Yompam/Byway Selno on Genetics and Breeding

"Yes! It sounds like you're ahead of us there, we have the theory but just storing an entire genome is a problem, let alone doing anything useful with it! Sorting out our computing technology is going to help a lot there, I imagine.

Some of them have breeding criteria and egg-raising differences, but it's harder to arrange breeding criteria and most of them are trying for a representative cross-section more than anything. Many people enjoy and benefit from participating in a family-unit, but it certainly is a lot of hard work! Kastakian children vary quite a bit in age of adulthood, and many choose to remain with the family-unit for a while after in any case; nine is possible, but on the very low end, it's more common between fourteen and twenty.

Usually the adult members of the family-unit continue to feel residual responsibility for their fledgling and check up on them for as long as they are capable of doing so, as well - it sounds like you humans don't have that drive as much? - so it's often a lifelong responsibility.

It would be quite hard for an experimental-breeding-endeavour-group to find a family-unit who would take on such a responsibility - one of the major factors in wanting to form a family-unit is wanting to pass on your genetic traits, it's not always the case that all members of the family-unit will participate in breeding but it's usual to have at least one egg-contribution from everyone involved, unless they have a genetic defect they don't want to transmit but still want to raise children."

Yompam looks over at Jupital. "It looks like ke's pretty busy with Tetratopia; I can make some guesses if you don't mind them being guesses, or we can continue to explore areas of difference and similarity so we have a fuller list of exchange topics..."

Jeeee / Byway Ikkeh on Retirement

"You mean you don't? Yompam must be as excited about that as I am about satellites! Uh, assuming it carries over, but... even just the computing technology should get us over a whole bunch of roadblocks in research, the biologists are always complaining that they just can't process enough data even with a huge mainframe in their hospital-ship.

It's not just senescence although that really doesn't help, some people just need to stop for a while, and then get back to it; I haven't had one but there have been times when my friendship-group have had to take quite a lot of care of me, I think Thessalia had one for a while?"

Talaskai / Byway Kriv + Ect on Endeavour-Groups

"Oh, like, all sorts of things?

Sometimes it's wanting something that's hard to get, like, your friend had a great idea but it needs a lot of metal so you go join a mining concern as more than a rotational helper, or you got caught in a storm and ran out of food once and now you really want to feed people and definitely never ever be hungry again, so you go join a salmon farm?

Or someone has an idea that is, like, really inspiring, and then a lot of people want to make that idea a reality? Or there's just something that obviously needs doing, and it seems like it'd be an okay kind of thing to do, and not enough people are doing it.

People who are trying to get an endeavour-group started advertise a lot, like they circulate information about what they want to do and how they're going to go about it and people go 'yeah, that sounds like a worthwhile thing' or 'that sounds really interesting and I want to know more'?

Lots of people have trouble thinking of or deciding what they want to do for themselves and want to join something someone else is doing - like, it's great being an adventurer when you're my age, but a lot of people get bored of only doing things that a small group can do, and they want to be part of something bigger, or achieve something bigger, and the only way to do that is to join up with other people trying to do that thing?

Uh. What's a - for-profit company? In translation it kind of sounds like 'organised group of people who specialise in a kind of rotational work together in order to get a really big account balance and have a fantastic retirement', but it sounds like you use it for more things?"

Meliashae to Byway Lak on profit

"So, what I think we're getting to here is that our societies distribute things really differently!

From what I've gathered you use a direct market-economics system for pretty much everything? We, uh, we really don't do that?

Obviously informal markets break out all over the place, when there are material scarce resources, and we use explicit formal markets for things where we absolutely need extrinsic motivation to get enough people to do something that needs doing, like caring for the retired, or maintenance of larger vessels, or all the supplies that retirement-ships and hospital-ships need.

But most of the time we don't think in terms of formal trades at all, and certainly not in terms of personal value-accumulation. What Kastakians tend to do is attempt to maximise overall value for everyone - to find the place where they are interested enough in what they're doing not to burn out, but also are doing something that is useful to as many people as possible? And the same for resources that we find ourselves stewards of - we try to find the place for them that will generate the most value overall.

