He looks a bit awkward.

"I'm not a specialist; I mostly know the stuff that people thought would be practically useful to me later.

Off the top of my head...the natural tendency for pattern-matching to leak into parsing things as omens--even when they couldn't possibly actually be related to each other--often culturally crystallises into different collections of taboos. Some people are surprisingly willing to risk premeditated violence, though I think we suspect a lot of that is, like, different baseline levels of desperation, that when you're barely surviving a lot of things end up being life-and-death backed-into-a-corner stuff.

Hmm...

...oh, this one was probably innate, given that the walk-ins themselves were mostly not like their societies in this regard. There are some places that are...obsessed with faces? Almost all of the people seem to be facial-recognition savants, and they're hyper-attentive to facial expressions. I was warned that clear communication with people who assume you noticed the way their face flickered for a moment is more difficult, and that people who care a lot about being able to see each other's faces are probably going to have a hard time with masking.

...anyway, hang on--"

Click.

"--so, the caffeination thing reminded me...uh, caffeine is okay, whatever that other stimulant was yesterday is okay, but in general we're going to have to be careful about psychoactives: some of them risk dislodging a hayi from the brain, and y'all wouldn't have been in a position to notice which ones those are.

The usual rule of thumb is that anything where you're still lucid is safe indefinitely, anything where you're not lucid will kill you in about four or five days if you're on it continuously or without enough time to recover between doses, and some things where you're not lucid will sometimes kill you faster. But I might not know all the edge cases, especially since there might be drugs that we abandoned early in development upon figuring out they were toxic to us and forgot about them while y'all kept pursuing those paths. Some drugs I can probably recognise--especially from medical training--and give gos or no-gos on, but it might get tricky to recognise alien portrayals of chemical structures and...the distinction between safe 'overlays' and dangerous 'disruptors' is not a concept I was prepared to have to import."

He - actually forgot about how Sinber and the kid aren't usually up at this hour, even though the kitchen is sunny and his making coffee, etc. doesn't make zero noise. They've got their blackout curtains and soundproofing, which apparently will block out all high-pitched noise quieter than his distress shriek yesterday.

While Minaiyu is talking he begins the coffee process. As Minaiyu talks about hayi and drugs, he unconsciously frowns their face dubiously at the packet of coffee grounds.

"The faces thing is interesting - and yeah, the culture doesn't sound very revealing. No, like, people who are way better at dead reckoning than the rest - or at poetry? If-you-want-to-say. That's the first savant axis we discovered, the most obvious - you can be really good at either dead reckoning or poetry, but not both.

. . . and, huh. We don't have any drugs that make people less lucid, that we would use outside a context of wanting to anesthetize them? Does that make your worries about me continuing my usual stimulant cycle, like, totally go poof, or am I being a troglodyte?"

He doesn't answer the savantism question yet: they should finish discussing his vulnerabilities and turn the recorder back on first.

"Coffee is definitely fine-- or, I mean, it definitely won't kill me, we do use it. I...can't say I'm entirely comfortable with adding caffeine to the list of basic necessities of life, but as long as there's a three-month buffer at home and a backup bottle of caffeine pills in our bag, I think it'd be okay. I don't know how much buffer you're currently running on that.

The other stimulant yesterday sure felt like an overlay: I'd be very surprised if it's deadly. ...although that being said, I would like to know what drug it is, even if it's safe.

I think probably the main measure we should take is researching what anesthetics are in use around here, writing up instructions on which drugs are acceptable risks under which circumstances, and putting them wherever you normally keep your medical records. We might not be in a condition to make the call then and there at the time it comes up."

"Makes sense." He bumbles around packing for the workday. "What's an overlay? It was a dopamine-reuptake-inhibitor [one word], they make most people like twice as functional, have you never experienced dopamine-reuptake-inhibitor before and if so why are you not fangirling about it?" It's genuine curiosity.

Almost everyone fangirls about dopamine-reuptake-inhibitor when they get old enough to afford it or to be over their fears about it affecting their development (whichever comes last)!

He looks thoughtful.

"...yeah, I think that word parses. And those are-- well, they're pretty safe on that front and in themselves, though sometimes they're dangerous for unrelated reasons and there's a few that have additional mechanisms of action that are disruptive.

