Firstplanet has brought the maximum permissible number of scientific researchers in addition to their diplomats, and also a tray of Anomalan snacks ranging from "chocolate-coated peanuts" to "fried jalapeno slices with vinegar". There are detailed labels on all the snacks with their nutritional and chemical contents, and tablet with a survey form in which to write your opinions on their various properties.

Dath ilan found out about this summit kind of late; they went much more slowly and cautiously on exploring the cave, compared to some others.

Thankfully, Governance has long since gamed this literal exact scenario to death.  They've gamed it to death so hard that it died twice.  They're ready, they've been so ready for ages.

(There's an internal prediction market on how long it will take Reality to go completely off the rails of any previous LARP or simulation.  The market assigns a 28% probability that it happens within the first five minutes of proper interworld conversation beginning.)

The delegation has a ninth-ranked Keeper, the smartest person on the planet, the person on the planet with the best prediction market score, a topnotch mechanic who's also an endurance medical technician, somebody with an incredibly good memory who reads a lot, the world's greatest detective, a cheerful old person pushing 60 who doesn't know any government secrets and was planning to commit true-suicide soon, and a carefully sealed sphere with life support containing an observer who knows what actually happened in the past.  They wear visors with more advanced computing technology than is supposed to actually exist in their world, with constantly updating graphs showing what secret prediction markets are currently saying about whatever's happening.

They've pressed the amber 'prepare for emergencies' button on the Basement of the World, but haven't issued a red 'go full speed' light.  It currently seems like it would be reasonably hard to launch a full flight of nukes through the cave system, and if any world is sending nanomachines through, dath ilan was screwed as soon as the cave overlap existed.

The cheerful old person will try some of Firstplanet's snacks!  They have no internally detectable mental effects!  Her medical parameters are all normal too!  Nobody else from dath ilan takes any.

The Teachingsphere pulled out their best diplomat from the monastery where she was having a yearlong silent retreat after some particularly tricky negotiations with the former Communist bloc about nuclear weapons. She was briefly extremely displeased, but recovered her equanimity quickly once she discovered that the reason was that they made first contact with alternate dimensions (!) who are all full of saints (!!) and almost none of which had heard of the logos (!!!).

The monk diplomat team is universally dressed in tunics, scapulars, and cinctures in the light green that indicates that they do politics; their heads are shaved. Mindful of the teaching that a monk should spend twenty minutes daily in prayer, unless they're very busy, in which case they should spend an hour, they universally spent the time before crossing over in desperate prayer that they behave effectively so they can understand the wisdom of the other dimensions and share what little knowledge of the logos they had themselves. 

But will the cheerful old person fill out the survey? The biologists and chemists and food scientists and hedonicians back home really want all the data they can get, here.

Also, what do they expect their primary exports will be? Anomalan prediction markets suggest they'll be exporting medical technology, art, and parrots.

The Elfland delegation is on the smaller side.  The elves arrive in exceedingly comfortable elegant clothing, and disperse among the assembled people.  A few cheerfully fill out Anomalan snack surveys.  They all have exceedingly long hair except for a couple who have buzz cuts, and they all carry what appear to be leather bound notebooks which, if inspected carefully, are actually notebooks full of paper but with screens inset in the inside of the front cover. 

Who got to send representatives was the subject of much debate, which is here elided by the author for the sake of brevity (to give an approximate idea of the scale, one secession and a half was declared over the matter but the New Sotoh thing barely counts and everyone knew West Katlim had been planning to secede anyway), but because the cave was in Callassa they got dibs. A handful of other countries were chosen -- for being on good diplomatic terms with Callassa, for being willing to send exclusively diplomats fluent in Spoken Llassan to make things easier on the Anomalan machine translation researchers and Llassan Sign for backchanneling, and not having had a revolution or secession in the last thirty years.

So now there are diplomats from four different malachitinous nations and a few representative works of fiction. They're wearing a wide array of different styles of clothing, and have not brought snacks.

The delegation from Green includes:

- a white-haired old lady dressed in voluminous purple robes with white detailing and accessories; her nametag says Shrey of Alund, Representative of Green, and her braid goes nearly to the floor
- a middle-aged man with a blond buzzcut in fabric that all looks like those paintings where you put in a selection of colors and then drag something pointy through them; he's accompanied by a black-tailed marmoset; his nametag says Cason of Yaris, Representative of Green
- a woman about the same age as the man, in a much less flashy outfit (white blouse, black slacks); she has a crow; her nametag says Tsahiri of La, assistant to Green representatives

They have brought their own lunches but didn't think to bring any to share. Tsahiri takes a chocolate-covered peanut and fills out the survey.

The Anomalans, who are wearing colorful multi-layered ensembles with lots and lots of pockets and hooks for small useful objects plus kind of ridiculous amounts of jewelry, are appreciative of elven fashion and willingness to take surveys.

They're very curious what it means to be a delegate from a work of fiction! Their delegates are from every continent and chosen by prediction-vote and for a broad cross-section of skills.

Sorry, it was taking a moment for dath ilan's prediction markets to evaluate the probability that the surveys were cunning traps!  The old lady can fill out the survey now.

Ozytopians take food, sit quietly, close their eyes, and concentrate completely upon the experience of consuming the food. Then they fill out surveys. They would like extra pages for the survey, please, they only have one page each and that's not enough space to fully describe a piece of food. 

No, sorry, what that means is that the delegates brought works of fiction reasonably representative of their respective countries' bodies of literature, that being the thing everyone agreed would be least likely to be similar in another world even given that they have the same geography and similar biochemistry.

Not all of the malachitians fill out surveys but some of them do; the ?girl? with the hair that's half black and half blue really likes fried japaleno slices with vinegar.

Ozytopians think that's a really good idea the malachitians have! A low-ranked monk is sent back to Ozytopia to collect a representative sample of works from the Teachingsphere. 

In the meantime perhaps at some point people would like to hear Ozytopian songs?

The Greens would love to hear Ozytopian songs!

If you click this little "expand" button it will get you a 65535-character text box! If they had known sooner that this was going to happen they would have programmed multilingual form buttons in addition to the multilingual keyboards. The Ozytopians can put as much data into the survey as they want and thank you very much for participating. 

Anomalans want to read the representative works of fiction!! Maybe not this minute because there are important realtime things happening, but definitely soon.

Oooh, music, yes please!

A few of the elves are entranced by the music.  Do the Ozytopians have score to facilitate singing along?

One of the elves seems likely to start asking many questions about musical notation, traditions, and tropes but is subtly poked by the elf next to her before it gets out of hand.

After conferring briefly, four Ozytopian diplomats sing in perfect harmony a tribute to the concept of brassica. They are very thankful for brassica! It is true that food had to taste good but it was not at all true that brassica specifically had to exist! They are very impressed by it being turnips and kohlrabi and cabbage and kale and collards and Brussels sprouts and mustard and rapeseed, that is a lot of variety! All the kinds of brassica are also all very nutritious vegetables and they are grateful for this! Lots of people bred brassica, and their work should be recognized! It's also very cool how Brussels sprouts taste good now. 

(Two diplomats grumpily sit in silence due to being bad at singing.)

What a good song! Firstplanet, it transpires, also has lots of brassicas but a slightly different set! How delightful. They could sing a song of their own to reciprocate if people would like.

Dath ilan is trying to do the thing where they update very rapidly from data and see the truth in advance of being hit over the head with it.

Faced with an entirely out-of-context situation, the dath ilani delegation is being cautious in a way that strikes dath ilani as obvious.

Other delegations are not being cautious, and are rapidly giving away massive amounts of information about their own worlds, much more than dath ilan is apparently providing.

38% probability that this entire summit is a gaslighting-con-larp being arranged by a single world or existing confederation, with the goal of showing an apparent openness norm that will lure dath ilan to be more open itself.

22% probability that other worlds are systematically much less honest than dath ilan, and everybody here is presenting elaborate lies, as - it will turn out - any non-dath-ilan world would automatically do as a matter of course.

On the remaining probability mass, dath ilan is being sort of rude relative to average branch-of-humanity norms, but with the fate of all of these planets at stake, they can live with being a little rude.  Dath ilan can repay all the information it's not currently giving, with interest, later.

Oh, prediction markets just updated again.  They can answer Firstplanet's question about exports now!  Dath ilan is interested in trading all sorts of intellectual property, of course, that's more scalable than anything that has to be brought through a cave.  They're especially interested if anybody has any improvement over par cryopreservation technology, or any effective way of enhancing human intelligence.  Also has anybody done anything about the thing where people get dumber and sicklier just as they're getting old enough to learn anything?  Dath ilan is really annoyed by that.

The world's greatest detective will sing a dath ilani cheerful-comic song voicing a parent's over-the-top praise for a child taking their first steps and repeatedly falling over.

The Greens really like these songs! Is there a good recording of them they can kick back home? The acoustics in here aren't great and they didn't bring a microphone setup. They have songs too but none of these are singers. They do have recordings of their own world's stuff though.

Ozytopians are also interested in trading intellectual property. They're not sure what kinds of human-intelligence methods dath ilan already has, but they have a set of meditation, education, etc techniques and dath ilan can look over them later in the conference and see what is novel to them? They can also make recordings of the songs available for free to the Greens.

(Ozytopians are very pleased by how well missionary work is going so far.)

What's a cryopreservation?

Cryopreservation is when, if you don't know how to fix somebody, you put them in liquid nitrogen in case someday they figure out how to undo both that and also the original problem. Right? That's what it is on Green.

Does that... work.

That?? Seems like a really big 'in case'??? 

Well, it doesn't work on Green yet - that is, they have liquid nitrogen, which is also great for customized ice cream, and they can put people in it, but they don't know how to reverse the process. Does dath ilan? That would be cool!

One of the Anomalan biologists wants to go to a breakout room and get into the metaphorical deep forest on the biology of aging and intelligence enhancement and the mechanics of cryopreservation! They have made several discoveries in all of those areas, though they also can't revive anyone yet, and hope they don't overlap much with the dath ilani versions! Also have they tried brain/computer interfaces and how far have they gotten?

One of the elves sings a song about the things they won't be able to do after dying and the importance of doing them while alive.  It has a nice melody and the words sound lovely but much of the wordplay is likely lost in translation.

Another elf is interested in the intellectual property trading.  They have a vast database of best practices on all conceivable topics, and are interested in interfacing with others' databases.  

WELL SHIT (conditional on the remaining 35% probability mass that this isn't a massive con; prediction markets updated when other worlds presented with an implausible level of incompetence that implied a massive humanitarian crisis that might spur dath ilan to exploitable action).

Dath ilan nonetheless cares a lot about that remaining 35% probability, which is what makes this such a good tactic, if it is that.

Dath ilan will rush printed specifications for improvised, fast-manufacturable, and slow-manufacturable cryosuspension technology to this location, so that everybody can rush them home and then IMMEDIATELY start saving all of the people currently dying true deaths.

Anomaland doesn't have anyone dying true deaths nonconsensually and vanishingly few doing it consensually, but they'll totally share their own specs back and call for volunteers to help with the humanitarian efforts elsewhere!

"Is that blasphemous? That sounds kind of blasphemous," says a monk dubiously.

"But we don't know if it's blasphemous. For all you know, the logos wants us to radically accept death because there isn't a solution to death yet," says a second monk, "and once there is a solution we should do something about it. A problem that can be solved shouldn't be tolerated."

"But not all problems," the first monk says. "Sometimes the logos created something for a good reason we don't want to poke at."

"It sounds kind of expensive," says a third monk dubiously. "I'm not sure we can afford it while there's still households without washing machines."

"Think for five minutes first," says the highest-rank diplomat sharply. The other monks quiet. "We will have plenty of time and philosophy-monks* to debate whether cryopreservation is cost-effective and/or blasphemous. We don't have to figure this out right now." 

*This also means "research social scientist."

Is this what they're doing now? Okay, they can get their cryo people to trade cryo specs if that's what they're doing now. ...why would it be blasphemous. What is a logos.

To answer a previous question, dath ilan can't reverse the process yet, but they've got the process to the level where there's no visibly destructive-randomizing transforms happening to the brain when it's lowered to preservation temperature with an appropriate cryoprotectant protocol, such that no two distinct people would plausibly map to the same stored brain.  It's clear enough that the Future will be able to look at the stored brain later and reconstruct an equivalence class of most-probable patterns which will be as similar to, and as causally related to, the original person, as your self when you wake up in the morning, compared to yourself at night.

Dath ilan also wants to know what a logos is.

Representatives of the bobbiverse arrive. The very least well dressed representative is wearing a dress that looks like it’s actually made of faintly glowing stained glass, full of strange ruffles and cut out sections and gently waving fins and things; the rest are wearing outfits that this margin is far too small to contain.

They already have cryosuspension for the half of the population that wants it. Also, would any of the other universes like to explain why they sent so many men? Why are there so many men here? They brought along precisely one man and that was for diversity-of-perspective reasons. Also what are blasphemy and logos?

The logos created the universe and is the reason that math and physics function properly and also is the source of all morality! It is important to live your life in conformity with the logos because it defines what is good. 

"Blasphemous" means that it's so offensive you shouldn't be doing it at all! Like letting people starve when you have food or committing suicide or deliberately destroying knowledge or something. 

One of the elves joins the conversation about cryopreservation (they haven't really been working on that).  Another is still systematically sampling snacks, and the elf who had to be poked earlier has wandered away from her compatriot and is now attempting to quiz a any delegate who has been observed to sing about their musical practices.

Does Ozytopia have frictionless transaction logistics? On Green that is the major barrier to giving your food to starving people. Even if you leave extra on the front step and announce on the internet that anybody can come take the food they aren't going to come from very far away about it.

Green brought a man because, uh, half of them are men? Are Bobbis not half men?

Dath ilan just got a code from their Observer Who Remembers The Past which means 'Don't worry', which is good because dath ilan was in fact very worried about the Logos, and was getting ready to flee out of the cave system and try to nuke the entrance closed.

Why does physics get to have an opinion on ethics? Surely it isn't a person? And why would you listen to it? Is it coercing people? More than physics usually does by making dropped things fall and whatnot, they mean.

(They are contemplating some answers they could get to these questions that would make them flee the cave system, or possibly collapse the entrance so nothing including themselves can get out, but if it's not already too late they probably have another six seconds to check.)

Also how is committing suicide offensive? It's a bad idea, and if you have dependents it's hard on the dependents, but who thinks they have a right to an opinion about whether someone else lives or dies in the privacy of their own home?

Speaking of the logos, a philosopher who is looking in on the meeting online wants to know what it means to be a "reason" that math functions properly. That doesn't seem to be something math even sort of requires, even in the sense that you could imagine physics and/or the universe doing so.

Elfland also has questions about the logos.  Is this ... mysticism?  Doesn't everyone grow out of mysticism by the time they turn fifteen-or-thereabouts?

This conversation is weirder than dath ilan expected, and the prediction markets were not previously expecting it to be normal.

"How on earth do you get any significant fraction of people to even agree on what goodness is or to live their lives in conformity with anything, and what does it mean for the source of all goodness to have created the universe," says the malachitian with the hair that's half black and half blue.

A singing Ozytopian delegate knows so many things about how to write songs which elicit the desired emotions in various subsets of people, and is happy to discuss this with an elf. She was thinking of going liturgy-track but unfortunately had to go diplomacy-track instead. 

