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.

It is not too hard to get a PDF of Pride and Prejudice with slightly janky formatting to open on Isabella's computer.

Thellim endeavors to read.

Pride and Prejudice is about a family in a much less technologically advanced time of Earth - no computers, no cars, no electricity. Despite what would be fairly clear cues to a modern Earthly reader that not all of the Bennett sisters are definitely submissive, it is assumed that they are because they're girls, and they can't inherit their house; they appear to be of a social class that can't just go get a job, or at least can't just go get most jobs, so one of them has to marry someone rich and support her sisters. In spite of this the narrative is supportive of attempts to find personally suitable doms rather than agreeing to the first financially suitable proposal to come one's way and it's definitely clear on doms being desirable in ways other than the monetary. When Isabella has teatime she tells Thellim where she can find the 2005 film to stream if she'd like another angle on the same plot with more supporting visuals and body language and costuming and whatnot, though she cautions the adaptation is not historically perfect.

Isabella comes home at six with a bag of Chinese takeout and lays it out. "Take whatever you want, I like all of this and will eat whatever you don't," she says.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk on a walkway, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his submissive understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

She's reading science at the moment Isabella gets in, in fact.  It's embarrassing that she was doing that instead of her literary homework.  (The thought of quickly tabbing back to the book to hide the evidence never crosses Thellim's mind; dath ilani do ever lie and hide even for small sad reasons but this is not an occasion for that.)

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.