me. Yes, conservative Christians are icky. And they should be allowed to form completely voluntary communities of icky people that enforce icky cultural norms and an insular society promoting ickiness, just like everyone else. If non-conservative-Christians don’t like what they’re doing, they should not go to that law school. Instead they can go to one of the dozens of other law schools that conform to their own philosophies. And if gays want a law school even friendlier to them than the average Canadian law school, they should be allowed to create some law school that only accepts gays and bans homophobes and teaches lots of courses on gay marriage law all the time.

Another person on the Facebook thread complained that this line of arguments leads to being okay with white separatists. And so it does. Fine. I think white separatists have exactly the right position about where the sort of white people who want to be white separatists should be relative to everyone else – separate. I am not sure what you think you are gaining by demanding that white separatists live in communities with a lot of black people in them, but I bet the black people in those communities aren’t thanking you. Why would they want a white separatist as a neighbor? Why should they have to have one?

If people want to go do their own thing in a way that harms no one else, you let them. That’s the Archipelagian way.

(someone will protest that Archipelagian voluntary freedom of association or disassociation could, in cases of enough racial prejudice, lead to segregation, and that segregation didn’t work. Indeed it didn’t. But I feel like a version segregation in which black people actually had the legally mandated right to get away from white people and remain completely unmolested by them – and where a white-controlled government wasn’t in charge of divvying up resources between white and black communities – would have worked a lot better than the segregation we actually had. The segregation we actually had was one in which white and black communities were separate until white people wanted something from black people, at which case they waltzed in and took it. If communities were actually totally separate, government and everything, by definition it would be impossible for one to oppress the other. The black community might start with less, but that could be solved by some kind of reparations. The Archipelagian way of dealing with this issue would be for white separatists to have separate white communities, black separatists to have separate black communities, integrationists to have integrated communities, resdistributive taxation from wealthier communities going into less wealthy ones, and a strong central government ruthlessly enforcing laws against any community trying to hurt another. I don’t think there’s a single black person in the segregation-era South who wouldn’t have taken that deal, and any black person who thinks the effect of whites on their community today is net negative should be pretty interested as well.)

This is one reason I find people who hate seasteads so distasteful. I mean, here’s what Reuters has to say about seasteading:

Fringe movements, of course, rarely cast themselves as obviously fringe. Racist, anti-civil rights forces cloaked themselves in the benign language of “state’s rights”. Anti-gay religious entities adopted the glossy, positive imagery of “family values”. Similarly, though many Libertarians embrace a pseudo-patriotic apple pie nostalgia, behind this façade is a very un-American, sinister vision.

Sure, most libertarians may not want to do away entirely with the idea of government or, for that matter, government-protected rights and civil liberties. But many do — and ironically vie for political power in a nation they ultimately want to destroy. Even the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter mocked the paradox of Libertarian candidates: “Get rid of government — but first, make me president!” Libertarians sowed the seeds of anti-government discontent, which is on the rise, and now want to harvest that discontent for a very radical, anti-America agenda. The image of libertarians living off-shore in their lawless private nation-states is just a postcard of the future they hope to build on land.

Strangely, the libertarian agenda has largely escaped scrutiny, at least compared to that of social conservatives. The fact that the political class is locked in debate about whether Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry is more socially conservative only creates a veneer of mainstream legitimacy for the likes of Ron Paul, whose libertarianism may be even more extreme and dangerously un-patriotic. With any luck America will recognize anti-government extremism for what it is — before libertarians throw America overboard and render us all castaways.

Keep in mind this is because some people want to go off and do their own thing in the middle of the ocean far away from everyone else without bothering anyone. And the newspapers are trying to whip up a panic about “throwing America overboard”.

So one way we could become more Archipelagian is just trying not to yell at people who are trying to go off and doing their own thing quietly with a group of voluntarily consenting friends.

But I think a better candidate for how to build a more Archipelagian world is to encourage the fracture of society into subcultures.

Like, transsexuals may not be able to go to a transsexual island somewhere and build Transtopia where anyone who misgenders anyone else gets thrown into a volcano. But of the transsexuals I know, a lot of them have lots of transsexual friends, their cissexual friends are all up-to-date on trans issues and don’t do a lot of misgendering, and they have great social networks where they share information about what businesses and doctors are or aren’t trans-friendly. They can take advantage of trigger warnings to make sure they expose themselves to only the sources that fit the values of their community, the information that would get broadcast if it was a normal community that could impose media norms. As Internet interaction starts to replace real-life interaction (and I think for a lot of people the majority of their social life is already on the Internet, and for some the majority of their economic life is as well) it becomes increasingly easy to limit yourself to transsexual-friendly spaces that keep bad people away.

The rationalist community is another good example. If I wanted, I could move to the Bay Area tomorrow and never have more than a tiny amount of contact with non-rationalists again. I could have rationalist roommates, live in a rationalist group house, try to date only other rationalists, try to get a job with a rationalist nonprofit like CFAR or a rationalist company like Quixey, and never have to deal with the benighted and depressing non-rationalist world again. Even without moving to the Bay Area, it’s been pretty easy for me to keep a lot of my social life, both on- and off- line, rationalist-focused, and I don’t regret this at all.

I don’t know if the future will be virtual reality. I expect the post-singularity future will include something like VR, although that might be like describing teleportation as “basically a sort of pack animal”. But how much the immediate pre-singularity world will make use of virtual reality, I don’t know.

But I bet if it doesn’t, it will be because virtual reality has been circumvented by things like social networks, bitcoin, and Mechanical Turk, which make it possible to do most of your interaction through the Internet even though you’re not literally plugged into it.

And that seems to me like a pretty good start in creating an Archipelago. I already hang out with various Finns and Brits and Aussies a lot more closely than I do my next-door neighbors, and if we start using litecoin and someone else starts using dogecoin then I’ll be more economically connected to them too. The degree to which I encounter certain objectifying or unvirtuous or triggering media already depends more on the moderation policies of Less Wrong and Slate Star Codex and who I block from my Facebook feed, than it does any laws about censorship of US media.

At what point are national governments rendered mostly irrelevant compared to the norms and rules of the groups of which we are voluntary members?

I don’t know, but I kind of look forward to finding out. It seems like a great way to start searching for utopia, or at least getting some people away from their metaphorical abusive-husbands.

And the other thing is that I have pretty strong opinions on which communities are better than others. Some communities were founded by toxic people for ganging up with other toxic people to celebrate and magnify their toxicity, and these (surprise, surprise) tend to be toxic. Others were formed by very careful, easily-harmed people trying to exclude everyone who could harm them, and these tend to be pretty safe albeit sometimes overbearing. Other people hit some kind of sweet spot that makes friendly people want to come in and angry people want to stay out, or just do a really good job choosing friends.

But I think the end result is that the closer you come to true freedom of association, the closer you get to a world where everyone is a member of more or less the community they deserve. That would be a pretty unprecedented bit of progress.

Pre-emptive plagiarism is the worst. I was all set to write about how I thought the problems I brought up in The Control Group Is Out Of Control could be addressed.

Then Josh Haas wrote A Modest Proposal To Fix Science, which took the words right out of my mouth. Separate out exploratory and confirmatory research, have the latter done by different people with no stake in the matter.

So if I want to wring a blog post out of this I’m going to have to go way further than that, come up with something really outlandish.

So here is how science works in the utopian culture of Raikoth.

II.

Anyone can do exploratory research. It can be experiments published in special exploratory research journals. Or it can be a collection of anecdotes supporting a theory published in a magazine. Or it can be a list of arguments on a website. The point is to get an idea out there, build interest.

Remember the Angel of Evidence? The centralized nationwide prediction market? Anyone with a theory can list it there. The goal of exploratory research is to get people interested enough in the idea to bet about it on the Angel.

Suppose you become convinced that eating grapes cures cancer. So you submit a listing to the Angel: “Eating grapes cures cancer”. Probably most people doubt this proposition and the odds are around zero. So you do some exploratory research. You conduct a small poorly controlled study of a dozen cancer patients who sign up, and feed them a lot of grapes. You report that all of them seemed to have their cancer go away. You talk about how chemicals in grapes are known tumor inhibitors. Gradually a couple of people start thinking there’s something to what you’re saying. They make bets on the prediction market – maybe saying there’s only a 10% chance that you’re right, but it’s enough. The skeptics, and there are many, gladly bet against them, hoping to part gullible fools from their money. Business on the bet starts to go up.