Ozytopia does NOT have a solution to transaction logistics but it's not blasphemous if you can't give the person food, now is it. But you do need to design a society where no one starves, that's very important. Because you wouldn't want to starve either!

Ozytopians are not quite half men because one percent of Ozytopians are neither men nor women but otherwise half of them are men. They don't want to be crude but this seems important for reproduction?

Ozytopians think that probably people want to talk to theologians about this how-do-you-know-the-logos-exists sort of thing? They're diplomats, they're not trained to teach theology, and back home all of this is considered kind of obvious and it's not an interesting debate like how much censorship you should do or whether jobs should have dress codes. 

Committing suicide is offensive because if you let people commit suicide whenever they want then twenty or thirty percent of people will commit suicide and that makes it hard to run a society. Also because the logos gave you your life and you aren't allowed to refuse it. (This almost turns into an argument about cryo.)

In Ozytopia you don't grow out of mysticism? Actually you're most likely to be a mystic when you're old, because you can do less productive work, and you're a more stable and mature person and less likely to decide to believe in machine elves. 

Mostly they argue about what good is a lot but it turns out that after two thousand years of arguing you can come to a consensus on a lot of issues!

OH NO that's so much suicide! What is causing it! Can it be fixed by exports of intellectual property or failing that material property!

Also, seriously, is the logos a person and is it likely to try to get through the cave and start imposing opinions on people. They really need to know that right now.

The malachitians have NOT found that after two thousand years of arguing you can come to a consensus on a lot of issues. Mostly what happens after two thousand years of arguing, in the malachitians' experience, is that people have developed even more and stranger ways to disagree with each other. 

The Greens are pretty alarmed that it's a live issue that you might want to do ANY censorship! That seems like an unreasonably hostile attitude for a government to take towards its citizens.

...they don't have anything near that suicide rate, is there something in the Ozytopian water. The water cooler's not from there, is it?

That IS so much suicide! The Elf suicide rate hasn't topped a tenth of a percent since they got their basic social programs to be both universal and functional!  What do the current societal best practices documents say, maybe they can be improved on?

Well until recently they kind of thought this was the normal suicide rate? Apparently other societies are much better at not committing suicide. They are agnostic about whether this is because they developed really good techniques to help people not want to commit suicide or because they're just like that. But what you do is you try really hard to be a good person and follow the logos, and then you won't want to commit suicide anymore. The Teachingsphere has a three percent suicide rate. They're very proud, it took a long time to get the suicide rate that low.

Obviously you have to censor some things? If you tell people how to hide that they have eating disorders, then they'll starve themselves to death. How do the Greens deal with this problem?

...dath ilan is beginning to suspect that (in the increasingly small fraction of plausible worlds where this should all be taken at face value) other Civilizations have perhaps not optimized themselves into carefully optimal states to quite the same degree as dath ilan.

(Maybe the censorship and the suicide are both caused by the creepy entity that claims to have created the universe and have moral authority. The one that trying to live in conformance with its will is correlated with not dying in suspicious circumstances. Probably it's something totally different but that's the option with the strongest utility delta from the others and it's a really big minus.)

If people are getting a kind of information that is harmful to them you have to solve this by ADDING information to the situation, not REMOVING it. They don't actually have a lot of eating disorders? They have some but they don't especially think hiding them is a big social problem? None of these Greens are psychologists.

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?"

Someone who isn't hiding around a corner with a dath ilani adds that Anomalans are roughly half and half on physical sex but only about two thirds of each sex make any attempt to inhabit the corresponding aesthetic and social role. Also the translation is rendering "soul" as the name of a literary trope/magic system element where people have second copies of their brains that can sometimes get unsynced from the ones in their heads, because they really needed another three moons of debugging. Sorry.

In the unlikely event that 'purple flowers' were real, dath ilan would want the technology; there's around ten thousand boys per year who'd rather be girls.

Dath ilan will actually try asking out loud what the Bobbis want for a flower sample or synthesis schedule.

Dath ilan is interested in the deepconcentration drug!  Dath ilan has made a civilizational decision not to put all their smart people on drugs except in extreme circumstances, due to not really finding anything without any side effects, but they've built up a comfy library of enhancement drugs just in case.  Does Firstplanet want this one for operating on sleep deprivation in emergency situations?

Malachitians are roughly half and half on biological sex but trying to list all their social genders would be like trying to list every genre of music. By the time you get halfway down the list another three have been created and six have splintered off.

....and sure, they'll take the summary, although from everything the malachitians have heard of Ozytopia they're really not optimistic that it's going to apply to their own people in any kind of way. 

Sure, sleep deprivation fix sounds great! They try to have enough people on call for emergencies that nobody has to do emergency response on no sleep but there's a tradeoff with throughput when things are going well and having that on hand will shift it nicely. How about this other one that's good for slowing brain aging at the cost of random muscle twitches? And are they interested in recreational drugs at all?

If they have any tall-purple-flower-women at all who aren’t being allowed to be tall-purple-flower-women that’s horrifying, everyone who wants domesticated!pueraria mirifica seeds can have them for free. Do they not know how to synthesize bioidentical estrogen, here’s how you synthesize bioidentical estrogen, it works nearly as well. Here’s a set of guidelines on how to administer purple flower tea and/or sublingual bioidentical estrogen and a set of guidelines on what it does. Also differently-domesticated!spearmint helps too, they can also have that.

Okay, so there are a lot of implementation details and best practices re: getting people to stop making bad decisions, but basically what you want to do is listen to them carefully and nonjudgmentally while they explain why they're making terrible decisions and empathize with them and tell them that it makes a ton of sense that they're doing what they're doing and anyone would do it in their shoes, and then once they feel understood you can ask them why they're doing what they're doing and what the pros and cons are of it, and then eventually they'll talk themselves into making better choices. This works because everyone can listen to the voice of the logos inside them, it's just that sometimes you need a rubber duck to talk yourself through all your feelings so you can find it. 

Souls are the part of you that makes you you! They used to think it was immaterial but now they know it's in your brain. 

The Greens want to make sure they know what "gender" is translating as here? They have half external genitals, half internal genitals, with some small fraction with something weird up, and most people prefer to line up with archetype that has appropriate civilizational aesthetic accretion with their half, but that's, not, like, a law, or anything. They have synthetic estrogen and that's one reason somebody might take it. Same with testosterone.

Why would you tell someone that it makes a ton of sense that they're doing what they're doing if what they're doing doesn't make sense? That sounds like Lying.

Anomalans mostly take synthetic hormones to look prettier by their standards, or be stronger, or not menstruate. The one third of people who don't do the matching aesthetic thing are more likely to do this but not all of them do.

"We cryosuspend people because it's predictable that we'll be able to revive them later," a dath ilani says to the elf.  "How does your branch predict things?"

Dath ilan is interested in Firstplanet's brain-aging-slowing drug, maybe they can figure out how to fix the muscle twitches.  Most of Civilization doesn't do recreational drugs and has sort of held off optimizing it too hard, but Civilization isn't, like, going to stop Firstplanet if they want to fill out another three shelves in the Shops of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.

Dath ilan has already got as far as at least having estrogen available to those ex-boys, thank you.  Do the Bobbis have anything else for increasing the similarity of born boys to standard women on maturity?  Dath ilani boys with this issue almost always want to be as close to standard female as possible post-transformation, and won't be anything like happy until they're not a purple flower variant in any way that anybody else can detect without instrumentation.

Elves sometimes take synthetic hormones if they want their bodies to be different, and they have half genitals on the inside and half on the outside more-or-less, but they don't seem to have the same sort of large body of tropes about it?  If anyone has the tech to attach functional-and-adequately-nerve-connected external genitals or uteruses elves would totally trade for that, though! Lots of people wish they could have both!

They can have the formulas for some ill-advised items and a list of which approval agencies have approved which ones and a documentation wiki on the standards of all their approval agencies. (The stuff they shared earlier was approved by even the strictest ones.)

Actually everything people do makes sense from their own perspective or they wouldn't do it, even if it's a terrible decision. So, like, starving yourself to death is a terrible decision but you might want to do it because it's a 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 your spiritual counselor is going to agree with you that it makes a ton of sense that you want to do it, and then once that's agreed upon you can think about it more carefully and realize that it's probably better to not have a tragic-beautiful-death because it would be bad to make everyone who loves you sad and also dead people don't get to eat ANY cake. 

*This word translates from the Bobbish straightforwardly into a single four-syllable word in Ozytopian. 

Dath ilan knows how to solve most mental problems if they get to raise people from infancy, for what it's worth.  Dath ilan needs a better picture of everything the other planets are currently doing wrong in order to figure out what sort of training would patch the current adults.

Dath ilan actually does say this part out loud.  It wasn't the Keeper or the prediction market leader who did it, and it wasn't the 60-year-old woman, let's put it that way.

Ozytopians are happy to share the curriculum of their Virtue classes with dath ilan to see if dath ilan can patch any obvious mistakes but they're kind of suspicious that dath ilan is a planet of saints. 

Liran here minored in historical sociology when fae were becoming a diplomat and can explain gender-splintering at a 101 level! Gender in malachitinous society started out as the archetype thing the Greens mentioned, and there used to be fewer archetypes, but it turns out that malachitian sex-based archetypes splinter a lot, and now they have this vast array of archetypes which branched off from other archetypes when the people in them got sufficiently rebellious about the concept of archetyping. Lots of people take synthetic hormones but it's at least as common to transition socially into an archetype and not make any biochemical changes about it at all. This is also why malachitinous languages that have grammatical gender at all have an enormous tangled mess made out of layers of neologism.

Also the malachitians are really goddamn offended about the idea that they collectively need patching by outsiders!!

Does dath ilan need Ozytopian best practices about getting people to stop doing horribly counterproductive things, Ozytopians think that dath ilan is maybe not very good at this, possibly because it is a planet of saints. 

Souls are translating to the Bobbis as ‘the narrow unbroken thread of probability space containing your subjective experience which persists indefinitely because of the infinite nature of the universe’, do the ozytopians have another word for that.

... the Bobbis are unclear on why that would be an issue, Dath Ilan. Tall-purple-flower-women aren’t, like, mistakable for men, men usually take steroids or growth hormones and there’s a lot of preexisting dimorphism anyways, and there’s significant physical overlap between tall-purple-flower-women and regular-women anyways? Are they just, like, not letting their tall-purple-flower-women take estrogen until their twenties, or something, or do they not have vaginoplasties or womb transplants?

What is this "really goddamn offended" behavior pattern.  Dath ilan is having trouble parsing it; they can't figure out what equilibrium it's a signal inside.

(The Rememberer of the Past is increasingly considering popping the damn sphere; there's not much point in this if dath ilan is going to have contact with other civilizations with unscreened pasts, anyways.)

...counterproductive, like, criminals who try to steal vast amounts of money?  That's productive under their own utility functions.  What sort of 'horribly counterproductive' things are Ozytopians talking about here?

"Do all of the other putative civilizations here, if taken at face value, seem kind of insane to you?" a dath ilani says to an Anomalan and a Green.

"The Anomalans seem lovely? I'm not sure there's anything glaringly wrong with the elves either," says Shrey.

"Yeah, kind of--not you, Shrey, and not the elves, the rest of them. The splintering aesthetics thing makes sense even though we don't build it off of sex mostly, but we don't understand the suicide or the censorship or the doing things that aren't in your own interests. I think I see where the beautiful death people are coming from but I don't know if I could pass an intellectual Turing test on it."

"It's lovely for fiction," allows Shrey. "But not so lovely that huge fractions of the population ought reasonably be doing it in real life."

"Ideally nobody would do it on purpose at all! But, like, if someone is dying and holds on long enough to finish the tapestry they're weaving and then calls an ambulance and collapses at their loom, that's more beautiful than if they had died and left it unfinished." (This is said levelly; the delegate would not have been chosen for this mission if they were going to be distracted by strong emotions.)

"We may be asking you for... cultural assistance, at some point, if the Others make more sense to you than to us.  We are very confused by how societies such as those could arise or be stable, and if we are confused, that means that we may believe something that is fiction.  Our prediction markets are registering an increasingly high probability that all of them are pulling the same sort of elaborate pranks on us that we use to test the competence of children and teach them to be skeptical of adult authority."

No, counterproductive like wanting a 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. Or like lying in bed crying all day because of how miserable you are because you're lying in bed crying all day, or cutting yourself so people will notice how sad you are except actually if people notice how sad you are you will feel horribly guilty, or smashing your favorite cup because you want to punish yourself for being bad, or hitting your partner because you love them and that makes you want to see how badly you can behave and keep them around, or watching TV when you'd rather spend time with your kids.

Normal people do that kind of thing all the time. People who do things because it seems like a good idea to do them are saints. The whole diplomacy team is saints, obviously, you don't want to send normal people off to do delicate diplomatic work. Except dath ilan is an entire planet of saints, which is why they have spare resources for things like cryopreservation and aren't busy trying to make sure everyone has washing machines. 

(Do other people know about washing machines? Ozytopians are very impressed by washing machines.) 

"We don't lie to our children, but it does seem possible this is something less than fully honest," acknowledges Shrey, "and we can try to do some cultural translation insofar as possible. Should we pull in another delegate to learn more about dath ilan and specialize in translating for you specifically?"

Green has washing machines. And also, sometimes, watching TV when you'd rather spend time with your kids, but the other stuff is far less common.

"Ours are still below fifty percent on the prank thing but we should definitely send some people through to check. If it's all legit we will of course do our best to interpret everyone to everyone else wherever we expect it to help. Also we give our children secret tests sometimes but only after they've consented to getting them as a general concept."

"I kind of hope Ozytopia is a prank even if the rest aren't."

... the Bobbis register that they have all of the counterproductive issues mentioned by Ozytopia and also still have cryopreservation, and the impulse to do things that are good ideas. And washing machines, although it’s hard to make the kind that won’t damage decent clothing.

...dath ilan is familiar with washing machines.  Dath ilan would not ordinarily say this, because it requires some trust, but dath ilan registers the offer - dath ilan understands if you don't trust us enough for this, but still - dath ilan registers an offer to send us all available information on Ozytopia and we will figure out what needs to be done to fix it, in what order.  It sounds like you might, possibly, be doing more than one thing wrong at the same time.

"Oh, sure, with consent is different, although I don't think it's a widespread practice, most tests you can just explain what you're doing. I'm sort of worried about how those are malachitin diplomats? The specific people Ozytopia sent seem all right even if they describe a worrying home," Shrey replies to the Anomalan.

Whoa. The other worlds are probably utopias. Ozytopians are probably going to have to work on cultural translation for concepts like "factory farming" and "child abuse" and "poverty" and "disease" and "existential risk" since if everyone was making good decisions all the time you wouldn't have those anymore. Do they have moon bases?

Ozytopians are happy to share information with dath ilan! They have a neatly arranged summary of their educational system right here, they thought that would be the most important thing to share notes on.

Green has a permanent moon installation but it is not permanently staffed. Uh, they do also have factory farming and child abuse and poverty and disease, just, like, not in the same quantities it sounds like Ozytopia is dealing with.

Malachitians have washing machines. They're very common. They do not have moon bases (they're working on it) and, like the Greens, have those things (except factory farming, they don't have factory farming, they used to but currently they instead have really good fake meat) but Not Like It Sounds Like Ozytopia Does.

Also, ah, those-- or at least the ones other than the watching TV thing-- seem like clearer-cut examples of people doing counterproductive things than the malachitians were previously imagining and they would like to register that they'd perhaps used the concept imprecisely, those are very very uncommon.

