Why now.  Thellim hasn't even had time to Google how much psions can read thoughts that aren't deliberately projected, or emotions when you're upset, which is the actual thing that Thellim should have done immediately.

[Trying to figure out how to construct elaborate hypothetical questions for you.]  Also, Isabella, let me know if you're just getting all my thoughts right now.

[Elaborate hypothetical questions, how exciting. You and the Internet getting along okay or did you immediately find porn and have a crisis?]

[Are we currently having an elaborate nested-hierarchical conversation that is mostly precognition?  Because I have other concerns about that which I haven't had time to research at all.]

[Oh, precognition can't nest. If I try to precog anything that is itself affected by precognition I drop out of it.]

[I'm worried about what happens when I'm precogged once, which I realize must be happening to everyone all the time because of lots of precogs around this world and the speed of light, but I also don't know how to navigate a conversation where precognition is happening on one side of it.  Is it possible for this conversation to apparently only take place outside of precognition as far as we know?]

[It's costly for me to precog conversations I'm participating in because I precog conditioning on my own decisions so I have to drop and retry a lot if I want to map out conversational branches, plus today I'm working so I'm already spending all the calories I can swallow on that, and I am not currently trying to precoggily manipulate this conversation because as far as I know I don't need to worry about leaving you alone for a couple hours and coming home to find that you have started World War III. If you do decide to interrupt me while I'm working I will see that as part of my precogged workday because it's not conditioned on my decisions.]

So if, hypothetically, I did need to start a planetary-scale conflict

[Poking around the Internet did start to give me the impression that I might end up really worried about this world's situation.  Though I'm not sure that worry would be - an irreconcilably bad thing from your own viewpoint?  If you came into dath ilan, would you try to stop people from offering childcare subsidies to unusually happy, healthy, intelligent potential parents?  Or try to decensor our past?  Or - if you ended up inside my house, somehow - how would you handle that situation?  How would you want me to handle that situation?]

[Uh, I guess I'd try to be one of the people who gets to read about the world's past before deciding to un-censor it, assuming there are such people, in case there's a really really great reason that I just am not thinking of. I don't think childcare subsidies are particularly bad. If I ended up in your house I would... want a place to sleep and a way to get food till I could contact Earth? Which would probably be easier than me getting your mom from here because I already know Earth people and specifically have a twin who I could telepath before anyone else. Presumably I would be swarmed by venture capitalists which, you know, sounds kind of fun unless they took up a ton of my time and I didn't have any left to practice telepathy.]

[What if dath ilan as a whole, but not all the people in it or me personally, was doing something that was wrong beyond any reasonable doubt under your own utility function?]

This isn't very clever but Thellim has had no time to plan.

[Uh, my current guess is that your culture was started that way but might not have any ongoing atrocities now that you are there, but if I showed up and discovered that you, uh, are ongoingly killing dissidents or kidnapping their kids or something - I don't know, that feels really detail-dependent, whether I had any leverage on there? Did you wander into the parts of Wikipedia that are about North Korea or something?]

[No.  What's North Korea.]

[It's a very badly managed country but they have nukes so nobody's doing anything much about it.]

Thellim notices she's pacing around the room, and tries to control her nervousness... no, wrong move, she should just let herself pace.  [But you already think North Korea is an importantly suboptimal situation, right?  What if you were my guest in dath ilan, and dath ilan was collectively doing something like that, and I - hadn't quite realized yet, that it was wrong - but you didn't know that I was necessarily beyond convincing?]

[I guess I'd try to convince you? In precognition if it seemed really delicate. Uh, is this about something you have just realized is rotten in the state of dath ilan or is this about you really not liking something about Earth even more than you already don't like anything about Earth besides sushi.]

[What if you're my guest in dath ilan, and you don't know, how to argue, because you don't know what, moral premises, my world runs on, which allows us to think, to believe, to think it looks like a, a good -] 

[It's possible I need to research things more and then get back to you on your next lunch break, I don't know how to argue right now, maybe you already think this particular thing is bad and that would be very nice but if it's not then I have to research more first.]

[You could just tell me what it is. Or... tell me ten things one of which it is, if you're especially nervous.]

[There's - there's educational-pranks we get, as children, the lesson of which is that - there's a flaw in human nature, at least in our nature, and at least we think it's a flaw.  It's that when you have some broad, sweeping statement that comes from - from kindness, from goodness, from the thread of Light that runs through the core of humanity - then even though people agree in the abstract that this kindness ought to apply to everyone - they sometimes just sort of forget that those morals exist, for some group of people - and then sometimes, the argument is as simple as saying, "But they're people too."  Only we get warned so much, as children, as adults, that it is weirdly possible to go on disagreeing past that point, terrifying experiments that stopped early and obviously could have been taken much further - but I don't know if this world has any concept at all, that there are things you ought not to do to anyone - are there things that you think, in principle, shouldn't be done to anyone?]

[Uh, yeah... okay, did you find, uh, should I start guessing?]

[There's more than one obvious possibility?  Go ahead and list them, then, I probably need to know anyways no matter how much I don't want to.]

[Well, it wasn't North Korea. Apartheid? One of the genocides? The CIA getting up to shenanigans? I should maybe thinking of - weirder stuff - children's rights? Do you folks have diplomatic relations with corvids who you have figured out how to talk to?]

[What rights... do children... not have?]

[I mean, their parents have custody of them, so they can't like... move out? Make some kinds of purchases? We do have child abuse laws, they can be removed from the home if their parents are caught beating them or starving them or anything.]

Better answer than feared.

[On your own view, who is it okay to beat or starve?]

[Uh, subs who are into that and... uh... ...people on hunger strikes? Respectively.]