I've seen a few people run the thought experiment where one imagines the best life a historical person could live, and/or the most good they could do. There are several variants, and you can tune which cheat codes they are given. People seem to get different answers, and this has me pretty curious.

• Eliezer said in the sequences that maybe all this rationality stuff just wouldn't help a 14th century peasant at all, unless they were given explicit formulas from the future. (See also, the Chronophone of Archimedes.)
• I've heard people ask why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China, and whether that was a contingent fluke of history, or a robust result of geography and culture. (I should admit at this point that I haven't read any of the Progress Studies stuff, but I want to.)
• I think Paul or Ajeya or Katja have wondered aloud about what a medieval peasant or alchemist could have done if they had been divinely struck by the spirit of EA and rationality, and people have argued back and forth about how sticky various blockers were. (I would appreciate links if anyone has them.)
• I skimmed that recent post about "Social Dark Matter" and wondered if 1950s America would have been much better if the social dark matter meme had somehow gotten a big edge in the arena of ideas.

I realized that I'm really uncertain about historical trajectories at pretty much every level. I am really unsure whether the Roman empire could have lasted longer and made a few extra major advancements (like steam engines and evolutionary biology). I'm unsure whether a medieval peasant armed with modern textbooks could have made a huge dent in history. And I'm also pretty unsure what it would have taken for 20th century America to have made faster moral progress than it did.

But I do notice that the more recent the alternate history, the less clueless I feel, which is a little motivating^[1]. So here are a few prompts of the top of my head:

1. What advice would you send back to your 10-year-old self if you weren't allowed to give lottery numbers or spoilers about global-scale events?
2. What could your parents or their immediate peers have done differently that would have substantially improved their material circumstances, emotional lives, or moral rectitude? What would have been the costs?
3. Could you get any easy wins if you were allowed to magically advertise one book or article to American intellectuals in the 1950s? (They can be wins of any size: global catastrophic risks, social dark matter, or your own pet peeve.)

1. ^{^}

   Possibly spurious, but this kind of reminds me of Read History of Philosophy Backwards