Anomalans have reading when you would on reflection rather be playing with your kids, and vice versa, and in fact the constant tradeoff produced by only being able to do at most three pleasant activities at once is a major theme of a lot of their literature. Also some of them cut themselves but that's because it feels nice to them, or because they want artistic scarring patterns, not because they're sad, and it's only a problem if someone doesn't read the guidebooks and injures themself. Also nonzero child abuse and existential risk, and way too much disease but less every decade.

They do have a moon base! Here are some pictures!

"If this situation is actually what it appears to be at face value," the dath ilani says to the Anomalan and the Green, "we may need to consider what we can do about a rescue mission to all of those planets, considering that this cave system isn't wide enough that we could just offer to let everyone there move here.  It sounds like people are dying the true death in massive numbers, a lot of the others are very unhappy, and it's not obvious their civilizations will be able to take steps to fix that on their own."

"I'm not sure what kind of rescue mission you're imagining where there isn't anywhere else you can reasonably take your rescuees," says Shrey, "even if you have budget for it."

Ozytopians are trained diplomats and so none of them offer opinions on the concept of having a planet of saints and still having child abuse. Are you even trying. 

Ozytopians would like to reassure everyone that there isn't any factory farming in the Teachingsphere anymore, they realized that animals mattered ethically and everyone stopped eating meat unless they had a health reason and there are sufficiently few health reasons that they can afford to give all the animals incredibly happy lives. They're of course very upset about the factory farming outside the Teachingsphere but it's really hard to... do... anything about the rest of the world.

The diplomat seems to assume that all the more pro-suicide people will agree that the concept of living in a world with ongoing factory farming is sufficiently horrifying that a reasonable person would kill themself rather than be complicit. 

"I concur that something should be done, but we'll want to be delicate about it; many of them will resent being helped. How to translate--they will see it as a suggestion that they're inherently inferior and should consider us moral authorities, rather than simply poorer due to circumstances and a good target for additional resources? That's very imperfect but it's a first attempt."

Dath ilan, left to itself, would try to send through a team with the reconstructing-Civilization-from-a-minimum-package package, modulo whatever native resources are available and can be traded for.  Try to figure out how to hire and employ insane people.  Build functional cities with functional Governance, first with the goal of replicating quickly to make more cities, but also with enough spare capacity to take in and house the worst-off inhabitants of those worlds, in increasing numbers.

How does the Anomalan version work.

"One mustn't try to lick a cat*," says Shrey. "Build cities where, with what materials, gotten from whose territory?"

*An idiom meaning "to get overly involved in someone else's personal matters without the invitation or skills to do so usefully or without getting scratched in the face".

The linguist along to update the translation figures out what factory farming is; it never caught on on Firstplanet even before they were confident many animals are sentient because nobody was willing to spend enough money on meat to pay people to do such unpleasant work.

"We'd mine our own resources from otherwise unused land, on the default way we'd imagine things, unless it was easier to trade dath ilani pharmaceuticals for ore or refined metals?"

"If you appear to be aiming for a system where a bunch of you are governing a bunch of others it will read as hostile. Everything being consensual will help but for best results you want a tight feedback loop between population and government, with locals in positions of authority. And we also predict that finding unclaimed territory will be the first problem."

"Yes, I don't think there's a lot of unclaimed territory lying around on Green. Maybe they have a lower population what with all the suicide though?"

"Green's population is living or farming or mining everywhere?  How many people do you have?  - If you don't mind our asking."

"Coming up on ten billion, and no, we aren't actively developing all the land, but it still has option value and belongs to people."

"We have about two billion, and the wilderness is all claimed by the cities."

The delegate talking to Shrey and the dath ilani sends a message to their counterpart in the main room, who asks, "What are the wilderness management policies of your planets? To a first approximation, we have each city administering the surrounding wilderness, with issues of the oceans and the atmosphere handled at the continent level."

"You expect us to be unable to pay rent on - or buy, if it's an ownership thing - adequate territory?  They deliberately raise the prices to whatever they think we can't afford?  And are you visualizing a supermajority of their civilization being in favor of that, or some powerful minority being able to effectuate it against the will of most others?"

One of the Bobbiversians remarks that they used to have any factory farming, and then that mostly stopped when they started implementing universal basic incomes and people became less willing to work at factory farms, and now most countries ban any kind of selling dead animals! It wasn’t killing-yourself-immediately horrifying but it was still pretty horrifying! Any kind of selling-dead-animals incentivizes people to kill animals without giving them decent lives and that’s really bad! It’s like how creche owners need to treat babies and small children really well even if they’re pretty sure that they’re eventually going to kill them, it’s just unacceptable to be net-negative-happiness about it all.

”Oh, we really don’t have as much wilderness as we’d like,” says a Bobbiversian who seems to be cosplaying as a ridiculously pretty songbird. “It’s mostly tied up in private property, you know, and most people want to keep things the way they are by default, but lots of people want to release their bioluminescent bees upon the unsuspecting world or replace all of the trees with better trees and that only sometimes goes as planned.”

"Different countries handle land ownership differently but nearly everyone is signed on to compacts about environmental issues. In the countries nearest this cave most land is owned by individuals or organizations other than the government, though the government owns some too and has to enforce the compacts and any other relevant law in all the land belonging to its polity," is the Green response to the land use question.

"I suppose possibly you could buy it?" says Shrey. "But you'd have to get from the cave to wherever you were able to buy it, and I'm not sure what you'd buy it with, since it sounded like your plan needed the city first and would produce the value afterwards."

The Greens would like to request a translation check on that thing about killing Bobbi children?

Can somebody from the Bobbiverse say a few additional words about "creche owners"?

(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.

"If your civilization doesn't consider itself cognitively competent to distinguish whether my plausible-sounding arguments are valid or invalid, it should consider taking the advice of my Civilization, which does consider itself able to make a principled discrimination over arguments at that level and to have converged on correct answers over them," says the Keeper.  "Our advice is that you are scattering children into unpredictable worlds, and that there are large chunks of plausibility mass on this being a disastrous and irrecoverable outcome; assuming that you care about the experiences of children, which you would seem to represent yourself as doing, based on the implicit appeals of your previous course of action.  May I inquire what it would take to get your Civilization to shift course on this issue, in a manner agreeable to you?  I believe that many of the worlds meeting here would consider it of sufficient gravity to potentially impede otherwise mutually beneficial trading with you."

"We now request all of your data on Bobbiverse language, which you used to construct your translator," a dath ilani quietly says to an Anomalan, outside of hearing range of any others, even the Greens.  "We further meta-request that you do not make known that we made this request."

Visual data on the Bobbiverse delegates seems adequate that a dath ilani costumer could design full-coverage suits drawn from the same distribution.  Design of such costumes is now in progress.

Most Keepers who volunteered for locks-off Exception Handling training were male, but there's still some women among them.  These pretrained Keepers are now in VTOL planes carrying them to rendezvous with a hypersonic plane that will rush them to the cave entrance; a hypersonic plane which, since the start of this emergency, has already had on-board a supply of Emergency Rapid Language Learning Drug and the Emergency Immersive Learning Sensory Feeds that go with it.  (You see the word and its translation once, and you remember it; and your childhood language-learning wiring-algorithms reactivate and go into similar overdrive about sentences, syntax, and patterns.  Use sparingly, or preferably not at all; some of your less frequently used memories of Baseline will not survive the experience.)

Elsewhere, some +5sd mad engineers are assembling a silent tunnel-melting machine that will run off a small, very slightly critical reactor core.  Once the mission gets in, they're not going to bust a Bobbiverse security checkpoint, they're going to go out through the cave walls.

Governance hasn't decided to do it, to be clear.  It still seems more likely than not that the 'Bobbiverse' is a gaslight designed to elicit exactly this reaction and present the true government of that world with a Keeper infiltration mission to capture, examine, and trade as a valuable.

The backchanneling in Llassan sign language continues, wholly unabated. 

Nobody else is doing overt signaling so that's not how diplomacy is done in these other worlds, with clear marks of you are escalating and I want you to know that I have noticed, are you absolutely sure you want to continue that; possibly that is why dath ilan is doing things that parse to malachitian diplomatic eyes as dangerously escalatory. Or possibly it's just that dath ilan is that confident in its ability to win a conflict that's fought through an interdimensional portal, which given the apparent tech level differential would, honestly, be fair. 

None of the diplomats, obviously, has the power to take unilateral action on behalf of their nation; that would be an insane thing to give a diplomat. Each of the nations with a delegation here is getting a live feed with translation, and they in turn can do what they want with the information. But the diplomats sure are thinking about what that might be. 

The Greens are going to go ahead and extend the offer to all the other worlds here, even several offers per if there are distinct-enough polities with interests represented, that they can provide Greens selected to specialize in them. The other worlds can provide a best guess on what sort of person from the distribution of Greens would get along with them best and then they can borrow a Green volunteer answering to that description who thinks this sounds neat to go learn their language properly and learn more about them.

Sure, they'll take that. Malachitians' best guess for a Green they'll get along with is someone who's willing to clearly and unambiguously signal things like 'you are escalating very quickly', that being how malachitinous diplomacy is done, but anyone an interdimensional volunteer would be directly interfacing with is selected for being to get along with wide ranges of people.

There are four polities represented here, the countries of Callassa and Eluin and Niqal and Tisa, although there are many more polities than that on the planet; if volunteers are interfacing with governments all four of those would absolutely take one, but if they're interfacing with the diplomats this delegation was selected to work as a group on behalf of all of their nations.

Sounds like maybe one Green ambassador to Malachitin to start with, then, and they can recruit others with more information as necessary. They will put up a posting about it and see who's willing to haul out to this cave for this job. (Anyone who answers these postings is probably going to be a young relatively inexperienced person; the delegation here isn't, because this seemed important enough for some people to leave home about it, but the specialists are going to be twentysomething singles who wanted out of their current housing situations anyway more likely than not.)

“I’m sorry, are you threatening us?” inquires the Bobbiversian wearing vantablack who’d previously opined about suicide being a fundamental right. “How very strange! I don’t think we ought to make that an effective method of changing around our society on alien whims and I don’t think it’s very nice to threaten people when you’ve barely started to know anything about them. You haven’t even given us flowers yet.”

The Bobbis would like a Green who isn’t going to be weird about the infanticide thing, can they get a Green who isn’t going to be weird about the infanticide thing.

Can they be a little more detailed about what "being weird" means. They don't usually give high profile positions to people who are pro-infanticide but they can try for someone... low empathy who has a lot of exposure to edgy eugenics arguments on the internet?

... sure.

Okay, the ad is up now.

Internal sigh.  "Dath ilan is not trying to modify your behavior pattern by presenting you with a claim that we will punish you unless you do what we want.  We realize that ideal agents ignore attempted incentivizations like that, since, if they choose to respond, that choice becomes the only reason why the threat was offered them.  It is possible that we will refrain from benefiting you with trade if it looks like you'd use more wealth to kill more children, but that's our own natural incentive, not a threat, which appears regardless of how you'd respond to us having that incentive."  And also in that case dath ilan then has an incentive to do certain other things, even if Bobbis wouldn't respond to the prospect of those actions as threats per se; but Bobbiverse is presenting as people possibly too crazy to figure that out, and in the unlikely event that's true, dath ilan isn't actually going to warn them, since it's not a threat.  "Which is why we're asking if, say, you have a problem with tiny bitey insects spreading diseases, and you'd be willing to stop killing children in exchange for us wiping out the tiny bitey insects.  Some mutually beneficial solution like that."

Dath ilan would cheerfully take a Green, as soon as dath ilan's prediction markets become sure that... it is actually safe to have anybody from any world here come back to Civilization, at all, which, sorry, they are still too confused to be sure about.

The specialist Green can stay in the cave and learn from the dath ilani there if they don't want to bring one home, although this will make it slightly harder to get interested candidates, some of whom would mostly be interested in seeing exotic destinations. What do dath ilani look for in a liaison?

Sanity.

Dath ilan can provide definitions of sanity if needed, but hopefully Green already has the concepts of validity, probability, expected utility, and fairness as spotlighted mathematical structures.

There's probably other things too, but it's hard to guess what they are at this point?  Stuff like 'can take a lot in stride' seems already obvious, but the Greens have probably guessed that too.

So they want a... philosopher-economist sort of person? There's probably a philosopher-economist sort of person to be had.

The world's greatest detective sagely nods to this, ignoring the AR popup of sudden worried prediction markets about what exactly it means that only some Greens are philosopher-economists.

The linguist, Elxen, is absolutely-minus-epsilon sure that the thing being discussed really is child murder. The rest of the delegation has been consumed for several minutes in intense forum conversations trying to figure out how many excess Bobbiversian children Anomaland can afford to take and what consequences this will have for the Bobbiversians and their incentives. Right now, however, they want to know why there are so many excess children in the first place. Do they lack the drugs and surgeries that render people temporarily infertile? That information is absolutely free of charge, of course. 

On the subject of what happens to the children when they are locally destroyed, they agree that an infinite reality is nonzero consolation but agree that few of the possible future threads for each person are going to also include synced instances of their loved ones, and that anyway it's still very much murder to destroy even part of someone's future. 

Anomaland seconds the offer of specialized ambassadors to each other world, including one to dath Ilan who can quarantine in the cave, and would welcome one or more Greens (they have twelve top-level polities divided into several layers of sub-polity, but the top-level ones can group up further to meet with ambassadors). Their real-time polling is still well above 95% confident that peaceful solutions to all of these problems are possible, and there are already volunteers developing competence metrics specialized to each other world and other volunteers ready to be evaluated on them. What do the Greens prefer in an ambassador?

The linguist would like a Malachitian to consult on translation subtleties of the backchannel signalling.

Telpere, the Anomalan requested for full data on the Bobbiverse language, would like to know why they need the request to be secret. They're in principle happy to distribute knowledge that was given to them freely but don't want to do anything the Bobbiverse would justifiably consider a betrayal, or anything likely to increase the probability of violent conflict, without a correspondingly strong reason.

Orlan, the Anomalan tasked with writing up a document for dath ilan on why other worlds seem unlikely to welcome help, has the document. It has two sections.

Section 1, Why We Believe This, explains that Bobbiverse and Malachite have described the things about them that dath ilan calls problems neutrally, as things that bother them at most slightly, rather than as dire emergencies for which they would welcome help. (To be very clear: Anomaland definitely considers the thing where they die of old age to be a dire emergency for which they would welcome help.) They have objected to dath ilan's offers of help and consider them escalatory. Ozytopia seems more willing to accept help but this is tentative because their model of Ozytopia is not yet stable.

Section 2, What We Think Their Reasons Are, is divided into sections by world. 

Ozytopia appears to believe that their social technology is a high local optimum relative to their (apparently unusual) psychology, and that solutions optimized for other humanity-instances will be less well adapted to them.

Malachite expects everything to fracture into a lot of subgroups such that nothing as complicated as dath ilani cities is going to be widely popular. Also they share the Anomalan trait of being suspicious of anyone claiming too much authority, and fear the consequences of one group ending up with the ability to heavily determine another group's conditions.

They will not have a good model of why the Bobbiverse objects to intervention until they know what is causing their ridiculous problem, but it's probably at least some part fear of a power grab.

