"Indeed.  But you've probably also - apart from the whole magic business - had some thoughts of Earth's own that are new to us, and arts in which dath ilan might take interest.  Thellim, this seems like a question for the dath ilani market-investigator?"

"Now there's a question I wouldn't want them asking the me from two years ago," Thellim says out loud back on Earth.  "Light, where do I start..."

[Earth has ideas they've deployed to make up for lacking coordination, methods that can accomplish the same ends by legitimately simpler and more elegant means, where dath ilan does the equivalent of brute-forcing it by manually instructing everybody on dath ilan to step left at the same time.  Probably the most striking example is that one Earth economist worked out that varying the money supply, in such fashion as to predictably regularize the total flow of money, can prevent missed-opportunity trades due to downward nominal wage rigidity... roughly, if dath ilan is willing to grow and shrink the currency supply according to fairly simple rules, I think you can shut down the entire executive branch of the government that tries to get people to be more willing to adjust prices downward, and replace it with one conditional prediction market plus ten lines of code running on the currency computer.]

"Interesting!  Yes, that sounds approximately like the type of novel-to-us innovation I might expect to be found in such a place.  What is the least expected concept that Earth has invented which dath ilan ought to import?"

[You mean the one that would have taken us the longest time to figure out, and would provoke the most disbelief from dath ilani if it wasn't explained very carefully?]

"Of course!"  Absent exerting the will to optimize over Isabella, it is not improper to let himself be steered by the first virtue of Curiosity.  "Naturally, I shall quite restrain any such reaction on my own part."

[Well, it certainly isn't hard to think of the one issue that caused Isabella to win the largest number of you-were-right-all-along points off of me.  And it's definitely the insight that's going to have all of dath ilan kicking itself the hardest, when we realized how much we missed, and how hard we missed it; and how our own concept of the Light probably caused a huge number of individuals to all shut down something important inside themselves as soon as they started to see it, because it didn't look like they thought something bright should look.  But I am not going to try to explain BDSM while this entire conversation is being routed through my mother.  Isabella, can we actually take that minute and get a transmission lock on Keeper Derrin now -]