"My parents aren't letting the kids go to the schools, they won't have heard any more than we did."

"Yeah, the share of the population with meaningful access to communications varies between twenty and eighty percent and lots of people, no matter what we do, get horrendous miscommunication. Things we're attempting to combat that include going door-to-door, keeping announcements as short, simple, and clear as possible, working with the church to announce and discuss our policies in sermons when they'll agree to do that, encouraging attendance at the schools, and assigning more social workers in neighborhoods with low coverage. I absolutely understand that lots of people got the information 'the aliens will take your kids if you beat them' and nothing else today, and that some of them will not bother looking up more information than that. I think that would have happened if we had expressed any willingness to take kids away under any circumstances, and that it is not significantly worsened by any particular details of the policy."

"It didn't occur to you we'd object to a massive legal change -"

"There are lots and lots of massive legal changes happening. We overhauled the whole legal system country-by-country over the last few weeks, we opened the schools, we opened the clinics, we opened the train stations, we held elections, I honestly expected this to be deeply unpopular among the people it affected but pretty much uninteresting to you. I think you are vastly underestimating the badness of beating children. It's correlated with much, much worse impulse control and more violent behavior later in life, it's correlated with being abused by a spouse because you're less likely to know you should object when your spouse beats you, it's related to much higher levels of stress hormones, impeded emotional regulation...this is confounded by, in Amenta, the sort of people who beat their children presumably having genes for it which they pass on to their children, but the effects of stress hormones stuff is corroborated by looking at the effect of elevated stress with other causes. People who beat their children are almost always causing their children lifelong damage. I am sure you know of people who did not experience it as traumatic, but there are also people who don't experience being raped as children as traumatic and it's still an incredibly harmful thing to do."

"How about being abducted by aliens, is that harmful?"

"Yeah, being removed from your parents' home is harmful to kids, there's abundant research on what makes it less so, negative outcomes associated with removal from the home are a little hard to disentangle from negative outcomes related to the circumstances which prompted it but you can compare a little by comparing areas with different standards for removal, and removing kids from their homes is worse than, say, poverty, which is very bad for kids, comparable to the death of a parent, which is very bad for kids, but not nearly as bad as being beaten to the point of visible injury, which again is one of the worst things you can possibly do to children."

"You could still deter it with something else that isn't really awful itself for kids."

"We're trying different policies in different places for that reason, but the reason I think it's plausible that the policy in place in Britain will win out overall is that the sort of people who'd beat their kids even knowing that there'll be a home removal in response - that is, the sort of parents whose kids will, in fact, be removed under Britain's current policy - are parents who cannot restrain the urge to beat their child bloody no matter the consequences, and I think those are the sort of parents who are least likely to benefit from classes and least likely to cooperate with attending them and most likely to get angry about being in trouble with the law and take that out on the vulnerable children who haven't been removed from their custody."

"Live-in home supervision, then -"

"I did ask some social workers about that, the response was that live-in observation in a tiny unclean house with a known child abuser angry at them were not conditions under which they could conceivably protect children and they would be professionally obligated to refuse such an assignment."

"Could've said in the announcements that you won't just vanish them forever -"

"My favorite phrasing was 'your children will be removed from the home and returned once we are satisfied that their home is an environment where they are safe, and will not be returned if they prefer not to return', but it didn't focus-group well, people were utterly baffled by the 'what the children prefer' thing and when asked to explain the message to their neighbor came up with all kinds of confusingly different interpretations and when the neighbors were asked to describe the policy they had pretty much no idea."

"The frequently asked questions format seemed comprehensible to me, did you focus group that?"

"Yeah, it's online and in little brochures which the social workers can hand out. On-site too but they frequently get taken and trashed, or vandalized. Some places have switched to doing them behind laminate right alongside the notices but I don't think most places in Britain have. There are benchmarks for information dissemination but some local flexibility on how to reach those benchmarks, it's one of the things the human regional coordinators work on and if they decide to subsidize computers or build more messageboards or hire more town criers instead of laminating - well, we'll check if they hit their benchmarks and then tell them what the most successful coordinators did."

"This planet isn't a laboratory for you to run neat experiments on."

"When we know what's best we do that everywhere. When we're not sure, we try things."

"Then you should have tried it on lower-stakes communications than something like this, and not done something like this until you were a fucking expert at how to communicate it."

"You can only figure out which information dissemination methods are least vulnerable to vandalism when you're announcing things upsetting enough that people will attempt it. Keep in mind that the penalty for this is much lighter than for aggravated assault of people other than your children, for which the penalty is a lengthy prison sentence during which you are in fact separated from your children."

"I feel like you are missing the point here."

"Oh?"

"This was bad. This was really bad. The humans who mostly share your goals universally agree that this was bad. We are having some difficulty in coming up with an irrefutable explanation of why it was bad, because you are a Timothy with fifty years of practice at sounding more reasonable than whoever you are talking to, but that just means that each of the component parts of the decision are possible for a Timothy to sound good while justifying, it does not change the fact that they added up to something really bad."

"I continue to feel like most of the disagreement is located in different instincts about how bad beating children is. I think if we had done the exact same thing but with something you thought was bad the way I think it is bad to beat children, your objections to the communication would mostly be on the level of 'I bet that regional coordinators who put more effort into FAQ distribution do better', not this meeting. If we'd done the exact same thing but with, say, 'we will take your children away if you rape them' -"

"Humans agree with you that that is bad. That matters a lot. The standards you have to meet when imposing something that your audience thinks is bad are different than the standards you have to meet when imposing something your audience thinks is completely insane."

"That's fair. I think that this policy is a good candidate for the policy that best reduces child abuse; I think you clearly didn't get enough information about it, and I'm sorry for that. Given that you didn't get enough information, there's a question of whether that's a process failure - we're not trying hard enough to get information out, we're doing things we shouldn't do at all until we get better at getting information out - or a incidental failure, where we followed reasonable procedures that produce in expectation good results and got a bad result. There is a lot of reason to treat those differently from each other."

"'Doing things you shouldn't do at all until you get better at getting information out' is a decent summary of the complaint."