These research prediction markets are slightly negative-sum. Maybe the loser loses $10, but the winner only gets $9. When enough people have bet on the market, the value of this “missing money” becomes considerable. This is the money that funds a confirmatory experiment.

What this means is that it is interest in – and disagreement about – the question at hand that makes an experiment possible. When no one believes grapes cure cancer, everyone’s probability is around zero and so no one bets against anyone else and there is no money available for the experiment. When you do your exploratory research and come up with good arguments why grapes should work, then if you really make your case some people should be willing to bet on it – not at even odds, maybe, but at least at 10:1 odds favoring them or whatever.

Suppose the experiment returns positive results (what qualifies as “positive results” is predefined – maybe the bet specifies “effect size > 0.4, p < 0.05"). Now one of two things happens. Either everyone is entirely convinced that grapes cure cancer, and people stop doing science and start eating more grapes. Or the controversy continues. If the controversy continues, a bet can be placed on the prediction market for the success or failure of a replication. No doubt people will want to take or short this bet at very different odds than they did the last one. Maybe you could get 10:1 odds against grapes curing cancer the first time, when you were going on a tiny exploratory study, but now you can only get even odds. No problem. The pro-grape side bets in favor, the anti-grape side is still willing to bet against, and the replication takes place. Rinse and repeat. At every step, one of three things is true. First, there is still controversy, in which case the controversy funds more experiments, and the odds at which people will bet on those experiments is the degree of credence we should have in the scientific prediction involved. Second, there isn't enough money in favor of the proposition to get a market going, in which case the proposition has been soundly disproven. Third, there isn't enough money against the proposition to get a market going, in which case the proposition is universally accepted scientific fact. In practice things are not this easy. The system is excellent at resolving controversies, and you can easily get as much money as you need to study whether guns decrease crime or whatever. But science includes not just controversies but basic research. Things like particle physics might suffer - who is going to bet for or against the proposition that the Higgs boson has a mass greater than 140 GeV? Only a couple of physicists even understand the question, and physicists as a group don't command large sums of spare capital. So what happens is that scientific bodies - the Raikothin equivalent of our National Science Foundation - subsidize the prediction markets. This is very important. Instead of donating $1 million to CERN to do boson research, they donate $1 million to the Angel of Evidence to make the prediction market more lucrative. Suddenly the market is positive-sum; maybe you lose $10 if you're wrong, but gain $11 if you're right. The lure of free money is very attractive. Some ordinary people jump in, not really sure what a boson is but knowing that the odds are in their favor. But more important, so do "science hedge funds" that hire consultant physicists to maximize their likely return. Just as hedge fundies in the US might do lots of research into copper mining even though they don't care about copper at all in order to figure out which mining company is the best buy, so these "science hedge funds" would try to figure out what mass the Higgs boson is likely to have, knowing they will win big if they're right. Although the National Science Fund type organization funds the experiments indirectly, it is the money of these investors that directly goes to CERN to buy boson-weighing machinery.

III.

So much for funding. How are the actual experiments conducted?

They are conducted by consultant scientists. The number one rule of being a consultant scientist is you do not care about the hypothesis.

The Raikolin would have a lot of reasons to react in horror if someone pointed them to Earth, but one of the bigger ones is that the person who invented a hypothesis is responsible for testing it. Or at least someone in the same field, who has been debating it for years and whose entire career depends upon it. This makes no more sense than asking criminals to judge their own trials, or having a candidate count the votes in their own election.

Having any strong opinion on the issue at hand is immediate disqualification for a consultant scientist to perform a confirmatory experiment.

The consultant scientist is selected by the investors in the prediction market. Corporate governance type laws are used to select a representative from both sides (those who will profit if the theory is debunked, and those who will profit if it is confirmed). Then they will meet together and agree on a consultant. If they cannot agree, sometimes they will each hire their own consultant scientist and perform two independent experiments, with the caveat that a result only counts if the two experiments return the same verdict.

As the consultant plans the experiment, she receives input from both the pro- and the con- investors. Finally, she decides upon an experimental draft and publishes it in a journal.

This publication is a form of pre-registration, but it’s also more than that. It is the exact published paper that will appear in the journal when the experiment is over, except that all numbers in the results section have been replaced by a question mark, ie “We compared three different levels of grape-eating and found that the highest level had ? percent less cancer than the lowest, p < ?". The only difference between this draft and the real paper is that the real one fills in the numbers and adds a Discussion section. This gives zero degrees of freedom in what tests are done and in how the results are presented.

Two things happen after the draft is published.

First, investors get one final chance to sell their bets or bow out of the experiment without losses. Perhaps some investors thought that grapes cured cancer, but now that they see the experimental protocol, they don’t believe it is good enough to detect this true fact. They bow out. Yes, this decreases the amount of money available for the experiment. That comes out of the consultant scientist’s salary, giving her an incentive to make as few people bow out as possible.

Second, everyone in the field is asked to give a statement (and make a token bet) on the results. This is the most important part. It means that if you believe grapes cause cancer, and the experiment shows that grapes have no effect, you can’t come back and say “Well, OBVIOUSLY this experiment didn’t detect it, they used overly ripe grapes, that completely negates the anti-tumor effect, this study was totally useless and doesn’t discredit my theory at all”. No. When the draft is published, if you think there are flaws in the protocol, you speak then or forever hold your peace. If you are virtuous, you even say something like “Well, right now I think grapes cure cancer with 90% probability, but if this experiment returns a null result, I guess I’ll have to lower that to 10%.”

These statements are made publicly and recorded publicly. If you say an experiment will prove something, and it doesn’t, and this happens again and again, then people will start noticing you don’t actually know any science.

(If you’re always right, you immediately get hired by a science hedge fund at an obscenely high salary.)

Finally, the consultant scientist does her experiment. Some result is obtained. The question marks in the draft are filled in, and it is resubmitted as a published paper. The appropriate people make or lose money. The appropriate scientific experts gain or lose prestige as people who are or aren’t able to predict natural processes. The appropriate consultant scientists gain or lose prestige as people whose results were or weren’t replicated. The exploratory scientist who proposed the hypothesis in the first place gains or loses prestige that make people more or less likely to bet money on the next idea she comes up with.

IV.

There are no homeopaths in Raikoth.

I mean, there were, ages ago. They proposed experiments that could be done to prove homeopathy, and put their money where their mouth was. They lost lots of money when it turned out not to work. They added epicycles, came up with extra conditions that had to be in place before homeopathy would have an effect. Their critics were more than happy to bet the money it took to test those conditions as well, and the critics ended up rich. Eventually, the homeopaths were either broke, or sufficiently mugged by reality that they stopped believing homeopathy worked.

But homeopathy is boring. The real jewel of this system is to be able to go online, access the Angel of Evidence, and see a list of every scientific hypothesis that anyone considers worth testing, along with the probability estimate that each is true. To watch as the ones in the middle gradually, after two or three experiments, end up getting so close to zero or one hundred as makes no difference, and dropping off the “active” list. To hear the gnashing of the teeth of people whose predictions have been disconfirmed and who no longer have a leg to stand on.

Also, if you can predict the masses of bosons consistently enough, you get crazy rich.

At the time I had no good answer. Now I do. I would give them Charlotte Lennox’s write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom (warning: super-long but super-worth-it).

Ozy informs me that everyone else in the world read this story five years ago. Maybe I am hopelessly behind the times? Maybe all my blog readers are intimately familiar with it?

If not, read it. Read it like an anthropological text. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo. No, read it even better than that. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo if you knew that, statistically, some of your friends and co-workers covertly become Yanomamo after getting home every evening.

I hesitate to summarize it, because people will read my summary and ignore the much superior original. I would not recommend that. But if you insist on skipping the (admittedly super-long) link above, here is what happens:

In the early 2000s, Harry Potter fanfiction authors and readers get embroiled in an apocalyptic feud between people who think that Harry should be in a relationship with Ginny vs. people who think Harry should be in a relationship with Hermione. This devolves from debate to personal attacks to real world stalking and harassment to legal cases to them splitting the community into different sites that pretty much refuse to talk to each other and ban stories with their nonpreferred relationship.

