"Don't worry too much about it, you're interesting." Isabella collects her cane and her coat and heads out.

Thellim gives her an Earth-wave-goodbye with one hand and a dath ilani handgesture with the other.

All right, step one in the investigation plan, see if Thellim can catch up on any more sleep.  This is going to be cognitively demanding and should be done on maximum available sleep!

All right, step one worked.  Now it's time for THINKING.  If she wants to actually do this correctly instead of turning into Science Maniac Verrez, she should actually list out all the anomalies and questions worth investigating, before she starts; then pick a first target based on its tractability X importance, instead of blindly maximizing one or the other; then try to come up with her own hypothesis before she starts looking at the data, so she knows what it is that she's learning and where her prior theoretical mistakes were.

Item one:  EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD IS WRONG AND MAKES NO SENSE.

Item two:  The world doesn't appear to run on math!  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  Lots of things don't run on math!  Thellim personally knows several logical inconsistencies and they've always been very nice impossibilities.

Item two point one:  This world has many precogs, which seems to imply that the possibility that Thellim is in the top layer of reality right this second is correspondingly small.

Thellim is strongly tempted to go over on Wikipedia and look up this issue right now, except for the enthusiasm-draining strong prediction that Wikipedia isn't going to know anything about it either.

Item three:  This is apparently what happens to you when you die under circumstances where you could not possibly be cryonically preserved.  Thellim is surprised, on reflection, that there has not been more speculation about this topic inside her own Civilization.  Perhaps it is considered an infohazard, since even thinking about this for ten seconds is enough for Thellim to start seeing ways that thinking about this topic could drive people insane.  Maybe 'Wikipedia' has articles about that topic, since nobody here seems to have the concept of information with negative value to imperfectly rational agents, possibly because they've never invented the idea of rational agency in the first place or realized that information is normally supposed to have positive value.

...well, it's sort of obvious how those three issues fit together, isn't it?  This reality apparently possesses a capability of internal division that lets it obtain 'precogged' answers and outcomes from sub-layers of reality; metaphorically and perhaps literally, it's a complexity-theoretic-superior computer to the physics of Thellim's home.

Some layer of that reality contains either the original of Thellim's universe or an isomorphic copy of its physics, the same way that Isabella's universe contains all the sublayers that get precogged.

And even the top layer of Isabella's world is a sublayer of some other region of this hierarchically(?) divisible reality; and the layers above Earth somehow put the lunar eclipses into place, as an equilibrium of unknown other factors and forces and optimization pressures there.

Then, some rule of some layer above both Earth and dath ilan in the hierarchy, fired to copy Thellim from dath ilan into Earth...

Is any of this concentrating probability, though?  Or did she just come up with a hypothesis isomorphic to "Anything can happen?" and start coding out the anythings by hand instead of compressing them?  It sounds like mostly that, so far.

Still, when your previous hypothesis was Stupid in the sense of definitely prohibiting materializing from dath ilan into Earth, there is something to be said for jumping to a hypothesis of greater ignorance which allows more things to happen.  And there is also something to be said for allowing that hypothesis of ignorance to be specific and have plausible-sounding specific structure inside it, just in case it does start concentrating probability or suggesting an agenda of investigation.  It could be, for example, that 'Wikipedia' will have something to say about the precog-supporting sub-layers of reality, and that some experimentally-confirmed theory about them will look like definite affirmation that there could be a copy or original of dath ilan inside one.

Also, Thellim is starting to notice that, if she switches her attention from nonfiction to fiction, there is a strangely large amount of fiction that would prepare somebody to analyze her situation, if she died under circumstances not permitting cryonic preservation, and woke up in another world with higher information-theoretic complexity (implying more destinations than source events, which is why her transportation here would be rare as seen by the destination).  Were those novels Keeper-influenced, encoding hidden advice from Keepers secretly meant to help people like her?  "Be very careful about which nonhuman superpowers you bargain with or give your allegiance to" and "nonhuman superpowers may not respond to your requests the way you expect, not because they lack information about you, but because they have inhuman utility functions over responding to requests" are both very common themes in Portal Fantasies, now that she thinks about it.  Those are both pieces of advice that she might have guessed for dead people, if she was guessing blind.  None of that advice seems obviously relevant to her own actual situation; but it wouldn't be surprising if the Keepers guessed wrong, guessing that blindly.

...This mostly feels like the wrong thing to consider right now, even if it is in some sense the most important.

Go back to breadth-first.  What, specifically, in this world is wrong and makes no sense?  What is every anomaly Thellim can remember seeing since coming here?

1.  Her literal materialization in somebody's home.  Actually, that it was inside somebody's home and not over the middle of the ocean is sufficiently improbable-given-randomness to be worth noting itself.

