This conversation has gotten to be a bit above Rebecca's pay grade but she crosses her arms anyway.

He puts his arm around her. "Also 'this should not be done at all', there's still that. Look, if Amentans think that beating children is one of the worst things you can do to them, then of course Amentans who are beaten are going to have had worse childhoods, they'd have had parents who were willing to do something universally agreed to be harmful to children! Here, it's agreed to be a good thing to do, to a point and within reason, and so you've got people who hate hurting their kids but they want to be good parents and understand that discipline is part of that, and you're assuming that that's going to have the same long-term effects when it obviously isn't."

"Human societies vary in how common it is to beat children, we can look at the relationship to cortisol levels and so on. Look, I can't tell you that the data for humans is blazingly unambiguously 'if you have ever whipped your children they are twenty percent likelier to commit a violent crime, controlling for genetic effects with a double-blinded twin study', but the evidence base here really is pretty strong and takes into effect things like that it's normalized here. - and it being normalized can go both ways, there is the effect you describe but there's also evidence that when something awful happens, being told that it was wrong, that you should not have had to go through it, and that it won't be allowed to happen again make it less likely people will experience long-term effects. A cultural background message encouraging people to think things like 'my parents whipped me because I stole money, and I deserved that, and they're good parents' might have less long-term negative effects than 'I did not deserve that, and it's not okay for people to hit me, and they did something seriously wrong', but I certainly wouldn't bet on it."

"It doesn't make them bad parents."

"...of course not. That doesn't enter into it at all - look, making things illegal is the result of a calculation about how much harm they cause, what deters them, and how much harm is caused by doing the thing which deters them. Laws are best read as 'this is harmful enough that punishing it in this way reduces total harm'. Good people do bad things; good people do well-intentioned fine-seeming things that when we look turn out to be bad; good people do things that were good under one set of circumstances and are bad under different ones. I promise you that on no level am I thinking 'well, the people who do this deserve to lose their children because they suck'. Just - just that this has to stop."

"I think you should give warning before implementing laws. 'This will come into effect January next unless other considerations interfere' or what have you. Don't blindside people."

"In some places we announced the law would be in effect in a month, some places six. I do think you're almost certainly right that either of those are better than 'effective immediately'."

"You can't just steal people's kids because you don't like how they bring them up. It's awful, you're awful."

"Do you think it's reasonable to take someone's kids if they beat one of them to death? Or lock them in a closet until they starve to death? Or forbid them from ever speaking? Or brand them with a poker for being too slow with the cleaning?"

"If they die that's not bringing them up at all. And I don't even know what you're going to do with them but it might be awful."

"Well, ideally we catch the kind of people who would eventually beat or starve their children to death before the child dies."

"You're going to find a lot of people who aren't and kidnap all their babies and do mystery alien things to them!"

"We're going to get them a safe, clean, quiet home with people who want children and don't have any, and who will supervise visitation with their parents, make sure they get to go to school and get enough food and clothes, and take care of them. We're going to work with their parents to help them stop beating their children and then if the children would like, send them home."

"The fact that this is not quite the picture Rebecca got is a serious strike against your communicative clarity, I don't think you accomplish your goals as well if instead of 'clear policy' you get 'miserable terror among people who consider this evidence against your having any business making law'."

"Do you have a suggestion for a communication that, if broadly published, would convince people that Amentan foster care isn't horrible? Because I'd be happy to have you in a focus group if that's how you want to spend your time, but I think your solution amounts to 'instead of being disbelieved, be believed!"

"I would love to be copied on what you're sending your focus groups. You could choose to issue all your announcements in cipher and you're not doing that and I think you have farther to go on the spectrum towards clarity, however you care to parody that."

"I hope you're right."

Rebecca leans hard on Michael.

Hug. 

"It's really stressful when you do things that we would obviously have asked you to do differently, out-of-the-blue without even a courtesy warning."

"I can send you everything that gets focused-grouped too, it's just a lot of volume. We have active focus groups in every country on about ten different policies each."

"But not all of them as big as this -"

"No, but I honestly did not dream that you'd object to this, everything that seems as objectionable as this is a big category. Better if you only want Britain."

"You thought we'd be like 'yay, those aliens sure will show all those terrible people like our parents'? 'yay, human kids will all be raised by indifferent Amentans who think they're inherently inferior'?"