That does have some downsides, like the one I just mentioned - if something doesn't have enough interest-value any more, but doesn't yet have enough certain, legible world-improvement value, it doesn't get prioritised for resources or labour, and unproven technologies that have been pioneered but not scaled tend to fall in that hole.

I mean, don't get me wrong, some people really love 'the thing I worked on is now the thing most people use' enough to take the risk, but I get the impression that Byway humans are much less risk averse than we are - or possibly the lack of a safety net drives people to take more risks?"

Eyyeh and Reren

"Apologies, our language does not inflect nouns for number, which led to confusion. The Imperator only has the one body. However, some of his drones which died of the same disease – it was a transmissible disease – were interred and frozen along with him.

Not publicly. His drones kept his diary and records, of course, but it is traditional for those to be interred along with the body, due to their sacredness. No one save for them have viewed it. The remaining drones of the Imperator were unable or unwilling to give reasons as to why he wanted to be frozen. It is implied that he did want to, however, since he funded research into the specifics of remna hibernation, as well as freezing and thawing viability experiments on various animals. Further, his drones did say that rather than using body control to fight the disease, he chose to prepare for a very long hibernation instead. 

Does your species hibernate? It translates, so you must be at least familiar with the concept. It is a type of cando – does that translate? A moment, please," he says, and consults with some translator and librarian drones. 

"It is a type of dormancy, which can express itself in various ways. Our world has a longer year length, and has occasional severe cold snaps and heat waves. Therefore, our species must be able to cope with variation in temperature. Specifically, he performed the type of dormancy suitable for experiencing freezing temperatures, not merely cold ones.

He was able to subdue people he saw as acting antisocially because all of his drones were personally and very strongly loyal to him – those drones now constitute the bulk of the military and much of the civil service today. You do not have drones – your society is composed entirely of people – so finding loyal people to coordinate with would be much harder, and the risk of defection much higher. I doubt it would have worked in yours."

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

In that case, they will happily take the pen to examine it! Is it ornamented? How is it designed – with regard to its shape, how it's filled with ink, the nib, and how it dispenses the same amount of ink regardless of pressure?

Retirement seems like an important enough thing for them that it's mildly confusing why you would only want to have a vague idea of what you have, but they don't voice this confusion. With them, they're fine (and prefer!) to have favors and trades between friends be informal and somewhat illegible, because that dispels resentment, and also because you don't need to have your friend do favors for you to survive. They absolutely will keep track of their food stores and prices of food at the market because that is necessary for survival.

Restem: "Admittedly, I am confused about what you said. I am going to analogize your words to try to help with my understanding. Suppose that A wants to bake a cake, and needs sugar. B has sugar. A makes the case to B that they will benefit if B gives them sugar. It is a compelling reason – with sugar, A can bake the cake. But...why would B give A the sugar? How does B benefit, unless B somehow arranges for A to bake the cake but receive a portion of it in compensation, or a favor-of-equal-value-to-be-traded-in-in-future."

Selno to Yompam

"Huh. We're wired to look out for the welfare of anyone young enough to be extra-vulnerable, of course, but actually providing for the child is the sole responsibility of its two parents. Having children stay dependent until fourteen or twenty . . . yeah, we can see how you'd end up with a big payout for anyone who can raise them more efficiently." He has so many questions but first, a lot of business is in order.

"I don't mind your guesses, respecting exchange deals - but who do you work for? Jupital?"

Ikkeh to Jeeee

Ikkeh frowns. "Is that common? About how long was it? Personally I've never gotten burnt out that badly, but it can happen to people sometimes . . . they're always back on their feet with a new job in about a dozen days, though, unless there's actually an underlying non-burnout problem requiring very expensive medical treatment. And being out for a dozen days hardly ever happens to people more frequently than once every few years, not enough to be a huge loss for the economy."

Kriv & Ect to Talaskai

. . .

"Money," ventures Kriv. "What does that translate as."

"Ke said 'account balance.'" mutters Ect.

"Five-mine-four-yours twelve-to-the-sixth-over-five milligrams mine ke doesn't grok it." Kriv ruminates a moment. "As in, as in, ke won't be able to explain what we're doing right now. Won't have the word for it." It's dicey but something is telling Kriv Kastakians just don't bet. Or at least Talaskai won't have.

"Of what?"

