"I usually get coffee and a muffin but everything here is pretty good. Have you had coffee?"

"I have!" Though in dath ilan it's not the sort of thing you could just - buy, no questions asked, at a food counter, and she's going to be a little annoyed if it's the best stimulant they have on offer and she also keeps not getting enough sleep, that seems like a great way to end up dependent on a substance and she would prefer not that. "I'll get a coffee, then, and - one of those beautiful pastry things that just came out?" 

She's not actually irritated by the wait in line, since there was plenty of novelty in her environment to look around at, but she anticipates that she would be pretty annoyed if she has to do this every morning. Or even tomorrow morning. She'll ask Eddie after what the options are for having food brought straight to your house. Probably worse than dath ilan - very plausibly more expensive, but if she's right about how valuable her knowledge is, here, she'll probably end up in a position to afford some conveniences. (To make it feel a little less like she's in an alien world very very far from home...) 

She receives the coffee and the croissant; Eddie pays for them both. Being able to directly and simply help someone he likes is nice. 

Merrin smiles at him and nibbles a bit of her croissant (it's good) and sips the coffee (it's less good but she manages not to make a face.) "Right. Um, do you know the particular people you're about to introduce me to at the hospital, or are we just planning to walk up and ask for the coordinator on duty right now?" 

"I know one of the administrators because they get a lot of their equipment shipped in by train. He's not normally the one who does the hiring but they'll hire someone if he says to and he'll be able to tell that you're good."

"Huh. Sure, that makes sense. What's he like?" 

"Very concerned that things get delivered on schedule," he says approvingly.

"Is that, um, something that you have to be concerned about here?" It really wouldn't have struck her as one of the harder logistical problems! Even if things are delivered slower, 'on schedule' can surely take that into account, you'd just adjust the expected schedules - all right, fine, it's not quite that simple, but she doesn't think it needs nearly as many layers of contingencies as most Exception Handling...

"We don't. That's why he always orders from us."

Merrin follows him out of the café. She's perfectly capable of eating and walking at the same time and she's even getting used to the coffee. 

"....I think there's something I don't get," she says after a minute. "If your company has the, um, logistical know-how on making sure trains run on schedule - and you're clearly getting business because of it, you just told me you are - then why isn't every single other company trying to learn it from you so they can keep up?" 

"I don't claim to understand all of it. It helps that we're the biggest and richest railroad in the country. And it's difficult; you have to be able to find good people and willing to promote them and trust them.  It's easier, for some people, to try to get Washington or the National Alliance of Railroads to pass another directive giving them handouts or favorable regulations or big government contracts, and survive that way."

That 'some people' includes Jim, to his deep yet resigned annoyance, but the problem of Jim is a weight he's been carrying so long he's forgotten it isn't part of his body.

"Is it - hard to assess which people are skilled at their jobs and which people aren't? I...wouldn't have thought of that as being one of the harder things. But I guess maybe your world has less reliable aptitude tests? In dath ilan you'd normally know by the time someone is ten approximately how smart they're going to be as an adult and where they're likely to be well-placed and end up most capable. I didn't know for myself until I was older than that, but I'm an outlier in a lot of ways, some of the things I'm really good at aren't things where there are standard tests for eight-year-olds. ...And obviously people change and sometimes they don't want to pick the career that the advisor thinks they'd be best suited for, but people don't usually change for the worse, and I think it's actually a lot easier to do performance reviews with adults, when we've had more of the training in accurate introspection - I guess your world maybe doesn't have that....?" 

"We have tests of intelligence, but they won't tell you if someone is going to give up on something after five minutes or spend an hour finding a clever solution, or whether they'll report a problem or try to cover it up, or a dozen other things. We don't have training in introspection."

