"You've definitely got the one where people think that everybody is staring at them and that voices are being projected into their heads, though that can be caused by other things than serotonin disorders.  I was relieved to find it, actually.  It implies we have pointwise similarity of neurology and probably the interworld equivalent of common ancestry."

"You could probably get somebody to try an astrology-curing pill just to see if it would work."

"I presently believe Isabella's version of the story where that would not work and should not be tried.  It would be a foul act to raise a child in such a way that astrology was plausible to them, but once that child is already an adult, their ownership of their own soul takes priority."

"Maybe you should adopt some foster kids to dath ilan and see if it's a species thing or what."

"In the unlikely event that two-way portals become possible, we will take all of the foster children that we can without violating whatever treaty arrangements are worked out.  And, I expect, a vast number of adults, if your governments do not simply formalize the arrangement by which they treat their citizens as captive farm animals."

"I mean I think the places that let people leave like here would let us leave and the places that don't like... I dunno, North Korea? Wouldn't."

"Isabella is correct to distrust governments given her experience with the behavior of governments.  Citizens are allowed to leave because there do not exist incentive gradients strong enough for governments to lose significant quantities of their farm animals that way; rich countries refuse immigrants, so poor countries still allow emigration.  My read is that if there is a country that is suddenly accepting all the exhausted sad people, and giving them someplace to rest and perhaps recover, Earth governments will very quickly discover some reason why nobody should be allowed to go to dath ilan."

"I don't think you have the logistical capacity even if we're positing a portal instead of a marginally expensive teleport," says Isabella. "There's like a billion of you, how would you absorb a substantial fraction of your population in Earthling refugees next time we have a big earthquake?"

"It's legal to build houses and farm food, neither is a huge fraction of our GDP, and some thought has already gone into making industries like that ridiculously scalable just in case there is some wild reason why a tenth of our infrastructure suddenly has to rebuild the other nine-tenths.  One year after dath ilan knows about Earth, we will have enough emergency arcologies set up to evacuate a billion people from Earth.  In two years we'll be ready to accept the entire population should that become necessary.  If we ran into a nicer civilization, I expect we would have reciprocal versions of the same arrangement, in case of asteroid strikes or alien invasions or ocean algae suddenly dying out."

"Yeah, that sounds neat, I mean, like, are you going to kidnap their children or forbid them from practicing their religion or stuff like that."

"I am willing to negotiate with you about what dath ilan won't do here, