If the taken-at-face-value internal reaction of the dath ilani delegation were to be summarized, it would be, "We don't know where to START with helping these people.  Where do we START."

Eating disorders are definitely a thing but anyone on Firstplanet capable of having one is probably capable of hiding it without help. The important thing to do is to publicize all the very good reasons not to have an eating disorder and all the advice on ceasing to have one and all the advice on what to do if someone you care about has one.

Greens agree with the delegation from Firstplanet. Is everybody else okay.

If Ozytopians were privy to dath ilani thoughts they would be very offended. That three percent suicide rate is an ACHIEVEMENT. They worked HARD on it. They bet dath ilan would not be NEARLY as good at keeping people from committing suicide. 

Ozytopians don't really like hiding information-- they discovered free speech a few centuries ago and it turns out that it speeds up the process of self-correction a lot. Have other people heard of it?-- so they would like to copy Green/Firstplanet best practices here. If there's something you can tell people that lets them read about how to have eating disorders without then starving themselves, the Ozytopians will make everyone learn it in Virtue class and then stop censoring those books. They are pretty sure that telling people not to have eating disorders will not help???? People already know that eating disorders are bad!!! If knowing something was bad reliably caused people not to do it they would not have nearly so many problems. 

Yeah, Elves have extensive notes in their societal optimization documents about ratios and tradeoffs for things like exercise levels and food groups and people usually seek resources if they find themselves much outside of those.

Knowing the consequences of things is pretty much the only thing that can cause people to do or not do things? Including noncausal consequences like "then anyone predicting you will know you would do that and act on it", in case the translation is unclear there. (They would really have liked another three moons to test the translation but needs must.)

The highest suicide rate anyone from Malachitin can think of is Bonne's and that's still less than half a percent. Also, no, they don't.... have the problem where if they don't censor people they'll starve themselves to death? When governments try to do any meaningful amount of censorship they tend to get revolutions about it. Knowing the consequences doesn't always stop people from doing things you don't want them to but it works a hell of a lot better than censorship. 

... no, half of all Bobbiversians aren’t men! Why would any universe want to be half men, that’s way too many men, put some back. Are Green and Ozytopian men just - much less murderous and less inclined to be happy with polyamory? Are they forcing all of their tall-purple-flower-women to be men?

“Suicide is a fundamental right and the correct response to being deprived of it is to attempt it immediately,” opines a representative wearing an elaborate structural garment involving vantablack and gemstones carved to look like flowers. “Our suicide rate is approximately one third, if you count suicides in later life, and I hardly see why that would be an issue of any kind. Also eating disorders are a legitimate form of tragic-beautiful-death-where-you-fall-into-a-glowing-cave-and-all-of-your-enemies-go-‘wow you look so pretty in that cave, I regret everything’-and-everyone-envies-how-beautiful-your-death-was and depriving people of them hardly seems fair!”

Okay, one part at least seems relatively straightforward to help with.  If you create this overly complicated molecule using 37 synthesis steps and inject it into somebody's bloodstream, it'll reboot a section of the hypothalamus and make it think that the person's ideal weight is their current weight plus 10 pounds.  This molecular variant is the same thing, but minus 10 pounds.  You can repeat the process until people are the weights they want to be.

...part of a commitment to free speech is that you can't actually hold out for a specific outcome of giving people all the information. That's the kind of thing Greens grow out of. Not everything is your business, such as whether a fully-informed person would consider it worthwhile to fight an eating disorder versus eating nothing but starch till they die of scurvy.

Do Bobbi men just murder each other a whole lot? Yikes? What is a tall-purple-flower-woman. Shrey is wearing purple and is a woman but she's not very tall or floral.

Greens will get on testing those molecules, those sound great!

See, actually, normally, when something is a terrible idea and absolutely nothing good will happen if you do it, then a bunch of people will naturally do it. You have to spend hundreds of hours carefully educating children to get them to reliably do things that are in their self-interest and not do things that are not in their self-interest. They kind of thought that was the human condition.

...Ozytopians are very jealous of everyone else's system here. Except the Bobbiverse. The Bobbiverse seems kind of like how they expected people to be. 

