"Because we'd have an arms race over it, because everyone else deserves some predictability - you want to minimize horrible disruptions to peoples' lives, there's been one, it'd be really ideal not to make it two."

"Which opinion is surely unrelated to it having been yours."

"Unpredictability is really bad. It's occasionally worth it - unpredictable water treatment, unpredictable end to ongoing atrocities, unpredictable end to slavery - but the purely economic costs of not knowing what government you'll be living under in five years are enormous and I don't actually think the most significant costs are economics. I do think what we did was worth it, compared to leaving you alone entirely, but that'd be at the top of the list of downsides."

"It is approximately plausible that given your degrees of freedom this is in fact exactly what you should have done."

"Well, we clearly should have had a - broader sense of tail risks."

"I hope whatever regrets you have are not because there are secret wizards who resemble your family. Some of the mistakes were avoidable anyway."

" - honestly it's mostly the secret wizards. I could do it better if I were doing it again with vastly more information, obviously, but that seems like a different category of thing."

"No, I mean things like the last rites thing or being clear that you think rotten tomatoes are spiritually cursed in advance, which you could have done with more research on the Muggle population."

"Sure. Six more months and one fewer person dies of mistakenly thinking that throwing rotting fruit is allowed, and a couple million die of dysentery. I don't know if we should have waited longer than we did but waiting until we knew everything would certainly have been waiting too long."

"You were the one with the paragraph about predictability."

"I think you're underestimating how hard it is to learn things from the outside even when you have a lot of time. I am not even positive that we'd have changed those things with six more months, as compared to picking slightly better infrastructure sites or having the schools open sooner or anticipating whatever happened in Portugal - or was that wizards -"

" - the palace being destroyed with everyone in it? I assumed that was you."

" - that was us, I mean the thing that prompted it, they downed several planes and the soldiers we sent in didn't come back -"

"Is it really hard to notice 'humans do not have the concept of pollution and you have to explain it' - anyway I guess that could have been wizards but I don't know why there'd be any there -"

"We knew humans had lots of competing understandings of ritual cleanliness and that some humans had none and that you cared about it much less on average, likely because of desensitization, it doesn't necessarily follow from that that you'd consider throwing rotted food at people to be nonviolent. The notes had to be short - if you put lots of clarifications in there you actually get a less clearer understanding in the general populace, because there's more for them to have to figure out and literacy is limited. I think a note clarifying everything which is as much of an edge case as 'violence is defined to include throwing all things, even non-injurious throwing of things' would have been a less clear note."

Sigh.

"I actually think if you just gave English humans a full summary of Amentan history and then asked 'so what are the things we're likeliest to get wrong' they'd have gone 'pollution is stupid and you don't know about God' and those are, in fact, the areas you messed up on, so..."

"We were thorough about confirming that God didn't exist!"

"Uh, I don't think he exists either but how did you check?"

"Uh, specific to English religions but we did this with all of them...Your world's approximately as old as ours - older, actually - and you have a fossil record consistent with having evolved from tree-dwelling primates, which is so obviously inconsistent with the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim origin stories as to be reassuring all by itself. Prayer doesn't do anything.There wasn't a big flood. There are no genetic signs of a population bottleneck consistent with the flood story either. Undetectably sabotaging religious rituals doesn't do anything. The wafers do not turn into the body of Christ - what the actual fuck is wrong with you people. That kind of thing."

"Huh."

"It seemed really unlikely a priori but you could've been the project of some more powerful aliens with bizarre project taste and we would definitely want to notice."

"Are you expecting to find any of those?"

" - so the universe is old enough that it'd be kind of weird if the only civilizations in it were in the same narrow band of technological capacity - you're far behind us on a civilizational scale, but you're right next to us on a geological one. So they should exist, unless there's some kind of upper bound on what technology can do and we're near it, and even then it's weird. It's hard to plan for something that ill-defined but that's one of the pragmatic justifications for being decent to humans, if someone else has high expectations or is operating on a rule like 'cooperate with people to the extent they would cooperate with you if they had the upper hand'..."

Nod.