These sites then sort themselves out into a status hierarchy with a few people called Big Name Fans at the top and everyone else competing to get their attention and affection, whether by praising them slavishly or by striking out in particularly cruel ways at people in the “enemy” relationship community.

A young woman named MsScribe joins the Harry/Hermione community. She proceeds to make herself popular and famous by use of sock-puppet accounts (a sockpuppet is when someone uses multiple internet nicknames to pretend to be multiple different people) that all praise her and talk about how great she is. Then she moves on to racist and sexist sockpuppet accounts who launch lots of slurs at her, so that everyone feels very sorry for her.

At the height of her power, she controls a small army of religious trolls who go around talking about the sinfulness of Harry Potter fanfiction authors and especially MsScribe and how much they hate gay people. All of these trolls drop hints about how they are supported by the Harry/Ginny community, and MsScribe leads the campaign to paint everyone who wants Harry and Ginny to be in a relationship as vile bigots and/or Christians. She classily cements her position by convincing everyone to call them “cockroaches” and post pictures of cockroaches whenever they make comments.

Throughout all this, a bunch of people are coming up with ironclad evidence that she is the one behind all of this (this is the Internet! They can just trace IPs!) Throughout all of it, MsScribe makes increasingly implausible denials. And throughout all of it, everyone supports MsScribe and ridicules her accusers. Because really, do you want to be on the side of a confirmed popular person, or a bunch of confirmed suspected racists whom we know are racist because they deny racism which is exactly what we would expect racists to do?

MsScribe writes negatively about a fan with cancer asking for money, and her comments get interpreted as being needlessly cruel to a cancer patient. Her popularity drops and everyone takes a second look at the evidence and realizes hey, she was obviously manipulating everyone all along. There is slight sheepishness but few apologies, because hey, we honestly thought the people we were bullying were unpopular.

MsScribe later ended up switching from Harry Potter fandom to blogging about social justice issues, which does not surprise me one bit. But let me do some social justice blogging of my own.

A lot of the comments I have seen discussing the issue say “Yeah, teenage girls will be teenage girls”.

Two responses seem relevant. First, quite a few of the people involved seem to have been in their late twenties or early thirties.

But second and more important, I am a guy and this story speaks to me because it is eerily similar to the story of my online life with a bunch of other guys when I was between about ages fifteen and twenty-two.

I’ve mentioned before how I spent long portions of my life in the interactive geofiction/”micronation” community. And because of the innate urge for self-presentation, I emphasized the part where we create amazing grand-scale fictional universes in which we enact epic battles and build civilizations from the ground up. And not the part where we behave like ridiculous little children having a hissy fit.

The first constructed country I was ever in, another guy named John from my school comes in and says that I am a bad leader and abusing my power. Because my online handle at the time was Giant_Squid314, he classily nicknames me “Squitler” and leads a bunch of his supporters to make “Squitler” related comments at everything I do. Then he and his friends secede to start their own country, named after a Red Hot Chili Peppers album. I retaliate by convincing his friends that he is oppressing them and they need to start a communist revolution to kick him out of the country, which works. Later he gets back in and convinces his friends to join my country under fake names, swelling the ranks of voters with people who are there just to vote for the worst policies in order to destroy the country. This becomes so bad that my friend Evan pulls a bloodless coup to abolish democracy and make himself sole leader, but then he cracks down so hard on John’s supporters that everyone gets upset and leaves (“emigrates”). This upsets my friend Bill, who somehow hacks John and tries to delete all his stuff; John counterhacks Bill and destroys his country. Then we all team up with a bunch of guys from Ireland, infiltrate John’s country and destroy it the same way he destroyed us as an act of revenge.

All this happened within about three months real-time, and I was in this hobby for ten years. Ten years.

There was an entire era when people would accuse other people of having said racist things on IRC (where logs were often unavailable, and context was absent). This would then be followed with the demand that every political ally of the affected person shun him forever and kick him out of the country and destroy every institution he had built, or else obviously they were secretly racist themselves. This was met with the only possible response: “actually, no, you’re the one who said racist things on the chat!”. These accusations often resembled the MsScribe story in their sheer not-entirely-social-justice-movement-approved incongruity: “You’re racist, and you’re a fat lardass!” “Oh yeah? Well you’re a f**king homophobic autistic Aspie who will never get laid!” Inevitably the more popular person would win and anyone so foolish as to defend the unpopular person (which I kept doing, because I never learn) was banished to Racist Hell. As for Actual Hell, there was a guy named Archbishop Fenton who kept saying really extreme Christian stuff about how we were all going there, and although we all suspected he was a sockpuppet I was never able to figure out whose.

So MsScribe? I’ll give her this: she was a gifted amateur. That is it. An amateur. We had frickin’ decade-old “intelligence organizations” whose entire job was to collect a network of spies – some real people, some sock puppets – who would join other people’s countries under fake (or real!) identities, get information on their secret plans, and throw important elections in favor of the parties we supported. I’m not even ashamed of my role leading one of the largest of these organizations, Shireroth’s spy bureau S.H.I.N.E. – if we had unilaterally disengaged from these kinds of games, we would have been demolished by people who didn’t.

I remember our scandals. We would build up “dossiers” on various individuals, then publicize them at times calculated to cause maximum damage. One of my favorite was when a prominent female politician was revealed to in fact be male – causing her support to plummet among the key “people who do whatever a girl says in the hopes that she will like them” demographic. In another, which happened a bit after my semi-retirement, the micronational world’s largest communist country, with thirty highly active citizens and a prominent international role, was found to be just one guy posting under thirty different names.

As leader of an espionage organization, I was expected to be able to avoid these damaging revelations, advise my countrymen on how to do the same, and run circles around my enemies. Without tooting my own horn too much, I maintained my most successful character for the better part of a year. This was a guy named Yvain, who infiltrated a Celtic-themed fantasy state called the Duchy of Goldenmoon, took it over, took over its largest neighbor, and was halfway to ultimate power over the entire continent before I got accepted to medical school and decided I should probably reassess how I was using my time.

(to create a paper trail and avoid breaking character, I used the nick “Yvain” for a lot of the websites I joined around this period, which is why half the Internet still knows me by that name. I am suitably embarassed by this)

Now I will say this for us boys – and we were boys, like 95% of us, and even the girls were usually found to be boys after careful investigation. We did it with class, we did it with cool names like “Paramountgate” and “The Three Hours’ War”, we wrote up our petty scandals into epic history books with bibliographies and appendices, and we backstabbed each other so elegantly it would make Machiavelli shed a single tear of pure joy. But in the end? We behaved exactly like teenage girls in a Harry Potter fandom.

It is hard at this point not to be reminded of the Robbers’ Cave experiment. Social psychologists divided boys at a camp into two groups, intending to do some experiments in order to figure out what they needed to do to make the groups hate each other, only to learn that the boys had already started hating each other with the burning fire of a thousand suns while they were busy planning the experiments. They boys had even formed little group identities, like “Our group are the rough and street-smart ones, the other group is a bunch of holier-than-thou goody-goodies” (the groups were chosen at random).

I read a lot of psychology even as a teenager, so it never surprised me that separating people out into different fictional countries would have the same effect.

But it did kind of surprise me that you could get quite those depths of hatred between people who thought that a fictional wizard should hook up with his best friend, versus other people who who thought he should hook up with his other best friend’s little sister. Every time I feel like my opinion of people is sufficiently low, I get new evidence making me bump it lower.

Anyway, once those depths of hatred are established, they will proceed in the same way among twenty-somethings trying to discuss Harry Potter romantic pairings, teenagers trying to run fictional countries, and Senators trying to pass vitally important legislation. And that’s why, if aliens ever requested exactly one item to teach them about the human race, I would give them the MsScribe story.

They’d kill us all, of course. They would sterilize Earth so thoroughly that not even the archaeobacteria would remain. But in the moment before I was vaporized, I would feel like our species had finally been understood.

The following are my posts on this blog about my constructed society of Raikoth:

1. Laws, Language, Society
2. Corruption, Priesthood
3. Cities, Land
4. Symbolic Beads
5. Economics, Relationships
6. History, Religion
7. Science

Related: Five Thousand Years In An Alternate Universe

Imagine the following world.