There are two basic categories of psychoactive, which--directly translated--we call 'overlays' and 'disruptors'. Overlays are called that because they only touch the surface of the soul: you're still there underneath, intact. Disruptors fuck with your sense of self or your ability to distinguish reality from unreality, distorting a hayi into a shape they can't hold for long. Best case scenario is it wears off in time and you make a full recovery, albeit shaken by what is often a very scary and disturbing experience; if it lasts longer than about four days--sometimes five, occasionally three in elderly people and other especially-fragile groups--the connection between brain and hayi will snap under the strain and kill you; if you're unlucky--and how much bad luck it takes depends on the drug--it'll kill you within hours, we think by causing brain damage that renders the brain uninhabitable.

I haven't done dopamine-reuptake-inhibitor before, no, though I also don't expect I'm getting the drug-naive experience since the body has had a chance to develop tolerance. It might have helped me feel less overwhelmed? Maybe the productivity boost would have been more noticeable if I'd had more to do.

--that sounds bad when I put it like that. It honestly wasn't that boring: I did choose to go into a field where I spend a fair bit of time observing hospital workers, after all. Though if I'm not going to be playing really-dead anymore, I'll want to ask the occasional question in-between patients, clear up points of confusion."

He grins. "Maybe once I pick up enough about how medicine works here, I can start offering second opinions."

<💭>! Second opinions!</💭>

He heads out. 

"I think I have enough time buffer even after grabbing Prodigy to slip a note to my boss making sure it's okay for you to work with me like that -"

And the other shoe drops.

"

- actually, I should, uh, probably just put in my next-nine-workdays notice that I'm quitting, huh, so we can figure out what you really want to do."

He was going to ask more about disruptors, but suddenly the task queue has a visible elephant in it.

Minaiyu looks surprised and concerned.

"That, uh...seems..."

He almost says 'rash', but maybe that's too insulting.

"...shouldn't we figure out what kind of setup we want first, and then quit if your job turns out to be incompatible with that? I was kind of assuming that the whole 50/50 thing would involve you switching to a lighter work schedule at your current job: is that not an option?"

For the second day in a row, he freezes on his way out to the garage. This time, it's in horror (unacknowledged) and bafflement (open). 

"Then I'd have to see the same people every day but I'd have lost standing with them! Don't y -

- Right, few job changes per lifetime. Here, if you can't do a job at least as well as you could before, anymore, for whatever reason, you quit and find something else where you don't have to drag yourself constantly over the nails of 'this person has seen me be more productive than I am currently being.'"

"...right, many job changes per lifetime," he echoes. "I guess it doesn't feel like such a scary leap into the unknown for you."

He almost apologises again for throwing Xakda's life into disarray, but it is increasingly clear that he does not actually comprehend how Xakda feels about having his life thrown into disarray, except 'not as badly as Minaiyu would feel in his place'. It gets annoying when people apologise profusely to you over something that you honestly did not think deserved profuse apologising.

...also there was the whole eating thing, with Xakda not asking for privacy because he was afraid Minaiyu wanted to be there. Sometimes apologising profusely to someone for impinging on them just ends up making them feel more pressured to let you impinge on them.

He's looking forward to having a firmer understanding of where the quicksand-pits are and where they aren't, so they can balance costs and benefits properly. No way out but through.

...well, almost no way.

"I wonder if it would help to add some sociology books to the psychology ones, like in terms of getting a better sense of things here."

He can understand finding it embarrassing to be less productive per work-hour. He supposes it's not hard to believe that in some cultures, that might bleed over to finding it embarrassing to be available for fewer work-hours.

"What sorts of jobs would you be looking at?"

Carplane entry resumes.

'What job would you look for next?' is always a fun question to contemplate, especially when it's not just a hypothetical.

He's always wanted to try kidshaping, but it'd just be an embarrassing thing to attempt while he's living or even coparenting with Sinber, who's been obsessively getting better at it for seven years in total. Plus it's not particularly easy to find a culture fit for one such as Xakda in that industry - kidshapers tend to be misanthropic auteurs just the same as architects and logisticians and mercenary-journeymen and . . . well, the same as a lot of professions you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps to make it in, because there's a lot of human capital to pack into your person but not much of a natural hierarchical company structure to the provision of the service . . . so, the same as a lot of professions. Perennial-sigh. There's a reason he's been driven toward hospital jobs, and it's not a love of the life-or-death stakes or a lust for the above-average pay. Hospital workers want to work with people.

