"You hide the antennae very well, I never woulda guessed."

"Yes, the similarity of outward forms fooled me as well.  In retrospect, though, I'd have done better from the start if I'd used my cached fictional procedures for dealing with aliens instead of humans.  It wouldn't have surprised me as much if aliens had low-quality food on their airplanes for unknown reasons.  Though Isabella still seems to think that I am underestimating within-human variation and overestimating how much your magic affects everything, and I am dutifully doing my best to maintain a separated mental partition for the world where she is correct about everything.  It's not among my most prized skills, but I am trying to the extent that any adult of my species ought to be able to try."

"She is right about everything with annoying frequency. I think being on airplanes makes it hard to smell or something? So everything tastes like you have a cold?"

"Yes, I found that after Googling.  I don't remember my ears popping on my last sane air trip until the plane started to fall apart, so we keep our airplanes at greater pressure and probably higher humidity too.  That's plausibly something that's genuinely expensive, and it would account for some of why our airplane food tastes better.  I continue to think that a slight amount of optimization could have produced better food than what I actually ate, with no greater mass and a cost that should have been trivially greater.  My reading suggests that the much larger problem is that airlines with better food can't charge an additional two dollars per ticket, because of a vastly larger problem in which your society has no credible mechanisms for evaluating the quality of anything."

Alex looks at Isabella.

"Yeah," says Bella.

"How do you usually evaluate the quality of things if it isn't, like, people reviewing 'em? We do have that."

"We have better aggregation mechanisms for individual judgments than taking the means of five-star ratings.  And we have a generally higher-trust society, in which it is possible for everyone to have online credentials that prevent sole defectors from snowing under a system with fake ratings, without that leading to an evil oppressive government.  Though Isabella has incredibly strong priors in favor of our government being secretly evil and oppressive, because it has secrets.  In our high-trust society, where our experience is that the government does not automatically go evil and oppressive, we trust our government to have some secrets without that being a massive plot to steal the underwear of every sapient being in existence."

"...steal their underwear?"

"Earth does have some fun memes.  I liked the one with the profit gnomes."

"I don't think I've seen that one but I'm glad you have found something to appreciate in our benighted hellscape."

"It really is.  After some additional research I'm coming around to Bella's view that, though she did not phrase it exactly this way, astrology is not a magical drug-equivalent effect but reasoning standards here being that bad."

"I mean, what would you do with somebody who did astrology on your planet, section them?"

"Within my species, anybody who started writing the equivalent of astrology would be straightforwardly insane.  I'm not saying society would treat them as insane because they're weird.  We have all sorts of extremely weird people, and they have much higher affordances for going off and forming their own subcultures without our government arresting them or our financial networks removing their ability to take credit cards.  I'm saying that we would run neurological-level psychiatric scans on that person and find a massive serotonin imbalance.  This difference is probably around 75% due to childhood education and 25% due to past genetic selection on intelligence, reflectivity, and emotional resilience."

"Well, uh, if that works for you, I guess."

"Different species, yes.  I'm not suggesting your species try randomly adopting features of my world, definitely not in an unordered fashion, and maybe not at all.  You don't have the deep features that would make the surface features work.  I currently agree that your government should not be allowed to keep secrets or diagnose mental illnesses."

"Humans do sometimes have mental illnesses! Serotonin imbalances, even, except I think those just make you depressed."

"You've definitely got the one where people think that everybody is staring at them and that voices are being projected into their heads, though that can be caused by other things than serotonin disorders.  I was relieved to find it, actually.  It implies we have pointwise similarity of neurology and probably the interworld equivalent of common ancestry."

"You could probably get somebody to try an astrology-curing pill just to see if it would work."

"I presently believe Isabella's version of the story where that would not work and should not be tried.  It would be a foul act to raise a child in such a way that astrology was plausible to them, but once that child is already an adult, their ownership of their own soul takes priority."

"Maybe you should adopt some foster kids to dath ilan and see if it's a species thing or what."

"In the unlikely event that two-way portals become possible, we will take all of the foster children that we can without violating whatever treaty arrangements are worked out.  And, I expect, a vast number of adults, if your governments do not simply formalize the arrangement by which they treat their citizens as captive farm animals."

"I mean I think the places that let people leave like here would let us leave and the places that don't like... I dunno, North Korea? Wouldn't."

"Isabella is correct to distrust governments given her experience with the behavior of governments.  Citizens are allowed to leave because there do not exist incentive gradients strong enough for governments to lose significant quantities of their farm animals that way; rich countries refuse immigrants, so poor countries still allow emigration.  My read is that if there is a country that is suddenly accepting all the exhausted sad people, and giving them someplace to rest and perhaps recover, Earth governments will very quickly discover some reason why nobody should be allowed to go to dath ilan."

"I don't think you have the logistical capacity even if we're positing a portal instead of a marginally expensive teleport," says Isabella. "There's like a billion of you, how would you absorb a substantial fraction of your population in Earthling refugees next time we have a big earthquake?"