It’s Imperial Rome. Nero has just gotten pissed at Seneca, but instead of killing him, he orders him into exile. The other Stoics are getting kind of wary at this whole “insane dictator ruling a decadent and corrupt empire” thing, so they all agree to head off with him and start a colony dedicated to virtue and righteousness, far away in the new continent that has recently been discovered across the sea. They are somewhat better philosophers than they are navigators, and crash into Greenland – where they are, in accordance with the tradition, Mistaken For Gods By The Native Populace. Seneca starts arranging the local paleo-Eskimos into his conception of the Ideal State, but gets distracted by his discovery of Eskimo shamanism, which is ten million times more fascinating than any philosophy the Romans had to offer. He wanders off into the tundra to go on a spirit quest, and his new Greenlandic society collapses into civil war. This is ended only by the fortuitious return of Seneca, who has ascended a holy volcano, talked to God, and become a prophet.

Several thousand years later, Greenland hosts an thriving society of high-tech Latin-speaking Eskimos following a religion descended in equal parts from Greco-Roman philosophy, shamanism, and vision quest volcano prophecies.

This is about the quickest way to explain the history of Raikoth without going through a lot of boring pre-history and geography and hard-to-pronounce names.

Exhibit on early Raikothin history from the 2011 Micronational World Expo. Click to expand

Religion

So what, exactly, is this religion?

Raikothin religion, sumurhe in its own language, recognizes two aspects of God, called Truth and Beauty. The existing world is a poorly ordered mishmash of these two aspects, whereas God is the two aspects artfully and perfectly combined.

Truth includes everything that actually objectively exists, in the exact way that it actually exists. This aspect is mathematical, precise, and completely devoid of subjectivity. It is symbolically associated with winter, stars, the colors blue and silver, and all the hard sciences as well as math.

Beauty includes feelings, dreams, hopes, personality, meaning. This aspect is numinous, charged with emotion, and fantastic. It is symbolically associated with summer, roses, the colors green and gold, and all the arts, especially poetry and especially especially music.

The world is a gradual and halting attempt to integrate Truth and Beauty, and humans are the interface points at which the integration takes place. Humans join Truth to Beauty by bringing beautiful things into existence or interpreting existing things in such a way as to make them beautiful.

The pattern of integration of Truth and Beauty is self-similar at every level. That is, each individual object is its own attempt to integrate the two aspects; completion of this task perfects the objects (it’s maybe a little teleological). Completion of the integration at the highest level perfects the world, causing it to become a manifestation of God.

Truth is symbolized as a star, Beauty as a spiral; the national flag, the Star and Spiral, combines both

This philosophy cashes out into a formalization of two different ways of looking at things, the Elith-mirta and Ainai-mirta (Perspective of Truth and Perspective of Beauty). The sumurhe religion itself is a perfect example. In the Elith-mirta, it is a useful metaphor for the fact that some things are easier to understand using mathematics and other things are easy to understand using native anthropomorphic intuitions, as well as a recognition that religion promotes psychic health and strengthens community ties. In the Ainai-mirta, Truth and Beauty are literal anthropomorphic deities (the god Elith and the goddess Ainai) who are worshipped through prayer and sacrifice and invoked for strength in times of need.

It is considered somewhere between bad form and heresy to mix up these perspectives or try to apply one to the other. To claim that what one wishes were true actually is true is a heresy, an attempt to subordinate the god Elith to the goddess Ainai. But to claim that what is true is beautiful or acceptable or just when it isn’t is equally heretical and also an insult to a goddess. Relativism, the idea that there is no Truth and everything should be viewed through Ainai-mirta, is an especially despicable heresy.

The level at which Beauty and Truth join together isn’t some superficial philosophical muddle, it’s the entire human project of art and science and trying to be happy and virtuous. Sumurhe is an attempt to give people a religious and mythological structure within which to view and appreciate that project.

It’s also an attempt to justify the institutions of the Raikothin state. The Angel of Evidence is an attempt to gain a direct connection to Truth, the Angel of Preference is an attempt to gain a direct connection to Beauty, and the Angel of Salience and the Archangel are attempts to integrate the information gained by both into a teleological improvement of the world. Thus also the three great religious institutions of Raikoth: the Priests of Truth, experts at understanding the external world; the Priests of Beauty, experts at understanding the human psyche; and the Priests of Joy, experts at figuring out how to make the two correspond.

Below this rarefied philosophical level sits a rich mythology, some of which dates back all the way to the Paleo-Eskimo substrate of the Raikothin population. This includes a Creation story, various archetypal characters and legendary heroes, and morality tales about the great leaders of the past. Believing any of these to be “true” in the sense of Elith-mirta would be a heresy, but they are believed to be Ainai-mirta, true-with-respect-to-Beauty, and repeated and taught in that sense. Even superstitions are tolerated and encouraged in this sense in order to make life more interesting: various standing stones that supposedly bring good luck, stories of places you can go to dream of those you have lost, stories about how when someone dies their good deeds incubate in the ground before flying out as butterflies to alight on those they loved during life, and the continued belief in the holy volcano as protector of the state (which it fulfills Elith-mirta as the source of cheap geothermal power).

I would expect that wealthier people would buy larger yurts to show off their wealth, and then those would get gradually less movable until they’re basically living in houses. Since this doesn’t happen, what status and signaling effects are they optimizing for?

I answered that if you’re trying to design a crazy crackpot utopia, you better have some plan on how to redirect the urge toward status games.

I still think status games are one of the most blitheringly idiotic parts of the human experience. When people have to spend all their money on competing over zero-sum prestige items, it would literally be exactly as beneficial to just set a heap of dollar bills on fire. But they’re a pretty ingrained part of the species and just saying “Please don’t engage in status games” isn’t going to cut it.

The Priests of Joy decided to attack this problem by co-opting status games for their own purposes. They initiated a tradition of wearing symbolic jewelery – usually a necklace made of brightly colored beads. Reading from left to right, each bead’s color advertises to potential interaction partners a certain fact about the wearer.

I don’t have strong feelings on the exact configuration of these necklaces, but the beads might include:

— Is the wearer actively looking for more romantic partners? (think combination of red light green light party and checking to see if someone has a wedding ring) Different colors can connote anything from “taken, stay away” to “I will have sex with pretty much anyone who asks” to “I am only looking for stable long-term relationships”

— Gender and sexual identity. Useful for transgender people who want a quick way to tell people what gender to identify them as, and to tell if someone is gay, straight, bi, etc and avoid awkward misunderstandings.

— Is the wearer an introvert or an extravert? Can have any meaning from “I love talking to random people, please approach me” to “Never talk to me under any circumstances” to “Well, I guess if you have something really interesting to say…”

These beads are all in fixed positions, and an average person can read and interpret them about as quickly as an average member of our own society can read and interpret stoplights or flag pins.

After these fixed beads comes a space where anyone can add any beads they want. Usually these are beads declaring allegiance to a particular social protocol – for example, once Crocker’s Rules are invented, someone can publicize the design of a Crocker’s Rules bead, after which everyone who wants to publicly declare Crocker’s Rules can wear that particular bead and if it is sufficiently well-known their interaction partners will know what it means. Another popular social protocol bead is “ask culture”, signifying that the wearer has promised to try not to be upset if you ask them for anything, even something they consider unreasonable.

Some protocol beads (signified by an octahedral shape) are reciprocal, meaning that they only apply to other people who wear the same social protocol bead. For example, a group might decide to take up radical honesty, but only feel the obligation to be radically honest to other people trying the same strategy. So this bead might signify “I intend to be radically honest to anyone else wearing this same bead”. Other social protocol beads are ridiculously complicated, basically swearing allegiances to entire constitutions governing the wearer’s social behavior.

As these get tested, they split society into various different subcultures. The ones that people like become popular, expand, and eventually become universally accepted mores. Others die out quickly, or remain confined to a small population of enthusiasts (the “I prefer to speak in Kadhamic all the time” bead has been fixed at about one percent of the population for over a millennium)

Obviously wearing these beads is pretty useful, especially in a society where everyone else wears them and you’re viewed as stubbornly withholding useful information if you don’t, such that anyone offending you would be your own fault. So after a few decades, when not wearing them would be considered unthinkable, the Priests introduced one final section of the necklace.