Those weight regulation meds are cool as all get out! Come over here and we can talk payment!

Once the dath ilani rep has been successfully pulled around a corner:

"What's your probability that the logos is each of intelligent, hostile, and capable of getting through the cave system?"

Wait, is everyone lumping body-follows-brain in with suicide? *Obviously* lots of people want to die when their brains stop working properly, but elvish culture isn't so savage as to make people do it themselves unless they really want to!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU DATH ILAN. Ozytopians love dath ilan so much. Do you have to repeat it if people start to starve themselves again?

...wait, payment? Uh, shit. Do Ozytopians have anything to pay with. 

Oh, yeah, no, if your mind is degrading you get into cryo immediately. And Ozytopians don't have cryo, so their tradeoffs are different. Maybe that's the whole explanation.

The Greens huffily announce that any knowledge they produce during this summit for their fellow delegations may be assumed to be free in the spirit of friendship and commensalism.

The Anomalans appreciate that but are going to pay for it anyway because their own dignity requires it.

Yeah, that is kind of what Ozytopians were thinking here, at least if it involves people not dying??? If the Ozytopians knew how to stop people from dying they would give it for free because people dying is bad.

If Ozytopians have any information that will save Anomalans' lives they will request one performance of a song in payment for the rights in perpetuity. 

The elves want to know how paying comes in to *making things better*

In their experience the way you get people to do things that are in their interest is to leave them alone about it so that they'll also come to the conclusion that it's in their interest and then do the thing, and if someone is really committed to wrecking their own life then forcing them to do otherwise will not in the long run help or dissuade them. The molecules do sound helpful for people who are medically underweight although the malachitians note that people who have eating disorders often have those on purpose and will probably not want to take them.

...also, sidenote, how do you get half your population to agree on a single gender, and also why? Like agreed that the way of doing things where one gender is murderous seems, ah, bad, and not very stable and would burn itself out very quickly, but half is a lot of people to all be the same gender.

(ALSO also why are so many worlds putting people into liquid nitrogen with no ability to get them back out of the liquid nitrogen, one of the diplomats opens xir mouth to say, but one of the others makes a face at xem and xe closes xir mouth again. It is not wrong that this is probably the wrong fight to start right now but also xe's annoyed about it.) 

Dath ilan would be more concerned about the Bobbis if their prediction markets weren't well over 90% on this particular society presenting less than a totally accurate picture of itself.

"Prediction markets are under 5% on all three," the dath ilani says to the Anomalan.  "They act much more like humans making an epistemic error, or a masquerade of that, than constructs of an agency that advanced."

Dath ilan expects that the other societies have their own tech improvements to trade, and if they don't, there's always payment in fiction.

A Bobbi representative explains that the relevant purple flower is an herb that produces strong phytoestrogens and has been bred to produce more of them; tall-purple-flower-women are the gender born with external genitalia that have historically used that purple flower to develop properly. These days they take a synthetic equivalent. And the tallness is because they usually take longer to start puberty than their non-tall non-purple-flower counterparts, and they’re about two thirds regular-women and nearly one third tall-purple-flower-women and about one twentieth male.

Five percent is still worryingly high but it's good that dath ilan has the same read on the situation. Perhaps they would like this formula for a drug that makes it easier to enter deepconcentration on problems right at the edge of your capability? Practically all their intellectual workers are on it at least some days.

Most of the time there's a male soul in a male body but sometimes there's a male or other-gendered soul in a female body? But these kinds of mistakes don't happen very often.

Wow the Bobbiverse has a lot of female souls in male bodies. That seems very unfortunate. 

Would malachitians like a summary of Ozytopian best practices for convincing people who are determined to ruin their own lives not to do that? It's really hard but they worked on it a lot and it turns out there are a lot of things a trained spiritual counselor can do!

Elves are a bit confused about this gender thing too.  Is everyone ... identifying themselves really strongly by their genitals?

This elf here is out of reach of anyone who is poised to stop her and says the thought out loud.  "Why are you freezing people if you can't unfreeze them?"