[Nothing comes to mind.]

As soon as Thellim tried being happy with herself, her mind went back to that video.  She wonders how long it will be, if ever, before that wears off.

And Thellim goes to look up astrology on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia refers her to some science papers!

Some of the papers are behind paywalls!

Okay.  Thellim will not overreact to this.  It is not proof of magical insanity.  They don't do it in dath ilan and would by local custom consider that to be Not Done and disqualify the papers as real science.  But that could conceivably vary between worlds in a way that doesn't violate coherence theorems.  Producing science costs money and selling it could be profitable, that is a totally reasonable thing to do differently in another world.

Here's some papers not behind paywalls.  Science aho!

What the -

Isabella calls back when she has luncheon. [Hey, Wikipedia treating you all right?]

[It is the general practice of my people that we try to develop bad theories even when we know they're going to be wrong, so that after the predictions turn out wrong, we can understand what we were wrong about.  I hope that you can take it in that spirit when I say that my current bad theory, entertained only for the sake of making predictions that I know will prove flawed, is that the moon doesn't let you do science.]

[...is that really your best guess? The moon doesn't let us do science?]

[Well you see, or rather, as my people would see, there is a certain probability-theoretic concept lying at the center of all epistemology - which either English doesn't have terminology for, or the person who put English into my head happened to not know, or it just isn't in my head for any other reason, but under the circumstances I am guessing the first case - which concept is also the thing that experimenters report in a sane world - called by my people the 'likelihood function'.  Conceptually, it is an extremely simple, natural, unambiguous mathematical object which combines by multiplication across different experiments.  For example, if there are two hypotheses H1 and H2, and the first experiment reports evidence E1 which is 1/3 likely given H1 and 1/4 likely given H2, and experiment two reports observation E2 which is 1/2 likely given H1 and 1/8 likely given H2, we can combine the two likelihood functions to say that the evidence is 1/6 likely given H1 and 1/32 likely given H2.  That is not an oversimplification, it is how that small discrete case of likelihood functions validly works.]

[I have been trying to entertain the hypothesis that there is some clever useful thing that 'p-values' and 'confidence intervals' are doing, but I have been looking up how to combine them, and they do not combine in any simple or sane way, and that disadvantage alone for purposes of accumulating knowledge should be decisive.  And also the underlying epistemology seems, to put it mildly, deranged, and allows you to attribute different 'p-values' to the same piece of evidence depending on the experimenter's state of mind.  It is likewise possible to measure an electric charge and get a '90% confidence interval' of [green, purple] if you have a procedure that generates a 95% confidence interval and then you add a small chance of substituting [green, purple] to the output of the previous procedure.  And it just seems really really conspicuous that something ripped the concept of likelihood functions out of your world's epistemology, and an enormous weird ad-hoc pseudo-mathematical edifice had to grow up around the gaping sucking void this left behind.  And I just don't see what kind of fact I could be missing about your world that could possibly contextualize this, because this is about math itself, not the empirics of any particular science.  I am trying to be a good epistemically humble reasoner and keep in mind alternative hypotheses like 'well, it's more likely that this "happened for any reason" than "happened because of magic", maybe there is just a giant conspiracy of journal editors who suppress all mention of likelihood functions, all across the multiple scientific fields whose papers I tried to check'.  But it really really seems realistically more likely that a world which permits power-granting lunar eclipses can also permit some generalized Eater of the Concept of Likelihood Functions.]

[Thank you for attending my stupid lecture about my wrong hypothesis.  How has your day been going?]

[I can't talk about much of my work, some of it's classified or just gated on not wanting to foul up other precogs. My lunch is tasty though. Uh. Somehow my main reaction to that is that I had imagined dath ilan would be better at variable names than calling things "H1" and "H2". Uh, I acknowledge there are some issues with how scientific experiments are conducted and reported but it seems like an exaggeration to say that we can't do science, let alone to blame the moon. Have you tried reading the Wikipedia page on statistics?]