This last part contains beads that can only be granted by a Priest. And although there are no rules forcing people to wear beads, there are rules banning people from wearing beads that falsely represent themselves (essentially an anti-counterfeiting law; these beads are minted by the government), and this has pretty much the same effect.

Among the beads on this last section are one declaring in very vague terms how much you earn, and another indicating level of charitable donation. Suppose the only three income level beads are “I earn less than $200,000 a year”, “I earn between $200,000 and $2 million a year” and “I earn over $2 million a year”. Most people will wear the “less than $200,000″ bead, which will be so common and so vague that it won’t have much effect on your social standing. Rich people can either wear the bead correctly signifying their income, or they can wear no bead at all, in which case it looks like they have something to hide and which is pretty suspicious.

Now imagine other beads, granted for certain levels of charitable donation. Give $1,000 to charity and the government gives you a pretty opal bead. Pay them $10,000 and you get a sapphire bead. Pay $100,000 and you get an emerald. And so on.

Now if someone is wearing an “I earn more than $2 million” bead but no charitable donation bead, they kind of look like a jerk, especially in a world where everyone else is wearing charitable donation beads of various sorts.

In practice, most people both want to ensure that everyone knows they’re rich, and make people not think of them as antisocial monsters. So most of them wear beads signifying their income and purchase charitable donation beads commensurate to that income.

There is much more uncertainty in the income-level beads than in the charitable-donation beads, which means that rich people who want to broadcast their wealth might have to use the charitable donation ones. For example, suppose you make $20 million, and a $1 million donation to charity gets you a diamond bead. Merely wearing the “Earn more than $2 million” bead might get you mistaken for one of those hoi polloi who only earns $2 million. If you have ten diamond beads, though, it’s pretty clear you earn at least ten million and probably more.

This decreases costly status games in two ways. First of all, if everyone looks at your beads first thing after meeting you, and your beads very clearly declare you earn at least $10 million, it’s not necessary to prove the same thing by having a ridiculous platinum-diamond watch. Second of all, each non-bead status purchase you get makes people even more likely to check the necklace and think “Hmmm, this guy has an entire superyacht, but he only has one diamond bead on his necklace? Seems like a pretty selfish person.”

As a result of these factors, as well as a very little bit of subtly directed good-old-fashioned propaganda, by far the most important status game in the Shining Garden is who gives the most to charity. And that’s a status game that most people can get behind.

EDIT: Maybe this would require a law saying that if you donate a certain amount, you must wear the corresponding bead? That would prevent people from refusing to do so for not wanting to appear to brag.

Third Eyes are little lifelogging cameras provided at government expense. They intermittently take pictures + video and record conversations and wirelessly upload them to a central database.

Oh no! Dystopian society in which the government can monitor everything you do, right?

Not exactly. The central database is encrypted, and only the wearer of a Third Eye knows its master password. This master password can be used to generate daily passwords, which unlock the data for a specific day without allowing reconstruction of the master password. At the request of the wearer and the provision of the daily password, the caretakers of the central database can decrypt a day’s recordings.

This soundly discourages crime. A falsely accused person can authorize decryption of their recordings for the time the crime took place, potentially proving their alibi. And a victim can authorize decryption of their recordings, proving their story to be correct.

“Decryption”, in this context, means that one of the Priests of Truth who runs the central database will watch the recordings and then send back a single bit of information. For example, a judge might send a request to know whether someone committed an assault on a certain day, and the accused might release the password to their Third Eye. The Priest would then watch the recordings, send back a “yes”, “no”, or “it’s complicated” to the question, and then swear an oath never to discuss the recording further without the subject’s consent. So if you didn’t commit a particular crime because you were busy having an affair with your best friend’s wife, your secret is safe.

Average citizens are not required to wear Third Eyes – that would be dystopian – but most people quickly see the benefits. But the Rhavakl, who serve as the police force, are required to wear them. The Priests of Truth, civil servants who might otherwise be subject to bribery, are required to wear them. Anyone in a position of power or vulnerable to corruption charges agrees to put on a Third Eye before being trusted with their office.

None of these people are ever required to disclose their password, of course. That particular rule is sacrosanct. But if you’re wearing a Third Eye, and you refuse to give access to it in a criminal proceeding, no one is the least bit reluctant to take that as an obvious admission of guilt.

The system isn’t perfect. Third Eyes neither record every single moment, nor can they upload their data to the central database in real time. It’s possible to accept a bribe very quickly, hoping you get in between Third Eye recordings. And clever muggers will demand that people hand over their Third Eyes during an assault, then break them so they don’t have a chance to transmit their data (some of the newer models have panic modes, but they don’t work 100% of the time).

But the device operates on a random schedule and never gives any detectable sign that it’s on. So anyone who wants to do something illicit has to hope they get lucky, and a lot of people aren’t willing to take the risk.

And the uncertainty inherent in Third Eyes is a feature, not a bug. It is acknowledged practice to hold trials before anyone knows whether the recordings from Third Eyes address the problem. The confirmation from Third Eyes then provides useful training data for Priests of Truth.

The Priesthood of Truth

The most important evaluations of factual questions are performed by prediction markets: either the Angel of Evidence in the Meta-Analytical Oracle or smaller oracles that address purely local concerns. But sometimes there are questions not worth a market’s time or energy, specific questions about individuals that need to be made dozens or hundreds of times per day. For these questions there are Priests of Truth.

Priests of Truth are humans who have been trained to have judgment approaching that of a prediction markets. To be accepted into the Priesthood, you must cultivate near-perfect calibration and accuracy compared to both other humans and predictive algorithms. Some tests face the candidate off against a prediction market they are not allowed to view. Others make them evaluate training data – cases from years ago in which the right answer is already known.

An Arch-Cathedral in Tala – because I already used up all my pictures of more relevant buildings in the last post

Most Priests go on to specialize. Some become judges for criminal trials, skilled in predicting whether a suspect actually committed a crime from the testimony available. Others work on the opposite end of the justice system, skilled at predicting whether offenders have been sufficiently rehabilitated that they will not offend again. Others are the ones who select gametes for the fertility program, skilled at predicting from genetic information and parental histories whether they will produce healthy and happy children. Still others are the ones predicting who should be offered incentives to give birth to and raise these children, based on predicted or observed parenting ability.

Others choose to serve the private sector. There are Priests of Truth who specialize in determining whether marriages will last; for a fee you and your significant other can meet with them and take some psychometric tests and they will tell you the chance you’ll still be together when you’re fifty. There are Priests who will tell you how likely you are to be happy at age 50 depending on what job you choose. There are Priests for nearly anything, and smart people consult them before any big decision.

All predictions by all Priests get entered into – you guessed it – a centralized database – and each Priest receives a score based on how much better or worse ze has done than other predictors – again including other priests, predictive algorithms, prediction markets, and the petitioner themselves. Those Priests who fail to beat chance or very simple toy models are expelled from the Priesthood, although given the rigorous initiation process this rarely happens. Those Priests who can beat chance but do poorly relative to other Priests end up in less important positions or out serving tiny communities in the Cold Waste. The most effective and accurate Priests advise the government on delicate tasks, earn wealth and fame, or become High Priests of entire cities.

But being a Priest of Truth isn’t just about being good at figuring things out. The Priesthood is a genuine religious order dedicated to the worship of Truth, one of the two (occasionally three, rarely four) gods of Raikoth. Their philosophy is that you can’t predict things well without learning not to lie to yourself, and you can’t learn not to lie to yourself while selectively preserving your ability to lie to others. Therefore, all Priests of Truth, upon their initiation, swear never to tell even the slightest lie, or to break even the most trivial oath. This commitment makes them useful as an incorruptible class who can evaluate possible corruption in anyone else.

Not that anyone takes this on trust. The Priests of Truth wear the biggest and most sophisticated Third Eyes on the island.

And although Raikoth abhors the idea of an involuntary death penalty (citizens may choose death in preference to exile or other punishments, but it is never forced upon them) this Priesthood is the sole exception. Any Priest of Truth caught lying, cheating, or breaking an oath is subjected to a shockingly primitive custom that has remained intact for over five thousand years since the pre-Apollonian era: they are thrown into the crater of Ianakve, the sacred volcano.