"Hmm. I think persistence at problem-solving is at least related to an aspect of intelligence we measure? Like, obviously we also have lots of ways to train those mental habits - and it's not just one mental habit, there's a cluster there - but I think it is measurable and it doesn't necessarily have to be via sneaky tests you do to children without them realizing it's a test or what it's testing -"

"- Wait. One second. Rethinking -"

"Sorry, I - didn't process the second failure mode you mentioned until now and what. That....sounds like a thing that isn't necessarily about intelligence and is more about - incentives not being lined up right? It sounds like you're talking about - people hiding mistakes in ways that aren't just a thing they can fix and put right and have the future mostly look like the world where they never made that mistake, if no one's looking too closely, because if it were only that then it wouldn't be a huge problem that prevented companies from keeping their trains running on schedule. ...I think in dath ilan there are a lot of incentives within Civilization that are set up so no one's very tempted to hide actually serious problems, because it's - not actually easier to do that and have to keep trying increasingly clever schemes to hide all the downstream effects, than just to explain the original problem and get help fixing it. Little kids do hide their mistakes but I think a lot of that is, like, they haven't fully developed theory-of-mind enough to realize how hard it is to convincingly hide a mistake and all its consequences from people older and smarter than you, and they don't necessarily have the incentives set up yet to think of themselves as on the same team as the adults. Which is... I don't actually know how to fix it, here, it feels like there are probably a lot of interlocking pieces and they'd all have to be moved in order to reach the better equilibrium, but I think that problem at least sort of makes sense to have. Does that make sense?" 

"Yes, that's an accurate description of the problem. If you could get enough people who cared more about trains running than about not being blamed, they'd react well to other people reporting problems and even the people who mostly care about not being blamed would have to get that by making the trains run. But getting enough of them, and making sure none of them get fired or driven off by one of the other kind, is the hard part."

"Aren't people going to intrinsically care about the trains running on time because that's how they get their own goods too? ...And their paycheck, obviously, but I guess it's maybe not an obvious idea to give people bonuses for coming up with especially clever solutions, and - maybe even if you try that, if you're starting from the equilibrium where everyone thinks it's fine to lie to hide problems short-term, maybe they also think it's fine to lie and say they did something clever when they didn't - and if you're less able to assess skill then it's harder to catch that and harder to tell if that's the incentive you're giving someone..."

What a HORRIFYING THOUGHT. She can...sort of imagine something vaguely like that happening if you tried to make a bunch of six-year-olds run a train company. But they would have to be literally six. And filtered somehow to not mostly be the kind of people who would end up fascinated by thinking of cleverer and cleverer solutions to all the problems whether or not there were external incentives - and probably also filtered to exclude kids like Merrin herself, who can admit that she had many flaws as a small child but being tempted to lie to adults was not one of them. 

Nod. "And there are thousands of employees in the system, so I don't just have to know who I can trust, I have to know who else is good at knowing who they can trust."

This is a slightly socially awkward question to ask, but you can't, actually, work with people on a difficult problem if you're going to flinch away from mildly awkward conversations. "Well, how good do you think you are at assessing that?" 

"Better than anyone else I know except Dagny and maybe Rearden. If you'd rather not take my word for it that's very reasonable and I can show you the records; stations managed by people I hire directly have better safety and efficiency records than the system average."

Nod. “I probably do want to look at those, but - more for general orienting purposes than because I don’t trust you on that? I - I think that if you could…fake being the sort of person you seem to be, to me, without knowing anything about my world, then - I don’t know, it just seems at that point like it’d win you more to actually be that person. I don’t know. I’d like to be more confident of that than I am but it’s my guess.”

Thoughtful nod. "I see what you mean."

Merrin has more thoughts to work through, but none yet at the stage to be questions. She follows Eddie the rest of the way to the hospital in silence, eyeing her surroundings in case there are any random hints to what ELSE might be horribly wrong here. 

The hospital building is the same low-tech, highly non-modular architecture as everywhere else, and showing its age, but it has the elegance of clean, simple lines, of a structure erected for a purpose and whose every element serves that purpose.

At the street corner across from it sits a man wrapped in a worn and dirty blanket, with a cardboard sign propped up in front of him reading "hungry, please help". Nobody including Eddie looks directly at him.

Aaaaaaaahwhat???? 

"Eddie," Merrin hisses urgently, catching up to him after staring for five full seconds and falling behind. "Eddie, what - that person - is he okay, why is he - why is nobody -?"