2.  The home contained two males in a couple, something far more frequent here than in dath ilan; it would later be claimed to her that sexual attraction on Earth doesn't go by reproductive potential of couplings at all, in defiance of the evolutionary equilibria that are supposed to be where biology and biological cognition originally come from.

3.  Thellim tried to speak a different language to show that she was from outside their world; which didn't work, in retrospect, according to later info, because Earth had more than one widely used language; the first of many, many cases of Earth being way off the multiagent-optimal boundary despite all the theorems showing that shouldn't happen for intelligent agents in general.

4.  Thellim was contacted by a voice in her head, because Brian and Jackson would have contacted Isabella later, and Isabella is a precog...

Thellim is starting to notice an isomorphism between the set "anomalous events" and the set "all events since landing on Earth".

The thought of trying to list out everything that happened to her in order is making Thellim's brain feel tired, even if it would be the methodologically optimal thing to do.  Maybe she'll just forgive herself for being less perfect, and do this more sloppily.  Yes, even on this irreplaceable first-pass-at-the-problem where her thoughts are fresh and hindsight traps are minimal.  There's a reason why Thellim's original employment wasn't as a scientist; she didn't want that much rigor in her daily mental life.

Okay, rougher view of the anomalousness of this world.  There's all sorts of places where pieces of Earth ought to be generated by an optimized equilibrium, observable facets of reality where the derivatives of some fitness gradient should have come to an approximate rest along most dimensions as pushed by an optimization process.  Like natural selection, and sexual desire; or offered economic goods, and people selecting where to spend their money.  Then instead there's sex-indifferent sexual attraction, or airplanes with terrible food and nonsensical advertisements.

An obvious thought is that the layer of reality she's now inside didn't generate those features by tracing a long causal history to find equilibria, and instead just... filled things in, sort of.  Like an author making up features of a book, only not quite like an author, because a human author paying attention and trying for realism wouldn't have non-upgradable bad food on an expensive airplane trip.  The people inside the world are allowed to notice these facts, but not allowed to realize that they're anomalous, or they've come up with overfitted hypotheses that manage to explain what should not be explainable.

Alternatively, another obvious thought is that there's perfectly sensible reasons for everything 'anomalous', and Thellim just doesn't know what they are.  Like with 'subways' seeming at first to be moving much too many people from one place and time to another, but hiddenly, subways just make additional stops... actually that still doesn't make very much sense?  There were still way too many people, even if they were going to twenty destinations instead of one destination.  But it makes twenty much times as much sense as before Isabella explained that part to Thellim, and maybe that reflects a predictable direction of updating where Thellim could learn more and more facts and things would stop looking out-of-equilibrium.

This seems like a good general point to try to narrow down first, if Thellim isn't going to do the proper, rigorous, mental-effort-intensive, slow process of collecting all her data and considering all her questions before investigating any.

In particular - though maybe this is just recency bias with respect to what she's thought about last - the couple-sex-mix frequencies seem most likely to have an explanation that is in Wikipedia, if events in this world have explanations at all.  Economics is complicated and changes rapidly as lots of agents compete to participate in more gainful-trades.  Sexual attraction moves more slowly over evolutionary time and is easier to study.

Also, the pattern of romantic couplings generates a huge fraction of all the goodness/fun/utility in Civilization, so even here somebody should be studying that?  But no, you could say the same thing or even more so about everybody's genetic material, and here that is considered a bad thing to try to optimize.  Well, either Wikipedia will have something to say about it, or there will be no articles in Wikipedia on sexuality; and later Isabella will explain that one time a scientist wondered out loud what makes two people fall in love, and then everybody on that continent murdered each other, after which nobody ever asked the question again.

Actually, no, if that scenario is true, the whole story will be on Wikipedia!  Because Earth doesn't infohazards!

Thellim takes a private moment to complain to herself about all the dubious looks Isabella gives her, every time Thellim mentions Civilization being grownup enough to do something that Isabella's version of 'civilization' can't manage to do without people randomly killing each other, for what doesn't even sound to Thellim like reasons, and it is obvious to her which of these two ways of organizing a planet is doing better, and it's the one that can manage to subsidize childcare for unusually smart or healthy people without that turning into immediate mass murder for reasons that Thellim still cannot begin to understand even after being told the end result in this world, but fine.

And Civilization isn't a monoculture either!  Just because their world can manage to coordinate on anything does not make it a monoculture!  Thellim bets that her Civilization has managed to produce one thousand times as much informed analysis of the cost-benefit tradeoffs of how much exploration and exploitation to do in particular dimensions of society!  And then meta-optimize their world for the correct amount of diversity versus optimization!  But Isabella would just point to that as even more proof that dath ilan is a monoculture!  When what they actually have is a planet whose qualities vital to life and happiness are distinguishable from noise!