But he is sick, he realizes, sick of the stress, the upheaval . . . sick of Aleith and his constant posturing. He's seen parts of the hospital industry he thinks he could run and love running, if he buckled down and gave his everything, but Sain-in-particular . . . isn't that.

There's an exhilarating sense of suddenly realizing that a heavy weight he's been carrying isn't part of his body, and that he might be able to drop it soon, if only he could find the right place.

He'll miss Nakoru, but he'd have traded Nakoru for Minaiyu any day.

His brain runs the familiar course of seeking any non-obvious advantageous alternatives over his central ideas for his next job - he could train in repair of electronics - but no, that's too much of a commitment - or try some kind of freelance medical consulting with somebody - no, he'd best keep it simple with this . . .

- his brain continues running down the tree -

(He rolls out of the garage.)

. . . yeah.

"Probably another hospital job, at a frankly more driven and sanely-run hospital - there's a small one in Pyeth that might be that. Otherwise I'd have to move. Probably far enough away that my pickups for Prodigy and my son with Raychis . . . and eventually my son with Sinber, would become long enough that according to contract I'd become responsible making the flight both ways, and possibly, depending on which way I moved, far enough away from Maith* that I'd have to resume that commute in whole or in part, too. I could reach out to Fairgame or Raychis and possibly work out a unified move with one of them, or at least move toward Maith. I'll have to look at a map and do all the math tonight."

For all the implied inconvenience, he sounds genuinely but not overly enthusiastic about the task, which is only mostly expert acting.

The emotions the expert acting is concealing aren't angst or annoyance-at-an-interruption, but a fear of confirming everyone's opinion that his living situation with Sinber was unsustainable.

"Um. I haven't listed my children indexed to my coparents to you yet, have I."

". . . Oh, and you said something about 'soci-ology'. Cardi-ology sounded overly specific, like, I once learned there used to be a word for freakin' myrmec-ology, but soci-ology sounds overly general - like, another word for philosophy, but framed as though it were somehow the speaker's special expertise. Am I obviously-to-you missing something?"

He waits for Minaiyu to answer before lifting off.

-

*for the interested, Maith is /maiθ/ (not /meiθ/), as Sain is supposed to be 'sign'; the convention of 'a' representing /a/, however, is not followed consistently in Bywayean/Gaha'eka names, which are just spelled to best-effort scan to someone who speaks English. For example, 'Raychis' is meant to be /reitʃɪs/, as 'Reychis' scans to me as /raitʃi/! (Erm, Xakda's X is an /x/, though.)

(Minaiyu clears out of the front once Xakda gets in the plane.)

...right, yes, people here are very casual about moving to new homes.

...well. Since they're going to be moving in the medium-term future one way or another, better for it to be soon, while everything is still up in the air anyway. Minaiyu hasn't, yet, had time to get attached to Pyeth, or to this house.

can they live somewhere walkable or at least with a train station next, there's gotta be some places that strike a balance of neither sensory-overload nor having-to-learn-to-fly-a-plane-to-get-anywhere-on-your-own-volition, right

(he doesn't want to have to learn to fly a plane: while--unlike most people--his mind probably does actually have the processing bandwidth to handle it in theory, the amount of risk involved in getting past the hurdles of noobishness is terrifying given how much is at stake

...honestly he's maybe not entirely comfortable with Xakda flying either, but at least Xakda has experience on his side and it would be Xakda's own fault if he crashed badly enough to cease to exist and hopefully Sinber or Andor or somebody would at least get the information out there about grid-hardening in their absence)

<You haven't listed the kids yet, no. I mean, there's been a lot going on, to be fair: it's reasonable that even something like that would never quite have been the most urgent thing.>

wait, hang on, this body has had sex with how many people?  this seems like something best not dwelled upon

(though he will file away, under local-social-mores, a note that Xakda doesn't seem ashamed or defensive of having had several sexual partners)

<By "sociology" I mean, like...the study of how your society works? Like, how things are set up, what effects the social mores have on people, stuff like that.

In Tashayan we draw a distinction between "sociology" which is...from an insider's perspective, the study of a society as done by and for its own members, versus "anthropology" which involves outsiders, but I think I've heard that other languages† draw the line in different places so maybe that doesn't translate neatly. I mean, if you've got books about how this society works aimed at outsiders, all the better, but I get the impression you probably don't.>

Should he ask what's wrong with Sain? On the one hand, potentially valuable context; on the other hand, complaining tends to be...emotionally fraught, for both speaker and listener.

...on the third hand, last time he was torn like this on whether to ask a question, he later regretted not asking.

<What do you mean by "more driven and sanely-run", if-you-want-to-say?>

---

†such as English

"Well," he hesitates into the increased noise, not having expected that question somehow - "did you notice how yesterday there were like two or three people obviously running out of rushedness rather than enthusiasm? That doesn't happen in most hospitals around here, because people get their notifications in time. They say . . . " is he allowed to say this? oh to hell with it "they say it didn't happen at Sain either, until this year. The speculation is that he's looking to switch to biotech, has been focusing on that, and will sell the hospital soon.

I was able to get a way higher-ranking position at Sain than I'll probably be able to get somewhere else, and it was a great learning experience, but, yeah, I'm ready to go back to somewhere that acts like it intends to survive.

Say, hey, how could insiders objectively publish about their own society, anyway? Where would the rails be keeping them from just slipping in as much self-serving cruft as they could get away with until the whole treatise was untrustworthy?"

He nods thoughtfully, then remembers that Xakda can't tell.

<I hope everyone, staff and patients alike, makes it through that okay.

"Objective" is maybe a strong word. But there's a distinct kind of value in a close-up view, and people might feel guilty about slipping in lots of self-serving cruft at least on purpose, and also...self-servingness doesn't all point in the same direction? Like, some people will be writing about aspects of their society that they personally hate, and other people will write about the same aspects but from a perspective of personally liking them, and sometimes with enough sources you can kind of triangulate. It's a hard skill, I can't say I'm great at it myself, but one worth practising.>

" - yeah, when I said this year - I've only worked there four months, and there was a lot of talk about it when I first got there, so I think it had only started a bit before then. And it's gone on so long, it has to stop soon or someone will just build a livelier hospital right by. But, I mean, you know how well it usually goes in the end when places change management, so, obviously, probably we're going to get eaten by a livelier hospital popping up right by anyway. Probably there's already one in the works and I just haven't heard about it." His voice is laced with a touch of cringing guilt for bad-mouthing his actual current employer to an outsider, no matter how he might be able to spin it to himself as circumstantially appropriate.

". . . Hold-on-let-me-think-about-for-an-hour-that wisdom-of-crowds objectivity thing."

Fields at a skew angle from the fields they passed over yesterday, but looking pretty similar, pass by underneath.

He thinks for a couple minutes.

When he replies, his voice is quieter.

". . . I can't think of any actual reason why it wouldn't work - and - actually we do use the wisdom-of-crowds strategy for finding the truth ever, but - that's different, it's not public in the same way blog posts are and it doesn't make factual claims, just deontic ones - that's what we call 'philosophy'.

But I can't imagine a 'sociology' of factual claims about how society is, working here. 'Anthropology' maybe." though he sounds uncertain.

". . . I think it's that - so the way it is now, everyone pays attention - or tries to pay attention to - " he chuckles strainedly " - what the top philosophers think about how you should live your life. And I think if the philosophers were framing it in factual terms - well, they're the top philosophers - even if you call them 'sociologists' - and people are going to try and take as much deontic stuff directly out of their works as possible.

The - philosophy writings that we have now - have to get rolled back, when people start acting according to them and other things break - so old load-bearing tenets are no longer valid - and if you want to re-add the repealed tenet you then have to change it to make it not break things when you implement it again -

basically everything is done with the assumption that people will follow some command, and if you couldn't figure out what command people would follow because everything was in fact-speak instead of command-speak, it'd be harder to - do new philosophy, or 'sociology', correctly.

That was a terrible thought-dump, please-grill-me-on-that-if-you-have-any-curiosities-about-it."

<Getting eaten by a new, livelier hospital sounds like changing management but with extra steps. Seems like a waste to have to build another set of hospital infrastructure in order to navigate the transition, although I guess I can see it being the best remaining option if they're painted into enough of a corner.

