"...I don't feel like I'm communicating about this effectively but I don't know what to try next."

Call up a fiction matchmaker and get them to steer me to a good short novel immersing me in it

"You don't have to solve all of my ignorance in a day, unless there's some deadline I'm unaware of."

"No rush as long as you continue to not take over the world or anything, nah."

"If I can in fact take over this world I have to do that, or so it currently seems to me.  I'm not sure if that disagreement reflects mistakes on my part, mistakes on your part, different utilities or all three."

"I mean, you can't, but you could perhaps be very destructive trying. If you actually think it's a good idea for dath ilani values to outright conquer Earth as opposed to just sending us math teachers I am not going to try to get in touch with them so that more of you can try."

"I think it's a good idea for dath ilani frameworks and institutions to exist on Earth, modulo points like it being possible that magical conditions here directly disallow science papers to use likelihood functions or people going insane if they think about heredity the wrong way.  It will be a lot easier to figure that out, adapt frameworks, and import them, if it's Civilization doing it instead of me trying to reconstruct things from memory.  The part where your version of civilization cannot just import all of our good ideas itself, the same way that dath ilan would just directly copy all your good ideas and pay you patent-gratuities on them, is something that - we're not just going to leave you like this.  It's not in us to do that."

"I think that your metaculture almost certainly took over in a bloodbath and I don't want it to happen here."

"You understand my world as little as I understand yours."

"But you understand your world less than I understand mine, because lots of it is being deliberately hidden from you, and I don't want it to happen here."

"It is apparently necessary, for unknown reasons that you might trust more if you understood the care that has gone into the frameworks giving us reason to trust them, that we causally screen off our past.  The example we're given of what didn't happen is that nobody intercepted an extraterrestrial radio transmission and instantiated alien software which tried to anti-optimize our world and now we've got to screen off everything it could have causally contaminated.  That is definitely not what happened but it is said to be reasonably indicative of what it is we now need to do.  The past is not hidden.  It is screened.  If we're doing this at all right, anything that happened in prehistory should not be able to affect you.  It is the present of Civilization that you would deal with, not its past, and that I do know and we do. not. do. the. bloodbath. thing. because. we. are. not. insane."

"I am not impressed with this as a response. I'm not going to try to contact anyone on dath ilan till I'm sure it's safe for Earth and the good things about Earth."

"Oh, I respect that.  I'm realizing exactly how stupid it was that I said we should directly call my mother when I did not, for example, try to estimate the probability that anything your world touches starts lunar-eclipsing.  Which is fine if it only does what you say it does, but not so fine if it does everything I think it does along with that."

"I mean, I won't be able to talk to her for a while, we can revisit the question of whether I should at any time in the middle."

"Yes.  And I'm sorry if I'm being strident.  But the notion that we screened off our past to hide a shameful massacre in which the present system was established is just - as wildly strange as mistakes I've no doubt been making to you.  I know in detail why that can't be true and it is triggering all of the emotions that human beings have about shameful things being attributed to them that they did not do.  For one thing, there are people in a very causally sealed environment who get ongoing info about Civilization and who could break the seal on the past if there was reason to do that.  We know who gets sent in, we know approximately what values they have when they go in, we know the oaths they took, we do know they're still alive, and if there was nothing in there but a shameful massacre they'd just tell us that!  For another, we did get told that the framework that made the decision was pretty similar to our current framework, especially in all the facets that aren't informative about the detailed past because they're just generically optimal solutions, and our current framework would not hide a shameful massacre.  I don't know if I can convey to you how alien a thought that is.  We have a list of all the considerations that screening the past is more important than, so people know there wasn't just an obvious missed consideration motivating the decision as a mistake, and the number two item on that list is that we're losing all the knowledge of our past errors.  The present voters wouldn't go along with doing that on purpose, we know the past voters weren't so different because they did preserve convergent info about that particular decision and their value tradeoff list looks a lot like ours.  We know that the entire upper government agreed to be fired and permanently banned from politics just to reduce doubt that anyone involved had an incentive to support that decision for the wrong reasons.  I could go on!  It was a big decision!  We took all the obvious precautions and passed down knowledge of their convergent properties the same way we kept and sanitized knowledge of how to make steel and so on!"

"I don't think a bloodbath was involved in, specifically, screening off the past, necessarily, but in establishing the dath ilan meta-culture such that this became an available action. You look like a human. You look like a human who did not have exclusively Africa-dwelling ancestors, even, which suggests that there was some population spread out of Africa before the divergence! Which means there were multiple, different human cultures developing independently some tens of thousands of years ago, and it's not that weird that some culture would develop an ideal that was like yours and refine their social technology over time until they could reliably spit out population members like you, but it has to have somehow taken over everywhere. How do you think that happened?"

"Until I got here the thought would not have occurred to me that there was not a single supremely obvious convergent answer to this question which is that all of the trajectories near the multi-agent-optimal boundary look like that.  I'm not even sure what you think should have happened instead."

"...something more like a Civilization game than like different low-tech societies running into each other and immediately deciding that they had no differences so important that they couldn't coordinate on things like banning certain music from the radio or obliterating the widespread study of history."

"If there was any group that did that they were not us.  And if so, somewhere along the line, much further back than the boundary of the known past, they turned into us, long after they'd finished playing Civ V.  Nothing resembling us by a very long distance ran into groups unlike us and tried to kill them instead of trading with them, sharing knowledge with them, or just plain helping them."

"I guess it's possible that some culture - pardon me, meta-culture - took over the world and only later morphed into a recognizable dath ilan ideology. But before anyone tries to trade with, share knowledge with, or just plain help Earth, they should have a solid grounding in what overtures look like threats to a planet with a Civ V backstory."

"Fully agreed.  We can start taking notes now if you want the first thing dath ilan hears to be a list of all the precautions they should take and all the things they shouldn't do.  I guarantee you that there is an Exception Handling procedure for the case of First Contact with a generally stupider or crazier human civilization, which already involves 'speak to them very cautiously until you understand how their models of you are bad' and which prioritizes 'try to figure out what does or might scare them and then don't say that'.  But the people much smarter than us will respect us a little more if it looks like we already tried to collect that information before they asked for it."

"Does the procedure also probably suggest not insulting them? Just a thought."

"Huh?"

"'Stupider' and 'crazier'? Insults?"

"Oh, sorry.  I did run across some mentions of cognitive tests on Wikipedia and eyeballing them it looks like an average dath ilani adult would max out the discriminative range of your IQ tests at 140 and our eight-year-olds would score about the same on the Cognitive Reflection Test as your distribution for adults.  I suppose it may not be fair to infer 'crazier' from the validity violations for astrology if those are otherwise functional people being forced insane on only some topics, but your world as a whole is definitely 'crazy' relative to coherent universal rules of valid reasoning, even if the people inside can reason validly about everything except astrology and other blocked topics.  It was meant as an ordinary fact, not an insult.  Sorry."

"Tests go higher than that, just not the ones you can casually find, you have to pay through the nose for the kind they invented for hypercogs. Earthlings will not take negative evaluations of their intelligence and sanity neutrally however you mean it unless you're really, really up on the polite ways to talk around it. What do you mean 'forced insane'?"