WHALES SEEM KIND OF SMART ARE YOU SURE IT'S A GOOD IDEA TO FRY THEM

We don't actually fry whales! It's a figure of speech. (Also, whales are *mammals*)

...She thinks Japanese people still hunt and eat whales, though? And probably some indigenous tribes? And of course historically whaling was a massive industry, whale blubber was a very important economic good. She'd be surprised if the same weren't true for Eifwen?

Well yeah but like, we stopped and tried to make reparations.

We agree whales are mammals; they're closely related to hippopotami and more distantly to giraffes and such.

Yeah, she would also prefer Earthlings stopped eating animals like octopus and so on but at least it's not particularly common

Octopi are kind of scary. Their brains are mostly in their arms. Imagine what it would be like if each of your arms had a large portion of your brain and they acted somewhat independently. It's unsettling.

She has imagined this before, actually! She would rather not do so again.

Summer thinks imagining messed up things like that from time to time is an important part of making sense of your place in the world!

Well, she has imagined it.

And, also, what???

Mindspace is deep and wide and incomprehensible but you're a mind nonetheless and you'll never fully appreciate your tiny little corner of it if you don't try to grasp aliens!

Yeah but you'll never fully appreciate it anyways, so why privilege that intervention in particular?

Because octopi came up.

Does Celene think she carefully picks optimal interventions out of the space of all possible interventions? Who does that?

...Probably sometimes people a lot smarter than her do that?

Within computational and information constraints, yeah.

But to answer the question of "who dedicates that much computation to it" the answer is "people who care about getting the right answer".

Summer is slightly torn between saying that sounds really stressful and calling Celene adorably nerdy.

Her entire life is stress.

(Well, not actually, but it does get kind of stressful, yes).

Has Celene considered getting wrong answers more often?

Well then she'd get worse results! And maybe she really really cares about getting good results!

Summer thinks your entire life being stress is a worse result!

It was an exaggeration! And lots of things are stressful! Thinking about unfortunate features of reality and confronting how bad it is is also really stressful but it's important to do it anyways! You can't just live in denial!

Was it an exaggeration Celene? Was it?

But yeah she's not asserting the optimal amount of stress is zero or anything. At absolute minimum, sometimes stressful things are fun.

Yes!!!! It was!!!

She's not sure she finds stressful things fun ever? Except in spite of the stress?

Has Celene never... played a difficult video game? Summer is making her play a difficult video game.

Of course she has! She's just unsure that, if you distilled her experience of it down to its base components, the stress part would be contributing to her enjoyment rather than an unfortunate casualty of something else that's necessary.