(In the corner.)

Dath ilan is getting the impression that Firstplanet and Green, which seem generally less confused about the Others than dath ilan, have strong predictions that the Others will not be enthusiastically cooperative about these rescue missions.  Is this impression correct.

"...you do that sort of thing on the planet scale? Callassa's got a national government that manages wilderness outside of cities, Niqal privatizes all their land, I'm from Eluin which is fairly developed but we have a national park system, I don't remember what Tisa does, sorry--"

"Tisa varies by province since we're so big but for the most part we've got the same system as Callassa just a level down, provincial governments manage land no individual person owns that's outside of city limits." 

"Right, that. And those are the four that have representatives in this room, obviously there are a lot more nations than that worldwide." 

"--wait sorry what was that about children and, uh, creche owners?"

The Teachingsphere has assorted pollution policies handled at the Teachingsphere level and is investing a lot of resources in coping with all the pollution being spewed outside the Teachingsphere. Most of the wilderness technically belongs to assorted contemplative retreats but is preserved in approximately its original state.

Incidentally, Ozytopians are very concerned about wilderness because they're worried the animals are unhappy there but there's not very much they can do about it at their current tech level. Do any of the planets of saints have best practices for wilderness management they can send over to make sure that all the animals are as happy as possible without causing longterm environmental damage?

Meanwhile, Ozytopians present a dath ilani representative who doesn't look very busy with the summary of their educational system in the hopes that dath ilan can identify improvements. (The summary was written on a typewriter.) 

The Ozytopian educational system devotes a quarter of its time to exercise, a quarter of its time to math and science, a quarter of its time to literature and writing, and a quarter of its time to rationality. Its rationality education has a lot less of the economics, logic, and game theory that a dath ilani would consider to be essential; in many cases it's substituted with "this is the will of the logos." Instead of this, they have a fantastic bonanza of solutions to mental problems, all of which are rare in dath ilan, many of which no one has ever heard of, a few of which they would dismiss as ludicrous even in fiction. They have developed meditation to a science and can reliably teach people to create all kinds of fascinating mental states, many externally verifiable even with Ozytopia's primitive neuroscience. Their deescalation techniques are similar to dath ilan's but noticeably significantly better, and regularly taught to teenagers. 

Maybe Ozytopia would love to have them, Ozytopia seems to acknowledge they have a problem. Shrey would expect it to be more like licking a cat in the other cases at least without a clearer more individualized plan to assess.

Well, the vast majority of children are raised in creches up until the age of eight, when they become legal adults and can vote and everything, and creches are variably large and variably staffed but they usually have a single owner who has final say over everything? Including how to implement their infanticide quotas, which are supposed to keep up historical child mortality rates and selection effects now that starvation and disease are less of a thing? - do the other universes not have infanticide quotas, that would explain a lot.

Dath ilan will start working on Ozytopia optimization!  What sort of educational-games do Ozytopians currently play with or on their children?  Here's an example of some games from the negotiation sequence, suitable for ages seven to nine.

Yes, they predict that the Others will not be enthusiastically cooperative about these rescue missions. They will work on writing up an explanation of why they believe this with more of the inferential steps built in.

No they do not have infanticide quotas! They just don't have kids they can't provide for!

GREEN WOULD LIKE TO REQUEST AN EXTRA CAREFUL TRANSLATION CHECK ON "INFANTICIDE QUOTAS".

Ozytopia does not have an infanticide quota, non-Teachingsphere countries usually do their infanticide in a more ad hoc way and the Teachingsphere has replaced infanticide with abortion and adoption. 

Dath ilan requests to know exactly what quality of cryopreservation the Bobbiverse is using on children subject to infanticide quotas.  What sort of cryoprotectants and vitrifactants have they gotten up to?

Malachitin has not had infanticide since the development of safe abortion and, sidenote, yes can they have that translation check please.

("So we mostly expect they're messing with us, but in case they aren't, it seems increasingly likely that we need to prep a locks-off Keeper infiltration mission with the intent to overthrow their Governance or optimize over the memetics of their civilization, since the transport bottleneck doesn't permit us to actually invade," somebody is saying back in dath ilan proper.  "Subject to the additional complication that, again taking things at face value, other worlds will likely have the same idea, and aside from the Anomalans and Greens they do not look easy to coordinate with.")

Meanwhile: 

Oh, those are neat games! The monks are very interested in them. They hadn't thought about teaching kids about the logos with that sort of direct experience before. Do dath ilanis find it helps people follow the logos?

Ozytopians also do a lot of experiential learning. For example, seven- through nine-year-olds spend a lot of time playing in a developmentally appropriately frustrating play space (with broken toys, reading spaces next to loud games, etc) in order to provoke interpersonal conflict and intrapersonal frustration, so that the adults can coach them through skills use. They find that pretend play is really useful to encourage perspective-taking, here's their best practices for encouraging that. These are the games they use to teach basic meditation skills. These are the games they use for teaching math and reading. This is the carefully created set of experiments that teach science through encouraging children to discover things for themselves.   

