The social sciences part of the science team is absolutely enthralled by the childraising schema. One of them is note taking as fast as possible on the Kastakian terminal while the others are engaged in enthusiastic wing waving debate complete with occasional mock charges, hissing and one brief full on tussle that is quickly broken up by the others as Ferek is glaring at them. The combatants are exiled swiftly back through the portal.

Vuleftis scans his teams transcripts and makes some notes

 - work out the details about access to natural philosophy on Kastakia
 - license our public domain to Gremiria and let them hold the proceeds in escrow

The problem with attempting to build communism is that despite a majority recognizing that Open Individualism and the Veil of Ignorance under Eternalism make Total Hedonistic Utilitarianism the correct course of action, our nature is illusory. We are tethered to time and ego in an evolutionary cage. In practice, one cannot be an absolutely coherent Bodhisattva, loving others as oneself. They work on meditations, psychedelics, therapy and general education to increase coherence and the chances of interpersonal experiences, but usually, this is not required, as you can be useful to others simply by being egoistically efficient. This is to say nothing of the 3/20 who disagree with this metaphysics entirely.

A few important somebodies will want to talk to these people. 

A typical Ailori can manage at least the very basics of Universal Love, Zen, and Enlightenment with minimal exposure to the concepts and a few months hermitage at the appropriate developmental stage, even in environments actively hostile to its development.

Some slightly less important somebodies will be interested in whether those techniques can be taught, or can only be learned. The ink drips from Vuleftis's pen. Then a more useful question comes to mind.

"If Ailor has eliminated scarcity, what is its policy regarding immigration?"

Vuleftis is a member of parliament, and with that comes a degree of responsibility in allocating resources.

There is a specific segment of the population he's thinking of that is an ongoing drain on those resources. They're not disabled or violent; they just don't contribute to society. Like, at all. There are times that the amount of work that needs to be done is insufficient to give everyone a share, and that's okay. Everybody gets a share of what the work produced if they're willing to work. A quadriplegic might be asked to be an extra set of eyes on a group of children and sound an alarm if there's a problem. In return, he is lauded as a contributing member of society and gets his rightful share of food and shelter. A repeat murderer can justifiably be barred from all cities, sentenced to forage in the woods, because the first responsibility of the state is to keep its citizens from being killed.

The Republic remains committed to ensuring all citizens' essential needs are met, but the budget shows they're feeling the pinch.

A trio of Ailor's aides react to the mock tussle, moving to intercept a moment before realizing it's not serious and shifting to merely stand nearby. 

Internally Ailor has freedom of movement, and being formally Asked To Leave somewhere isn't... well, it's probably the most common social conflict and legal matter, but legal matters are very rare.  Normally they wouldn't be worried about immigration at all, but the talk of gene-sharing and not being able to experience Universal Love and currency makes them a little nervous that they might not be screening for everything they ought to be. Plus the possibility they're about to experience an unmanageable volume of problems that are novel or normally quite rare. The Blue Book is self correcting enough that a population that's unwilling to contribute enough to sustain themselves won't eat for free forever, but it's not an ideal universe to eat up all our current Slack on the way there if that's how things go. 

If you're having problems with essential needs is that a physics problem or is it due to having currency? Or maybe political? Ailor might have ideas for the first two, but is reluctant to involve themselves in the third. 

That answers a few questions Vuleftis had about Ailor. He hadn't imagined anyone being formally Asked To Leave... more like being offered somewhere they might want to go. Actually, he privately imagined them being tossed onto the back of a cart like cordwood and anyone who didn't roll off in protest at this treatment was fine with being sent wherever. But that's more of a joke he'd tell privately to members of the budgeting committee.

Agriculture is a physics problem and significant headway has been made in that area. Improvements to crop yields continue to outpace the growth in bellies that need filling. If yields doubled, that would probably solve the budget problem, but there's still a second-order drag on the economy from people seeing them and wondering why they shouldn't also subsist by eating up the slack. 

It's unclear how currency or politics could be the root of the problem. The slack-eaters frequently don't have money, but it's neither hard to obtain money nor to live without it. The High Council has foresworn money and frequently uses the same public lodging and kitchens that the least welloff members of society use. The slack-eaters don't lack political representation in theory, but they also don't show up to vote.

Thessalia apologies to the Ailor observers - "We did leave everyone who'd get that way with someone who isn't a friend out, but researchers do get awfully excited about child raising arrangements."

Anyone doing their background reading will discover the big friendly bird people regularly get into minor physical altercations when sufficiently worked up about a topic - or just for fun - or more seriously when they feel physically trapped without trust this will resolve itself.