Also a convenient source of geothermal power!

I don’t believe society is perfect the way it is, I’m just a small-c conservative who’s cautious of changing things. We’ve never tried a complex globalized urban Information Age society with communist/libertarian/reactionary policies, and if you accidentally bring down civilization an “oops” isn’t going to cut it. In real life I’m pretty risk-averse and that shows politically. And when I find sweeping revolutionary changes I would be up for, by bad luck they’re all ones well outside the mainstream of debate, which focuses disproportionately on stupid tribal issues anyway.

So I am a terrible political activist. But I have spent the last thirteen years constructing a utopian society in my basement.

Coat of arms of the Shining Garden of Kai-Raikoth

This has a couple of advantages over debating politics. First, it’s performed entirely on hypothetical people so there are no ethical concerns and you can throw caution to the wind. Second, you don’t have to be “practical” or limit yourself to things you could “actually achieve”. Third, no one else is discussing the politics of your fictional society, so there’s less incentive to frame your thoughts in the same terms and in response to the same questions as everyone else.

I have been reluctant to bring it up here, because it is not relevant to sober politics, parts of it are amateurish and unfinished, and it makes the worst extremist look sane and grounded in reality. And I was afraid it wouldn’t really make sense without a little bit of the background of the world it takes place in.

But I’ve already outed myself as a conworlder. And I’m bored. And maybe it will shut some people up about how boring my politics are. So…

In the north of the planet Micras lies the island of Raikoth, about the latitude of Iceland and the size of Great Britain. In the present day (the 51st century ASC) it has a population of about 8 million – similar to that of Honduras or Israel.

Map of Raikoth. Click to expand thumbnail.

Raikoth is an ancient civilization, but during the 11th century ASC they ceded their sovereignty to the Holy Empire of Sxiro, a sprawling feudal conglomeration occupying nearly the entirety of the continent to their south. In exchange, the God-Emperor of Sxiro granted them extremely favorable terms including almost complete self-government.

The Raikolin are not a people prone to self-doubt. Their constitution – which they adopted only when the God-Emperor absolutely insisted all lands under his dominion present him with a charter of some sort – reads simply:

In all situations, the government of Raikoth will take the normatively correct action.

For most of the 5th millennium ASC, their laws insisted that the Platonic Ideal of the Good was both head of state and head of government; this was relaxed in 4682 to allow the Archpriest of Joy to serve as head of government, again at the insistence of a confused and annoyed Sxiran God-Emperor.

The Raikolin themselves are happy to explain the secrets of what they consider their success, though no other land on Micras has quite taken them up on the offer. They attribute it to three principles which they have pursued to their logical conclusion: Perfect Language, Perfect Government, Perfect Population.

Kadhamic: A Perfect Language

Early in their history, the Raikothin state was plagued by politics. Everyone had a different opinion for which way the state should go, everyone thought everyone else’s opinions were wrong, and debate was interminable, hostile, and unable to make any inroads into the problem.

Some began to wonder if the problem was the inherent slipperiness of language. Poor language encoded false assumptions about the world, allowing conflation of factual statements, value statements, and meaningless feel-good cliches. It led to confusing categories, framing effects, and a bad habit of reifying ad hoc concepts.

Luckily for Raikoth, an unusually high percent of its population were logician-monks (don’t ask) in a good position to begin working on an alternative. Starting with an outlook akin to logical positivism, they invented a language whose grammar was identical to philosophical rigor and in which every concept had to be expressed precisely. Cheap shots, ad hominem attacks, rhetorical tricks, appeals to emotion – all were painstakingly prohibited by careful choice of vocabulary and syntax, and ambijectivity is carefully collapsed into its component pieces.

A sample of Kadhamic writing from the Codex Hamiltonensis

The thorniest problem was moral speech: what should “good” mean in a perfect language? Here the logician-monks spent millennia refining a utilitarian superstructure until it described exactly how to aggregate preferences to create a utility function for the entire society. The resulting book, the Risurion-Silk, was declared to be literally an incarnation of God, who was, after all, only another word for the concept of maximal goodness. “Good” was declared to mean “increasing the function described in the Risurion-Silk” or alternately “increasing the degree to which the Universe instantiates God”.

Thus was born Kadhamic, the perfect language. Having developed it, the government merely banned all discussion of politics in any language other than Kadhamic. This had two salutary effects. First, it prevented anyone who lacked the intelligence to learn Kadhamic from participating in political life. Second, it ended the worst sorts of political disagreement almost overnight, as constructing specious arguments for false positions became difficult or impossible.

The Shining Garden: A Perfect Government

Nevertheless, substantive political disagreement – genuine debate about facts or values – still remained. Before the Fallow Time in the 35th century ASC this was mostly addressed by a parliament of representatives from the nine cities, but during the leadership of High [untranslatable] Nithi Kirenion and afterwards, a more elegant system was put in place: the rule of the the Angels.

An Angel is a creature that bridges the gap between God and Man. The Angels of Tala, the capital of Raikoth, are massive computer systems that allow humans to make calculations about the value of God as instantiated in the Risurion-Silk.

City map of Tala as it was eight hundred years ago, before the Shining Garden era. Click to expand thumbnail.

The Angel of Preference takes census and survey data from every citizen of Raikoth, runs it through the series of utilitarian superstructure functions in the Risurion-Silk, and spits out a utility function. Its calculations bear the same resemblance to the QALYs and DALYs of today as a supercomputer does to an abacus. What it ends up with are a series of preference weights for possible world-states and for various subcomponents of those world-states. It knows the marginal value of saving three people from poverty and how that compares to the marginal value of decreasing water pollution 6% in the Great Gleaming Fjord, or of one new baby being born in Uolrhaphen.

The Angel of Evidence is a system of linked “oracles” – what we would call prediction markets – heavily subsidized by the government and played not only by thousands of Raikolin but by the great financial conglomerates of Sxiro and even further afield. Fed sufficient time, money, and publicity, it can calculate the likely effects of any policy with an accuracy even the Priests of Truth cannot match. When Endi Arusion wanted to declare sanctions on Lirikoth, he asked the Angel exactly how long their rebellion would last; according to legend, it got the length of the centuries-long conflict correct to the day.

The Angel of Salience accepts suggestions from anyone on Raikoth, whether they be a destitute fisherman or a High Priest of Joy. These suggestions can be any form of policy change, whether that be tax relief, new land use regulations, or the invasion of a foreign power. The thousands of suggestions it receives each day get crowdsourced, with average citizens and experts giving them upvotes or downvotes whose weight is proportional to those users’ past success rates. Eventually, the most creative or well-thought-out proposals rise to the top and become salient for further investigation.

The Archangel, located in a vast temple in the Gardens of the Dead, combines input from all three Angels to render government decisions. It takes policy proposals from the Angel of Salience, uses the Angel of Evidence to estimate their likely effects, and finally runs those effects through the Angel of Preference to determine whether they would raise or lower the utility function represented therein and so bring the world closer to or further from the Divine. The set of noncontradictory policies that most satisfies the Angel of Preference becomes the law of Raikoth.

The Meta-Analytical Oracle, home to the Angel of Evidence and parts of the Archangel (real world source)

In her landmark work on governments, Zelde Kalirion once called Raikoth a “totalitarian anarchy”, and with good reason. The Angels’ decrees are entirely impersonal. It might demand a city uproot itself and move elsewhere, or strike down a doctrine in the national religion, or even tell everyone in the country to render a certain number of opals to a certain engineering company in exchange for their constructing a bridge.

Yet there is no single entity called “the government” which executes these requests. There are the Rhavakal, a self-contained chivalric military order with an obsessive focus on martial arts – and occasionally the Angels order them to invade things or arrest people. There are the Priesthoods of Truth, Beauty, and Joy, three very wealthy and powerful religious groups – and occasionally the Angels order them to take care of some errand. There are a host of companies whom the Angels sometimes order to perform one task or another. And there are normal everyday citizens, whom the Angels often ask for financial support for one of their plans or another. But all of these groups alike are simply tools whom the Angels make use of. And so – with the possible exception of the Priests of Joy, whose tasks include maintaining the Angels’ physical forms and tweaking their algorithms – none of them consider themselves (or are considered by others) part of a body called “the government”.

