[And you don't think it's odd that people's otherwise totally functional reasoning abilities suddenly switch off when applied to particular topics that seem potentially related to the bizarre power-granting lunar eclipses.]

Thellim is going to make a list of all the things that people are 'superstitious' about.  Maybe there's a pattern.  She bets nobody here has tried that.

[It's not just astrology! Astrology seems of a kind with the ghosts thing! I think the - amount of explicit reasoning - the typical Earthling needs to get along in life is lower than the standard you need to - be allowed in public and understood as sane - in dath ilan.]

[I don't think I understood that...?  The words are fine, I just don't understand what the sentence means by this environment requiring less explicit reasoning.]

[What are you imagining goes wrong if someone is, like, working retail, raising a family, playing basketball in their spare time, and believes in ghosts, which are not real?]

['Ghosts' seems like a larger concept than the braintalk or English is giving me directly, so I don't know specifically what goes wrong.  But in a broad sense, if you are otherwise thinking clearly, you expect to do worse on average by having more false beliefs?  Maybe somebody tries to buy not-real ghosts using real money... do I need to walk through the coherence theorems for cases like that?]

[You need to stop leaning so hard on theorems in general when predicting human behavior but as it happens we have people who believe in ghosts and do not try to purchase them and if they did they'd probably stop at a reasonable hobby expenditure amount of ghost purchase and it would not be more debilitating than liking expensive wine or something.]

[So... the magic makes the environment less harsh than dath ilan in a way that means people here evolved less refined reasoning capacity, rather than them being directly disturbed by lunar forces?  Your environment seems very aggressive when it comes to, for example, successfully exploiting my taste buds with extra-salty snacks while I was distracted.]

[If you want me to lock up the snacks so only the resident eclipsed can eat them then I can do that but I'd, you know, rather not. Please stop attributing large scale trends to magic all the time. There are fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand unlocked eclipsed in the entire world and most of us are under twenty-five and don't know how to do much yet. It's possible the environment is less harsh than dath ilan but my first guess is that you start disappearing people if they start seriously considering crystal healing instead of allowing them to wander around putting quartzes in their purse or whatever, people-disappearing habits would certainly be a harshness of the environment.]

[I... genuinely do not know what we would do if somebody in our world suddenly started exhibiting the reasoning pattern I saw in the astrology repository, though we would have to do something if they started exhibiting other behavior patterns in your world, like them stabbing people if they thought too hard about eugenics.  I don't think somebody like that would end up happy enough to have kids, so you're correct regardless that the genes would be disadvantaged in our world more than yours.  I suppose if that's gone on long enough, it's a non-directly-magical explanation for why people here would have generally less refined reasoning capabilities] and how Isabella isn't more INCREDIBLY DISTURBED by that concept Thellim cannot understand, oh wait she can it's magic.  [The part where you go insane if you try to control your own population genetics is totally magic, though, just saying.  Sorry if I seem to be harping on that.]

[- okay, uh, people don't actually "start stabbing people if they think too hard about eugenics", perhaps I didn't emphasize enough how much I was oversimplifying. Do you want me to go into that more right now or when I get home? You could read the Wikipedia page on eugenics.]

[Oh, that sounds like fun.  I can't wait to see what kind of reasoning errors that produces.  Hopefully having all these infohazards inside my head does not detonate me after I actually get exposed to a lunar eclipse here.]

[Even if you eat before your eclipse and you get magic, you probably won't explode yourself.]

[No, I mean that if I go around reading all the Wikipedia articles about knowledge that drives your people insane, I may be fine now but I'd be gambling a lot on either that quality sticking to me through your next lunar eclipse, or on being able to solve my local version of that problem in the next few months.]

[We do not have information that straightforwardly drives people insane, though given your rigid definition of sanity I suppose long term cultural exposure could get a result you'd call that.]

Isabella JUST GOT THROUGH SAYING that otherwise functional people suddenly can't reason consistently about 'ghosts' and YOU TOTALLY HAVE INFORMATION THAT DRIVES PEOPLE INSANE, are you not even allowed to notice THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SPECIFIC PROPOSITION AND THE GENERAL ONE.

Thellim takes some deep breaths and calms herself.  This is not actually Isabella's fault in any way.

Also - Thellim needs to keep reminding herself about this, because she has just had to defend her own views in argument and you need to achieve a very high mental skill level before that stops having at least temporary effects on you - also, Thellim herself could be the wrong one here.  Well, it's increasingly hard to see how Isabella could be right.  But that doesn't mean Thellim herself is right, or that she is not pervasively misunderstanding some things due to total nonacquaintance with this dimension, perhaps in a way that would justly annoy Isabella especially if Thellim gets strident about it.

If this was a book in Science Maniac Verrez then Thellim would be managing to be wrong about nearly but not quite everything while missing key clues in Isabella's presentation because Thellim was annoyed and actually Thellim has been very quickly assembling a very large body of conjoined hypotheses in a way that is not completely nonreminiscent of Verrez at his worst.  Maybe it's fine if you do that in real life instead of in a humorous young-adult novel but...

...okay, no, you probably can't get away with that in real life either.  P(A /\ B) <= P(A).

If people here aren't allowed to know that while thinking about astrology that would explain an awful lot.

...but it is logically-necessarily less probable than people making mistakes about astrology for any reason.

[Isabella, I apologize if I've been running too quickly with my hypotheses in a way that is obviously stupid if you're a native.  I believe I got caught up in the heat of argument and started stringing ideas together more quickly than I could realistically expect to do correctly after being transported to a new dimension.  It - does still seem fairly likely to me that something is wrong in a very general sense covering at least some of the things jumping out at me, but I shouldn't be sounding confident so early of anything more specific than that.  I will follow your advice about looking up astrology on Wikipedia, and try to learn more than the very little I actually know about this place.]

There.  Now she is not totally being Verrez on an unusually silly day anymore, and is once again being a virtuous, mentally disciplined person.

[Glad to hear it. Anything else I should hear before I go back to work?]

[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.