She's getting sidetracked, here.  Probably because Isabella is hosting her and being incredibly generous to a stranger without - apparently, this part itself is bizarre - any expectation that Thellim will be able to parlay her knowledge into trillionaire status and repay her.  But sometimes Isabella acts disapproving, and doesn't seem to want to clarify their relationship with more explicit terms; which makes Thellim feel unsure whether maybe the support gets shut off, if she says the wrong thing.  Thellim is at least temporarily dependent on Isabella, right now, more than she's been dependent on anyone since she was eight years old and passed the tests for initial-level economic self-determination.  Which means that Thellim has things she wants to say back to Isabella on certain subjects, but has been suppressing herself from saying, because it may or may not be safe; which means those rejoinders keep running through her mind, a loop of cognition that can't complete itself.

Thellim acknowledges this feeling; tells the feeling that it will have a chance to speak again later, when she understands her relationship with Isabella more solidly; and turns her attention back to analyzing Earth.

The topic at hand was whether the couple-sex-mix here would turn out to have a surprisingly reasonable explanation.

Thellim can try to observe this on Wikipedia.

Before she does that, she is supposed to try and solve the puzzle herself; so that, if there is a surprising answer, Thellim can notice herself having been wrong, and ask about how she went wrong.

So.  If it's not just the world being painted in sloppily, or in a pattern that Thellim doesn't understand - then how could this result be an evolutionary equilibrium?  Or more generally, what would Thellim guess had happened here, if she'd been told it was the result of history happening?

The first obvious guess was mages enabling homosexual couples to reproduce.  It's a very elegant and clear-in-retrospect guess which would have instantly explained how sexual attraction could have come uncoupled from the previous sexual polarities, to the point where Thellim is ashamed she took as long to consider that hypothesis as she did.  But it was a very good hypothesis before Isabella shot it down.

Thellim had even got as far as deducing that, with sexual reproduction uncoupled from the original binary polarity, a new binary polarity would probably start to emerge for the same reason it originally emerged in sexual organisms; hypothesized, but not known, to reflect a divergence of sexual strategies between "fertilize all the other organisms" and "actually raise the children".  That would be the 'dom' and 'sub' part, or so Thellim had been guessing; and once 'doms' and 'subs' had started pairing off, the set of all 'doms' and the set of all 'subs' making equal contributions to the next generation would have stabilized their relative population frequencies at 1:1, for the same reason that males and females were thus stabilized.  Or to be more precise, parental investment would have stabilized at 1:1, so if raising a 'dom' takes twice as many parental resources as raising a 'sub', there should be half as many 'doms' as 'subs'.

The part Isabella mentioned earlier about 'doms' assuming more control and 'subs' having less control in relationships, on this view, would represent a new iteration of the not-entirely-pleasant strategy-divergence between "insert your genetic material into other organisms" and "accept that genetic material and raise the resulting offspring" that gave rise to men and women.  Even with the specific events of prehistory screened off, dath ilan doesn't hide that general truth of the past.  The consequence of that evolutionary logic, as executing adaptations in men and women, is too obvious to need any historical records; it's immediately visible to anybody who knows evolutionary biology and has read a few romance novels.  The untrained male has an instinct to seize and guard a woman's reproductive capacity, instinctively using violence to stop her from interacting with other men at the same time that he instinctively displays other forms of commitment to try to earn her acquiescence.  The untrained female has adaptations that assume an environment in which men will try to pressure her into more sex than is optimal for her own reproductive fitness, so her adaptations push her to instinctively resist that pressure while also instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her.  There is a long-running dichotomy-tradeoff-argument in dath ilan between the position that this is just stupid, and somewhat evil, and was structurally evil back when some of the first sexually recombinant organisms started to specialize in injecting their genes into other organisms; and that current humans should opt out entirely from the more conflicty and combative ways that sex evolved to work, starting with using mental discipline to counteract those tendencies and eventually trying to select them out of humanity's descendants.  Versus the position that it's (1) not that bad, (2) actually quite fun in saner versions, and (3) now baked into humanity's core utility function as a top-level value that is not up for debate from merely instrumental considerations or how it originated a billion years earlier.  Almost nobody completely believes in either implausibly-oversimplified-policy-stance extreme, of course, but people differ in where they place themselves on that spectrum of opinion.

Thellim had gotten as far as reasoning through all that, and wondering whether the new 'dom' versus 'sub' sexual polarity had ended up better or worse from the standpoint of "how awful would it look to a generic nice alien that reproduced asexually" or, possibly, to Thellim herself.

Except that apparently mage-assisted reproduction is not what's going on.

It was a very pretty hypothesis, but it is, apparently, not what's going on.

So Thellim needs to properly let this beautiful hypothesis die, mourn it, and then start over.

