Arguably she has not been doing that fast enough here, come to think; though in her defense being thrown into literally an entire different environment is enough invalidation that sheer cognitive speed is going to be an issue and trying to update all her emotions simultaneously could cause serious internal strain.

"I see. I suppose it would widely be considered admirable to be adaptable but sometimes people like to encourage faith instead, so I suppose in that sense it's understood to be a tradeoff virtue in some subcultures."

"I... am just going to assume I misunderstood that and move on and that there is not actually an Earthling subculture trialing what happens when everybody goes on believing that it is snowing outside after it stops snowing."

"Not about snowing, no."

"If this is humorous exaggeration please keep in mind that I don't know the baseline you're exaggerating against and so it's not funny."

"I really don't know how to explain religion. Uh, we have an old story called the Odyssey where a dude gets lost on his way home from a war and takes twenty years to get home and his spouse rejects other suitors in the meantime even though they make this very difficult for her because she is holding on to the hope that he'll come home? And this is frequently understood as a virtue of hers."

"That's... also a virtue in dath ilan, if she loves him that much?  That's not what adaptation is?  Failure to adapt is if she incorrectly estimates the probability or keeps all her policies without trying to recalculate given the new probability, not if she decides a small probability is worth waiting for her love."

"Okay, then I don't have any great examples to hand right now that don't involve explaining religion."

"Small fraction of population-moments I can worry about later or key to understanding your whole society?"

"Second thing but it's kind of embarrassing."

"If my mind immediately suggests blaming it on the lunar eclipses I won't say so out loud."

"Thanks, I appreciate that. Uh, billions of people believe in one of several popular - ontological frameworks - according to which the world was created by an entity or possibly a coalition of entities with supernatural powers who are often further postulated to be omnipotent and omniscient and omnibenevolent, though the details vary widely. There are other less common religions that I know less about but also postulate supernatural entities that do not make much sense."

"On priors I'd have considered that quite plausible, and alarming."  Thellim quietly predicts:  People think about it really badly with similar patterns as astrology, Isabella thinks it is all fake, all the specific claims listed on Wikipedia fail to fact-check according to Wikipedia's referenced papers.

"Considered what plausible, billions of religious people or an omnibenevolent god?"

"Obviously not omnibenevolent relative to my culture's utility function distribution, but your lunar-eclipse-related phenomena don't look like the unoptimized rest of Nature - they don't seem like stars exploding or waves in an ocean.  Between natural selection, cognitive intelligence, and gradient balancing in multiagent equilibria, I'd have said it looks more like cognitive intelligence or gradient balancing."

"Ah."

"You think there's some differential equations where you solve them and end up with that?  I do consider that very plausible, considering that such solutions are far from obvious at a first glance to bounded agents, that the thing did actually happen, and that powerful beings have no obvious reason to hide from you.  Cognitive agency seems relatively more plausible, but I would not have predicted this world to exist in the first place, so it is very understandable if you laugh at my priors and ignore them instead of trying to update them on evidence they said was impossible."

"Can you try a little more to work with your English install here, I'm not following you."

"It looks to me like somebody did it on purpose, instead of, say, molecules bonded together and that's what came out.  But I would not have guessed in advance that it would happen at all and what you're supposed to do in a case like that is throw out all the ideas that didn't predict the thing and go find some new ideas, instead of trying to make it fit into your old ideas."

"Well, hopefully Wikipedia will work all right for you here."

"If I can just look up where the eclipse powers come from in Wikipedia I am going to go do that immediately, possibly stomping directly through any solid objects that may be in my way.  But I don't think you mean that?"

"I meant religion, Wikipedia does not know why we eclipse."

"Noted.  What about it is key to understanding your culture?"

"Billions of people consider their religious beliefs an important part of their lives, conflict between religious groups has driven many wars, religious discrimination is illegal in some contexts, display of mainstream-palatable religious belief is still very helpful to being elected to public office and in some social situations."

"With the exception of falling far enough off the multiagent-optimal boundary to end up in multiagent-value-destroying conflict, it seems hard to blame them for that?  If you had disagreements about superpowerful beings watching everything your civilization was doing, that would be a very reasonable thing to form political factions about.  Even dath ilan currently has epistemically-based political factions instead of being able to apply theorems about no common knowledge of disagreement, embarrassing as that may be."