"In general terms, inadequate medical care - including very occasionally incurable conditions which couldn't reasonably have adequate care - is the main reason a Kastakian might regret their life, although mostly we haven't tested particularly bad material conditions! 

We do hear the call of the sea - being underground can be a suitable substitute for some but not all - a Kastakian trapped on land would suffer, primarily increasing anxiety, although probably still not so much they'd want to die about it.

I think repatriation would be the most appropriate remedy in most cases, with best efforts at medical care while waiting for that to be available.

We don't really consider that children have any debt to their parents? Society in general sometimes has historically compensated parents, although we've been doing better in recent decades and only those with very rare traits like high manual dexterity or stamina might be considered for direct compensation at the moment, childless friends still tend to give gifts but this isn't formalised.

There are a number of desired conditions we could tabulate, but generally more Kastakians is good even if they're not raised absolutely optimally - sufficient care and provision to avoid serious medical issues and sufficient freedom to leave bad situations voluntarily is essentially all that's required. 

From our reading we come out of the egg a little more developed than the average sentient, so there's a little less initial vulnerability - oh, I suppose we should give you temperature ranges, vibration and impact tolerances etcetera for the egg, but they're fairly forgiving. Ideally they should be around normal conversations to get language development started properly, but it can be fixed later."

Oh, being offered a stike on the head and then waking up in a crate headed to elsewhere is something that has ever happened to trouble makers. It gets rarer and rarer now that we've found most of the lead and pulled it out of the schoolhouses. These are known known issues, and those tend to be getting better even if painfully slowly.

Do you like fish? Here is a standard home aquaponics module with high yield companion planting. Here's the infrastructure to keep it at maximum yield, and here's what it looks like if you instead fuck it up and it tries to automatically rebalance the ecosystem. Unless the Slack-eaters are too lazy to pick food off the vine this should give them an easy way to feed themselves naturally coupled with skill-building incentives for ecological empathy. 

Kastakian has nothing to apologize for. Ailor understands how easy blood can run hot and feathers can get ruffled. One of the attendants has a preening kit if they would like help unruffling those feathers. 

It might be easier if they were troublemakers. Troublemakers can usually be redirected. Or flogged if they can't be. But it's legal to be annoying, live on the streets, and be a bad influence. There are positive laws protecting those actions. There's even a tiny minority that does those things on principle.

Hello! We are not giving them homes, but this aquaponics module should definitely be added to public kitchens if possible.

What do Kastakians who opt out of society... do? And how does the rest of Kastakia respond?

"Oh, lots of things. The most usual case is they just take their transciever offline and disappear into the, less traffic heavy parts of the ocean, or the really determined ones go deep inland, and we never hear from them again. 

We grow food forests on shorelines, and can subsist off fish and seaweed usually anyway, so it's not that difficult to be self sufficient until you need medical care.

Sometimes they make trouble, like there have been groups opposed to specific child raising experiments, or historically that have taken over small areas for 'rewilding'. If they're not directly harming anyone we leave them to it where possible, otherwise, well, fortunately we have folk like Fretek who think about the messy business of defence.

If they show back up at a hospital ship obviously they'll get treatment same as someone who has been off being an adventurer and not done any shifts. It's important they can opt back in when they like, someone might just get tired of people and want to be properly alone for a bit."

"It might be helpful to have a quick review of normal Kastakian child raising and some things we have tried? 

The traditional method is one egg, approximately four to eight adults, one small boat. The adults generally pursue light adventuring and correspondance work while raising the child by incorporating them into the party and letting them explore what they are interested in. 

Multiple children in this environment is not advised - it's good for the family boats to meet up but 'siblings' will inevitably fight, often quite seriously. 

We have experimented with a range of mass child rearing methods. None have produced better individuals than the single egg family approach, but it is possible to raise Kastakians in a regimented environment in close quarters as long as they have a minimal amount of private space with an appropriate sleeping surface and reading light, access to reading material and regular mealtimes and hygiene sessions and so on. 

The results generally are less independent and motivated than your standard Kastakian and are more prone to negative behavior patterns like doing nothing but sleeping and needing to be coaxed to eat, getting lost in reading rather than ever contributing, leaving society altogether, and random bouts of screaming and violence.

Every now and again someone has a bright idea for a new mass child raising regime, and this is generally permitted unless it appears to amount to serious torture that is likely to produce only damaged people - essentially this is just policed by how many people are motivated to stop them. Child raising without good intentions is vanishingly rare."

