Keeper Derrin is not even trying not to make a horrified face.  He is never going to be imperturbable enough not to react to statements like that.  He doesn't want to be that unperturbed.  Ending up disturbed and indeed antiturbed seems right and proper in this situation.  Even if you blame it all on superintelligences, that doesn't make it sound any more likely even in retrospect.

[The next most critical fact about Earth is that... I register that my native cofounder will probably wish to put this differently, once it's her turn to talk, but still: from a dath ilani perspective their civilization is made entirely out of coordination failure.  Coordination that fails on every scale recursively, where uncoordinated individuals assemble into groups that don't express their preferences, and then those groups also fail to coordinate with each other, forming governments that offend all of their component factions, which governments then close off their borders from other governments.  The entirety of Earth is one gigantic failure fractal.  It's so far below the multi-agent-optimal-boundary, only their professional economists have a five-syllable phrase for describing what a 'Pareto frontier' is, since they've never seen one in real life.  Individuals sort of act in locally optimal equilibrium with their local incentives, but all of the local incentives are weird and insane, meaning that the local best strategy is also insane from any larger perspective.  I cannot overemphasize how much you cannot predict Earth by reasoning that most features will have already been optimized into a not-much-further-improvable equilibrium.  The closest thing you can do to optimality-based analysis is to think in terms of individually incentive-following responses to incredibly weird local situations.  And the weird local situations cannot themselves be derived from first principles, because they are the bizarrely harmful equilibria of other weird incentives in other parts of the system.  Or at least I can't derive the weird situations from first principles, after two years of exposure and getting over the shock and trying to adapt.  I would've been much better off if I'd tried to understand it as an alien society instead of a human one, in retrospect; and I expect the same would hold for an Earthling trying to understand dath ilan.]

"I'd find a concrete example helpful."

[In the 'country' I'm in, and most but not all other 'countries', it's considered forbidden to speak of optimization-over-heritable-variation; people practice it only on an individual basis rather than a socially planned one, while denying to themselves and others that they are doing even that much.]

"To be fair to the Other, among students of reconstructed-probable-history, heritage-optimization is considered a prime example of something a young civilization could easily screw up on an existentially horrific scale," Keeper Derrin says.  Perhaps he shouldn't be pushing back against this exposition of the Other's foolishness, but he'll try it once and see where the conversation goes from there.  "There are no save points nor rollbacks for the population gene pool.  We may have been incredibly lucky, in our own early history, that we didn't accidentally breed ourselves into small yappy pets.  Re-extrapolating from the amount of genetic selection undergone by domesticated bear species relative to their natural-bear ancestors, we can infer that the concept of deliberate breeding must have been around for thousands of years.  Extrapolating historical progress thousands of years backward as a regress, the idea of natural selection must have been discovered at a time when early groups of humans knew very little else.  It is very easy to imagine a civilization having accidents with their early attempts at heritage-optimization that would lead the Others to, for very arguable reasons, close off that entire field until their prediction markets indicated near-certainty about the results of any future attempts."

[Keeper, if dath ilan's real prehistory was anything remotely like Earth's - never mind.  Let me try again with a different example.]

[Elections in the 'country' I'm inside run on a system where the person with the most votes gets elected, which produces strong incentives for strategic voting and an immense obsession with backing only 'electable' candidates and not 'wasting' votes; one of Earth's own writers described it as a system of only voting for lizards, because otherwise the wrong lizard might get in.  Now, you're wondering why this is public policy, when surely the prediction markets predict that other electoral systems would result in much better observables over voter-aggregation outcomes.  And the answer is again complicated but, basically, their whole society just isn't organized that way, in fact, prediction markets are illegal.  Which isn't just about the politicians being awful, it's about the voters having been traumatized into a fear of numbers, by an 'educational system' that would make me physically sick to recount to you.  They'd be scared of a political system that had even more numbers in it.  And if you're wondering why their experimenters can't explore the space of possibilities and discover a better educational system - well, again their whole society just isn't organized that way; again, it's basically illegal.  Most things are, here.  Illegal I mean.  Not just against custom, actually outlawed, with no exceptions because there's no exception routes built into almost all their laws.  But also their society doesn't generally rely on its experimenter-analogues to figure out questions like that; which is in part because the experimenter-analogues generally can't figure out problems much more difficult than the deterministic-visible-mechanism level; which is in part because their experimental reports aren't allowed to mention likelihood functions.]

"Wait, what?" says Helorm after she repeats this.  She mostly isn't quite attuned to the reports as reality rather than fiction, but that part is just absurd.  "How do you analyze experiments at all without likelihood functions?"

[EXTREMELY POORLY.  There's an enormous subjective incoherent inconsistent branch of pseudo-mathematics whose entire purpose is just to avoid ever mentioning likelihood functions, which doesn't allow the results of separate experiments to be combined into a single piece of evidence except through fantastically complex manipulations that often turn out to be computer errors.  Very little of the resulting 'science' is reproducible even in surface findings, a fact which they call their 'replication crisis'.  And it's not because the lunar eclipses are suppressing the concept of likelihood functions from their minds; Earthlings can understand it, they had the concept before I got here, although it wasn't in their central Network's repository page on statistics.  It's not the lunar eclipses, there actually is an enormous conspiracy of 'journal editors' who all act simultaneously to prevent anyone from using real math to describe their experimental results, on pain of their work being suppressed from elite channels.  Only it's not actually an explicit conspiracy, because if it was an explicit conspiracy, it would be coordination, and if Earthlings were trying to coordinate on that scale, they would fail, and lots of papers would be using likelihood functions.  The main conditions under which Earthlings actually manage uniformity of action, at that scale, is when they're acting out of an unspoken will to all make the same mistake at the same time so none of them look any sillier than each other.]

"Dear, has it occurred to you that, even if their civilization seems very strange from our perspective, it may have its own internal logic that you failed to -"

[Yes Mom, that thought occurred to me during the first half-minute just like it did to you, and no Earth is not using secretly valid logic it is actually crazy.  I am willing to bet cash that the-people-much-smarter-than-I-am will back me up on this rough informal judgment.]

After Helorm repeats that to the Keeper, she adds, "I'll take that bet for 24 labor-hours at 1:1," speaking with the casual assurance of somebody who won quite a number of bets with Thellim when she was twelve, and who doesn't think the situation has changed significantly since then.  Thellim is a dear, but it is much more likely that she is failing to understand the different ways of an alien world than that an advanced technological civilization has arisen which is 'actually crazy'.

"I am also going to want to hear out the Others' perspective before I accept all this."

[Understandable.  I am, in part, venting at this point, because I have not had anyone to talk to in two years who could understand how crazy this planet actually is.  But, Keeper, also - remember how I said that Earth taboos optimization-over-heritable-variation?  The third most critical fact about this planet:  I estimate the average inferred-central-intelligence-factor here to be roughly four standard deviations below our own, with a standard deviation around four-thirds ours.]

"Four standard deviations below us!" Helorm bursts out, when she's finished her sworn job of transmitting.  She can't even imagine a society like that; -4sd is low enough that someone would have trouble learning calculus or statistics, even as an adult.  The sequence of events leading up to a 'giant failure fractal' suddenly seems much more horrifyingly plausible: some historical accident leads to heredity-optimization being forbidden; undo and backtrace through however many generations of not selecting for intelligence, and all the positive change in dath ilan that can be attributed to that.  And an entire planet ends up - and even if their standard deviations are wider, that's still - "Thellim, that would make you one of their cognitive elite!"

[Ha ha.  Yes.  That's me now, all right, member of Earth's cognitive elite.  Bluecheck on Twitter as of two months ago, even, which is the closest this planet has to publicly declaring that you are important.  The person who literally actually invented prediction markets here has invited me to publicly dialogue with him.  I am now the very smart people who are smarter than the other people.  It's ridiculous, horrifying, and sad in equal measures.]

This is not going to end well, for either her hapless daughter or the hapless planet she's on.

[Though it's not about intelligence, really.  The population here is over seven billion, so there are still hundreds of thousands of people across the planet who have my level of fluid intelligence or better.  It's more about my having grown up learning mental skills that don't exist here.  In theory, Earth's cognitive elites should be smart enough to learn those skills the same way I did, but nobody here was smart enough to invent them.  Just the fact that I ever apply numbers to moral situations at all, 'unironically' as they say here, is widely considered to make me a crazy person who went all the way off the deep end of utilitarianism.  In this place I am not the smartest - but I am the highest-ranked Keeper, the greatest master of terrifyingly sane epistemology on this planet.  Pay attention to Mom's horrified expression while she's repeating that because things are in fact that bad.]

"What have you been doing in that world up until now?"  Keeper Derrin is, in truth, starting to worry.

[...embarrassingly little, at least so far as actual accomplishments.  I didn't actually think we'd ever be successful in contacting dath ilan, before today, so I tried to transfer what comparatively useful knowledge of ours I could.]

[And I... did not have much luck in that.  They're generally equiv-tech, matching us in advancement of underlying materials despite the general craziness - maybe because their population is larger, maybe because mages make up for bad institutions, maybe because their world has a longer real history behind it, maybe because they pushed ahead further on computers, I don't know.  I did not carry with me the specialist knowledge to benefit a mostly-equiv-tech civilization.  Earth already has chromium-manganese steel, and I don't know how to engineer more comfortable chairs.]

[So I started with logical decision theory, which seemed like the simplest important thing they had not invented that I actually knew.  Or at least, I knew what the theorems ought to say, if not how to prove them.  Results, at least when tried by someone at my competence level:  I got very little uptake from local economists, I did not know how to describe things in their special prestigious language and they would lose face if they were seen paying attention to anyone who doesn't speak that language.  Some of the few locals who seemed to understand my informal descriptions became more honest and better-coordinating people.  Others went crazier and now spend a lot of mental effort trying to coordinate with other civilizations they are not actually in contact with.  I backed off decision theory after that.  I also didn't have much luck in convincing their civilization to use likelihood functions in their experimental reports, on the epistemic side; even though I could remember how the proofs work there, at least.]

Helorm still does not understand how the poo you build an advanced technological civilization without anybody ever using a likelihood function.  But she is not without awareness of the stereotypes she has been starting to embody, over the course of this conversation; and despite what her daughter probably thinks now, Helorm is in principle capable of repeating her daughter's words to the Keeper without interrupting.

[I eventually gave up on planning specific interventions, and started dumping everything I knew.  My models just weren't predicting the future well enough for me to plan.  My dath-ilani-taught mental skills seem to let me do moderately better than an average Earthling of equivalent intelligence, especially considering how far I started out of my element, but I don't seem able to take on Earth's whole civilization and win.  So far the most mileage I've gotten out of my dath ilani training is talking about the mental skills explicitly and using those accounts to impress people who read my blog, yes I realize exactly how poorly that speaks of my real mastery.  But I also couldn't think of any cunning plans that seemed more helpful to Earth in real life, than if I just started directly blogging everything useful I remembered from dath ilan.  There's now a sort of... minor community that grew up around my blog, over the last year?  It's nothing like dath ilan, I think our software mostly doesn't run on Earthlings unless you start the install much earlier in childhood.  But I can somewhat talk to them, though they are all more similar to each other than they are to me, and there are weird selection effects going on that I did not foresee coming in advance.]

Helorm repeats this, followed by, "Thellim, did you make a dath-ilan-obeying Kelthorkarnen?"

(Dath ilan doesn't have a single-syllable word for "cult" any more than Earth has a single-syllable word for "Pareto optimal".  Helorm is referring to a fictional name which became a proverbial trope for inhabitants of a fantasy world who form a conspiracy obeying eldritch outsiders in return for promises of their personal wishes being fulfilled.  There is not any connotation about the conspirators dressing funny, because dath ilan does not have the concept for "cult" in that way.)

[I put in all of the obvious-to-a-dath-ilani precautions against that happening, as adapted to local forms of insanity.  So now my definitely-not-Kelthorkarni have weird mental inhibitions against actually listening to me, even when I clearly do know much better than they do.  In retrospect I think I was guarding against entirely the wrong failure modes.  The problem is not that they're too conformist, it's that they don't understand how to be defiant without diving heedlessly into the seas of entropy.  It's plausible I should've just gone full Kelthorkarnen.]

"Thellim..."