The Galisyin – A Perfect Populace

“Galisyin” means “the gardened ones”, and it is a name the Raikolin give themselves. They believe that even a perfect government cannot help bad people, and even a flawed government cannot keep down good ones. A disaster eight hundred years ago led to the ideology of istilve iab istisemial priktino – “fractal perfection of which every part is itself perfect”, in which the innate virtues of the Raikothin people must be robust enough to survive even a total collapse of their society.

The gardening begins with birth and reproduction. All men get RISUG as part of what we might call their high school health class; although they may reverse the process at any time, in practice no one does so until they want to have a child, and the procedure can be repeated free of cost at any time. This effectively prevents unplanned pregnancies and unwanted children

The punishment for most serious crimes is exile – either to the many colonies like Kymrikoth, Kalirphanam, and Psentikoth, or to monasteries in the mountains (which serve about the same role prisons do in our society except that instead of hanging out with hardened criminals they mostly hang out with monks and do monastic labor, meditation, and study). In either case, they are effectively removed from the breeding population for long periods, sometimes forever.

Finally, as a country that passed the demographic transition a few millennia ago, the natural fertility rate is well below replacement. The Angels keep the population at their desired level by paying people to have and raise children, and the highest price is given for people who are willing to use gametes selected by the Priests of Truth as unusually likely to create good people (where “good” is as always defined as “tending to increase the function described in the Risurion-silk” but usually involves intelligence, compassion, sanity, health, and creativity).

Although these three measures do relatively little over the space of a single generation, over hundreds of years they have transformed the populace to one that scores well above the Sxiran baseline on nearly every desirable trait.

Headquarters of the Priests of Truth

In addition the Galisyin ideal includes euthenics – bettering people by improving their environment. My old Biodeterminists’ Guide to Parenting is an very Raikothin way of looking at the world and its suggestions (refined and tested by centuries of constant study) are law, sometimes holy law. Some euthenic interventions are more proactive: for example, there is an exactly optimal amount of lithium in the water supply. There’s even occasional eradication campaigns for toxoplasma (at least in men), although the Arctic location itself does most of the hard work in decreasing parasite load.

Along with the biological work comes the education, which has almost nothing to do with what our own society calls by that name. There is little attempt to teach history, science, music, or grammar – it is assumed that a correctly biodetermined population with access to free libraries will pick all of that up by themselves. Instead school is entirely about instilling good habits of mind that will make people virtuous and prosocial citizens.

The curriculum is heavy on meditation; students spend five to ten years meditating for an hour a day under the guidance of Priests of Beauty who are expert in the discipline. The goal is to achieve near-perfect self-control, low anxiety, compassion for others, and lasting happiness (if any of the studies showing that meditation improves academic performance prove true, that’s just icing on the cake).

A second class that wouldn’t be recognizable in real-world schools is Experimental Theology, aka nationwide school-sponsored drug use. The idea here is that years of research with chemicals like LSD and psilocybin have put their ability to permanently positively alter personality on a sound scientific basis, and as children’s minds develop they are inducted into different levels of mystical experiences with these drugs in ways that give them more love, energy, and feelings of community.

The third and most important class is rationality. This class is the difference between dystopia and utopia; it intends to teach everyone the rationale behind their society and give them the tools to engage in politics or choose not to do so. First is instruction in the perfect philosophical language Kadhamic. Then is instruction in a sort of turbo-charged form of critical thinking only possible in Kadhamic (but which I’d like to think the Less Wrong Sequences are a close vernacular approximation to). Then come enough math and science to understand something sort of analogous to our Rational Choice Theory, Game Theory, Evolutionary Psychology, Decision Theory, et cetera – things necessary to understand morality and government design. Finally comes an investigation into morality, the justifications behind the Risurion-silk, and the heretical logics which compete with it.

At the end of these lessons comes a sort of rumspringa, where young men and women leave the Shining Garden and tour the rest of Sxiro and the world, observing its freest and richest regions as well as its poorest and most desperate. They are then offered a choice between returning to Raikoth, living in the “colonies” – a series of outlying lands inhabited mostly by Raikolin who reject the heavily ordered life of the Shining Garden – or moving to mainland Sxiro. Those who choose the last option are given free remedial training in the Sxiran language and help integrating into local culture – but most find it bizarre, offputting, and barbaric, and choose to stay in Raikoth after all.

During adult life, Raikothin continue their self-cultivation with the help of the Priests of Beauty, who are sort of combination clerics / counselors / psychiatrists. They have more the friendly attitude of a pastor than the saccharine attitude of a therapist or the clinical attitude of a doctor, but if necessary they also have the expertise to prescribe a mind-boggling variety of drugs and supplements, many completely unknown or ridiculously illegal here on Earth. They differ from more typical therapists in having complete confidentiality; they are forbidden from reporting their flock to the authorities or to mental institutions for any reason (other organizations do have those powers, but don’t interface with the Priests of Beauty). This tends to inspire a relationship of trust, and the Priests of Truth watch them to make sure they deserve it.

Those who desire a level of perfection beyond that of normal Galisyin head to the monasteries, about a dozen or so isolated communities the size of small cities in the high mountains. There they grow their own food, meditate, study, and try to live more or less in harmony with nature. Several monasteries are under oath to take in anyone who wants to join them, setting a valuable floor to the level of misery and poverty anyone has to put up with.

This is the first time I’ve shown Raikoth to anyone outside the tiny community of conworlders, so if you have any questions ask and I’ll try to expand upon them.

Then as more people got interested, it expanded into “role-play a planet”, and then back up to “simulate a planet”.

I’m not sure when it morphed into “get hundreds of friends to create and spend large portions of their lives in a fantastically-detailed alternate universe, building such close relationships that many ended up dating or marrying one another”, but it was sometime before the end of the sixth century.

…oh, right. Back in the second century we adopted a convention that one day in the real world was one year in our fictional planet of Micras. The sixth century would have been a little less than two years after we started, so early 2001. Since then various new societies have arisen with dozens of calendars of their own, but a few of us purists have kept the original one going.

And it is in that original calendar that we celebrated yesterday the turn of the sixth millennium. The year 5000 ASC. I – and others, there are still a few other people who have been around since the beginning – have been simulating Micras’ politics, mapping its contours, and writing its history for five thousand days.

It’s kind of terrifying how much of my life this one game has shaped.

It was my friend Eoin – Ard-Baron of Treesia and Fabon on Micras – who first convinced me to move to Ireland.

It was my friend Erik – founder and erstwhile Kaiser of Shireroth on Micras – who got a LiveJournal and convinced me to start blogging.

It was my friend James – Duke of Kildare on Micras – who first sat me down and told me I needed to start listening to good music and handed me some Ayreon and Nightwish – which shaped my musical tastes right up till the present.

It was my friend Ari – Duke of Straylight on Micras – who first linked me to Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the rationalist community.

They say that if the fool persists in his folly, he will become wise. And even wasting several hours a day in constructed worlds gives you a couple of benefits, if you keep it up for thirteen years. Insofar as I can make webpages, it’s from my time as Shireroth’s Minister of Information. Insofar as I know Photoshop and graphic arts, it’s from my time as head of the Micronational Cartography Society, which maintains the physical and political maps of Micras. Insofar as I can write, it’s because of years painstakingly composing treaties and fake history books. Insofar as I can argue or convince, it’s from debates in fictional legislatures about whether or not to go to war with distant countries with names like “Baracão” and “Novikrasniystan”, run by a bunch of poli sci majors in London or computer geeks in Belgium or even stranger people even further afield.

II.

More than that, though, it’s taught me about people. The total lack of rules or advance planning with which we constructed Micras gives it an amazing feature unmatched in any other role-play I know of: the game is exactly identical to the meta-game.

A country is a bunch of people coming together and claiming to be a country and doing country-like things (kind of like in reality). The king – or Shah, or President, or Premier, or Ayatollah – of the country is whoever can convince other people to call them the king and obey their orders (kind of like in reality). The country’s land is pretty much whatever land they can convince other people to accept they have (ibid). The constitution is whatever document you can convince everyone else to sign (…).

If one person wants to found their own single-person country, no one can stop them, but they’re less likely to be taken seriously or considered a Great Power. If lots of people come together to form a country, no one can stop them, but they had better be able to get along and agree on the rules. If you want to unite to ostracize somebody, no one can stop you, but you’d better be able to get more people on your side than they have on theirs.

