[So... the magic makes the environment less harsh than dath ilan in a way that means people here evolved less refined reasoning capacity, rather than them being directly disturbed by lunar forces?  Your environment seems very aggressive when it comes to, for example, successfully exploiting my taste buds with extra-salty snacks while I was distracted.]

[If you want me to lock up the snacks so only the resident eclipsed can eat them then I can do that but I'd, you know, rather not. Please stop attributing large scale trends to magic all the time. There are fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand unlocked eclipsed in the entire world and most of us are under twenty-five and don't know how to do much yet. It's possible the environment is less harsh than dath ilan but my first guess is that you start disappearing people if they start seriously considering crystal healing instead of allowing them to wander around putting quartzes in their purse or whatever, people-disappearing habits would certainly be a harshness of the environment.]

[I... genuinely do not know what we would do if somebody in our world suddenly started exhibiting the reasoning pattern I saw in the astrology repository, though we would have to do something if they started exhibiting other behavior patterns in your world, like them stabbing people if they thought too hard about eugenics.  I don't think somebody like that would end up happy enough to have kids, so you're correct regardless that the genes would be disadvantaged in our world more than yours.  I suppose if that's gone on long enough, it's a non-directly-magical explanation for why people here would have generally less refined reasoning capabilities] and how Isabella isn't more INCREDIBLY DISTURBED by that concept Thellim cannot understand, oh wait she can it's magic.  [The part where you go insane if you try to control your own population genetics is totally magic, though, just saying.  Sorry if I seem to be harping on that.]

[- okay, uh, people don't actually "start stabbing people if they think too hard about eugenics", perhaps I didn't emphasize enough how much I was oversimplifying. Do you want me to go into that more right now or when I get home? You could read the Wikipedia page on eugenics.]

[Oh, that sounds like fun.  I can't wait to see what kind of reasoning errors that produces.  Hopefully having all these infohazards inside my head does not detonate me after I actually get exposed to a lunar eclipse here.]

[Even if you eat before your eclipse and you get magic, you probably won't explode yourself.]

[No, I mean that if I go around reading all the Wikipedia articles about knowledge that drives your people insane, I may be fine now but I'd be gambling a lot on either that quality sticking to me through your next lunar eclipse, or on being able to solve my local version of that problem in the next few months.]

[We do not have information that straightforwardly drives people insane, though given your rigid definition of sanity I suppose long term cultural exposure could get a result you'd call that.]

Isabella JUST GOT THROUGH SAYING that otherwise functional people suddenly can't reason consistently about 'ghosts' and YOU TOTALLY HAVE INFORMATION THAT DRIVES PEOPLE INSANE, are you not even allowed to notice THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE SPECIFIC PROPOSITION AND THE GENERAL ONE.

Thellim takes some deep breaths and calms herself.  This is not actually Isabella's fault in any way.

Also - Thellim needs to keep reminding herself about this, because she has just had to defend her own views in argument and you need to achieve a very high mental skill level before that stops having at least temporary effects on you - also, Thellim herself could be the wrong one here.  Well, it's increasingly hard to see how Isabella could be right.  But that doesn't mean Thellim herself is right, or that she is not pervasively misunderstanding some things due to total nonacquaintance with this dimension, perhaps in a way that would justly annoy Isabella especially if Thellim gets strident about it.

If this was a book in Science Maniac Verrez then Thellim would be managing to be wrong about nearly but not quite everything while missing key clues in Isabella's presentation because Thellim was annoyed and actually Thellim has been very quickly assembling a very large body of conjoined hypotheses in a way that is not completely nonreminiscent of Verrez at his worst.  Maybe it's fine if you do that in real life instead of in a humorous young-adult novel but...

...okay, no, you probably can't get away with that in real life either.  P(A /\ B) <= P(A).

If people here aren't allowed to know that while thinking about astrology that would explain an awful lot.

...but it is logically-necessarily less probable than people making mistakes about astrology for any reason.

