It was one thing when she was in dath ilan, sure. Laeirthe has observed Merrin’s thoughts about dath ilan. It does, genuinely, seem like a Civilization that is not unreasonable to put one’s trust in?

Like, he wouldn’t, because he’s fundamentally not that sort of guy, but for someone like Merrin, who is apparently at all times filled with a baffling desperate desire to have someone to follow who is worth following and to be only a small, useful, but not special part of something larger than herself, sure! She could do a lot worse than working for dath ilan’s Governance! 

The situation here is not the same. And Merrin needs to make that update, already.

That sounds really hard and scary though

That's valid! The situation that she's in is, in fact, a very difficult and stressful one to be in! It's understandable if she needs to do a lot of...some kind of processing? Probably the kind that people mean when they talk about "grieving" something you lost? (Laeirthe is a little confused about this, but he's only 10% of a fictional person.) 

But. 

Merrin needs to live in the situation she's actually in, which is one where she no longer has Civilization to catch her if she falls. And Merrin needs to stop making excuses for not forming her own hypotheses about the situation and making her own contingency planning, based on an extremely suspicious-sounding claim made by a person who Laeirthe is not very inclined to trust at all. 

A convenient claim, really, if said person is not their ally – a hypothesis that’s very readily available to Laeirthe, whose fictional-character-instance spent thousands of years mostly having enemies – and does not want Merrin asking too many questions. 

...Okay, but it's Estha? 

(A motion akin to “riffling through Merrin’s memories of this ‘Estha’ person.”) 

…How sure is Merrin of that claim, or that it means what she thinks it means? 

Um. 

Well, he looks the same and sounds the same, right? But it's not just that, Merrin...can see how that could be misleading, like, identical twins do exist, and are more similar than chance even on things like mannerisms? 

He also recognizes her, though? He accurately recounted the last time they saw each other? In what world is that compatible with him, instead, being some random guy who happens to look and sound the same?  

...Okay, taking a step back here. 

Rewind to yesterday.

Merrin was confused about her larger model of Reality, sure, and how it made sense within the basic physical-universe-causality she had previously thought she understood for her to be where she was. And, sure, she was also having some trouble keeping it together on an emotional-stability level, though honestly not that much, he does not think she was at any point especially near to having her beliefs come unpinned from the physical reality around her.

But. Rolling back everything she now knows, or rather thinks she knows: would she, in fact, if the hypothesis had occurred to her, have assessed that “and she encountered some sort of cognitohazardous entity or phenomenon that erased half of her memories of how day to day life looked in dath ilan” was a remotely plausible or parsimonious explanation? 

....No? Because she was missing the pieces she would have needed to have that hypothesis occur to her in the first place??? 

Okay, just, look. 

What does Merrin actually think about a hypothesis that includes, among other claims, “Merrin has forgotten a whole bunch of critical facts about how human biology works, such that her detailed models of medicine no longer output correct predictions”?

Does such a hypothesis fit better than her previous ones with everything else she thinks she knows about the Reality she's experienced living in? 

....He didn't really think so. 

Look, Laeirthe is not confident here. He doesn't have the answers. He’s, like, 10% of a person, being simulated on a brain that is a little too slow for him, and his episodic memories such as they are seem to be of a FICTIONAL SETTING. 

But Laeirthe’s current impression is that, no, Merrin has not fucking forgotten how biology or medicine work, and Merrin is not attending nearly enough to how little sense that part makes.

Merrin is an expert. A narrow, highly specialized expert, sure, but within her realm, she has an incredibly detailed and coherent set of models, and Laeirthe is poking around at the sheer extent of her knowledge here in something like awe, and he does not think there are gaps, and he doesn't think that Merrin thinks so either. 

....So how does that square with all of her baffling mispredictions about the course of Estha’s recovery? Because that part kind of is making Merrin feel unsure of her sanity? 

Laeirthe isn’t sure! He just said he doesn't have all the answers! He thinks Merrin in fact doesn’t have all of the key information she needs to make sense of it, and so Laeirthe doesn't either, he only knows what he knows and he doesn't actually have mentalistmagic mindreading powers like his fictional instance.

But his current belief is that the discrepancy is a fact about ““Estha””, and not necessarily evidence that Merrin has forgotten anything at all. 

Reasoning from fictional evidence is dubious and all, but, for example, Laeirthe’s fictional setting of origin also has conceptualmagic for healing?

And, theoretically, one could perhaps imagine a scenario where Merrin was not wrong about how human biology worked in dath ilan, the place where she spent many thousands of hours learning it and then treating patients and having pretty impressively correct judgement and predictions about it, and it’s just that it doesn’t work like that in this part of Reality? 

....This planet totally has normal biology thought? Like, accounting for it being alien-exoplanet biology, and then separately accounting for the strange narratively-convenient coincidence where she can digest and obtain calories from some of the local biomass. Things are made of cells! She's looked at them with the low-powered optical microscope in her kit! She has not seen anything that would be better explained by some sort of silly conceptualmagic ""life-force"" than by, like, the existence of photosynthesis and cellular respiration and protein transcription? 

See, that's EXACTLY WHAT HE WAS SAYING, Merrin is an expert in her own field and she has models and she trusts them, except when she's doing some sort of squirrelly social-deference thing about it. 

...Maybe it's not the planet. Maybe ""Estha"" isn't actually human? 

What in the name of superheated toilet paper would he be instead???? ...Also he clearly is more or less anatomically and metabolically human, he has the correct bones and organs in the appropriate places and he came back in normal human range on so many different labs? The discrepancies do NOT feel like they would be explained by him being a DIFFERENT SPECIES??? 

It's really funny how she's just repeatedly proving Laeirthe's point for him here. 

It kind of is, yeah. 

....Trying a new angle. 

Okay, look: Laeirthe also does not see an obvious gap in Merrin’s understanding of dath ilani Civilization where secret mentalistmagic mind control would fit?

That would have implications, right, and (reaching for concepts, trying and failing for a level of abstraction on which he expects to be able to reason with precision and can’t, quite, not in this brain when he’s 10% of a simulated fictional character who a random medtech generated out of her fanfiction to keep herself company, what a situation to be in) -

- anyway, Laeirthe is not going to have the level of rigor in his thinking that he wants, here, but…the Civilization that Merrin perceived made sense to her. 

And she wasn’t cleared to know all of its infohazardous secrets, but she did know quite a lot about its emergency policies, and…does it feel, to her, like Exception Handling wrote its contingency-plans centrally around magical mind control being a threat? 

Um. Why in the world does Laeirthe think Merrin of all people would be able to recognize if they were?

Like, on the assumption that the mentalistmagic mind control exists and is considered a cognitohazard, of course the Governance personnel cleared to know about it would be careful to design policies that, where they took the threat into account, also thoroughly obfuscated what threat they were guarding against??? That's super basic information security???? And Merrin is a really easy case, they have to avoid making the hypothesis an obvious one for people with much more thinkoomph than her? 

That’s a pile of flaming dog poop. 

- no, wrongthought, Laeirthe was being sloppy and imprecise there. The logic Merrin just reasoned through seems potentially sound - potentially, he's not agreeing with her, he's just admitting that it's not something he's thought through all the way - anyway he is not directly disputing that one can make arguments of this form and have the logic be sound, in principle. 

But he’s definitely confident in rejecting the part where Merrin is taking her logic and going "therefore I couldn't possibly know things, because I'm just a little unspecial person who only understands medicine", and using it as an excuse not to have her own thoughts and to instead defer to this guy who just showed up, immediately almost died, and then really suspiciously told her that he thinks she's more insane than him.  

She’s smarter than that.