[You've been kind to me.  For today, I won't do anything with the intent of affecting your larger world without checking in with you first, and more likely not at all.  Deontology is complicated, and I'm too worn to explain the details, but I think that much of a promise should let you finish your work without fear.  We do have logical-decision-theory where I come from and I'm not going to break the Algorithm.]

[I... don't know what that last sentence means but okay.]

[I'm almost afraid to ask what you have instead, but that is a surprisingly good candidate for being a large part of the problem around here.  If your reality-layer has anyone who is good at math or economics I'd expect them to be able to recognize the importance very quickly.]

[Maybe it's just discussed in different terms. I've only taken a couple econ classes.]

[You can't do econ without logical-decision-theory as the base.  Or at least not from first principles; I suppose you could arbitrarily assume an infinite set of assumptions that agents are making about other agents' assumptions.  If it'd been invented, you'd know.]

[I suppose you can at some point describe it and we can see if I recognize it by some other name. We do have economics as a field.]

[You've got a field that corresponds to whatever you hear when I think the word 'economics', yes.  It remains to be seen how well isomorphisms of subject matters commute with translations of braintalk concepts.]

[Fair enough, I guess. You could read the Wikipedia page on econ if you like.]

[I will be reading about a lot of things, rest assured.]

Among Thellim's first thoughts, now that she's thinking again, is that maybe she can figure out how to present as some kind of superdominant - a third sex in the system, one that makes all the current dominants want to obey her.  This shouldn't be easy if this world is in a nearly-inexploitable-equilibrium, but that's just what so many visible features aren't in.  Maybe nobody here can imagine that possibility without the moon driving them mad, for the same reason they can't think about optimizing heritable traits without running amok with kitchen knives.

Having the dominants obey her wouldn't actually solve the problem where the moon is altering half the population to seek out painful experiences.  But it would be a start on whatever actually needs doing.

Are the children saner before they go through their eclipses?  It's funny to think of taking over this world with a faction of eleven-year-olds but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.  Thellim might not have been on the competitive frontier of adulthood at age eleven, but she could still perform gainful labor, and might have been able to do all sorts of jobs if adults hadn't been doing them already.

[Okay. I'm sorry you found porn and had a crisis. You could turn on safe search in the Google settings but it's not perfect. I'm about to go back to work in a minute, anything else you want to cover first?]

[I think I may just need to - read more.  Get more data until a pattern emerges and things start making sense and my predictions start coming true.  I'm not looking forward to it, but I think it's what I have to do.  After a snack.]

[Sure. Maybe I should recommend you fiction or something so you can see more of the - moving parts of the world - but later. Bye!]

Snacks available in Isabella's apartment include:

- potato chips
- peanut butter pretzels
- trail mix
- oreos
- parmesan crisps
- apples
- bananas
- string cheese
- seedy crackers
- guacamole
- seven layer dip

Thellim tries samples of everything that looks unfamiliar - meaning everything except the trail mix and apples - and proceeds to eat way too much of everything except bananas, before she realizes that Earth's economy got her while she was distracted.

All right, back to work.  She doesn't really - want to - but she has to.  It's just occurred to Thellim that she herself may only have months remaining before her "nearest lunar eclipse to twelfth birthday" hits her and possibly turns her into a submissive.  She might have only that long to find a solution on at least an individual level, and if she can't find one, she would have to - pretty seriously reconsider suicide again.  Maybe she just drew an unusually bad world to end up in on her first draw from a permadeath roulette.

Assuming, once again, that all her wild theorizing is correct at all.

If their first lunar eclipse has substantial effects on kids not being turned into mages and psions, somebody ought to have studied that, right?  Somebody?  Please?

Not quite tracking the distinction between the way she's thinking about Earth herself, versus the way Isabella talks about Earth, the first thing that Thellim types into Google is "effect of moon on personality".

Isabella calls her back a bit later. [Having eleveneses, how are you doing?]

[So I know you don't do this here - I know you don't, because I searched it - but in dath ilan we get administered temporary-mind-affecting-drugs once our brains have stabilized enough to be safe to poke a bit, so we can learn what it's like if our brain starts to malfunction and operate safely inside it.  We're also trained to recognize common syndromes of insanity like psychosis, both in ourselves and in others.]