Well, it's a bit of a premature-observation-cheat.  But Isabella did mention that Brian and Jackson could make arrangements with a female-female couple to get kids all around.  In principle, this ends with everybody having the same number of offspring and replicated genes as in two male-female couples.  Arguendo, why couldn't that lead to evolutionary equilibria that were just as stable?

Counter-arguendo (Thellim replies to herself):  Assuming both Brian and Jackson cooperate to raise both of Brian and Jackson's respective children, and the two women do the same with their two children - there'd be a lot of guardian-investment in children not genetically related to the raiser.  Over evolutionary time, you'd get guardians showing favor to their related children over their unrelated children, and maybe slipping some help to their offspring being raised elsewhere.  Which seems like it would degenerate back into heterosexual pairbonding.

For that matter, wouldn't some female-female couples go looking for unusually cheerful and healthy geniuses to inseminate them?  And wouldn't that produce dramatically greater reproductive variance for males than females, which would come with its own set of problematic evolutionary trends over time?  Or would that act of optimizing their children count as a forbidden-to-think-about concern over genetic inheritance because people in Isabella's world start murdering people as soon as they think about that, not that Thellim is worried about that or anything, it's not like anybody here thinks that could possibly be anomalous somehow, or in any ways related to this being the kind of universe that has an impossibly bizarre lunar eclipse setup and terrible airplane food that people don't notice as strange -

She's getting off-track again.  She's supposed to be conditioning right now on the assumption that this universe does have a consistent historical logic.

Thellim can't think of any arrangements for non-magical homosexual reproduction which would be evolutionarily stable over the long term, faced with competition from ongoing heterosexual reproduction.  This could just be because there's a set of adaptations for stably trading kids that Thellim has failed to envision.  But the more likely hypothesis - again going off premature-observation-cheating from Isabella mentioning relatively recent changes to sexual norms - is that the current situation is not in near-equilibrium evolutionarily.  Give it a few centuries, and heterosexuality will become more common; the remaining male-male couples will be frantically competing to become one of the couples that has a thousand children apiece with the female-female couples; and everybody will be consciously desperate to have children.

Continuing that reasoning further:  If 'dom' and 'sub' polarity isn't the effect of bipolar sexuality being destabilized by magical reproduction, the obvious next thought is that 'dom' and 'sub' are the causes of that destabilized bipolar sexuality.

Supposedly, Isabella's Earth doesn't put any care at all into preventing economically-adversarially-optimized superstimuli from being developed and released to the Network - has no concept of infohazards in general, apparently.  And to a first approximation, Earth has nobody in charge of its globally important features, which is why the interdimensional alien visitor got picked up by one helpful psion and taken to a small apartment.  So some porn-making corporation could have developed superstimuli versions of sexual polarity, icecreamizing male to 'dom' and female to 'sub' in ways that bound more tightly to sexual receptors than the original sexes; and then that meme spread like a detonating supernova through their whole civilization and entirely displaced masculinity/feminity.  Without there being even the theoretical possibility of anybody who could stop to question whether that was a good or bad thing.  And the new situation isn't evolutionarily stable, but Isabella's people can't let themselves think about that or where the new setup will trend or eventually stabilize, because then they'll go insane and start stabbing each other with kitchen knives.

So that - feels like Thellim's current hypothesis, more or less?  Her guess in advance of observation?  It's not a very polished hypothesis, but Thellim doubts she'll come up with a much better one for further thinking.  The point here isn't to be correct, so much as to notice what she learned after finding out the correct answer - to notice which parts of Thellim's wrong background reasoning helped produce her no-doubt-wrong conclusion.

Of course, that's assuming the Network even contains an answer.  Most of Thellim's guessing-probability is on "There literally isn't a historical reason, and people in this layer of reality are not noticing that their airport seat designs and sexual emotions aren't plausible equilibria of historical developments."

And that's quite enough trying to guess the answer in advance.  Thellim has been good, she has been very good, she has been super scientifically virtuous about being explicitly wrong in advance, instead of pretending afterwards that she was "mostly on the right track".

Now let's start Wikipedia-ing... what keyword, exactly?  "Why isn't everybody heterosexual?"  That sounds like a Network query rather than an encyclopedia article title, but maybe the Network query will tell Thellim what keywords she should even be checking in Wikipedia.

First google result:  "The invention of 'heterosexuality' - BBC Future".  It mostly seems to be arguing that 'heterosexuality' is a stupid concept and shouldn't even get a word in the language or be taught to children, although of course the article doesn't phrase it that way because sanity forbid that anybody try to coordinate around children learning optimized subject matter or that anybody try to design a language to facilitate clear thinking.

Okay, let's try: evolutionary biology of doms and subs.

Oh.  Apparently 'dom' and 'sub' are actually short for "dominant" and "submissive".

Is this actually as bad as it sounds from the words?  Maybe she should just read the science paper she found before panicking.