[No, but I can do that next.  Is there some special merit or virtue of Wikipedia I don't know about?  In my world,] you know, the one you keep calling a monoculture, [there is not one special repository of knowledge that is better than all the other repositories of knowledge on the Network.]

[I happen to be personally fond of Wikipedia. It's not perfect, sometimes there's vandalism and incompleteness and edit wars, but for your purposes - breadth-first citation-backed neutrally written crossreferenced content with the editing history available if you want that and the whole thing's free and you only have to learn how to navigate the one site, it's basically ideal. When you Google things you have to sift out bad results or you wind up believing in astrology and you don't have the context to do that well, though if Wikipedia fails you in some way by all means fall back on a more general search.]

[Is this a potential crux?  Where, if I can show you that likelihood functions are extremely basic and useful and an incredibly direct consequence of probability axioms - after you get home, that is - and also your world's diamond-standard Wikipedia article on statistics proves to have no mention of them, then you might agree with me that something odd could be going on whether or not it has anything directly to do with magic?]

[Uh, I am not actually in the mood for a math lesson, but even presuming I was and presuming you demonstrated that this was the case that might get me to... email my old math teacher, or my brother's professor maybe, and if they don't know either suggest you try to write it up for a math journal. It's not actually that weird to me that you might have run into math we haven't, you seem to be from a very mathy planet and sometimes basic-seeming things take a while to think up, like hallways, or like can openers and screwdrivers having been invented after cans and screws.]

Isabella, your world has, for example, CARS.  Admittedly, both the invention of cars and the invention of likelihood functions are behind the curtain of the past infohazard, in dath ilan.  But Thellim is pretty sure that LIKELIHOOD FUNCTIONS come before INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES on any reasonable technology lattice.  That would be like discovering Maxwell's Equations before you invented the pre-mathematical concept of natural selection!

...maybe it's a very nonmathy planet?

Maybe the math got Eaten.

No that's not right the p-values stuff was much more complicated than likelihood functions, they couldn't execute the arithmetic operations if math in general was being eaten in anything like a natural order of complexity.

[Not a crux, then, oh well.  Shall I plunge back into reading the Network, starting with the Wikipedia page on statistics and focusing more heavily on Wikipedia after that, so I can come up with, by your lights, ever more deranged misunderstandings of your poor innocent world?]

[I mean, I hope you'll get less deranged over time. You can do that or I can recommend you some public domain fiction you'll be able to get off Google in case that, uh, works better?]

[Oh, that does sound like a good idea!  It might be a more natural immersion method.  And it would let me rest my brain a bit as well.  I don't think anybody here knows me well enough to matchmake fiction for me, though?  Or is there a psion for that?]

[...you will have to tell me more about fiction matchmaking later. People just, uh, read what sounds fun or interesting or that their friends are reading or that is considered an important cultural touchstone. My criteria for picking something out for you is that it can't have any sex scenes or be too depressing and should not have any fantasy elements because those will confuse you and since you also have to be able to easily get it off the internet without much internet knowhow it has to be out of copyright and I think given these constraints I recommend "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen. It will probably still confuse you - among other things there are some mentions of religion and the entire thing is set in another country two hundred years ago so the etiquette and stuff is all very different - but I'm hoping it will not horrify you and you can ask me about it at teatime.]

Wait, is Thellim the only fiction matchmaker in this world!?

That is a weird thing to get as your Unique Dath Ilan Profession in a Portal Fantasy but okay then.  Not necessarily a bad thing for Thellim in terms of her ability to support herself if she doesn't get any mage or psion powers!  Though, of course, she doesn't actually know any of the fiction of this world, the people are very strange to her, and she'd be advertising for a profession that doesn't exist...

No, it probably is a bad thing for Thellim's ability to support herself.  Well done to whoever is subverting the genre conventions here.

[I'll go read Pride and Prejudice after I've checked out the Wikipedia page on statistics.  Good luck with your recommendation!]

[Uh, thank you. How about you try to download it now so I can help you troubleshoot if you run into something confusing.]

[Yes, thank you!]  Thellim attempts to find a book and download it.