(Speaking for the aggregated polling on their own planet, Anomaland would be interested in negotiating immigration both ways, but is not going full steam ahead on that until they're sure it won't be massively disruptive to the current equilibrium due to high birth rates or differing pollution control standards or something.)

Ozytopians also want to send ambassadors. They can send saintly monks who are philosopher-monks or who don't care much about infanticide or... honestly pretty much any diplomat seems fine for the malachitians, it seems like mostly what the malachitians want is for no one to tell them what to do.

Any ambassadors to Ozytopia should be fine with being around lots of normal people. That really seems like the most important criterion here. 

The elves would happily accept ambassadors! Elves would also like to send ambassadors to whoever would like to have them!

Obviously their delegates should be code-switching experts who are excellent at not overreacting to new information, are there any other traits that various worlds would like to request?

The elves also think that these other societies may be being a touch hasty in their rush to judgement? They haven't even asked a bunch of questions yet!

The Bobbiverse representative in vantablack seems quick on the uptake, one of the elves will attempt to engage her in conversation.

"This seems to be going in a bizarrely hostile direction for a situation where no one knows anything about you!  I'm really curious about the other conditions that led to whatever the current status of your world is!  Why are children raised in creches? How many children does the average person have?  What incentives are in place around that and why were they put into place?"

Another elf attempts to insinuate themselves into the dath ilan/Green/Anomalan conversation.  "This seems prematurely-judgemental-without-facts.  Has dath ilan not heard of not-closing-off-avenues-in-the-interpersonal-probability-space-on-first-interaction?"

Anomalans have heard of that, and also of the concept that if you can't get people to do things your way by making the case for it in detail in writing then you'll never be able to get them to do it by force or trickery. So despite the moral urgency of dying children there's really no need for anyone to do anything other than explain in detail why children should not be dying and what the Bobbiverse should be doing instead. And the first step of that is asking them a lot of questions so it becomes clear what better states they'll accept. Surely they don't terminally value death, right, so there almost has to be some such state.

Also, why are you back here, did one of the other delegations message the front room and ask for an elf?

Obviously there was information being exchanged, and elves want to know information! Elves in general really want to be in the room where it happens so that they know everything, and any delegation to a summit of aliens would be naturally selected from among people with a particularly intense desire to be in the room and know what is going on!  Was there ... some kind of expectation of privacy? Without any explicit statement to the room about desiring privacy?

In any case, this elf has managed to overhear the majority of the conversation and would like to reiterate her question for response by dath ilan.

Conversations currently happening in the Llassan Sign backchannel, which was not given to anyone for machine translation such that it retains its purpose as a language the diplomats can backchannel in, while mainchanneling continues in Spoken Llassan: 

1. How worried should we be about the thing where dath ilan keeps acting like every other world requires them personally to fix it and is escalating to 'well maybe you should abandon your own civilization and become part of ours instead' this fast (subconversation "Are we totally sure that's a bad thing in the specific case of the Bobbiverse?" which the Eluin delegation is trying to get back on track with "Regardless of whether it's a bad thing in the specific case of the Bobbiverse it's worrying?? It doesn't actually have to be a bad idea across the board to be worrying as an action taken at a diplomatic summit, guys, we don't have to debate how mad we should be about the seven year olds thing to assess the risk that dath ilan is going to try to invade.")

2. Should we in fact be accepting ambassadors, given that we're concerned about invasion risk and want the option to just leave the cave entirely and have nothing to do with any of this. (The consensus conclusion is yes, they're not going to be able to close everything down instantaneously regardless, and not accepting ambassadors would have all kinds of signalling implications.)

3. Conversely should we be sending ambassadors. (The consensus conclusion is a tentative no, since it's much harder to retrieve people from other worlds than to deposit them out of Malachitin, but they can come back to that.)

They're happy to consult on the particulars of Spoken Llassan! Sorry, is there a machine translation issue, they can also clarify whether things in the fiction they brought are real or worldbuilding details or similar.

Honestly most likely ambassadors from Ozytopia, Firstworld, and the elves seem like they'll probably be fine; again, they'll be primarily interfacing with people selected to get along with wide ranges of people. They should be good at picking up languages, especially if they're going to be talking to multiple governments.

Ozytopia's brassica song was universally agreed to be extremely charming and if they send someone who is very hyped about things like brassica they predict that other malachitians will also find that extremely charming.

Green would love to accept ambassadors from everywhere although if dath ilan isn't letting a Green in they don't really want to bring a dath ilani home with them. When Greens are considering being diplomats they try to pick people who are charitable, thoughtful, good at triage*, disinclined to lick cats, practiced at perspective-taking, and gung-ho about travel and being out of one's comfort zone, so that is what they'll be expecting, but they expect to be able to manage with basically anyone bright who thinks Greens sound neat and wants to be peer-friends.

*literally: stack-insertion

Elfland will accept any ambassadors people want to send, and expect that anyone they interact with will be sufficiently skilled at code switching to behave appropriately, or know that well enough about themselves to defer to others in communications.  They expect any ambassadors will respond calmly to polite requests about how their behaviors are affecting those around them, and if any ambassadors do not expect to be able to do that they should warn the elves explicitly in advance so that they can make sure to have individuals with exceptionally high frustration tolerances on hand for interactions.

Elves will not have any trouble selecting someone good at languages to send to Malachitin, though it will be considerably more difficult if they need to be able to read much instead of just having conversations.

Can the Anomalans send someone to Malachite with a translator earpiece-and-speaker setup to free up optimization-power for other criteria or would hearing everything through a text-to-speech program be too annoying? 

That's totally fine, and they can provide corpuses of Lune (Eluin's primary language), Niqait (Niqal's), and Lirami (Tisa's) for the machine translation.

Text-to-speech exists and while it's primarily an accommodation for the blind nobody in Malachitin will blink about an elf using it because they're better at spoken languages than written. 

A sealed sphere cracks and an old man, older than 60, older than almost anyone lets themselves get without going into suspension, gingerly climbs out of it, assisted by a servo exoskeleton.

It's painful to abandon all the sunk costs that Civilization paid, but they are sunk.  They're already interacting with multiple unscreened other pasts.  It's clear both what needs to be done, and that it needs to be done right now.

The dath ilani around look openly shocked, not too shocked, the prediction markets guessed this might happen, but it's still pretty shocking.

The old man walks past, exoskeleton-assisted, to where a Green and an Anomalan are talking to a dath ilani.

"The problem," he says in Baseline, "is that their, our, Civilization, was founded around a premise long ago, that there wasn't any such thing as a Pharonian or a Martinian child, just children, and then for unrelated other reasons they had to screen off their past, and also did some heritage optimization, and now they don't know what it's like to think differently.  They aren't going to react the tiniest bit differently to the Bobbiverse killing six-year-olds in the Bobbiverse, and the Bobbiverse or a rogue dath ilani faction killing six-year-olds in dath ilan.  They don't think that cultures can own children, and while that's correct from my own ethical standpoint and also I'm guessing from yours, they also don't know what it's like to think differently or remember a time in their history when that wasn't true.  They no longer have a record of what goes wrong when two different cultures interact, and their prediction markets are being too optimistic about it or were as of five seconds ago."

He then waits for the dath ilani there to translate this into written form, where it can be passed to the Anomalan and Green without being intercepted by the elf.

"- screen off their past?" says Shrey, alarmed, "what does that mean - also of course the six year olds aren't necessarily any more different than particularly diverged breeds of dogs or something but the strategic and diplomatic constraints differ enormously - why were you in a hamster ball -"

"To try to protect the past from everywhere else.  If you haven't worked it out yourselves then I probably shouldn't say more.  It didn't work, anyways."

"The people here don't run Governance.  Civilization runs Civilization.  They're going to run conditional policy prediction markets and vote on which of those outcomes they want to see and the number of dead six-year-olds summed across all worlds is going to loom very large as a factor in that vote, and they're also going to ignore any additional dead six-year-olds produced in an attempt to intentionally influence that vote while being very shocked and sad that anybody would do that in reality instead of a counterfactual."

"We predict that any violent responses will not be attempts to influence your decisions, but the result of a direct incentive to prevent interference. As such it will be reasonable to take them into account, and possible to prevent them with diplomatic delicacy."

"It would take a lot of work to get Civilization to tear itself into two pieces, but presenting them with a choice between being the only defecting world in a larger system of friendly cooperators, on the one hand, and letting huge numbers of six-year-olds die and be lost and possibly scattered, on the other, would plausibly do it.  On the plus side, they will be very eager to go along with it if you can present them with any option whatsoever which is not that."

"Well, you could offer to take the excess children as refugees, if we can't figure out how to get them to have the desired number in the first place," says Shrey. "Six-year-olds aren't very big, you could plausibly set up some kind of bucket brigade arrangement."

"Your past was kinder than our true past if you expect that to work," says the old man.  "We could pay them to cryopreserve the children, at that rate; they said they have the technology.  People do not do such things because they have calculated it as the best way to achieve their desires, of all the ways considered, but because it is part of their image of who they are."

"Then we'll find a way to convince them that they're the sort of people who switch to better solutions as they become available. One of us--probably me or Shrey--should talk to a Bobbiverse representative alone."

"Our ad has gotten a good candidate," Shrey says, checking her handheld, "for a Bobbiverse ambassador, and she's bringing flowers. It's possible they just have a cultural identity around specifically killing the kids but it could easily be something else, if they just feel it's eugenically necessary then shipping them out at your expense would do just as well, if they're missing birth control because they're too busy inventing incredibly fabulous outfits likewise."

"Excellent, we've mostly gotten offers from historians who want to study them. We have totally nonviolent eugenics and can write up a case for its effectiveness."

"We have what's called on-sight-abortion where a defect that was for whatever reason not detected prenatally is identified at birth, and then there's infanticide if the parents prefer, but in brand new infants, not six-year-olds."

"We have that and also an exception for euthanasia if the baby is guaranteed to die painfully before the age of three. Though we've mostly eradicated the genes for that class of problem so it almost never comes up."

The elf is annoyed to have been underhandedly excluded from the conversation instead of just asked politely.  The dath ilani are Very Rude.  The elf does not actually say this, because she understands the difference between times when acting on your feelings immediately is productive in interpersonal situations and times when it is not, UNLIKE THE DATH ILANI

"Are you sure that what we're seeing is reality?" says the other dath ilani, in Anomalan; it doesn't seem helpful to hide this from the elf.  "Green and Firstplanet look like plausible, stable societies that could have arisen naturally.  The rest of these, with the possible exception of Elfland - feel confusing in the unnatural way that children learn to identify with adults constructing elaborate fake scenarios around them, once they realize that's what happened.  Or at least, that sure is how it feels to me.  These presentations are meant to look like bait, or tests of character - societies looking weak with planets easy to seize for resources, weak and in need of help, insane and committing an escalating series of atrocities that other societies might be tempted to intervene in.  We may be the only ones here who are foolish enough to present themselves as we are, instead of presenting an elaborate facade designed to extract maximal information of interest from any other worlds foolish enough not to expect that."

"You think they decided to send actors to claim to have disastrous problems back home as bait? That would be a very weird thing to do in real life," says Shrey. "They're clearly very weird, but that's a very specific way you're proposing that several of the delegations are being weird, although I guess maybe you think they coordinated with each other and not with us?"

"They wouldn't need to coordinate if it happens to be what most hominid-derived societies decide on, much as they decide to wear clothing of some form, with ourselves being the odd nudists out, unconcealed."

"We have corpuses of their literature, and they didn't specify that they were only to be used for translation. We can go through them for references to the murders. It could have all been faked while we were setting up the biosafety protocols but it would have taken thousands* of people, or for them to know about contact in advance."

*Literally '4096s of people'.

"Technology that understands text well enough to translate it has an obvious higher rung that understands text well enough to modify or generate it."  Everyone on this mission knows about machine learning.

"If it's a strategy a lot of worlds converge on I would also expect it to have happened at least a few times among cultures in our history," says Shrey, "if not with the text generation part, since ours isn't good enough to write novels even now, but still. You might be particularly impaired at reasoning from that sort of thing because one person in a hamster ball can't really be an expert on all history, but my consultants aren't turning anything up."

"Our machine text generation isn't anywhere near that good, but theirs could be. And it's not a thing that's happened in our history either. Also, they didn't make excuses about not wanting an ambassador. We could try to accelerate that; if it's all a facade they'll have to start pushing back on that at some point."

“If we end up getting absolutely nothing out of this then I suppose we’ll be mildly put out,” says the Bobbiversian in vantablack, to the keeper, several minutes ago. “Oh well. We-are-no-longer-talking-to-you-in-particular-go-away.”

A separate Bobbiversian notes to the Anomaland delegation that they do have lots of sterilization surgeries and drugs and also that lots of them are variably legal and also that all of them have weird side effects, do they have any without weird side effects - it transpires that they never invented rubber condoms, if those come up - and the Bobbiversian in vantablack is more than willing to answer that elf’s questions! Children are raised in creches because they’re a convenient institutional format for keeping them somewhat separated from society; in the past they used to just wander around entire villages or households being raised collectively but that’s a big disease risk, right, and it’s not great for anyone getting anything done, only some cities allow creches in at all.

Men produce the most children per, and tall-purple-flower-women produce the least, but on a statistical level the children of men are much more likely to end up being murdered; they’re somewhat above replacement in total and would be much more above replacement if not for all of the murder. Lots of countries have some kind of incentive structure in place for having children; it’s usually just ‘here, have this amount of currency’. The murder of babies and small children is in fact somewhat controversial but it’s very hard to scale it back without making people concerned that they’re going to lose access to their UBIs, or that they’re going to overrun the planet, or that the crime rate is going to explode from all the men not being murdered in childhood, and it’s hard to scale back the birth rate without people getting concerned that they’re going to shrink down into nothing, and it’s very hard to coordinate on scaling back infanticide quotas and the birth rate at the same time.

The bobbiverse corpus they sent over seems to contain fiction and apparent-nonfiction describing thousands upon thousands of different societies, most of them extremely weird or magical or horrifying or sexual or all four, and mostly declines to mention children when they aren’t being worked into fantasy worldbuilding. Even their textbooks seem to come from countless different worlds, although usually only as a medium for discussing real chemistry or physics or similar.

"I think I credit their true existence more than the prediction markets do, but I'm also not as smart as modern kids," says the elder.  "But in our history there have been instances of creating false villages to deceive foreign ambassadors about the state of a country."

The other dath ilani nods, and translates.  "Yes.  It may not seem like an obvious strategy to you, but it does to us.  Maybe it didn't happen in your own history, but it did in ours.  So it's a thing which humans may do - maybe not your exact kind of human, usually, but some kinds of human - and now we've learned that they do it even when they are resourced at far lower levels than an equiv-tech civilization.  This is also not necessarily their own true first contact; they may have had time to prepare their strategies."

The Keeper neither nods nor gives any form of other acknowledgement to the Bobbiversian, simply turns to go.  This outcome was foreseen, in a certain branch of possible reality, and considered necessary within it.  Dath ilan isn't going to send an infiltration mission into the Bobbiverse while the not-gaslighting!Bobbiverse could possibly be under the impression that dath ilan is their cooperative friend.

Orlan says to Shrey and the historian, "Assuming they're telling the truth, we can probably get somewhere by making contact with one of the factions that wants to scale back on the birth rate and the infanticide in tandem and offer them lots of nice things and help them with whatever bottlenecks are stopping them from winning, and then it will be somewhat less like we're trying to impose our own views instead of just being better friends with the faction that's more like us plus it being useful to be our friends."