Fights almost never happen in gremiria. Our delegates possess the survival instincts of a lightbulb, no one has instructed them to react otherwise, so they simply watch with intrigued detachment.

​Gremiria doubts its current capacity to provide "adventures" and is still struggling to parse the concept in this context. Gremirians are not fond of nature, the newer generations simply would not survive it due to the genetic shutdown of pain. However, older outliers might still be found. To satisfy the nature-dependent circuits of the brain, we rely heavily on simulacra in our design. Would this suffice for your species? We can offer mirrors or video to extend perceived space, duplicated natural color palettes, artificial pitch and roll, swimming pools? Providing underground habitats or simulacra is far simpler than life on ships, we need to maintain integration with the ultra-dense logistics of the arcology. We can produce ships, but our decentralization technologies are weaker and we will probably have to import them.

​Socially, it seems your children are relatively... low-maintenance? We can provide large groups of adults for interaction and upbringing, provided the task is relatively unskilled and does not require coercion, discipline, or the projection of authority. Our education has focused heavily on universal mnemonics and mastery learning, and this point on the Pareto frontier seems distant from gamification or engagement. We don't yet know how your memory functions. Our approach worked on monkeys, but not on birds, our cognitive architectures are too different.

Huh, interesting. We're surprised that people live on the street for any period of time. Do they not build flavellas or shelters? What do they do when it rains? If they're merely trading comfort for less work then that's just a strange preference. If they're trading less work for more work then that suggests a more complicated motivation. We've had tribal people who have refused to learn the skills to work in order to protect themselves from being exploited for labor. This feels like it might pattern-match.

If we may ask, is four to eight the general ideal small group size for Kastakiani? We generally find good results in having slightly older children help teach younger children in small groups as long as there's enough adults on call to help them out if they get in trouble. Depending on the sorts of children's adventures you use this might increase at least Slack if not scalability? 

Gremiria seems very Zen about the scuffle, but then says confusing and worrying things about nature and pain. There's currently a debate on if this is a miscommunication or if Gremirians are a bizarre human-looking alien that somehow has different qualia and a lack of pain receptors. 

A single human-looking person walks in, unannounced and unexpected. They look androgynous, have very long, unkempt and dirty hair, and wearing loose orange clothes. Their expression is serene.

"Confuse not our street-dwellers and slack-eaters! The former are rare and do so on some principle that I personally don't quite understand. It's technically illegal to violate their rights and force them to come inside when the weather gets bad, but I don't think anyone has been prosecuted for doing that in my lifetime. The latter randomly nap outside when whether permits but when it doesn't, they come to the..."

Vuleftis paused. If no one thought to include this in a cultural packet, translating any colloquial term won't convey the meaning. 

"...the temple dormitories, like anyone else who finds oneself in need of shelter. Maybe ten to twenty percent of people live in one at any given time instead of in a clan house or detached room. The overwhelming majority of people are there temporarily and feel the obligation to contribute, either through volunteering labor or donating an extra few shillings per half-month. They know universal access to clothing, food, medicine, and shelter isn't somehow free, so they contribute to the commonweal under..."

He's blanking on terms again. One of the aides notices and writes down some possible translations of related concepts (godly-guest-friendship, categorical-imperative, enlightened-self-interest, veil-of-ignorance) to pass on down.

"If you provide some basic reading lessons - if they've been exposed to conversations in the shell they should come out with basic spoken language, although will need a while to attach context, and will pick up reading just by following along with someone reading aloud - and make sure they have good access to reading material, that will substitute for adventure somewhat, although if there is nothing useful for them to do they might find something to do anyway and you might get disciplinary issues there.

Also in that case you'll have to deliberately make sure they get exercise rather than it just happening naturally, and they'll quickly get bored of anything repetitive. 

Not sure on the simulcra, we don't have anything nearly that advanced - probably best to send material from mining endeavour groups who are more likely to adapt well to the underground.

Also, have your seas been depleted or polluted? If not you'll probably find adolescent Kastakians will happily build a boat or raft out of anything available and just set off to subsist on seaweed and fish for a month or two if everything in the arcology is too boring - especially if you can provide text net connectivity remotely. Most new Adventurers make it back to civilisation fine, and those we get back injured generally express it was entirely worth it."

"Discipline or authority problems - if there's nothing useful for a Kastakian kid to do they will find something to do and that may involve writing on the walls, disassembling things to find out how they work, and getting into places they shouldn't be in.

Also if there are multiple kids around they will absolutely fight each other unless it is extremely clear that is unacceptable behaviour and they're not left unsupervised too long. 

