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What would YOUR version of dath ilan be like? Do you think it would be better or worse than Yudkowsky's? What would it get right that his doesn't? What would it probably end up worse on?
There should be a religion where the afterlife starts by appearing in your median world -- presumably a kind of heaven for good people, and a kind of hell for bad people, but with no external judgment: you are judging yourself by how much you love or hate your median world.
(Originally I wanted to say that the entire afterlife should be your median world, but that is to harsh. Meeting different people is sometimes nice, and I also don't like the idea of losing your friends forever. But everyone should get a hard lesson on what is it like to have yourself as a neighbor.)
Did you mean the reader's median world, not the reader's idea[1] of Yudkowsky's MW? I suspect that the MW of most readers merely wouldn't stumble into various forms of incompetence like kids failing to learn to read. Instead, the erroneous practice would be tested, found not to outperform the baseline, and be rejected.
A worst-case scenario is that the MW is an incoherent concept due to reasons like evolution pushing the average personality away from that of the reader[2] or due to the fact that the reader would be able to think through only a few implications of a wholesale shift of personalities (e.g. if Yudkowsky's description of dath ilan has the line related to murders and resurrections from a frozen brain, but not an explanation for how murderers emerged in the first place) or biased to only think through desirable implications.
1. ^
For example, if a counterfactual Yudkowsky didn't end up revealing his BDSM preferences, then they wouldn't influence the reader's views on dath ilan.
2. ^
Or reasons like the reader's personality having been changed by having been a war participant and the governments being far more reluctant to start a new war, causing next generations not to receive such an experience at all.
1Rattengift
I did mean the reader's median world! The reader's idea of Yudkowsky's MW would be too polar between participants; it would be less fun.
Good thoughts!