"It's good for people when systems run well. Sometimes that means not knowing exactly how they work, just that they do."

"Would it not work if they knew how?"

"Well, if they knew that I was learning everything from the memos they would be more careful with the memos and do more things that they knew I did not check. Not knowing what I check makes  them do fewer things I wouldn't like."

Nod.

"I guess it would work just as well if I were omniscient but it's nice to have things which work in practice."

"Being omniscient would be bad."

"Oh? I think I would love it."

"But you'd know things that were private!"

"But I'd also know if that was important to someone - like, right now maybe there's someone who finds it horribly invasive to be looked at by me, and I don't know it, and so I won't not look at them."

"But you'd definitely know stuff people were thinking or writing to themselves. The looking at thing might not even be a thing."

"It's probably a thing. I look at people very invasively. And - if I knew the exact number of atoms in a rock I wouldn't be paying attention to it. I don't think it would be very hard to have a habit of not paying attention to things you know are private any more than you pay attention to constantly-updating rock-atom numbers."

"That depends what kind of omniscient, you're just making up how hard stuff would be to do."

"I guess being omniscient and constantly aware of everything with no ability to not pay attention to it would be pretty bad. Worth it, but not good."

"It would be really bad! What would be so great about it that it'd be worth it?"

"We would know how to get to other planets!!"

"It would be better if you just knew that and not anything you shouldn't know instead."

"Okay, yes, I would take knowing how to travel faster than light and live longer and season in other places and use this to get all those things for our people over knowing everything-with-no-way-to-filter it, if someone were offering custom-tailored magic knowledge."

"Good."

"Is anyone offering magic knowledge?"

"No. I have magic amnesia but that is the opposite."

"It really is." Squeeze.

"I don't like it."

"It is pretty upsetting if someone did it on purpose."

"You think they might not have?"

"Well, I don't know, but it's hard to see what purpose it serves and it's possible that, uh, shaping someone Amentan-shaped affects their memories, or something like that, or that you lost your memories and that is why they decided to leave you here."