Usually how our memory functions is 'very well, thank you', works best with systems that make sense as a whole rather than disconnected facts. Also Kastakian children are more likely to misbehave if they are expected to do repetitive things, variety is key. 

Four to eight is generally a good team size for most endeavours - more and people start splitting into sub groups and not knowing everyone involved as well. Older Kastakian kids love teaching younger ones in short bursts, probably no more than a couple of hours at a time, but the involved adult supervision definitely needs to be able and willing to break up fights - the older ones will likely be fine but if the younger ones get bored they might fight with each other."

Kastakian children sound a little harder to raise than the average local child, but within the abilities of a couple of empty nesters.

(A translator pauses for a second upon realizing the idiom doesn't need to be adapted.)

Ailor greets the monk warmly, as if he's supposed to be here! 

Oh! You're supporting Hippies via Tithe instead of the Land Rent! This doesn't eat slack on Ailor because maintaining the Drum Circle and providing Free Love are counted for the public good, even though paying for Free Love is a logical contradiction. Your hippies seem rather anti-social and there's quite a lot of them, though. Do they not do Peyote? Or Cannabis, shrooms, and MDMA? Spiritual drug use sometimes leaves you hallucinating for the rest of your life but much more often promotes pro social behavior. If you have a small enough group for testing, perhaps we should send over some Hippies and the appropriate PSAs against spiritual drug use? Or if you prefer we can just provide you with our strains, database, and PSAs so you can test in more controlled ways yourself?

Ailor wonders if wall-writing, disassembling things, and accessing the secret spaces is a problem! They won't know for another seventy years for certain, but making all of that into age appropriate learning puzzles is the current theorized best practices. The fighting seems more of a problem.

"I am Lirakoz, from the Planet we call Ranalite. I am a Shaman, though the meaning of that role is probably not apparent." they speak very slowly, with a strong accent, trying to enunciate every sound as clearly as possible.

"The rest of my planet will not establish contact in the near future. They might later; it is not known to me. But in the meantime, I was guided here by intuition, to share the information that might be most critical for contact between civilizations. I hope it would not be, and do not expect to singlehandedly change the course of history with simple explanations of philosophy, especially as am I am not specialized in teaching anything to anyone." their specializations are intuition and Linguistics, that being the reason why they are here instead of someone else "But simple actions should be undertaken when their effect can be beneficial." (the original phrase was "a policy of takings low-cost actions of positive expected utility has higher expected rule-utility than a policy of high-cost actions of positive expected utility, even if the simple calculation is the same", but that is very hard to translate correctly without a firm grasp of the language).

The voice is not loud, and they don't actively try to attract attention from anyone. It doesn't matter, they have nowhere else important to be, and can just repeat themself again if needed, as often as needed. This is one of many ways in which Lirakoz is highly unusual among Ranalites.

Managing childhood chaos is surprisingly easy when cleaning is centralized, the real challenge is finding a compromise that satisfies the children's need for a sense of control through inflicting long-lasting damage while keeping the habitat habitable. Many gremirians are fairly tolerant of disorder. Our own children often fail to get along, but rarely to the point of justifying isolation from their peers.

​We have complex puzzles as a substitute for disassembling things, satellite connectivity, and competitive sports (mostly for older, pre-modification generations, as the younger ones’ lack of pain shifts training focus entirely toward technique and external monitoring). If reading serves as a surrogate for adventure, then we certainly have much to offer, along with other digital entertainment!

​Our animal suffering cessation projects have not yet reached the oceans. Migratory aquatic species, especially megafauna, cannot be easily kept in sanctuaries or raised from embryos outside of a host, we fear losing them permanently if we intervene, so our oceans remain wild, pristine, and unfortunately, likely to stay that way for a long time.

​This seems sufficient to begin experimentation. If you invite a group of Adventurers, we will try to replicate your lifestyle, and from that baseline, we can introduce variations, such as simulacra for urban adaptation or collaborative mixed species child-rearing trials.

​Greetings and welcome, Lirakoz! Is the lack of contact with your world due to technical constraints, or a deliberate philosophical stance of your people?

The interplay of Church and State can be tricky but here's the short version: the Church collects the tithe and the State collects the land rent and other taxes on negative externalities. The State handles things like police, the fire department, and making sure the population is fed. The Church handles things like education, medical care, and making sure the population is clothed. In theory, these funds are separate buckets. But sometimes if tithes drop, Parliament has to cut budgets elsewhere to make up the difference in funding the safety net. Conversely, Parliament can only request budgetary assistance if tithes go up and tax revenue goes down, which sometimes happens when anti-tax candidates win majorities increase the standard deduction or decrease the base rate per square meter. 