Hmm...

...it is definitely a failure mode, to end up with disguised commands. It's important to be honest about the fact that you're ordering people around--when you are--because otherwise people get resentful and miserable and eventually something will snap.

But there's still room for, oh...studying the differences in kids raised in two-generation versus three-generation households, for example. And it's possible for people to describe informative experiences in a way that doesn't have a specific moral, just to give people a better and more multi-dimensional understanding of what the world is like.

This maybe shades into outsider-aimed stuff, but when I was thirteen I read this book that was a collection of personal essays by people who lived or had lived in remote areas: tiny mountain villages, isolated cabins in the woods, polar observatories, stuff like that. And some of them loved it and some of them hated it and lots of them had complicated feelings about it, but the book as a whole wasn't trying to instill any one opinion in you: the idea was for you to spend some time contemplating how you would feel in those people's places, and to be aware that moving there was an option that you could take if you wanted.>

". . . Do places on Rekka, just, change management, and keep going? Why would a skilled hospital-runner be okay with just inheriting someone else's entire operation as-is, instead of what he could do, which is put up a new one optimized for how he likes to do things?

And - I'm glad y'all have a way to inhabit different lifestyles if y'all don't like to try them out. I don't understand, though - the book author* who's compiling all these essays - when they pick the essays they pick, it'll be to make some kind of point? Maybe not about which lifestyles are best, but maybe about which ones are underrated or overrated. And you do have to treat that differently from evidence you observe out in the wild yourself . . .

. . . that alone doesn't make 'sociology' not a valid field-of-knowledge - we'd call the 'child in a 3-generation - holy shit - house vs 2-generation' - thing, developmental psychology, but if you call it sociology, okay, it's still obviously a field-of-knowledge, and in that field you can't just go around trusting everything you read either! All philosophers are always trying to sell you something even if they're not doing deontology.

The difference between the child development example and the living situation essays example is, I think, that the child development thing has a possible objective angle that the writer can step back and take - they can prove to you that the study was double-blinded, or make some stark case about likelihood ratios where you'd easily notice if it was false - and just regale you with the content of their deep subject-matter expertise - whereas it seems like those essays are all about subjective personal histories? And 'subjective personal histories filtered through somebody's subtle unconscious sell' doesn't generally get you 'enduring facts' - not without debate - and you need some capacity to generate 'reliable facts with zero debate' to call something a field-of-knowledge."

There Pyeth is in the distance again - they're approaching it more from the left this time.

*The entire society of Gahai lacks a word 'editor', meaning "person who, as a paid job, exercises veto power over how authors write, without themselves contributing anything to the literature".

<...are hospitals with hundreds of staff here normally run by a single person, with that much dependence on a single person's whims? Lilyfield Hospital--the big one, with the critical-care facility--was run by a team. Like, they had a primary point-of-contact for coordination† purposes, and she was empowered to make some decisions without consulting anyone, but she couldn't just go around changing everything on her own.

Having a single runner is for, like...>

He was going to say "restaurants and stuff", but...yeah, in hindsight maybe he shouldn't be surprised that this language has no word for "restaurant", huh.

(Restaurants' indoor dining stalls are normally an even mix of transparent and opaque, and largely-outdoor or -takeout restaurants with just a single dining stall are pretty much always opaque. But...come to think of it, he's pretty sure he's heard that dining stalls were originally developed as a sanitation measure, by people who weren't actually thinking in advance about accommodations for food-sex convergents and people with severe hayfever and any other demographics for whom the logistics of eating outside the home are unusually difficult to navigate. Maybe restaurants have to first exist before they can be made accessible, and if restaurants in their primitive form are inaccessible to most people they just never happen.)

Well, fuck it, he'll just be vague for the moment: Xakda can ask for specifics if he wants. They can talk restaurant anthropology in some future recording.

<...small shops, and even then I know there's at least one in Bluecoral Bay that's changed hands twice in the past decade and is still ticking along, with a few tweaks here and there but recognisably the same store. Although it's also not uncommon for small places to--> no word for "fail-the-bus-test", either <--collapse when the person who started them is no longer available.

