"I guess you guys live long enough that maybe you can roll with an - unfair decade or two no problem for the best chance of stabilizing Amentan civilization?"

"I think we'd accept it if we didn't live this long, or if it was going to be forever. If it was needed to help people and we knew that."

"I think you might be very different people if you didn't live this long, but - maybe, yeah."

"I don't think we would be but I suppose there's no way to know."

"Yeah. There's this concept in gambling - playing games or making predictions versus other players, with paradigmatically monetary stakes - 'risk of ruin'. Where you can do all kinds of fancy math to figure out what bet has the highest expected utility, but while upside can go up without a cap, downside can't. When you've bet your whole pool of money available for gambling, you can't make any more bets. So you can wind up with situations where you could maximize expected utility by putting all your money on something with objectively favorable odds, over and over again, and this makes you fabulously rich but only if you have perfect luck every single time...

- I bring this up because we can die, and you can't, so you don't have to worry about being ruined; you can take losses, but you can't be out of the game forever and you can bet whatever you need to bet to get the best expected utility."

"I don't think Amaliens decide what's important in a way that makes that argument work, but also I think the fact that it's really hard to kill us isn't as relevant as it might seem. We can lose resources which decreas-es our chances of future success - in extreme cases we could be left in lava for centuries, unable to have any real impact on problems we encounter."

"Yeah, that's fair enough. I do think the - historical evolutionary context is relevant to how Amentans approach things though."

"That sounds like it would be true!"

"I re-sear-ched evol-ution for a bit before and figured out that Amaliens have something like it - our habits and ideas and stuff are more likely to stick around if they are useful for people, which leads to a sort of nat-ural selection for Amaliens."

"Huh. I guess if you don't have especially stable personalities or eidetic memories or a lot of biologically-varying limitations that would work."

"It can vary how much we change. My epi-sodic memory is a bit worse than normal and pretty much only goes back fifty amalien years or something. Amn't sure how I acted before that. Neh doesn't seem to rem-ember anything from before she fell in lava, and I think her per-sonality changed from that. There's an amalien named Fika who's memory is really good and based on Mon-ument I don't think she's changed much over tens of thousands of years at least, maybe way longer. Deet has a really bad memory and has trouble rem-embering anything before an Amentan year ago and changes a lot over-time - lots of why he is very big on prin-ciples now is cause he feels like things 'bout him aren't stab-le otherwise I think."

"Huh. I think if I were in that position I would put a lot of effort into writing down events of my life and what plans I wanted to make and why."

"Wouldn't sur-prise me if he did. I 'spect that wouldn't help over too long a time if he didn't also stick to prin-ciples he really beli-eved in too.

"Also um. Wri-ting doesn't last too long by our stand-ards. Would have to spend a bun-ch of time cop-ying things if he wanted to rem-ember over a long time."

"Yeah, or you'd need to etch stuff into gold or something. Either that or invent computers so copying was less of a time-sink, which I guess would not be a predictable consequence of going along the tech tree in that direction."

"I sort of exp-ect Vira has at least come up with the ideas for computers - and she sometimes builds up a bunch of tech that are used for building other things so she can end up with a final comp-licated thing she wanted. Just, making them long lasting and main-tainable and mass producable wouldn't have seemed super rel-evant for whatever she was doing prolly. She usually has a spe-cific goal she is trying to accomp-lish when she builds things - like learning what will happen or doing a single thing once to fix a problem.

"Yeah. Man, that sounds - lonely? Does she have science friends or is she just doing this all by herself?"

"She has some science friends! Though she doesn't always work with one of them, I think she enjoys telling people about her science but is also more okay being alone than most amaliens are."

"She's very impressive."

"She really is."

Lucien and Pelape proceed to have a second debate, with Pelape posing as a purple. 

Meanwhile, Meelia writes to Tish and Haemi.

Hi.

I'm back home and happy to be here, it's good to see my amalien friends again and to have Cheep back with me. Got hugs from Keeta and also Lucien and those were very good. Gonna try helping people from here, Lucien is good at that I think.

Am still sad 'bout how I made you feel but. Thing that I woulda had to go home quickly anyways since talk-ing to my amalien friends about reds was superduper important. And would have been sad bout being on Amenta without being able to help even if I did know I shouldn't try to help on my own.

Going to collect monster friends to help, am excited bout that! One's sorta like a monkey with eight hands that copies the things other people are doing round it and am gonna be going to get him to help with indus-trializing things - he's even better at gymnastics than I am but it's fun to be comp-et-itive with him.

Love,
Meelia

Dear Meelia,

We're glad you made it home safe. Did the greys we hired work out all right?

It makes us a little nervous now when you say "helping people" and aren't specific! Can you explain? Maybe we could help you refine your ideas.

The monkey monster sounds fun, I bet a video of him on the internet would be very popular.

- Love, Tish and Haemi

"Hey, whats it okay to say that we're working on to my Amentan friends who don't like reds very much?" Meelia asks Lucien, who in turn talks to Pelape about it.

"Uh, maybe that you're hoping alleviating scarcity in general will make it politically easier to pension them off?"

"I don't really get what that means?"

"You are hoping that if Amentans are wealthier it won't be so hard for them to give reds what they need."