"Hippies." That is, wow, there's a lot of context there. Let's, uh, let's see is we can clear up some stuff. 

So there are people who perform work that markets don't adequately measure the social value of, like artists. There are professionals who don't want to spend three- or four-twelfths of their income of housing, food storage and prep, etc, and just need a place to sleep between supper and breakfast. There are people who sign up for seasonal work, like construction or being a farmhand, and move around a lot so they move around and consequently don't pay for fixed housing. There are teenagers who find their parents or clan intolerable and need to be somewhere else while they plan and execute the next phase of their lives. None of them are what we've here dubbed slack-eaters, who make up less than one-twelfth of the people sleeping at a temple. Are any of these people "Hippies"?

The previous ayatollah used cannabis. None of the other drugs sound familiar. "Free Love" seems to be a social movement in response to previously mandated sociosexual restrictions. Vuleftis has never heard of someone having sex professionally, but he knows some very competitive hobbyists.

"Greetings, Lirakoz! Ailor welcomes what you wish to share and asks for no more. Would it be useful to have a place to lecture?" The Head of State proclaims with as much gravitas as his old frame can carry. The aides are on standby with some folded blankets that can be improvised into cushion seating, incense, some polished rocks, a podium made by locking together a few collapsible stools, some candles, and a singing bowl if Lirakoz wants any of that stuff. He continues formally, "We welcome you further to spend as much time as you wish to spare, and leave with all the knowledge you might carry."

Ailor is still quite curious about Gremiria's pain thing, but politely not interrupting someone else's conversation. 

Ah, Ailor has a somewhat different political structure. It's useful to better understand the Second Republic's. 

We're in rapid-pattern-matching-to-converge-on-a-concept! Artists are likely Hippies. Professionals and seasonal workers are likely not, unless they only work when they want something. Young people could go any way. Tribespeople who avoid labor to protect themselves from exploitation are hippies, colloquially, although they don't usually identify as such. Hobbyists who contribute more via sex than other activities might be considered hippies. 

Free Love was in fact an important early part of the Reform era. Previously Ailor's religions used government to restrict sex to procreation only. Free Love allowed people to interact with and learn healthier forms of sexuality. That generation also experimented with... well, basically all the recreational drugs. 

"Both reasons, to my knowledge. Accessing the contact point and verifying it proved hard, but a different philosophical approach might have needed less evidence and dedicated more effort to the possibility". That is, really, why you need shamans. But this is too self-evident for Lirakoz to actively think.

"I do not known what would be useful. I am not a lecturer. And you are aliens. You would probably know better". That even shamans don't have knowledge privileged to expertise in most cases is something that should have obvious. But of course, those are aliens, even if some are human-looking, different cultural epistemologies are not surprising, even if the translation difficulties could be ignored (and they can't be).

"Start at the ideal and work backwards. Then we can see what missing pieces we can share." Working backwards from your goal-state isn't formally part of Ailori philosophy, because it's the default way of thinking. This advice is similar to reminding someone to breathe. 

"Ailor seeks to maximize the happiness and well being of sophonts. For us this looks like lifelong learning and skill building, densely weaving-together-many-reasons of work, and forging meaningful connections. Our known known problems are improving slowly. Any unknown knowns or unknown unknowns you notice would be useful and appreciated. Or, if you're in the Current Era or later then we would like to skip any skippable-intermediate-upgrades we can skip."

"What does the ideal world look like to you?"

Hm! Seems like our concepts of universal love differ significantly! To us, the ideal world looks just like a hedonium shockwave. We possess no control over whom we are born as, or whose perspective we will wake up in tomorrow. We do not experience the flow of time, it is easier to assume we are merely random, static snapshots of consciousness within a block universe. We cannot increase «our own» happiness, but we can act as agents who retrospectively maximize our chances of being a happy consciousness by increasing the total amount of it in the universe.

Gremiria cares about the happiness of consciousness-as-a-function-of-time instrumentally - because happy people are more efficient, or as part of trade deals with egoistic agents within our freedom framework. However, even egoists rarely terminally desire triggers of qualia, such as «meaningful connections» or «mastery», over the qualia themselves. If the median citizen wishes to increase the net happiness in the universe, those who reject this metaphysics want happiness to be inflicted upon them-as-a-function-of-time. Almost no one desires to exist as a complex personality and live in the volcano's lairs with catgirls or something, at least not for long.

This goal will be achieved after the singularity, but before then, we will minimize suffering by sterilizing animal life and simplifying ecosystems. Human happiness is negligible relative to less intelligent life, but it also increases over time.