If you want to claim you have a billion nuclear bombs, no one can stop you, but they’ll just say you’re a terrible simulation partner and ignore you when you say you bomb them. If you want to claim you are pure pacifists, no one can stop you, but then you better either have an alternate plan for protecting yourself (like strong allies) or be prepared to just absent yourself from the military simulation and annoy everyone else. If you want to write a history of your country that conflicts with histories everyone else has written, no one can stop you, but no one is going to take your history seriously either or build upon it or make it part of their canon.

As a result, while other geeks were learning how to calculate damage from Magic Missiles, I was learning how to manipulate consensus reality. I guarantee you one of these skills is more valuable than the other.

III.

The skill of manipulating consensus reality seems more or less identical to the skill commonly called “leadership”. It is easy to underestimate. The whole gag of the comic strip Dilbert is underestimating leadership. These brilliant engineers do the actual hard work, and then some idiot just says “work faster!” or something similarly dumb and gets hailed as a leader and paid a much higher salary and given credit for the group’s success

Micras has been a sort of laboratory for leadership – countries mostly between one and thirty people, rising and collapsing on a scale of months to decades. After thirteen years I am at no risk of underestimating leadership. I have seen countries transition from Great Powers to smoking ruins within weeks after a new and less competent monarch succeeds the old. I’ve also seen tiny city-states led by someone who understands the methods of persuasion and balance-of-power politics take over an entire hemisphere through soft power.

Occasionally I have even been a leader myself. It’s not hard on Micras – gather two or three friends, start a small country, crown yourself King. Or join an existing country, build a power base, and get elected Prime Minister. Or if that’s too much for you, it’s never too hard to find jobs on the regional level. My own homeland of Shireroth has long operated with five Dukes, each ruling a fifth of the country’s territory, and the positions are noncompetitive enough that during one particularly complicated conspiracy I managed to attain a few of them under false personae.

But I’ve also held the real thing – the Golden Mango Throne of the Kaiser of Shireroth, widely agreed to be the most complicated and unrewarding leadership position on Micras. For a role with no real-world power or consequences, it’s amazing how stressful, time-consuming, and life-sapping it can be – and how much you learn by holding it. If I thought they would take me halfway seriously, I would strike some kind of lucrative deal with a business school to let their students “study abroad” in a Shirerithian leadership position. If nothing else, it would knock some humility into them really quickly.

I titled this post “Things I Learned By Spending Five Thousand Years In An Alternate Universe”, so I guess I should get into some actual lessons. This is probably the only “leadership advice” I will ever give, and I have no idea if it transfers to the real world, but here you go.

I think the most important thing I learned about leadership is to avoid it. It’s stressful, everyone blames you for everything, and “getting to make decisions” sounds a lot better before you realize how banal and annoying 99% of decisions are. But I also learned that large organizations tend to have a position that pretty much controls everything from behind the scenes but doesn’t have to cope with the appearance of power. In Shireroth it’s called “Steward”. In Westeros it was “King’s Hand”. I don’t know about the USA, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was “White House Chief of Staff”. These positions are a whole lot more fun, and surprisingly there’s a lot less competition for them.

Closely related is learning how many people are optimizing for appearance – which means if you’re optimizing for something else it’s pretty easy to strike compromises that give everyone what they want. If you’re fighting for control of a province, the compromise “your enemy gets an important sounding title like Archduke with almost completely ceremonial powers, and you get a boring sounding title like Undersecretary of Resource Management that controls the place’s economy and military” works a surprising amount of the time. Same with titling a bill “The X Party Wins Bill” and getting leading members of the X Party to support it and having the Y Party protest it angrily and not have any policy proposals of the X Party in it at all.

The third important thing I learned is to have a lot more respect for politicians and people in power. I think everyone should have the media perform a hatchet job on them at least once. It’s this really scary feeling when you know you’re trying to be honest and do the right thing, and yet you see how easy it is for a hostile writer to cast every single thing you do as corrupt and destructive. And how quick everyone is to believe them. And how attempts to set the record straight get met with outraged “how dare you give one of those typical sputtering non-apologies!”. It reminds me of those computer games where “ACCUSE” is just a button you press, and it doesn’t even matter what the accusation is or whether it makes sense. Once someone has invoked the genre of scandal, it will play out the same either way, proceeding deterministically along political lines until everyone reaches the usual compromise of agreeing you’re scummy and dishonest but not worth the trouble of impeaching.

The last important thing I learned is to be nice. It practically never fails that somebody who thinks they’re really cool joins Micras, makes fun of one of our admittedly disproportionate number of people with no real life or social skills, bullies and harasses them for months or even years…and then that person is the swing vote in an important election, or finds themselves sitting on a deposit of valuable rare earth metals everyone needs. My favorite cases are when neither of those two things happens, and the person just spends five years sorting out their issues and becoming smarter and more competent, and then ends up in charge of everything solely by their own merit. I am pleased to report they rarely forget how the bully behaved when they were young and stupid.

I don’t know how many of these lessons work in reality. I think at least some of them do. But also, I don’t think I learned any of these lessons on their own. They’re part of meta-lessons where my brain learned to grasp these concepts of status and popularity and negotiation. I don’t actually go into parties thinking “that guy there is the Duke of the room, and those guys there to the side are his Counts”, but I do think my brain is using circuitry that it developed in part for those sorts of calculations, and goodness knows I needed to get that circuitry somehow.

IV.

All this probably makes it sound like all we do on Micras is plot and conspire against each other, but that’s really only a small part of it. We are first and foremost conworlders, or geofictionalists, or that thing there’s no non-awkward word for which involves creating detail for alternate worlds (and which one of my girlfriends has a college degree in, by the way!)

If leading a country trains the mind, conworlding trains the soul. In fact, I sometimes feel like a good conworld is like a projection of the creator’s soul – like there’s some sense in which a reader of the Silmarillion understands Tolkien as a person on a deeper level even than one of his friends or family members might.

Micras is a collective conworld, but it’s a salad bowl and not a melting pot. Most people get their own country or province or island, develop its culture in their own image, and only then do they federate into nations or empires or hokey EU-style monstrosities.

The question “If you were a society, what kind of society would you be?” is strangely existential. Some people are bland liberal democracies. Some people are tropical island paradises. Some people are extremely efficient Singaporean city-states. But anyone at all interesting is something that has never quite existed before on Earth. Tolkien was the Elves. I don’t know much about Iain Banks, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was the Culture.

One guy on Micras is a libertarian. He just sort of hangs around going “Yup, my country’s government still isn’t doing anything. Just hanging around punishing the initiation of force.” It’s very cute.

It makes you examine your soul, conworlding does. Over the centuries, changes in your outlook are mirrored by revolutions in your country’s government. The problems debated in its universities and great books are the problems you struggle with every day. Sometimes your values and aesthetics drift, and some fictional philosopher mirrors the change across a span of worlds. Very rarely, it is the fictional philosopher who makes a good point that the real you is forced to consider.

So far in thirteen years we’ve only had one person totally lose touch with reality and start believing his country was real and worshipping the deities of his own constructed religion and whatnot. I am pleased to say he eventually made a full recovery and is now a physicist. But – and I can’t speak for anyone else on Micras – there’s always this feeling. If you spend ten years building up a culture in your own image, you start to feel at home there. If your real-world society doesn’t fit you too well – if, like Bryan Caplan, you like to retreat within a bubble, then it’s hard not to start thinking of yourself as a citizen of a civilization that exists only in your dreams. If Tolkien never spoke Quenya to himself when he was alone, I will eat my hat.

Somewhere in the ocean hundreds of miles north of the Shirerithian mainland there is a mountainous arctic island upon which thrives an emergent oracular techno-theocracy that calls itself the Shining Garden of Raikoth. Its priests wear a silver spiral around their necks as a sign of their dedication, and in solidarity with them I too wear the spiral. But that is as far as it goes. No deity-worshipping. No speaking to myself in constructed languages. Just the spiral.

That and spending five thousand days of my life on it.

Link: Bastion Union, a major micronational portal that hosts Shireroth
Link: A description of the constructed society of Raikoth