Does dath ilan lie to children in class occasionally to encourage the children to not take everything on faith? This is a really great strategy, the monks think.

A creche’s infanticide quota is the number of babies and small children - the exact cutoff varies from two years old to six, depending on the country - that creche is required to murder? Lots of countries cryopreserve babies and small children to such and such standard, which is decent but probably not quite up to Dath Ilani standards, lots of other countries use a lower standard, some countries don’t cryopreserve anyone under the age of eight at all.

The Bobbiversian who mentioned this factoid senses that they may have made an error, and clarifies that the existence of the cave is only very gradually being made news, in a way that won’t cause half of the planet to think that they’ve gone insane, and that all of the Bobbi diplomats present were selected for being willing to operate under the assumption that they were hallucinating, which is not an ideal diplomat selection method, pretty please don’t hate their world forever because of something said indelicately?

Dath ilan expects that a majority of children at age seven have qualia.  Qualia may develop as early as age three in precocious youngsters.  Why would you not cryopreserve a seven-year-old.

Wait, does dath ilan think newborns don't have souls???????

“Their thread of probability-space is still going to continue on indefinitely, assuming that the universe is infinite - an assumption that seems even more reasonable, given present circumstance - so it seems unlikely that anything of value is actually ever being lost whenever anyone dies. They’re just being moved around. I doubt that I’m going to bother being cryopreserved myself, it’s not really very 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,” says a Bobbiversian wearing an intricate mask and fully covering the rest of their body.

"We would ordinarily consider that particular line of reasoning infohazardous, but since you've raised the topic anyway, we are very sure that we do not know where or in what sort of environment people end up after all of their mainline-universe instantiations are destroyed, and there are pessimistic possibilities as well as optimistic ones," says the ninth-rank Keeper to the Bobbiverse.  "Children are particularly unlikely to be prepared to handle themselves in alien aspects of those situations; and for lost children to be able to contact copies of their parents, or more distant relatives who likewise had all of their local instantation destroyed, requires a relatively optimistic outcome."

"We do prefer to avoid directly lying to children but we don't consider it lying to present them with elaborately faked situations they may not catch on to until years later," another dath ilani is saying to Ozytopians.  "We would say in our own terms that it brings the children into congruence with mathematical structures that underlie powerful and effective thought; we do not locally have the concept of logos."

The monks agree that obviously you don't want the children to be wrong forever, they're glad the dath ilanis are on the same page here.

The mathematical structures that underlie powerful and effective thought... are the logos? That's the thing that it is? There is admittedly some debate about whether it is additionally a person but they're very sure it's the mathematical structures that underlie powerful and effective thought. 

“That’s part of the reasoning for why the whims of creche owners are involved at all in the selection process, and why there isn’t just a single testing system with absolute authority that might always select a particular child; it’s vanishingly unlikely for all of a child’s mainline instantiations to be destroyed, the chance that their probability thread will go to another close version of our world is drastically higher than the chance that they’re going to spontaneously appear somewhere else” says the masked-Bobbiversian.

”I don’t even think that this whole probability-thread thing is legitimate,” says the songbird cosplayer, “so I don’t know what you two are going on about. I personally think that infanticide is bad and that we should stop.”

"That is not how the Isekai Theory of Immortality works," the ninth-rank Keeper says.  "You continue in the remaining causal processes immediately succeeding, and connected to, that causal state nearly all of whose successions were otherwise destroyed.  A different version of you, with a different brain-state, who branched off from you five minutes ago is not that successor; let alone somebody who branched off from you days ago, let alone someone who grew up in a creche with a different owner.  They can't catch the anthropic exception thrown, a conclusion which should be clear from considering the overt dissimilarities of memory and recent experience, to say nothing of the actual causal discontinuity in the thread of self-identified experience.  And if your civilization is still at the level where you disagree about these matters and have not converged to stable agreement on them, why do you consider your controversial current understanding to be something on which it is acceptable to stake the experiential graphs of children?"

"How would, how could, the axioms of probability be a person?  What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?" a dath ilani inquires of the monk.

This is all a very concerning amount of lace to dress up murdering children in. Are at least the Anomalans concerned about the murdering children.

“I-am-not-actually-capable-of-competently-arguing-with-you-so-I’m-not-going-to-try-but-I-expect-that-you-could-produce-arguments-that-compelling-for-false-statements,” says the masked Bobbiversian.

The malachitians are extremely concerned about the murdering children!!!!!!!!!! They're backchanneling in rapid-fire Llassan sign, currently.