"I mean, that'd be better in the sense that there'd be something really appealing I could do without fudging anything, but I'd still be way off base for the central theme of the caste. And it'd matter a lot more that I tend not to get along that well with other greys."

"And you think you still wouldn't?"

"I think I still would have had the problems I had if I'd been trying for a deskwork detective job, so yes."

"Hmm."

"Why do you ask?"

"I'm not sure if it's the same thing but I can't think of a question that would get at whether it is."

"This all started because I wanted to know if it was close enough to count for 'Amentans wouldn't replace an Earthly caste system with their own if we'd already had one'."

"Would you actually be happy with us if we declared housekeeping female and soldiering male and sewing female and manufacturing male and nudged humans into that system?"

"No, I don't want you to add legal constraints of any kind on what careers humans can take up at all. If that's not on the table, I want more options than what happened to work for you."

"It would really surprise me if you were better off with two castes where you can't select for aptitude over time and are stuck with a fifty-fifty balance regardless of what the job demand looks like and you have to marry intercaste."

"Hmmm, when you put it like that, why don't we go with the option where we aren't stuck with any balance on even a generational timescale and never need to consider caste when marrying at all?"

"I am sure some people will do that. I am not sure we should nudge people to do that."

"As ever my sticking point is the children of people who decide castes are shiny."

"We could study it. Some of them are just like Amentans, they have a caste with whatever gatekept options for flexibility we're creating internally, some of them can do whatever they want. I really think the ones with a caste will be happier and better-integrated and more productively employed and less likely to commit crimes."

"I think this experiment is incredibly rigged. You could say that since the rigging is an inextricable feature of the entire political situation of the world that's fair anyway, but it is rigged."

"Yes, I don't think Amentan castes would be the best thing for humans who were post-industrial and colonizing planets of their own accord. I do think they're the best thing for humans whose independence as a species is probably going to look like 'countries around the equatorial regions of planets largely Amentan-held'."

"In the long run we could also populate planets that have very short or very long years just fine and castes seem very annoyingly difficult to dislodge unless you're literally Miolee."

"I don't know. I think once there are enough planets for there to be casteless ones then people whose castes suit them very poorly will go there and there, hair color will actually not tell you all that much, and I wouldn't expect it to be that persistent at that point."

"You shouldn't have to move to another planet in order to take up painting."

"You wouldn't. And - if humans don't integrate well then no other planets will want them and I expect that to turn out to be a much more painful constraint."

"Ex-reds could go stealth with hair dye and accent coaching. I think even if you go all in on casteing humans - commit to forcing them into staying in the boxes their grandparents chose come what may, wedge every weird human occupation like 'priest' into a caste or make the grand sacrifice of multi-casteing it, encourage every promising human child to pick a caste so they can go to the really good schools - I think even if you do all that they'll be visibly obvious. Consistent skin tones and the men get really tall and hairy and so on. Not everybody will be like, 'hello, unremarkable purple, welcome'. Have you accounted for that?"

"Oh, yeah, nobody is going to be confused about what species people are, at least not reliably. I think a shopkeeper is still likelier to hire a purple human than a random human. It can be noticeable without mattering, or without mattering more than having your roots showing and the wrong color matters."

"More likely, sure, I don't know how much and the switch does spend a lot on the chance."

"I'm also hoping hybrids will help. Make it a spectrum instead of a category - we're going to be aggressively incentivizing hybrids for other reasons anyway..."

"- can you sell a trial period for castes? Get people to register an intent to declare a caste, don't impose any requirements for five years, maybe even longer for a control group, don't tell them you're observing but look into how much of what they do would be difficult if they did that and then interview them about whether they were just doing it for lack of access to elite caste-restricted stuff or if they actually like it."