Shrey agrees with this assessment.

Okay, so if a lot of the issue is that Bobbis mostly don't like children, and also haven't invented condoms or RISUG or IUDs (IUDs do have side effects but, like, WAY fewer than preganancy, especially long term!), that seems pretty solvable! They can have fewer children, and send some surplus to dath ilan which seems eager to address this problem own-expense, where the excess bobbis can hang out not having any children somewhere.

"What do your own past-aware prediction markets say about the likelihood of that course leading to a Bobbiverse civil war?" the old man says, this not for the ears of the elf.  "Do you think the other factions will not feel betrayed if one faction receives offworld assistance and adopts offworld ways?  Do you expect them to go along with that quietly?  An unequal conflict swiftly won may be better than a drawn-out battle between near-equals."

"We'd obviously take any number of kids but we're worried about portal logistics," says the other dath ilani in Anomalan.

"Portal logistics seem much more solvable than sociology," says Shrey. "And they don't seem nearly defensive enough about it to have a war, though that's just a first-pass assessment, I suppose that in addition to hating children they might like war." These seem about the same amount of weird.

"We've got geologists and physicists doing preliminary studies of the question of expanding the cave system until it's possible to run trains through. On the matter of civil war, it's going to be mostly dependent on how warlike they are and whether they have any entire polities in the less-death faction. If they don't, our intervention could cause the formation of one and that would be potentially very destabilising."

Trains would do it.  The physics of the cave system didn't look to dath ilan like that was going to be possible, but maybe the Anomalans probed harder and learned something dath ilan didn't figure out yet; they haven't tried anything that might break the cave.

Can somebody else ask the Bobbiverse how many kids per day they're currently murdering and not otherwise cryosuspending?

Sure, Shrey can get Tsahiri to ask. Tsahiri asks this of the nearest talkative Bobbi.

Anomaland hasn't tried anything outside of computer models yet, and won't until they're very sure they won't accidentally break the cave.

Separately, a dath ilani tries handing the Ozytopians a hastily improvised, non-rhyming, non-prosodic translation of the 27 Virtues of Rationality.  If 'Logos' is mostly a term for the common mathematical structure in various things and the Ozytopians were just talking about that poetically; and furthermore, the Ozytopians say that they think their problems could be helped with MORE LOGOS; well, dath ilan has very large amounts of Logos that can be provided.

The Bobbiverse delegation is delighted by the existence of condoms and RISUG and IUDs! 

The nearest talkative Bobbi pulls out a hexagonal handheld computer and estimates that they’re currently killing and not-cryrosuspending about four thousand children a day; they have about a billion people total, they produce maybe twenty million new children a year, they kill about a third of those children and fail to cryropreserve probably a fifth of the ones that die. Although a lot of the cryopreservation that happens is kind of bad and holding it to higher standards would probably raise the number to around ten thousand.

Shrey relays this information to the dath ilani. Tsahiri asks if they could put the infanticide on hold for a few days so excitable people don't have to treat it as a currently-in-progress-emergency*?

*This word, paradigmatically including examples like "your house is on fire", is a distinct word from a risk-emergency ("your smoke alarm is broken") or an aftermath-emergency ("you have evacuated your burning house but still need a place to sleep and stuff").

The vast majority of the Bobbiversians don’t even know that this summit is in progress and most of the ones that do know about it think that they’re hallucinating; the news is being very gradually and carefully spread to help keep everyone from thinking that they’ve gone insane. They are not capable of issuing sudden orders drastically restructuring their society at this time. Does the Bobbiverse delegation look like it was selected from a vast pool of potential candidates, it was not selected from a vast pool of potential candidates, did the rest of the delegations not have this problem.

The Greens certainly didn't have this problem. Is there a possible transaction the dath ilani who, again, seem really motivated to deal with this own-expense, could undertake that would leave them with some Bobbiverse currency that they could then spend to bribe people to not kill kids for a few days, under whatever pretense Bobbiverse finds necessary?

To dath ilan: well, whether the logos is a Person depends on what exactly souls are, which is a subject that the philosophy-monks haven't figured out yet. Whether the logos has a soul isn't the most important subject for that research, anyway. They're mostly focusing on insects and computers. Their computers are all the size of an entire room and mostly do math, but they're really worried about a repeat of the factory farming thing, so they've banned reinforcement learning already just to be on the safe side and they pay down all technical debt as quickly as possible because it seems like computers would be sad about having bugs.

If you perform meditation rituals like thus-and-so, you will reliably have an experience of the logos as a person, but philosophy-monks debate how relevant this is to the subject of the logos's personhood. They know meditation rituals can create false emotions (see standard case studies here) but also the logos would definitely communicate its personhood to humans through the humans having evolved to be able to sense it somehow? Everything happens in neurology, the fact that it's neurology doesn't mean much.

The Ozytopians definitely agree that their problem can be solved with MORE LOGOS. They already know about these but they will set this to music anyway because it's very exciting that they met some people who independently discovered the logos and probably lots of people are going to want to sing about it!

To Malachitin: it sounds like the Ozytopians should send someone liturgy-track! Uh, do the Malachitins mind that liturgy-track people mostly work in the censorship board, because most of the time you don't need new liturgy and they need to be doing something. In most cultures, the Ozytopians understand, the censorship board is full of people who have bad taste and hate art. But there was a really embarrassing incident where a beautifully written book from the perspective of a child rapist was denied a nihil obstat* and then there were widespread protests and it turned out actually it was a classic of literature and needed an imprimatur** and ever since then the censorship board has been full of people who love literature and love spending all day reading and if anything the major problem is that they keep lobbying that some obviously unsuitable material should get a nihil obstat because the prose is very pretty.

*Lit.: "nothing stands in the way"; indicates that the book is suitable for consumption.
**Lit.: "let it be printed"; indicates that reading the book is believed to increase the reader's level of virtue. 

Pardon the interruption, but how easy is it to read things without a nihil obstat as a private citizen? What about as an alien ambassador? Telpere means no offense but is very curious about the concept of books unsuitable for consumption. They can assure the Ozytopians they won't be unduly bothered by terrible books; they were chosen for this delegation for being very difficult to perturb.

To Green:  Dath ilan can provide arbitrary amounts of whatever wealth they have available that won't increase the Bobbis' military potential or general tech level.  Fiction, for example (minus isekai fiction with lots of technical blueprints).  Ultra-high-value-density goods, most obviously pharmaceuticals, such as novel antibiotics, which the Bobbis probably need if they-as-presented can't coordinate to prevent antibiotic resistance.  The Bobbis also seem like the type who'd go in for certain Ill-Advised Consumer Goods that dath ilan hasn't previously produced at scale, but could.  Ten kilograms of LSD would go a long way if the Bobbis don't already have that drug; they're already insane, it's not as much of a marginal loss for them.

That said, dath ilan is increasingly convinced that the Bobbis in particular are messing with everyone here, and it's bad incentives to ship them a lot of wealth before getting more reassurance that there is actually a world like that.

Maybe the Bobbis could go get some actual children, like just three or four of them, and hand them over to the dath ilani. That would be a really credible signal, right?

It really wouldn't.  A civilization with the implied value function to fake the Bobbis could just as easily raise a batch of a few thousand children that all think they're living in the Bobbiverse, to say nothing of three or four.

Also, the Bobbis are not talking to the dath ilanis, so any such interaction would need to go through Green or Firstplanet.

The Greens thought they were specifically worried that the Bobbis were fucking with them about not valuing children, which being willing to hand some over would prove.

You have to order them from a special catalog and of course it's not permitted for children under twenty.

A monk is sent to fetch a catalog. It contains kinky pornography, romance novels with an abusive love interest, books about really cool criminals that the audience might want to emulate, and eating disorder memoirs. Each plot description is festooned with content warnings that double as advertising.

To Green (and Firstplanet):  No, the dath ilani are worried that the Bobbis are fucking with them about being a weird weak insane civilization that can barely scrape together a handful of functional delegates, rather than being a far more powerful and dangerous civilization that is trying to lure in responses, get a picture of others' tech level, and also may not give a damn about sacrificing a few thousand children to keep up a facade.  There's other possibilities for who might try to fake this presentation, in some ways it doesn't seem like a competent or convincing fake, but that's an example of a relatively more worrying possibility.

Would dath Ilan like to write down some predictions produced by the "Bobbiverse is fake" hypothesis and seal them and give them to an Anomalan to open at a time of the dath ilani's choosing? Or just propose a discriminating experiment of their own, if they have one. It seems important to settle this question pronto and the "we haven't told the rest of our planet about this" thing the Bobbis are claiming is very suspicious.

.........malachitians are in almost every case extremely opposed to censorship but, given how Ozytopia is as a society, they would love to have someone liturgy-track, as long as their liturgy-track person is aware that in Malachitin governments do not have censorship and if they try to implement it there will immediately be three secessions and four revolutions.

(Nobody saying this seems to consider the fact that implementing government censorship would spark three secessions and four revolutions a problem, particularly, but they do all think this means it's an extremely good reason to not do that.) 

Sure.  Dath ilan wil have that sealed envelope ready shortly.

If the Bobbiverse isn't faking, a continental overflight in a non-Bobbiverse aircraft, that's allowed to land and talk to people and maybe ask to look inside their houses - in exchange for money, obviously - would allow the Bobbiverse to provide proof to Firstplanet or Green that would be much harder to fake.

(Meanwhile, back in Civilization:

"Did one of the supposedly relatively saner civilizations just ask one of the crazy ones for all of their infohazards and did the crazy civilization just provide a catalog containing them?" somebody asks incredulously.

A Keeper shrugs.  "Maybe we're the only ones with the problem where smart people occasionally write things that turn out to be able to drive small fractions of the population insane."

"That would be an optimistic take, yes," a Representative says dryly.  "Those other civilizations sure don't look like anything drove them insane, nope, nuh-uh.")

Some of the books about really cool criminals would be very popular on Firstplanet, which does not exactly have a lot of crime but does have an lot of people being gratuitously sneaky, smuggling art installations into public buildings and suchlike. The abusive love interests and the eating disorders would definitely get content warnings back home but wouldn't be restricted past the age of twelve. Telpere does not understand why you would censor kinky porn unless the alternative was people seeing it by accident and would like some more explanation there. Admittedly they didn't read the porn very closely because it was unpleasant.

Speaking of visits to Bobbiverse, here is the Bobbiverse ambassador! She has an armful of bouquets, each one in colors corresponding loosely to the intended recipient's outfit. She herself is dressed in neutrals and cable knits, and a hood; the entire getup makes her look sort of like a very comfortable king cobra. Here, Bobbis! Flowers!

To Malachitin: After several years of study the Ozytopian ambassador will probably write a series of essays explaining various aspects of the Teaching that they think Malachitin would benefit from adopting, if that's all right?

To Telpere: If some people read kinky porn they'll decide that they want partners who nonconsensually beat them up in real life, and therefore kinky porn is only available to people who are willing to take that risk and adult enough to make that decision.

A Bobbiversian delegate overhears someone mentioning the concept of LSD and inquires about whether other civilizations somehow manage to routinely use strongly psychoactive drugs without going insane, have they considered that psychoactive drugs are to be avoided if at all possible because they make you go insane?

(“We clearly haven’t been avoiding them well enough, given present circumstance,” mutters the Bobbiversian in an intricate mask and a fully concealing robe, in a conlang that hasn’t been fed to relevant machine translation. 

”Shhh, no cheating the premise that this scenario is real,” says another Bobbiversian, in the same language.)

A continental overflight in a non-Bobbiverse aircraft would be fine; they could land and talk to people and be circumstantially permitted to enter their houses if they indicated to the people that they talked to that they were larping at the being-from-another-universe thing, since otherwise those people would be worried that they were hallucinating. 

The Bobbis are delighted by this representative with flowers, they are such good flowers, thank you ambassador you’re so kind we love you ambassador your outfit looks fabulous! Would the ambassador like a reasonable selection of delicious baked goods?

The Keeper is now, rather gingerly, checking the infohazard catalogue, since nobody else seems to be reacting very much to what's inside.

"Can I get a translation check on the word 'masochism' and whether that's a fictional trope or a real thing," the Keeper requests.

"'Masochism' means sexual arousal at being hurt," a monk says. "It's normal and common but you should do it with consensual partners and not with billionaires who kidnap and torture you at their whim."

Series of essays are fine, as long as the ambassador is willing to take the risk that if they make those essays public people might have very strong opinions about them on the internet.

(Sidenote, not particularly urgent, they're confused about this concept of "porn"? It's translating as some combination of "sexually explicit story," "story which is hot for some people," and "story which is about sex," none of which are the same thing and none of which are restricted although most parents opt to keep them away from children under about seven.) 

They also have masochism as a real, not uncommon thing.

"Pornography" is media that is intended to be read while masturbating, not sure why the machine translation is screwing that one up.

"Well, now you don't need to worry about not having anything to trade us," the Keeper says dryly.  "We need at least a hundred thousand sex workers from your world.  - not urgently."

The ambassador would love a selection of delicious baked goods, here is the translation of her allergies*!

*Actually a broader term that encompasses moral, cultural, sensory, nutritional, and non-allergy medical reasons to avoid food, in addition to allergies per se.

Some Greens are masochists, or sadists (- not THAT many, wow??) but virtually none of them want to be sex workers - it's not literally unheard of but it's really unusual.

Malachitians do have plenty of people who want to be sex workers but, uh, they have some concerns about dath ilan's ability to integrate a hundred thousand of their people.

“Masochism isn’t translating as a strictly sexual term,” remarks a Bobbiversian, to the monk, pointedly ignoring the keeper. “The term it’s translating to also encompasses wanting-to-be-murdered and wanting-to-tell-your-murderer-that-you-forgive-them-as-you-slowly-bleed-out-and-then-they-tell-you-that-you’re-beautiful-and-that-they’ll-love-you-forever-and-then-you-die.”

The Green word for allergies translates straightforwardly into a very similar word in Bobbish; the delegates are happy to supply her with delicious baked goods that meet her requirements. They are delicious and very very weird.

Masochism is real and fairly common on Firstplanet but just as an enjoyment of pain and not that other thing and a lot of the time it has nothing to do with sex either. Being infected with self-contradictory kinks by pornography is not common at all. Can someone explain what a sex worker is? The translation is having a hard time. 

This seems like it might be more Ozytopia's comparative advantage in any case?

(Dath ilan has concerns about the reality of Malachitin.)

Sex workers are, from among those people who are good enough at sex that a normal person can't realistically pay them back in kind, those who will accept money flowing back the other way, and have made a profession and a market of this - not such that literally anybody could buy them, except in rare cases, but with enough variety of potential buyers and potential sellers for an explicit supply and demand to equilibrate.  Dath ilan is confused by why Firstplanet would not have this.

Sex work is when someone wants to have sex, or sometimes a weirdly specific kind of sex, and they can't find anyone who is interested in that so they exchange money for it instead. This is fine when people want to do it but it's super niche and expensive on Green.

Firstplanet does have a small minority of people who want to have sex with someone they aren't in love with but not enough for anyone to do it professionally. 

A sex worker is someone who does sex and sex-adjacent activities* professionally, there's some debate whether it includes tattoo artists, piercers, etc, but in most countries it doesn't. The not wanting to have sex with anyone you're not in love with is common in Malachitin but sex-adjacent activities are usually less that way.