[I tried looking up what your world knows, if anything, about the effect of the moon on personality.  I found a... fascinating... Network repository that I've been reading through for the last while.  It turns out there's a whole suite of effects of planetary bodies on personality, besides just lunar eclipses - mostly having to do with the exact position of planets at people's time of birth, or possibly conception.  However, natives of this world can't think about that subject without the underlying magic of this world rendering them locally insane.  They can think about it at all, and notice the effects of the planets, but not think - validly.  I'm concerned that you won't and possibly can't believe me, and the syndrome does not look exactly like psychosis or any single drug I've experienced.  But I am very sure that any native of Earth who tries to think about the subject matter you call 'astrology' gets hit by the equivalent of a medium-strength mind-affecting-drug.]

[...okay, so, uh, astrology is... fake. I am not actually sure how to convince you that I can think about it and have concluded reasonably that it's fake, do you have an idea?]

[I'm not sure what you mean by 'fake' - the update my brain tried to do in the background was 'half the people can't think about it sanely and half the people can't see it exists' - but the pattern so far has not suggested that the generalized-weird-phenomenon of magic will do things like reach in and fake your experimental results.  So if you can direct me towards nice sane science research showing that 'astrology is fake', that might update me?  I guess in retrospect I should have been looking at places other than that one Network repository, but I was trying to analyze exactly what the distorted pattern of reasoning was.  For some reason it did not occur to me that there'd be a large solid body of science on astrology that a Network repository on the topic just wouldn't think to mention at all.]  Not that this fact itself would be suspicious or anything.

[So, uh, sometimes people believe things that aren't true? Astrology is just one example, it's not specifically celestial-body-related, if that's what has you crediting it, some people believe that you can find water by waving sticks around or that there are ghosts or fairies or something. Plus religion in general, which is a different category socially but would probably look similar to you. Probably someone has done scientific research on this that would look convincing to someone seriously entertaining the hypothesis but you could start with Wikipedia on astrology? They'll have citations.]

[Rogerroger.  I'll investigate that for next time, then.  I do apologize for the frustration you must be experiencing, if I am somehow interpreting this world in a completely wrong way based on my bad priors and this is perfectly obvious to anyone who grew up here and knows all about it,] as opposed to being able to actually see what is there and notice the enormous collection of nothing but anomalies and other people not noticing those anomalies.  But Thellim is trying to keep the other hypothesis in mind as a possibility, in its own separated mental compartment.

(There is no nearby separated mental compartment for it somehow being perfectly fine to do what Thellim saw in that video.  She contemplated making a compartment like that, briefly, but decided that this was not in fact a sane or healthy or wise or good thing to do.  There are limits to charitable hypotheses.)

[It's, uh, an interesting change of pace, but you find very creative ways to react to things, I'll give you that.]

[Does it change anything if I say that people in dath ilan also make prediction errors, but even when they are making very bad prediction errors, I have literally never seen anybody in dath ilan reason about anything the way that people here are reasoning about 'astrology', and that there are literally dozens of blatant stereotypical inference errors per page that somebody should have noticed if everyone's perceptions weren't switched off?]

[I'm not surprised that astrology pages are full of errors because they're talking nonsense? That mostly makes me worried for whatever totalitarian system you have for suppressing superstitious people in dath ilan.]

[We do not have 'superstitious people' per se because we do not have pervasive generalized-lunar-eclipse 'astrological' phenomena driving us insane.  Some people do have neurological syndromes related to, for example, serotonin imbalances, which we can cure by addressing those serotonin imbalances, and people say in advance that they'd want to be cured if that happened to them and are afterward thankful for having been cured.  I agree that there is a legitimate ethical question about whether a new person with new interests is created by the insanity and then wronged by its cure, but I disagree that the answer to this ethical question is obvious, or that only a 'totalitarian system' would more greatly respect the interests of the prior person who existed before the schizophrenia and had opinions about what to do in that case.]

[I'm not sure if SSRIs affect superstition but I have not anecdotally heard of it. At any rate, people who believe in astrology or ghosts or whatever are generally perfectly functional outside of being weird about wanting to know whether people are Geminis and avoiding creepy houses and they are not experiencing discrete psychiatric episodes as we understand them.]