[Isabella, I apologize if I've been running too quickly with my hypotheses in a way that is obviously stupid if you're a native.  I believe I got caught up in the heat of argument and started stringing ideas together more quickly than I could realistically expect to do correctly after being transported to a new dimension.  It - does still seem fairly likely to me that something is wrong in a very general sense covering at least some of the things jumping out at me, but I shouldn't be sounding confident so early of anything more specific than that.  I will follow your advice about looking up astrology on Wikipedia, and try to learn more than the very little I actually know about this place.]

There.  Now she is not totally being Verrez on an unusually silly day anymore, and is once again being a virtuous, mentally disciplined person.

[Glad to hear it. Anything else I should hear before I go back to work?]

[Nothing comes to mind.]

As soon as Thellim tried being happy with herself, her mind went back to that video.  She wonders how long it will be, if ever, before that wears off.

And Thellim goes to look up astrology on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia refers her to some science papers!

Some of the papers are behind paywalls!

Okay.  Thellim will not overreact to this.  It is not proof of magical insanity.  They don't do it in dath ilan and would by local custom consider that to be Not Done and disqualify the papers as real science.  But that could conceivably vary between worlds in a way that doesn't violate coherence theorems.  Producing science costs money and selling it could be profitable, that is a totally reasonable thing to do differently in another world.

Here's some papers not behind paywalls.  Science aho!

What the -

Isabella calls back when she has luncheon. [Hey, Wikipedia treating you all right?]

[It is the general practice of my people that we try to develop bad theories even when we know they're going to be wrong, so that after the predictions turn out wrong, we can understand what we were wrong about.  I hope that you can take it in that spirit when I say that my current bad theory, entertained only for the sake of making predictions that I know will prove flawed, is that the moon doesn't let you do science.]

[...is that really your best guess? The moon doesn't let us do science?]

[Well you see, or rather, as my people would see, there is a certain probability-theoretic concept lying at the center of all epistemology - which either English doesn't have terminology for, or the person who put English into my head happened to not know, or it just isn't in my head for any other reason, but under the circumstances I am guessing the first case - which concept is also the thing that experimenters report in a sane world - called by my people the 'likelihood function'.  Conceptually, it is an extremely simple, natural, unambiguous mathematical object which combines by multiplication across different experiments.  For example, if there are two hypotheses H1 and H2, and the first experiment reports evidence E1 which is 1/3 likely given H1 and 1/4 likely given H2, and experiment two reports observation E2 which is 1/2 likely given H1 and 1/8 likely given H2, we can combine the two likelihood functions to say that the evidence is 1/6 likely given H1 and 1/32 likely given H2.  That is not an oversimplification, it is how that small discrete case of likelihood functions validly works.]

[I have been trying to entertain the hypothesis that there is some clever useful thing that 'p-values' and 'confidence intervals' are doing, but I have been looking up how to combine them, and they do not combine in any simple or sane way, and that disadvantage alone for purposes of accumulating knowledge should be decisive.  And also the underlying epistemology seems, to put it mildly, deranged, and allows you to attribute different 'p-values' to the same piece of evidence depending on the experimenter's state of mind.  It is likewise possible to measure an electric charge and get a '90% confidence interval' of [green, purple] if you have a procedure that generates a 95% confidence interval and then you add a small chance of substituting [green, purple] to the output of the previous procedure.  And it just seems really really conspicuous that something ripped the concept of likelihood functions out of your world's epistemology, and an enormous weird ad-hoc pseudo-mathematical edifice had to grow up around the gaping sucking void this left behind.  And I just don't see what kind of fact I could be missing about your world that could possibly contextualize this, because this is about math itself, not the empirics of any particular science.  I am trying to be a good epistemically humble reasoner and keep in mind alternative hypotheses like 'well, it's more likely that this "happened for any reason" than "happened because of magic", maybe there is just a giant conspiracy of journal editors who suppress all mention of likelihood functions, all across the multiple scientific fields whose papers I tried to check'.  But it really really seems realistically more likely that a world which permits power-granting lunar eclipses can also permit some generalized Eater of the Concept of Likelihood Functions.]

[Thank you for attending my stupid lecture about my wrong hypothesis.  How has your day been going?]