Kriv raises his eyebrows and enunciates very slowly. "Lin-say nine."

"Five-yours-four-mine twelve-to-the-sixth-over-five milligrams yours Linsay nine ke groks it as in ke has the word for what we're doing," says Ect. He squints at Kriv. "How is 'account balance' not 'money'."

"Well, what are we doing?" Kriv looks at Talaskai like Talaskai is an explosive with its fuse lit.

Lak to Meliashae

When Lak speaks again, he sounds distant. "It's. Actually the presence of a safety net. If I were going to venture a guess. A safety net that you wouldn't have if your species had somehow managed to advance to the point of radio and computers without evolving the strategy of weighing possible actions in terms of relative social profit and loss." He feels oversharing-remorse, but that's irrational given that as it stands the Kastakians are hardly potential trade partners. He's not sure if they qualify as fully sapient, not being able to rationally evaluate expected returns from action? But they have language and all the other features. Wizard Vaxi. Lak feels the assumptions of duodecades' psychic philosophy crumble underneath his standing feet.

"When the first company on Byway to successfully scale transistor manufacture -" he names a company "set out, they followed a long line of failures, and knew that, from the outside, it looked like there was only a very slim chance they'd make a profit. But -" he recounts the history of the company's founder having tested his innovations in his boss's workshop, and becoming justifiedly confident that that would scale up "and unlike if he'd been working on Kastakia, he knew he could always make a living machine-operating or delivery-driving or something. He wasn't staking his entire future on the to-all-appearances unlikely prospect of this project coming up plus, and for that matter neither were any of the failures.

None of us need to depend on what we are to other people, because we are, far more reliably, something to the economy." Reverence. "It sets us free.

I'd known you could be - an early-historic civilization, without being as free - although the system would still have endpoints that would open themselves up to trade for obviously advantageous scaling of critical infrastructure - but to get to this point, and do everything, or even ten out of twelve things, on a person-to-person scale - how - ?" How. They're lying, hustling the Bywayeans, and everyone. Trying to inspire pity, or something.

"Maximize overall value for everyone - find where you're the most needed - that's what explicit money does. You want where you're most valued? Follow the money. And there's a lot of latitude within that to do what you enjoy. That's categorically harder, without a direct market economy getting involved, on whatever scale you're working on. You'd just be deliberately blinding yourself. Your society, as you describe it - its parts shouldn't have any idea of how to organize themselves. It'd be like a brain with neurotransmitters but no electricity, no mechanism by which to send information at a distance. It'd be - a lumpy, incoherent, unpredictable boiling swamp, not a sensate species - forgive the metaphor, I know some people don't like egregore talk, but. A mess like that couldn't be relied upon to accumulate anything."

No remorse, Lak, if ke's being straight they're hardly viable trade partners until they learn this, and if they're hustling you . . .

Eyyeh to Reren

They totally kill their drones. There haven't been any other noun snafus, that Eyyeh's noticed.

". . . You really think he's dead." Eyyeh deadpans. No way will they assimilate a foreigner's intuition about their own sleeping hero. If anything, Eyyeh is winning Byway time, along with himself information.

"How many drones did he have? How many remna were there, at that time?"

Reren to Eyyeh

"Yes. Of course, we do not have the technology to revive dead frozen remna, and even if we do, we don't know whether his preparations were sufficient in preserving his body in a state that can be revived. Functionally, he is dead. In any case, even were he to return to life, he would not be restored to power – at the tail end of the second Imperial period, he transitioned the power structure to a democracy, such that in the years before his death, he was formally removed from all politics. At the time, drone training had progressed to the point that he could have most of his drones – which were many – switch allegiance to the elected Consul, thus giving them full control over military and civil service matters.

Hm, I don't have the numbers committed to memory, but we brought records of the Imperial Census stretching all the way back to the first one. I'll send a drone to fetch the records, although it might take a bit, since it was so long ago. I'd estimate...half a billion remna at that time, of which one in twenty were his drones. That's 5%. I think that's in the correct direction but I could be wrong. The census might not cover military matters, since that's covered under the transparency report. Did we have the transparency report at that time? I didn't live through this time, so I don't remember. I'll order the drone to look for that figure for you as well.

What about you? How do you structure your civil service and military?"

Eyyeh to Reren

That's a higher proportion of the population than Eyyeh was expecting. But.

"How exactly does the control work? That many - it still wouldn't make any more sense, that the Imperator should be Controlling them, unless you develop some kind of extension of working memory that's only usable for that purpose.

'Civil service' and 'military' may be part of the confusion here . . . whatever those are, I don't think we have them. What are they?"

Reren to Eyyeh

"It used to be a process mediated by biology, but now it's more psychological. Drones become attached to their Controllers and optimize over their desires. We call this process...it translates as 'binding' or 'imprinting'. It's not...it's not like there's a direct link. Think of them like...a perfectly loyal worker? Or like, a machine, but more complicated. Does that make sense? It's difficult to explain because it is so basic to us.

Really? You don't have those? Then what does your government consist of?"

A pause.

"Ah. You don't have one. That neatly explains many aspects of your society that were previously baffling, and also explains your similarity to the Kastakians. I'm not sure I can explain unless you know what a 'government' is. Or perhaps 'state'. Do you have a word for 'coordination'?"

Eyyeh to Reren

"Thank you for your patience in explaining these basic things to me." He means it. "Unfortunately, it seems you have many more to explain. 'Coordination' . . . no. None of those."

Reren to Eyyeh

Reren does not sigh or roll his eyes, because the selection process to become a Legislator and later a delegate is rigorous.

"Coordination is...the process by which agents agree to perform or not perform a specific action, so as to push the current situation from a suboptimal stable equilibrium to a more optimal metastable equilibrium. Maybe an example is needed.

Let's say that a dozen people live near a forest, and there is a fruit tree there which produces really delicious fruits once a season. Let's also say that people will want to get as many fruits as they can. The default state is that people will squabble over the fruits: they'll spend time watching over the tree, or steal from people who got the fruits, or attack and threaten them to get them to yield, or pick the fruits even when they're not at their best, since getting something worse is better than getting nothing.

Ultimately, no matter how much they fight, the number of fruits on the tree are limited. If they figured out a way to apportion the fruits in a way that appeases everyone, then they could stop wasting time doing all those things, but still have fruit to enjoy. They could say that all the fruits are picked at their best, with each person getting an equal share of fruit. Or maybe people do auctions for the fruit. Something like that.

This is better – they get fruit and their time back – but it's not stable. It's always possible for one person to defect. For example, they could pick all the fruits before they're ready. There has to be an enforcement mechanism to make sure that people who say they'll agree, but were actually deceiving the others. They could agree that anyone who breaks the rule is chased out of the forest, or does not receive fruit for a year, or gets beat up, or something sufficiently aversive to prevent people from defecting, something that will change their payoff-matrix so that they'll do the antiantisocial or prosocial thing.

A government is this agreement, but reified and more general. A military is an arm of the government that uses violent force to change said payoff-matrix, although in our case we separate this into two: the military acts externally, on people the who are not under our government, with the police acting on people who are."

Eyyeh to Reren

". . . Does utility literally grow on trees in your world.

Like, does enough stuff-that-people-value, that people would want to fight over it, regularly just spring into existence not as the obvious product of some person's labor."

Eyyeh is going to hold off the existential crisis that will be in order if literally the most basic axiom of philosophy turns out not to hold across universes, until the moment the axiom's destruction or preservation is actually confirmed to him. Which timeframe may extend significantly beyond this conversation, given that these aliens are shady at best, and probably animalistic superintelligent menaces. Until they actually strike Eyyeh down, or prove him something of clear worth that he didn't already know, they're getting maximum skepticism.

Reren to Eyyeh

"Well, yes? Like, fruit does grow on trees...hm, is that a metaphor or an idiom? And yes, there is tons of that: fertile land, land with ores or gems, forests, lakes and coastlines with fish. Even for items which are artificial, ownership is only meaningful to the extent that you can protect it. If someone steals it from you, then it doesn't matter whether or not you are the one who invested labor into making it. That's why we have the government to shift people's payoff matrices away from stealing and more to making, and also make sure that the adversarial-arms-race of developing better theft technique and developing better theft-prevention doesn't happen."

He's very confused at how their society doesn't have government and hasn't devolved into killing each other. Maybe their species is more peaceful? That seems like the most obvious example.