I mean, it's true that if you compile a book about something it's because you want people to know more about it, which for many contexts implies thinking it's underrated? And there is the classic problem where people sometimes write songs about how music is great but nobody writes songs about how music is boring--because people who think music is boring aren't going to express that through the medium of song--and so music will never portray the full breadth of experience.

Anyway...there's a place in the world for case studies, but yeah, it's...>

He's quiet for a moment. When he continues, his voice is more solemn.

<...whenever possible, you want that to be the beginning of the journey towards enduring facts rather than the end. Case studies...draw attention to there being something there worth looking into.>

(he'll be a case study soon enough, of a phenomenon--and, for that matter, of a society--that Gahai may never have another opportunity to investigate)

---

†he blithely uses this word, unaware that most brains he could theoretically have landed in here would not have contained it

"It is the same bias, in both cases, but music about how great music is, versus a book claiming to be science and just containing someone's narration of their life -

- music and science have different standards for how they prove their worthiness to exist?

Music just has to be good, to be worth peoples' attention, and you can tell if music is good or not right away by listening to it, if you already have a developed music taste. Whether the lyrics resonate with people is part of that, but music doesn't have to say something new-and-true-and-useful in order to have the right to exist. Science does. If you're claiming to have written worthwhile science, you need to say something you can prove is new-and-true-and-useful, because that's the value of science, just like being euphoric to listen to is the value of music.

Rekka's ideas about company-running are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to its newsletter.

Wild ballpark estimate, the median multi-person company around here, that ever starts turning a profit, lasts five years, and the company at the eleven-twelfths point on the distribution lasts twenty. How about Rekkan companies?"

he, too, wishes to subscribe to Rekkan newsletters

<Uh, hmm...

...at a wild ballpark estimate, and bearing in mind the restrictions to "multi-person" and "successfully turns a profit for a while", I guess maybe double those numbers? I'm not at all confident in that, though.

Especially considering how broad a definition of "lasts" would fit with this conversation: that could make it longer. Like, if a print-shop owner sells out to another print shop and they take over and run it as a second branch, the original company is gone, but there hasn't been a significant disruption to, like, people's ability to walk into that building and buy a roll of microfilm. And they probably kept the staff on.>

"I wasn't thinking about the branch thing because I've never heard of that happening! Thanks for the data!

Augh! How does any of it work! How do people know what to do, if the owner changes or isn't making decisions? I have no idea and I should just be patient and learn slowly, I guess.

But, like, if I were to take a first stab at explicating my confusion - 

- a day shift worker at a factory where lots of oil gets spilled on the floor notices that the overnight cleaners have started leaving the incredibly unwieldy interlocking anti-slip floor grates flipped, so now the rough anti-slip side is facing uselessly downward and they're trying to work on a slip-n-slide. They notify their boss but the boss doesn't know anyone on the cleaning crew.

If the thing that happens then that resolves the problem is not 'their boss tells their boss and within one more layer of command, you get the owner, who commands everybody including the cleaning crew and can pass the message back down, backed by authority' - then what is the thing that happens then that resolves the problem?"

<In a lot of cases it probably goes pretty similarly, just with a factory coordinator instead of the owner. You might sometimes pass it up to someone who laterally knows the head of cleaning, who would likely just tell them directly rather than passing it further up the chain and then back down: the head of cleaning wouldn't need a vital safety warning to be from their boss in order to act upon it.>

"Why would anyone ever not mark their message as a vital safety warning, if that's the way to have your concerns prioritized?

I mean, sure, at first, it would be an obvious lie that would cost you your reputation, so you don't, but there are fringes of the original intended category, that successive message authors can widen and widen until the actual shared concept of 'vital safety warning' includes any intra-company message you might want to convey.

Sorry if this seems too obvious to bear mentioning to you, I'm just trying to clarify where my confusion lies."

<I wasn't thinking of it as being explicitly marked as a vital safety warning? If you give someone a message that an oil-covered floor has had its anti-slip protections knocked out of commission, the recipient will notice how important it is to fix that.

And, uh...I guess that kind of broadening language-drift thing probably does happen to warnings sometimes, hyperbole and all that, but I wouldn't expect it to happen much as a deliberate attempt to violate triage? That sounds very against...acting-to-build-the-kind-of-world-you-want-to-live-in.

...sorry, I know that's a mouthful, it's a single word in Tashayan.>