In an ordinary Midwestern suburb is an ordinary two-bedroom house containing an ordinary couple. One of them has a plate of chicken and green beans and the other is kneeling beside him with his hands tied behind his back, opening his mouth to receive a green bean.
"That's... also a virtue in dath ilan, if she loves him that much? That's not what adaptation is? Failure to adapt is if she incorrectly estimates the probability or keeps all her policies without trying to recalculate given the new probability, not if she decides a small probability is worth waiting for her love."
"Okay, then I don't have any great examples to hand right now that don't involve explaining religion."
"Small fraction of population-moments I can worry about later or key to understanding your whole society?"
"If my mind immediately suggests blaming it on the lunar eclipses I won't say so out loud."
"Thanks, I appreciate that. Uh, billions of people believe in one of several popular - ontological frameworks - according to which the world was created by an entity or possibly a coalition of entities with supernatural powers who are often further postulated to be omnipotent and omniscient and omnibenevolent, though the details vary widely. There are other less common religions that I know less about but also postulate supernatural entities that do not make much sense."
"On priors I'd have considered that quite plausible, and alarming." Thellim quietly predicts: People think about it really badly with similar patterns as astrology, Isabella thinks it is all fake, all the specific claims listed on Wikipedia fail to fact-check according to Wikipedia's referenced papers.
"Obviously not omnibenevolent relative to my culture's utility function distribution, but your lunar-eclipse-related phenomena don't look like the unoptimized rest of Nature - they don't seem like stars exploding or waves in an ocean. Between natural selection, cognitive intelligence, and gradient balancing in multiagent equilibria, I'd have said it looks more like cognitive intelligence or gradient balancing."
"You think there's some differential equations where you solve them and end up with that? I do consider that very plausible, considering that such solutions are far from obvious at a first glance to bounded agents, that the thing did actually happen, and that powerful beings have no obvious reason to hide from you. Cognitive agency seems relatively more plausible, but I would not have predicted this world to exist in the first place, so it is very understandable if you laugh at my priors and ignore them instead of trying to update them on evidence they said was impossible."
"It looks to me like somebody did it on purpose, instead of, say, molecules bonded together and that's what came out. But I would not have guessed in advance that it would happen at all and what you're supposed to do in a case like that is throw out all the ideas that didn't predict the thing and go find some new ideas, instead of trying to make it fit into your old ideas."
"If I can just look up where the eclipse powers come from in Wikipedia I am going to go do that immediately, possibly stomping directly through any solid objects that may be in my way. But I don't think you mean that?"
"Billions of people consider their religious beliefs an important part of their lives, conflict between religious groups has driven many wars, religious discrimination is illegal in some contexts, display of mainstream-palatable religious belief is still very helpful to being elected to public office and in some social situations."
"With the exception of falling far enough off the multiagent-optimal boundary to end up in multiagent-value-destroying conflict, it seems hard to blame them for that? If you had disagreements about superpowerful beings watching everything your civilization was doing, that would be a very reasonable thing to form political factions about. Even dath ilan currently has epistemically-based political factions instead of being able to apply theorems about no common knowledge of disagreement, embarrassing as that may be."
"...I don't feel like I'm communicating about this effectively but I don't know what to try next."
Call up a fiction matchmaker and get them to steer me to a good short novel immersing me in it
"You don't have to solve all of my ignorance in a day, unless there's some deadline I'm unaware of."
"If I can in fact take over this world I have to do that, or so it currently seems to me. I'm not sure if that disagreement reflects mistakes on my part, mistakes on your part, different utilities or all three."
"I mean, you can't, but you could perhaps be very destructive trying. If you actually think it's a good idea for dath ilani values to outright conquer Earth as opposed to just sending us math teachers I am not going to try to get in touch with them so that more of you can try."
"I think it's a good idea for dath ilani frameworks and institutions to exist on Earth, modulo points like it being possible that magical conditions here directly disallow science papers to use likelihood functions or people going insane if they think about heredity the wrong way. It will be a lot easier to figure that out, adapt frameworks, and import them, if it's Civilization doing it instead of me trying to reconstruct things from memory. The part where your version of civilization cannot just import all of our good ideas itself, the same way that dath ilan would just directly copy all your good ideas and pay you patent-gratuities on them, is something that - we're not just going to leave you like this. It's not in us to do that."