They don't even have a military...

...but their technology is clearly superior. And besides, the Imperium isn't exactly expansionist – it left behind totally fine land unoccupied as terra nullius so that people could have meaningful exit rights. 

Eyyeh to Reren

Eyyeh is looking at Reren like Reren is a celestial body rising at the wrong time of the day.

Slowly, tonelessly, with the inflection of somebody explaining how to get multiplication from repeated addition: "Fertile land has to be farmed. Ores and gems have to be mined. Forests have to be combed. Fish have to be caught. Fruit has to be picked, and if there's no fruit left in the literal forest, it has to be grown. Whoever does the work of sculpting the froth of Nature into a utile form acquires the resulting utility as a property - an attribute, an extension.

Y'all . . . steal these properties of others as your default course of action?"

Reren to Eyyeh

"Well, see, I can wait for you to do that, and then, after you have farmed the land and mined the gems and combed the forests and caught the fish and picked the fruit, I could kill you and take everything that you have. Or steal it from you – that would likewise alienate you from the product of your labor.

That's what happens to animals in the natural environment every day. Animals kill each other to eat them. You're talking about ownership as though it's an inalienable, irrevocable thing, when really, one could just reach over and take something from someone else, if that person did not have the means to repulse the attack. 

It's not the default course, but it is the most stable course, and so unless a different metastable equilibrium is reached, things will degrade to such a state normally.

I would greatly appreciate information as to how your species evolved, or what your culture is like, so that I can model you better."

Eyyeh to Reren

Eyyeh feels like calmly packing up all his things and walking back through the cave entrance that goes back to Byway.

He doesn't know what he would do if the remna couldn't follow. The fact is, all his knowledge says they can.

Voice low and cold: "I feel implicitly threatened by you at this exact particular instant, and I will not surrender heart-information about my species under such a condition."

Reren to Eyyeh

Intense frustration...! Which does not show on Reren's face, although his tentacles do start moving a touch faster.

"Why do you feel threatened? The fact that we have the capability to do it does not mean we have the intent to. And besides, your world's technology is much better than ours," although they wouldn't have the conception of things like tactics, or a dozen gross years of military history. "There is very little for us to gain from attacking you, and much more to gain from trading peacefully. 

I will also remind you that I talked at length about our species' evolution and our biology at length, and now that I have asked you to do the same, you are refusing. I underwent the mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known, in the process of wishing to establish friendship, and you did not. This is displeasing to me, and although I am obligated to talk to you because of my position, I, personally, would be upset if you continued to refrain from speaking openly."

Eyyeh to Reren

"As you doubtless perceive, the humans of Byway are a near_totally-nonaggressive species completely incapable of posing any harm to you or yours. As I suspected from the beginning, the Imperium is a to-some-extent-coherent force, which has the capacity and the motivation, at least in principle, to coerce some of the humans of Byway into serving its goals, whatever those goals may evidence." Never mind that he'd been thinking in terms of sogging science fiction plots . . . ! "These suspicions in part motivated my intentionally" he puts some iron in the word "steering the conversation between us toward your choosing to frontload your investment of disclosure, so that I could gauge whether you merited my trust of a disclosure-return-investment to lead us closer to the negotiation of formal dealings. Never did my worst imaginings touch what you actually disclosed. I daresay" voice tamped like a spring "if I die on the spot, my final emotion will be joy that in being so reticent, I dodged being the proximate cause of my species's final embarrassment." Eyes steely, but live - searching.

"Now that you are caught up to my frame of mind, are you still interested in dealing with me? If you are honest in your intent to trade peacefully, my full apology and partnership are nearly guaranteed in the medium run, but to earn them will require getting through a long and mutually costly game of defusing. If you do choose to play, we can pre-negotiate a price for your time, which I will pay out whether I end up deeming you trustworthy or not." 

Reren to Eyyeh

"I see. So you took advantage of our vulnerable posture and did not come here in good faith. We will remember this.

I am uninterested in further conversation with you. Goodbye."

Reren leaves to talk with Consul Restem.

Lisal, halfway between the Tetratopian and Bywayean delegations, is stopped by a drone. There is a brief conversation before he turns back and returns to the Imperial side.