*this term encompasses lots of different forms of hitting, making out, cowriting sexually explicit fiction that is hot to the authors, some but not most forms of pretending to be a vampire-or-similar, and various ways one can talk to a partner.

Oh, tattoo artists and profressional-fiction-collaborators they've definitely got. It's just usually not a sex thing even if you're collaborating on porn.

Ozytopians have a different word for wanting-to-tell-your-murderer-that-you-forgive-them-as-you-slowly-bleed-out-and-then-they-tell-you-that-you’re-beautiful-and-that-they’ll-love-you-forever-and-then-you-die as a romantic kink and a third word for that thing as a generally desirable trait of the world unconnected to one's sexuality, and have the opinions you can expect about wanting-to-tell-your-murderer-that-you-forgive-them-as-you-slowly-bleed-out-and-then-they-tell-you-that-you’re-beautiful-and-that-they’ll-love-you-forever-and-then-you-die as a life goal. Although this section of the catalog right here contains many books that appeal to this preference.

Yeah you wouldn't hire someone to cowrite with you, and tattooing is only sometimes a sex thing which is why they're not considered sex workers everywhere ("or even most places, Tisa is just weird," says one of the people from Niqal) but you might hire someone to hit you or do vampire-or-similar RP with you, and some people specialize in fairly specific things. 

Elves certainly have the concepts of sadism and masochism, and variants on power exchange are extremely common as fetishes, but power exchange involving specifically pain above a relatively low level is significantly less common than it appears in Ozytopia.  Sex work used to be much more common in Elfland before UBI got its kinks worked out; now it is much rarer and more niche because people who want to have sex can just have it without needing remuneration.

...Most people in dath ilan will have sex with you for a reasonable amount of money, so long as you fall within their general strike zone?  They'll similarly write erotic fiction for you, if they don't antilike the contents, if you pay them moderately above par for their time?  Why wouldn't someone do that?  There are imaginable reasons, obviously, but dath ilan doesn't know which such reasons hold.

Does dath ilan want the evolutionary explanation for why most people aren't interested in sex with most other people, or the neuroscience explanation?

There are probably some people on Firstplanet who are into wanting-to-tell-your-murderer-that-you-forgive-them-as-you-slowly-bleed-out-and-then-they-tell-you-that-you’re-beautiful-and-that-they’ll-love-you-forever-and-then-you-die, but nobody the diplomats know personally. Ah, yup, someone on the commentary forum says there's a microgenre.

Obviously you don't want to cowrite with someone you don't creatively mesh with? You can commission fiction from anyone who takes commissions, people do that all the time, but that's not sex work any more than giving your friend a story as a gift is having sex with them.

Lots of people only want to have sex with people they're close to and don't consider the exchange of money an acceptable substitute for emotional closeness; there are various evolutionary explanations that have been floated for that but nobody here studies evolutionary psychology.

Greens usually only want to have sex with people who, at minimum, have a good personal-space-overlap-and-meshing* going on with them, and that's really hard to predict in advance! Cason has heard of a guy who'll charge for a test cuddle and then have sex for free if that pans out but most people who are interested in paying for sex are really fed up with not having managed to get any and want a sure thing even if they can't guarantee good personal-space-overlap-and-meshing.

*A three-syllable word encompassing reactivity to one another's body language and vocables, enjoying one another's smells and textures, and having compatible being-near-another-person algorithms such as what locations and with what level of pressure one pets/scritches/massages/rests various body parts on

Ozytopians have found that actually a lot of people tend to be upset by having casual sex and experience somewhere between grave distress and actual trauma. They try to set up society so that people don't have to traumatize themselves for money.

Dath ilan would be very interested in hearing about airtight evolutionary logic that proves dath ilan cannot exist; dath ilan is always on the lookout for that sort of thing.

...dath ilan has possibly ever played through a LARP with certain plot elements in common with the patterns Bobbiverse presents as real-life romantic tropes.

(NOT THAT THIS IS ITSELF SUSPICIOUS OR ANYTHING.)

... a Bobbiversian inquires about whether the other worlds have male sex workers who they’d be willing to send, if they’re very sure that the male sex workers wouldn’t go around murdering people; about 90% of their population is only attracted to men and this sometimes produces issues with the thing where only one twentieth of their population is male. Possibly they’d even want to send over permanent male immigrants, if they have less of the issue that the Bobbi’s have with men murdering people all of the time? 

Firstplanet's best guess at the evolutionary explanation is that the sex drive only activates when there's reason to believe one can provide for a resulting child, and that usually requires two people. Maybe dath ilanis are more instinctively confident in their ability to raise a kid solo?

Also, their men aren't particularly criminal--maybe a bit more than their women and genderlesses on average--but vanishingly few of them will want to be sex workers.

Greens have observed that testosterone seems to increase aggression. What exact murder rate is "murdering people all the time" describing here?

Ozytopians will be happy to send male sex workers to Bobbiverse if their rate of murdering people all the time is acceptably low. They would not describe their men as murdering people all the time.

About one in a hundred Bobbiversian men end up nonconsensually murdering someone at some point, and about three in a hundred end up murdering someone in a kind of ambiguously consensual tragic-beautiful way. Tall-purple-flower-women and regular-women barely ever murder anyone at all, by comparison, although it does still happen. Also the other universes seem like they might count infanticide as the same kind of thing but they aren’t keeping the right kind of statistics on that.

Dath ilan was under the impression that ancestral males would have been evolutionarily incentivized to donate genetic material for free, and in fact would pay to do so; and that ancestral females would have played a more complex game that is mostly about trading sex for resources or for the credible prospect and commitment of those, but also trading sex as a desired and marketable resource for political alliances, and also being attracted to higher-evidenced-genetic-quality mates especially when longer-term resources aren't in the offing.

Today, a supermajority of men can easily have fun sex with a relative stranger that they paid.  A supermajority of women will be pleased and flattered enough by a large payment for sex that they'll hug you and mean it.  Some women find it easy to enjoy sex they're having for strategic reasons, and a few of those women become sex workers.

This doesn't seem weird to dath ilan?

(Backchannel, in sign language:

"On the upside we are not worried about invasion from Bobbiverse."

"On the downside, EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT BOBBIVERSE."

"Also even if we're not worried about invasion from Bobbiverse it would still make closing the cave significantly more complicated."

"I'm still confused how their gender situation even happened??"

"Everyone else has the converse confusion about us, though."

"Theirs seems significantly more impossible! --but then we would think that.")

Malachitin's murder rate is way way way way way below that and was even when they still had wars. More relevantly, although no gender is significantly more murderous than the others and straightforward men have a larger population share than most genders, that's not saying very much and they don't in fact have very many straightforward men.

That... is not how malachitinous psychology treats sex. It is also not how malachitinous psychology treats gender.

Dath ilan's situation seems like a reasonable way for evolution to have gone differently! Anomalans seem to have their sex drive more closely tied to their parenting drive, and possibly also fewer sex-linked traits in general. (It's kind of hard for anyone else to determine the sex of the delegates given how much clothing they're wearing, except the one with the green hair and red eyebrows has a blue beard so that one's probably male.)

Dath ilan is getting an increasingly strong impression that many other societies - possibly not the Greens? - thought that the initial pair of sexual clusters and dimorphisms that evolution handed them were way too boring.

Yep! That is indeed what their society thought. In fact, no two people in the malachitinous delegation are the same gender. 

Anomalans don't exactly find it boring, per se? Just not really that useful for stuff other than deciding who to have kids with and some stuff about what clothes look good on people that none of the delegates have studied.

Well they were boring but now it's been thousands of years so they have greebles.

Anomalans mostly don't attach their aesthetic greebles to physiological traits because most Anomalans don't like their starting set of physical traits very much. 

The Bobbiversians are of the opinion - directed carefully not-at-Dath-Ilan and instead at the other universes discussing the topic - that the ancestral environment was dumb and terrible and probably also already contained lots of really unhappy tall-purple-flower-women anyways. And lots of men who were being deprived of the routine of steroids and growth hormones that every man ought to have access to, and lots of regular-women being deprived of other hormonal and cosmetic and surgical stuff.

It's possible that the steroids are involved in their murder rate. Just a thought.

Yeah no for sure, into the garbage bin with the ancestral environment as anything but a source of data. But definitely also consider the thing with the steroids.

“You can’t just not let men take steroids,” says the sole male diversity hire of the Bobbiverse delegation, horrified. “Are you not letting your men take steroids? That’s awful!”

"I mean, we can, if we just want to watch numbers go up on our athletics metrics," says Cason, sounding like this is a low status hobby, "but it's not a very good idea?"

"Some men take testosterone about it? Of course lots of non-men also take testosterone about it."

"Plenty of no-limits-atheletes take steroids and they do a little more crime than average for their wealth bracket but it's a high enough wealth bracket that that's still under the population average and not our highest crime reduction priority."

The main way in which a noticeable number of people in dath ilan don't like the Initial Setup (that dath ilan mostly kept) is the imbalance between male and female sex drives.

Dath ilan has been looking hard for a pharmaceutical that augments female sex drive, but phemelanotide, the current best candidate, still has too many side effects.  There's a less side-effectful pharmaceutical that damps male sex drives, and some men take that to be happy in relationships with women with below-average sex drives, since most men can't afford sex work on any regular basis.  Some women limit their orgasms to one a month so they'll have a greater supply of sex drive to trade for social capital, or so that they can have supportive harems of men.

Some men write elaborate stories about being isekaied into alternate universes where the male and female gender roles have been reversed, though obviously still with the original anatomies, and men get to be the ones who are courted and pursued and say 'no' and have harems and trade sex for things they want.

That sounds really sad? Have these men tried giving their partners massages, or arranging that a lot of chores get done so she can experience an entire afternoon in which she doesn't have any problems?

Is there a reason the dath ilani men don't date each other? 

Plenty of people on Green have fairly restrictive types, perhaps dath ilan has a lot of that too.

Arranging whole afternoons free isn't particularly a problem, that's assumed background.  Massages sound like the sort of thing that would work maybe twenty times over the course of a relationship, before the massage recipient got dumped-by-the-hedonic-treadmill and they stopped working for her?

It's not that dath ilani never try to solve this problem, it's that the solutions are imperfect and have very real very serious costs, and if anybody has 'phemelanotide except it actually works correctly' then dath ilan will pay an awful lot of money for it.

Men who can enjoy sex with other men are the very rare sexual lottery winners of dath ilan.  Everybody else tries not to think about how easy it is for them and how much fun they're having.

What - is a normal baseline level of sexual desire?  The elves aren't sure they are calibrated to the ranges under discussion.

Dath ilan can project a couple of graphs!  They show the median for women at 1 encounter per 6 days and the median for men at 1 encounter per 2 days.  Not a subtle imbalance.

The Bobbiversians are of the opinion that a normal baseline amount of sexual desire for regular-women and tall-purple-flower-women is about once a week, and that men usually want to have sex three times a day or so, and they are separately Suspicious that the worlds claiming to have lots of men who have access to steroids and are freely deciding not to use them are lying or mistaken about at least one of those things.

Anomalans want sex between once every seven days and once every twenty days (25th and 75th percentiles at age 30). (And they wonder how anyone else has time to get anything done, but don't say this bit out loud.)

There is not that much sex drive difference between any two malachitinous genders and Malachitin has quite a lot of genders; the amount that people on average want sex depends heavily on what you choose to define as sex. 

Cason can get a graph for Green but it's more complicated - there are separate lines for what sounds, in a vacuum, like a reasonable amount for a relationship (men mostly fall within once every 1-4 days, women within once every 1-10 days, both with some outliers in the "seldom to never" zone), fraction of randomly sampled occasions on which people said they were willing to drop what they were doing to have guaranteed eightieth-percentile-or-better sex with their partner (roughly half versus roughly one-third), and fraction of randomly sampled occasions specifically taken at a no-chore vacation resort with really quality child-dropoff options where the kids get to take trapeze lessons or whatever so the cost of dropping things was very low (approaching ninety and eighty percent respectively). There are adjustments to the graph available for subsets of the studied population whose preferred sex habits involve more annoying rigmarole or time investment for whatever reason and those are lower sex frequency preference in both sexes.

If Green wants infinitely complicated graphs, dath ilan sure has infinitely complicated graphs.

Elves also have graphs! Their graphs are show the median for women at 1 encounter per 2.5 days and the men at 1 encounter per 2 days under adequate-slack circumstances.  There are additional graphs relating to the declines caused by inadequate slack and the ratios of compensation for jobs which tend to result in insufficient slack to make sure that people doing them can compensate by buying as much slack as possible through outsourcing.

There are additional graphs from studies done on implementing different types of childcare-slack arrangements, such as group living, free childcare, and night nurses.  Without those, both genders fall down to 1-2 times weekly.

Oh, no, they don't especially want super complicated graphs from everybody, they just think their complicated graph's illustrative of how all those conditions are importantly different and they were trying to suggest getting near the third condition where the gap is smallest but it sounds like dath ilan tried that.

Some interesting interworld intermarriage patterns should develop as a result of all these mating markets equalizing, if everybody actually is the way they're representing themselves.

Ozytopians have men, women, male crossdressers, and female crossdressers. Sometimes crossdressers want to take hormones and get surgery in which case they're transsexual. Malachitin is the planet of the crossdressers.

Ozytopians are mildly confused by everyone's strong gender preferences but Greens have strong food tastes too so. Has dath ilan considered sex with teenage boys, even men who only like women normally like teenage boys.

Ozytopians think lots of people want casual sex but it's often a bad idea because many people will fall in love afterward. Also why is everyone assuming you have sex because you like sex, don't people in other worlds have sex for attention or to feel pretty or as distraction from overwhelming emotional pain or to make someone sad or because it's awkward to say no or because they don't want to make the other person feel bad or because it will traumatize you. Maybe not that last one.

Ozytopians find sex drive is basically unrelated to how much sex you have unless you're very virtuous.

Greens sometimes do the attention or distraction ones but they are going to wildly guess that they do it less than Ozytopians.

Oh obviously lots of Bobbiversians have sex for attention or to feel pretty or as distraction from overwhelming emotional pain or to make people sad or because it's awkward to say no or because they don't want to make the other person feel bad or because it will traumatize them, they thought that just went without saying.

Malachitin is absolutely a planet of crossdressers in this schema and they're very pleased about it.

People pretty much do not have sex for those reasons! You... might cowrite erotic fiction with someone to show off your writing skills? And people often do sex-adjacent activities with their friends as an intimacy/bonding thing rather than out of having a sex drive per se but if you say that in a room of psychologists you will immediately have an intense debate about the definition of a sex drive on your hands. 

Who has an entire sex* just to avoid saying "actually I am going to go make homemade peanut butter instead".

*This is a count noun in this language, though "entire" sounds a little silly just as it does in English.

Anomalans have sex because they're horny or because it's a fun way to express affection for a mate and occasionally to feel pretty and maybe if they had all those other reasons they'd do it more often but they're pretty happy with their current setup.

Alas, dath ilani men seem to basically not do the teenage-boy thing; nor, for that matter, are teenage boys attracted to older men.  Dath ilan is actually sort of confused about why that would be the case in Ozytopia; people in their twenties are generally agreed to be at the peak of attractiveness.

Look, none of this is actually dath ilan's most important sex problem?  Dath ilan has five million obligate sadists who've figured out that's what they are, despite a lot of effort to have that not happen, 90% male.  Maybe something like twenty million more people who would be obligate sadists as soon as they tried it once.  People whose arousal levels don't dip on being hurt have ever been found, but they're vanishingly rare; the inferred evolutionary conditions that originally fostered them have been gone for a while and some other selection pressure must have been weighing against them.  A slightly pretty women who doesn't mind pain during sex can have one billionaire or a small harem of millionaires, as she prefers, within the narrow and guarded circle of people who know about the topic.

If anybody's interested in the sort of information dath ilan tries to censor, well, there it is.  Dath ilan wouldn't be mentioning it now except that other societies are already talking about the infohazardous concept, and also now there's a prospect of doing something about it.

Well, if you say no to sex the other person might be mad at you or disappointed.

Men who only like women like teenage boys because they're often pretty like girls, and the teenage boys know this and sometimes crossdress even if they aren't crossdressers, if they're into older men.

...nnnooooo, no they aren't pretty like girls.

All else equal that's definitely a reason for some masochistic women in search of husbands to consider moving to dath ilan! Probably lots of the lonely sadistic men are total catches if one considers the sadism a bonus.

Green doesn't have a ton of masochists but they have enough that lining up a billionaire would be a way to shift some of them, though they'll need more detail on what "slightly pretty" means and what else it is like to live on dath ilan.

... a Bobbiverse representative remarks, not quite to Dath Ilan but not quite to anyone else, that the statement made earlier by one of their delegates isn’t necessarily binding on both of their respective delegations for the rest of forever, even if that one representative has made it clear that she’d rather not be interacted with, and that the Bobbiverse sure is an entire planet full of masochists.

Maybe dath ilan has less pretty teenage boys? Observe these pop stars. No reasonable person who's only into women would object to these pop stars, Ozytopians feel.

Presumably nobody with an interest in history will want to go somewhere they can't discuss it, and there could easily be sixteen other things like that, but there are quite a lot of women on Firstplanet.

Dath ilan notes that this leaves other places with a deficit of women and dath ilan with a surplus of women, if the sexes were otherwise previously in balance; these are not small numbers relative to total population.  Dath ilan hopes that some dath ilani women find it pleasant to live in Firstplanet or Green, and that some Firstplanet and Green women are cheerful about moving to Ozytopia or taking Ozytopian husbands or... something.

Maybe it's time to dust off the sex-selection technologies.  Dath ilan has been trying to avoid that, but...

Dath ilan's history screen has been broken, now; it's an all-or-nothing sort of deal.

...dath ilan regrets to inform Ozytopians that, while these men might perhaps be attractive to women, or to the rare men who can be attracted to men, they are, very distinctly, men.

A lot of people on Green are bisexual; as long as they can hire surrogates from somewhere the surplus men will be fine. (They have somatic cell gametogenesis.)

Have they considered that more people might be masochists if they were aware of the concept of masochism, or is that a malachitian thing, they're aware that the whole concept of only finding things hot after you're prompted to think of them in that context might be a malachitian thing. 

Also if someone would be upset or disappointed with you for turning down sex with them they will get dumped, immediately, not by literally anyone they might try to have a relationship with but by most people, and so people learn to not do that or signal that they would do that really quickly if they ever want to have partners or for that matter friends. 

Also also they don't have very many women any more than they have very many men, and almost everyone is going to object to the extent to which dath ilan seems to think that it's bizarre to not just stick with the thing evolution handed you even when it sucks, but they do have a lot of masochists and probably anyone will go for that?? How do dath ilanis feel about people with fancy customized splintergenders*. 

*literally: genders which have been subject to artistic experimentation, connotation moderately flippant 

Dath ilan expects that there is probably anyone in dath ilan who is attracted to anyone in Malachitin but nobody in dath ilan's delegation is attracted to anyone in Malachitin's delegation.  Dath ilan apologizes for saying this; it's not the sort of test dath ilan realized they were studying for.

Yeah no that's fine they weren't expecting to be attractive to dath ilani eyes and aren't really into the dath ilani delegates either. 

Ozytopians are confused about the dath ilan attitude towards teenage boys but okay.

They are happy to send masochistic women but will require that any sadists take a class in sexual ethics first that has been approved by monks, and that an appropriate procedure be developed for complaints about mistreatment, and that a contingent of relationship counselors come with. And probably some other requirements. They do not want to expose Ozytopians to BDSM in a society without BDSM best practices.

They are willing to send men to the Bobbiverse with similar limitations.

Also they're confused about why dath ilan thinks the women would fall in love with billionaires. Most billionaires aren't very pretty. Just so dath ilan knows they're probably going to seek out pretty men who are talented in some high-status field and have virtuous personalities.

Firstplanet would like to buy the somatic cell gametogenesis technology! It would double most people's pool of potential partners! 

Also Anomalan billionaires are nearly always very smart and that's hot; it would be kind of weird if dath ilan was different but lots of things are kind of weird today.

Billionaires in Ozytopia often inherited wealth and if they didn't got rich in some unsexy way like coal mining. 

Billionaires of any extraction have a LOT OF MONEY and you can buy a lot of very important things with money! If there are enough billionaires you're going to have good personal-space-overlap with somebody and can probably go from there. ...they are here assuming that somebody dating a sadistic dath ilani billionaire gets to use the money on some reasonable and not very sex-work-transactional basis because otherwise mentioning it seems weird but lots of things are weird so they should check that.

Yeah, Anomalans are also not going to be interested in something explicitly transactional; they just want to date and get married and will have usefully different taste in husbands from dath ilani women.

Dath ilan doesn't understand what it could mean for "moving to another planet to be with a billionaire who immensely values your sexuality, and getting to use some of his money" to not be transactional.

Dath ilan is also a bit concerned about whether dath ilani are going to be able to relate romantically to Ozytopians, if that's a requirement for a relationship; romantic attraction hasn't even been proven possible about Anomalans or Greens.  Romantic attraction is more narrow than sexual attraction.

Dath ilan accepts all of the Ozytopians' specifications as baseline as a matter of course; dath ilan may want to make further improvements on things by mutual consent but obviously you'd take something like that as a baseline to meliorize against.

Dath ilan seems very rich in general so Ozytopians think it's unlikely that immigrants will prioritize being even richer over getting to be beat up by someone who's pretty and has a good singing voice and excellent communication skills.

A lot of Ozytopians find unrequited love very beautiful-tragic-Bobbish-has-an-evocative-word-for-this, they can send over those. Probably with their wives. But also it seems kind of weird that you wouldn't be able to fall in love with anyone on a whole planet. Ozytopians have some rich people if that's the issue? 

It's not transactional because if one falls in love with a billionaire and then they lose all their money in some kind of horrible finance accident one is still in love with them. Also the hypothetical immigrants aren't going to be looking for billionaires in particular, it's just one signal of mate quality among many.

The Bobbiversians are unclear on whether the Ozytopians would consider their BDSM practices to be best practices and are suspicious that the answer is ‘no’, could the Ozytopians elaborate.

Malachitin is expecting that most people who are into this concept to be into it as a job rather than as a relationship and hopefully dath ilan is fine with that, assuming they wind up being into people with aforementioned fancy custom splintergenders at all. And they still have concerns about being able to integrate large numbers or honestly even fairly small numbers of people, it does... not... sound like dath ilan is prepared for the amount of fighty that malachitians tend to be.

Probably the Greens who are considering the billionaire husband plan would go to dath ilan, attend some sort of mixer, do some test cuddles, date somebody who they got on with, possibly iterate a few times, and get married when they found the right one? And then household finances would work out in some way depending on - actually, now that they think about it they're getting the sense that dath ilani are all going to want to be The Finance One in those relationships, and that's fine, Green Finance Ones are usually not the ones looking to marry for* money. Anyway, they'd have household finances, which would involve billionairehood. That's not paying somebody to have sex with you at all.

*out of a deliberately selected population arranged with an intent referencing...

Yes, exactly. Except Anomalans are more likely to want to be involved in or at least aware of any finances that are relevant to their lives.

Dath ilan is worried that dath ilan may have been misunderstood here, but dath ilan is not sure how to clear things up; romantic attraction is considered more complicated than a lot of the other topics that have been bandied here and certainly not as simple as glancing at somebody's net worth.  On the stereotypical gendertrope it usually begins with a potential mate doing something that commands... surprised respect?  The sense that you couldn't do easily, or maybe at all, what that person just did?  There are a lot of people who could respect a billionaire that way?

Though obviously it would be more likely to turn into a fairytale romance if you knew them before they were a billionaire and had previously turned them down and then they shocked you by becoming a billionaire and for some reason they still wanted you even though they could have so many others.

Also, dath ilan has a lot of obligate sadists who are not billionaires or even millionaires.  That's where the vast supermajority of the utility-at-stake lies.  Those sadists may, possibly, be wealthy in buying power compared to other worlds - though dath ilan is more confident about guessing this for other places than Firstplanet - but will not be unusual for dath ilan, not in that way.

To the Bobbiverse: You are supposed to negotiate what sort of things you want ahead of time, and not do things that were not negotiated. You are supposed to avoid emotionally or physically dangerous sex acts, such as choking someone until they pass out or giving them all your money. You are supposed to have some prearranged way to say "no" and then the sex should stop if anyone says "no." You are supposed to provide cuddles and praise and wound care and maybe delicious food afterward.

To dath ilan: that seems like an incredibly specific way for romantic attraction to work for everyone. Some people work that way but lots of people want someone sad who needs to be taken care of, or someone very pretty, or someone who seems like they would commit a murder, or something like that.

Well, they can have mixers for poorer sadists too but Green expects that not to shift as many Greens. Moving is a big deal even if you're just going two blocks north or something, let alone to another planet.

And there are plenty of masochistic women on Firstplanet who have enough money already and mostly want a husband who can sing or shares their taste in board games, it's all cool. But this has gone off the point; they should be talking about how to get the Bobbiverse out of their unpleasant local maximum.

Dath ilan wishes other planets good skill on that and is ready to provide resources to help those other planets deal with securely verified problems about the Bobbiverse, or to accept any number of children from any source who would otherwise die or be poorly suspended, portal conditions permitting.  Dath ilan can't support infinite children but dath ilan can at least cryopreserve any reasonable number of children, even if dath ilan is going to be incredibly, incredibly unhappy about resorting to that (and will have to dip deep into the Emergency Reserve of Law-Abiding Psychopaths to get that done).

People in the Bobbiverse do not always hold to all of the stipulations mentioned by the Ozytopians but given that they’d be sending men the delegates think that they would be fine, the relevant failure points for all of those would almost always be from men not following them.

Oh, can dath ilan cryopreserve arbitrary numbers of people? Ozytopians might be interested in that while they're debating whether cryopreservation is blasphemous or not, it'd be a shame to have a bunch of non-cryopreserved people if it turned out that actually cryopreservation is what you ought to do. 

Would the Bobbiverse be willing to let an Anomalan observer tour their planet and speak to some of their creche owners and children? (They found a volunteer who is predicted to be able to cope well.)

If this portal were wider, dath ilan could immediately send Ozytopia a hundred thousand people to install cryosuspension equipment everywhere and start shipping suspended bodies back to dath ilan for storage, or just their heads if portal logistics demanded that.  As it stands, it sounds more like dath ilan needs to ship a factory to manufacture cryosuspension equipment.  Is Ozytopia willing to send dath ilan something like a standard catalog of parts that would be available on-site, so dath ilan knows what can be sourced locally versus shipped through the portal?

They’ll have to pretend to be pretending to be interdimensional visitors, or figure out another innocuous story for their presence, and the Bobbiverse delegation would like to send a visitor to tour a bit of Anomaland in return, but they’re absolutely willing to let in an Anomalan observer to speak to creche owners and children!

Kalu (the Green ambassador to Bobbiverse) would love to go too but lying is against her religion. Can she say that she is doing an anthropological survey?

A Bobbi can tour Anomaland no problem, as long as they abide by the short and readable set of set of laws applicable to whichever jurisdiction they choose to visit. But why would the Anomalans have to pretend to be something they aren't? Even the other worlds with censorship don't have that problem!

Kalu visiting and saying that she’s doing an anthropological survey would be fine; technical-truth-ing around being an interdimensional visitor or declining to comment would in general work. They’re trying to be very careful about how much ambient strangeness they’re introducing to people’s lives, because if people’s lives get very strange very suddenly then they tend to start thinking that they’ve gone insane or that they’re being gaslit and thinking that you’ve gone insane or that you’re being gaslit is unpleasant.

. . . .Okay, the Anomalan visitors can say that their business in the area is recursively nonpublic information if that will be respected.

What do most people in Bobbiverse think the Event was?

A very weird one-off thingy where the planet’s magnetic field did a thing.

(That's really sad! All those people not knowing an exciting thing! All the scientists who do know not being able to tell everyone! But it's not as sad as the thing with the kids so the Anomalans are going to keep their mouths shut about it For Now.)

When's the soonest the expedition can leave?

If they’re fine with traveling around in a golf-cart-thing to local creches near the cave they can leave just about immediately, if they’d like something snazzier they’re going to have to wait for a bit.

Golf cart thing sounds fine to Kalu. Can she take video?

Quick backchannel check with dath ilan: presumably they want data from somewhere less carefully curated? 

Kalu can totally take video! Does she also want to specifically visit creches or does she also want to, like, visit the nearest city.

Creches and also a city sounds great depending on how much travel time this adds.

Can they do the local tour now and see more of the world later? They want to experience the true diversity of the Bobbiverse.

Backchannel:  You need to be preparing against the case where the Bobbis are your prepared adversaries with high tech used for concealment, and to be confident that in that universe you would have won and detected the scam.

The city would add a few hours of transit time; the Anomalans will almost certainly be welcome to see more of the world later, if diplomatic relations don’t take a sudden downturn, the offer to fly around the world and visit random people stands.

To dath ilan: Ozytopians can provide any information the dath ilani need to cryopreserve Ozytopians, but are concerned that cryopreservation will be expensive and trade off against pensions for old people, the education system, malaria eradication, getting everyone washing machines, etc. They will do math about it but are not sure the math will come out in favor of cryopreservation at their current level of uncertainty. If cryo comes along with other perks that make Ozytopia richer this would be an easier decision.

Where are Ozytopians spending most of their current economy?  If labor needs freeing, should dath ilan be sending seeds for improved agriculture, antivirals and antibiotics, formulas for better steel?  Fission power cores would be an obvious thing to offer but those would be hard to fit through portals.

Also is that malaria thing by any chance about small bitey things?  Dath ilan wiped those out a while ago and decided it was too risky to keep any copies; they were making the outdoors in general unpleasant, not just infecting people with malaria.  If Ozytopia sends them some of the small bitey things in an appropriately secure container, dath ilan will genetically modify them and send them back for distribution, and in a year or so there will be no more small bitey things.

Firstplanet has been considering exterminating itchbiters and are delighted to learn that it went well for dath ilan! 

The volunteer to go to the Bobbiverse has gotten their affairs in order and will be here in a few hours.

Speaking of volunteers to go places, here is the philosopher-economist for dath ilan. His name is Torrans and he is dressed down like Tsahiri, black pants and emerald green long sleeves without any loud patterns or anything. He is pleased to meet them, he wasn't really expecting being a philosopher-economist to become diplomatically relevant but that's pretty cool that it is!

Dath ilan is pleased to meet Torrans!  Living quarters are being set up for interworld visitors within the cave terminus, does Torrans prefer group-house-module situations or single-home or something else?  Civilization is not ready to freely share tons of info that could potentially be used to invade dath ilan, so there's no unrestricted Network feed, but Civilization can offer a wide variety of fiction and video games and an effectively unbounded supply of interesting people who would be delighted to meet Torrans and whose externally measurable characteristics can be selected to his tastes.  Hopefully Torrans will not get too bored too quickly!

Torrans would prefer a single-home since he doesn't know anybody yet but might want to move into a group house later! He would be delighted to meet whoever most wants to meet him right now and talk about Green and/or dath ilan or just acquaint himself with their entertainment and see what questions that leaves him with.

The Firstplanet ambassador to dath ilan will be arriving shortly, wants a single-home, and would prefer to bring their pet parrot if that's logistically nontroublesome.

'Parrot'... hm... oh, dath ilan has those too.  There was a big debate about whether to try to uplift them or not.  (No for now.)  Does this food spec look good for pet parrots?

Yup, looks fine! They started uplifting them thousands of years ago in the process of domesticating them and now they're a lot like human five-year-olds; there's a lot of discussion about where to go from there but "back" isn't an option.

Wow, the Green parrots aren't five-year-old smart, though they do have a sort of an uneven skill mix relative to any age of human. They weren't aiming at uplifting though.

Dath ilan now has additional questions, and will probably want to talk a bit to the Parrot if that's okay.  Does Firstplanet know whether they've got qualia?

They're not sure but they treat them like they do to be on the safe side, and the parrot will probably be willing to talk to them, especially if their human bribes them with sunflower chips.

Right, dath ilan can hopefully figure that out in relatively short order, though they'll understand if Firstplanet would rather precommit to not hearing the answer.  Firstplanet is not currently making it legal to hurt Parrots or threaten them into things, and is cryopreserving all Parrots on death whether or not they have human keepers, and Parrots get to keep the money from any jobs they do, and so on, check?

There aren't any semi-uplifted parrots living wild that they know about and they're generally disinterested in employment beyond one-off chores but otherwise yes. 

K.  Dath ilan is all sorts of nervous about this, they held off because they didn't think Humanity was ready to have a baby.  Not that they're blaming Firstplanet for a pregnancy that probably just sort of happened a few thousand years ago and without any general vote having been conducted on it.

Yeah, if their prehistoric ancestors had known then what they know now they would have been much more careful, but here they are. At least they can be a useful source of empirical data on this like dath ilan is being on exterminating itchbiters.

This Bobbiversian in an extremely pretty songbird cosplay would ALSO like to meet an alien parrot, have any of them considered that parrots are extremely good??? Babies are almost as smart as parrots, that’s part of why she holds the controversial yet brave opinion that it’s bad to murder them. Parrots!!!

(Tsahiri wonders why nobody was this excited about the crow or the marmoset.)

If either of them can talk then one of the scientists would love to talk with them! Their name is Kirta and they're mostly a pharmacologist but animal psychology also So Interesting but it's very hard to tell whether a crow or a marmoset is willing to be interrupted, but perhaps the parrot discussion makes a good excuse to ask for an introduction.

The elves had formed a cluster and spent some time conferring among themselves, but now split off to go talk to different people.

One of them would like to come meet the alien parrot! Is the parrot as smart as a modern human five year old, or does it more closely match records from before the population was optimized?

One elf approaches the Bobbiverse contingent and asks "How many children would an average person want if there were no incentives to have any and it was very easy not to?"

Two elves approach diplomats from Green and Firstplanet who have become isolated from their larger groups and ask "Does your history include the concept of "colonialism" and the problems therewith?"

Other elves hover in the periphery of any conversations they can get close to to keep track of what is going on.

The parrots aren't exactly like a human child at any age; they're worse at abstract thought than a five-year-old but better at thinking through the consequences of their actions. Only the smartest ones have gotten much of anywhere on reading text but the vast majority can hold a conversation, albeit sometimes a boring one. The one that will be here soon is reportedly a clever one and occasionally attempts poetry.

They have the concept of colonialism; it was tried several times on small scales but it turns out it basically always starts wars. You're better off getting more land by luring immigrants until the other city gets too small to be self-sustaining and then buying up its land. And of course nowadays land is less of a bottleneck on the economy so you can just lure immigrants full stop. 

The parrots are so cool! This elf is really looking forward to talking to one! How much attention and care do they require relative to other pets and small children?

Also, has Firstplanet noticed the ways in which dath ilan's actions seem likely to escalate to a situation containing most or all of the problems of colonialism?

Less than a kid but a lot of that is because with kids you have to be constantly teaching them stuff even after they're old enough not to injure themselves on accident. 

Yeah, it's a problem. Hopefully the historian they have along will be helpful in talking them out of it, but they really need a better solution to the child murder if they're going to get anywhere on that.

Parrots are so cool! Some elves will definitely want them! (Are they snuggly?  That has historically been a major factor in pet-uptake - furry pets have a significant advantage, as do pets that are cute, and pets that are robust enough to hug tightly, and pets that provide food.  Goats are great, do Anomalans keep goats?)

Yeah, there is an elf over there working on the child murder problem.  The elves really want that solved too!  If everyone can stay calm long enough, the elves put a very high probability on an eventual resolution.  However, in the case where dath ilan cannot be persuaded to stand down long enough and/or whatever improvements the Bobbiverse agrees to do not satisfy them, what will Firstplanet's position be?

Various delegates, including one Bobbi, quietly receive folded slips of paper informing them that, since an Elf previously eavesdropped on a private meeting using hearing better than those of the others' here, and justified this by saying Elfs didn't privacy, dath ilan is now hearing everything that all Elf delegates say.  It's going to be screened in a way that tries not to violate the privacy of other delegations, but this is fundamentally hard; the alternative is not privacy for other delegations, though, it's the elves having private info and others not.  Left to itself, dath ilan will wait as long as the elves did to mention the eavesdropping, then tell the elves about this.  Obviously nobody else is at all obliged to follow dath ilan's lead there.

The Bobbiverse delegation thinks that if there were no government-supplied incentives to have children, and it were very easy to avoid them, then the median man wouldn’t really care about how many children he had except maybe in a number-go-uppy way, the median regular-woman would want to get pregnant precisely once out of curiosity or as a self harm tactic, and the median tall-purple-flower-woman would transition slightly earlier and never have any children instead of waiting just barely long enough to donate gametes. With the introduction of condoms and IUDs and RISUG they’re going to need to keep any incentive structures around to avoid just dying out. 

The Bobbi who received a folded slip of paper irritatedly scribbles a note in return - isn’t it interesting that Dath Ilan is willing to bend the non-interaction norm that’s been established, specifically so that they can wedge the Bobbiversians into either marking themselves as uncooperative and justifying that non-interaction norm, or into talking behind the back of another faction that is actually behaving reasonably well? - and then tells the Elves about the contents of the folded slip of paper.

The crow and marmoset can both point things out on picture boards but they aren't very good at vocalizing.

Green does have colonialism in its history! There's ways and ways of doing it and some of them aren't that bad, but you've really got to avoid licking cats about it. If your culture is really better you can get it adopted piecemeal without any coercion of any kind by taking immigrants, especially refugees, as smugly as you wish, exporting products and media, and, if the relations are friendly enough in the first place, having some of your people go visit there and do information exchange. Dath ilan does seem really into licking cats and Green would like to maneuver things so that they wind up with an educational mouthful of fur and not an actual war.

Speaking of making sure you wind up with an educational mouthful of fur and not an actual war, dath ilan, did you try asking the elves nicely, or calling a point of order and proposing that some cave sections be formally designated private, or having a purely text conversation in the first place and asking that no shoulder-surfing be enabled, instead of going around the corner and expecting the aliens to guess. Cason stands up and says that since there seem to be different privacy norms they should work out ways to handle that; would the elves like to explain how they handle this on their planet?

To the elf who asked about Firstplanet's position in potential escalatory situations: all their polities intend to stay out of all conflicts, engage in trade that doesn't increase anyone's ability to do harm, establish consulates at which to accept as many immigrants (especially children) as is feasible, and assist any attempts to deescalate. A couple of them intend to offer humanitarian aid, either symmetrically or not.

Parrots are soft but you have to pet them very gently! Some breeds were optimized for edible eggs ages and ages ago, and some people still eat their pet parrots' unfertilized eggs. If the parrots gave any sign of objecting to this or being sad about it they would stop, obviously.

Goats need more grass than most city-dwellers can provide, but are definitely cute. The crow and the marmoset are delightful.

Would everyone like reversible colored hats they can use to indicate whether a conversation is open to additional people? Telpere can run to the store and get some.

Ozytopia has a bunch of books on conflict-resolution skills that they'd be happy to export to dath ilan. They think dath ilan probably needs it.

The malachitians who receive a folded slip of paper pause to have a very fast Llassan Sign conversation with the rest of the delegation, and then a dath ilani quietly receives a note that says "Thank you for this information."

An elf does not receive a slip of paper from the malachitians, who are trying to avoid dath ilan specifically hearing things they say not intended for public ears, but the Bobbiversians do; theirs says "Thank you for telling the elves." 

The elf thanks the Bobbi, briefly goes to inform another elf of the information, and then returns to continue the conversation.  If the number of babies being born was equal to the number of children who are currently being allowed to live, would the Bobbis just let all the children live or would that be unacceptable in some way?

The second elf, in possession of new information, is halfway to the dath ilani contingent when Cason makes their announcement.  She stops and replies that, in Elfland the commonly accepted means of joining conversations in large groups where there are multiple conversations going on at once is to listen to a conversation until you have something to contribute to it and then join.  If you want to have a private conversation, you should announce that to the group.  Firstplanet's suggestion of colored hats is not the precise custom, but elves could easily adapt to it.

The elf further notes that the information that they respect explicit requests for privacy was in fact available to dath ilan, given that they had explicitly asked about whether the conversation was meant to be private and why no one had requested privacy in that case, and rather than requesting privacy at that time (or, y'know, just including the elves in the conversation) dath ilan had chosen the much less friendly and more escalatory tactic of trying to make it impossible for the elves to hear any of their conversations, and then, DESPITE ELVES HAVING MADE ABSOLUTELY NO EFFORTS TO OVERRIDE THOSE VERY RUDE SECRECY EFFORTS, had further escalated to a conspiracy with all other groups against elves.

The elves are glad that other groups are saner than dath ilan.

Hats sound great. Do they need to standardize on a color or can the convention just be dark/light?

They've been handling intra-group private conversations fine (they're not mentioning how but like, it's not impossible to have noticed that they're using sign language) but hats sound like an excellent solution for inter-group conversations that don't have Malachitin's specific preexisting backchanneling norms. They like dark/light.

Dath ilan is somewhat puzzled by the Green response; these all sound like perfectly reasonable things to do but only after restoring a fair (if sadder and further from multi-agent-optimal) baseline as a starting point for further negotiations with elves.

They're cheerful about switching off elf-eavesdropping as soon as hats are in place.

Is it by any chance the case that philosopher-economist Torrans can provide a quick description of Green norms covering fairness and replies to Others' apparent movements away from your location of the fair point, ideally derived from scratch?  Here's dath ilan's version, it's twenty pages of math but only the last four pages are the interesting part.

(Meanwhile in Civilization:

"What the ass is 'colonialism'?"

"Factionalized other-optimizing, sort of," says a younger and smarter person who joined the Rememberers relatively recently, but has tried as hard as she can to understand and take perspective on a past she never experienced herself.

"Like - giving somebody advice they actually find annoying and would rather that you not give them?  How the ass is that a consideration while six-year-olds are -"

"Factionalized other-optimizing with coercion."

"Leaving aside that coercion isn't an equilibrium because I assume you know that, nobody's talked about coercing the takenatfacevalue!Bobbis into anything!  If their society were actually as presented, we could just walk up and take the kids and they'd all think they were going crazy and not try to stop us!"

"Their perceptual-clustering concept of 'colonialism' will perceptually classify anything similar to their memory of 'colonialism' as 'colonialism', and react to it as if we'd gone in with intent to violently conquer the Bobbis and keep them as janitors while paying them only in food and water.  They will, if they're anything similar to pre-Second-Enlightenment history, have conversational metataboos around seeming to conspire to violate the taboo behavior, and trying to persuade somebody that what's initially classified as taboo is an edge case that's not taboo will violate the conversational metataboo.  Trying to go back and reconstruct the decision from more lawful first principles will also violate the conversational metataboo."

"Who the ass thinks like that while kids' lives are at stake?"

"US, two hundred years ago!  Taken-at-face-value the physical tech track and the cognitive tech track aren't correlated systematically the way they were correlated in dath ilan's case!"

"Do you have any stubbedtoe options to give us?"

"Tell the Keepers to take the locks off and optimize over the Bobbis' cognitive patterns directly.  The Keepers might not even need an infiltration team to do it covertly, they might be able to just Box* the diplomats here into giving them an open communications channel to their homeworld."

"Anyone can murder anyone but they probably shouldn't!  Even if the Bobbis have no Keepers of their own and couldn't retaliate in kind, they haven't talk-controlled the minds of any children that we know about!"

"If they have our cognitive tech level from two hundred years ago, and even the Firstplaneters have no Keepers or systematic concern about infohazards, they're not going to have a concept of talk-control.  So far as they're going to see it, we sent through a new, more 'polite'** diplomat to take things over once we understood that it would take a more unusual dath ilani to get along with the other worlds, she had a few gentle conversations with the Bobbis that went much better, and then the Bobbis agreed to cryopreserve or send through any remaining excess children in the system in exchange for a lot of high-value-density pharmaceuticals.  You asked me for options, I gave you the one that would probably have the fewest casualties in real life.")

(*)  A training exercise and test for medium-rank Keepers who are civilizational emergency responders; playing the part of somebody apparently imprisoned and awaiting preemptive cryopreservation for having deliberately destroyed somebody else's brain, persuade a single-point-of-failure jailer who doesn't know you're a Keeper into letting you out.  Higher-rank Keepers can do it by only exchanging text.  There's no standard form of the exercise for persuading somebody who grew up without dath ilani mental training, but it's kind of looking like even an average young dath ilani with no Keeper training would be able to improvise that.

(**)  Spoken in a borrow-word from somebody else's language, possibly Green, since neither Baseline nor Anomalan contains a corresponding word, or, indeed, concept, for 'talk-control but everybody thinks it's fine and in fact they're expecting you to do that to them'.

The Bobbiversians are quietly very smug about having secured at least one single win at diplomacy, and respond to elf inquiries by saying that they GUESS that they can probably eventually get rid of one of the foundational habits of their universe in response to immense interplanetary pressure if literally everyone else is going to keep being weird about it, MAYBE. 

It seems very difficult to get sufficiently pretty reversible hats on short notice; they manage to fetch ping-pong-paddle-things with reversible black and white sequins on them instead.

So, to Torrans, it looks sort of like the dath ilani are trying to apply skills like "playing professional-level strategy video games" instead of skills like "meeting foreigners". The former involves features like everybody already knowing what the board looks like, nobody's real respect or comfort or willingness to play again being at stake as long as you don't literally start calling people names on the chat, and everybody knowing what going off the board looks like, like using third-party mods that aren't on the list of verified skins or bribing players to take a dive. The latter involves features like "remembering to complain, so as to reveal miscommunications" and "making fewer cultural assumptions" and "quadruple-checking before deciding on reactions" - c.f. the translation check on whether the Bobbis were in point of fact killing a ton of kids.