"I mean, how many people did you convince to tell you what they want their sex partners dressed up as in the bedroom, here? Most people on Earth aren't masochists either, it's a large minority but it's not over half."

"When you say conventional wisdom do you mean that there's classic survey experiments replicating 0.7 correlation or..."

"...there might be but that isn't what I mean, it's more like it's something that seems like a pretty obvious logical leap to a lot of people and there's nothing particularly contradicting it so folks repeat it to each other."

Would it be less insulting than 'crazy' if she more technically describes Earth civilization as 'not valid'

"And no public goods or scientific institutions, so nobody can scrape up the money to go do the obvious survey... no, that doesn't sound right?  Somebody is doing science if all the information on Wikipedia isn't just made up."

"We do have science, yes, even if you don't like how they do stats. Uh, there are a lot of things to study? It's not especially important to have very rigorous results on whether masochists like jalapenos more."

"I am confused about the flow of argument!  I thought the proposition was that eating spicy food is a lower, clearly benign point along a spectrum of benign masochism that extends smoothly off into the horizon.  Whether liking spicy food does or does not correlate with more extreme masochism seems like... a clear evidence-differential signal about the underlying hypothesis?"

"...yes, but nobody's exactly banging down scientists' doors going 'study whether spicy food is correlated with masochism, we need to know now, it's of urgent import' so scientists are spending their budgets on studying, like, alcoholism or octopuses or Antarctica or whatever."

"If a tenth of your population is masochists, the benefit of all studies relating to masochism gets multiplied by one-tenth your population size.  If you ever have the choice between losing all science on masochists and losing all science on Antarctica you should probably pick Antarctica."

"If you find a way to get super rich you are welcome to commission a study on masochism and even demand they use dath ilan style statistics, don't let me stand in your way, but what would you be planning to do with information on this if you weren't personally an alien?"

"Optimize masochism, but it is not clear to me that I should share ideas I generate on this subject from within Earth's moral reference frame."

"...I feel like if you were really good at optimizing people's personal preferences, you would be yelling about Earth food as much as you yell about everything else."

"Food here has been fine so far, except when it is on airplanes, and then it is not fine, which I did notice and alarm about."

"So I don't know that there are obvious improvements to be made in the implementation of masochism any more than there are in the implementation of tasty food, masochists are not encouraged to practice their proclivities on airplanes so that part doesn't come into it, and I really don't see you inventing revolutionary new sex toys."

"I am not able to follow the thread of this argument.  Do you not have - the idea that people in horrible pain take moral priority over an equivalent number of people not in horrible pain?  The only way that food takes priority would be if subs were being impelled to eat such awful food that they had to be -"

strapped down unable to move, locked down more than even the torture required, like the torturers were making a deliberate point of exactly how helpless she was, not even able to try to defend herself or writhe away after strike after strike after strike, unable to do anything but scream louder than any scream Thellim has ever heard in her life

"- anchored in place by metal bonds and have the food forcibly inserted into their mouths while they scream.  Actually, that seems to me like a strong counterargument that masochism occupies a natural continuum with spicy food.  I've never heard of anybody in dath ilan forming such a powerful spicy food preference that they needed to be restrained in place and forced to eat the meal while they screamed... though I guess it could be very rare, or maybe treated as a failure of intertemporal bargaining..."

"...I think we're having very different conversations. When you say 'optimize masochism' what do you mean?"

"I should not in fact think about that.  I am a little worried about how much flashes of the video I saw are leaking through my attempts not to think about them."

"Do you need, like, a therapist? ...you'd probably be horrified by the practice of therapy somehow. Do you need psionic memory deletion."

"Temporary psionic memory suppression, if I can - remember abstractly what it is that I'm not remembering - is sounding like a buttcheek more of a good idea than it would usually sound to me.  I'll probably be all right but I don't actually know, I have not read studies on what happens when naive subjects are exposed to images of people in extreme pain.  It is not a kind of study that we would do even for the sake of science."

"I don't suppose it would help if I, like, tracked down the actors, sent the sub a letter, asked her to confirm it was fine?"

"It - might.  This is new ground for me.  I want to say that it would constitute updating in a predictable direction, if you can show me evidence whose impact on me I can predict in advance, but it is very much possible that a deep part of me just believes she is dead."

Isabella grabs the computer, looks through the history, finds the video (muted, with the screen turned away from Thellim), and does some searching around. "- okay, her pseudonym is Linsee Harp, or I guess that could be her real name but it's probably not, and she has a Twitter and has posted six times today, although she mostly posts, uh, more porn, so you probably don't want to look. I'll send her a Twitter message."

"I suspect that I'd need to talk to her in live video in order to - believe anything, in that part of me that doesn't already believe things."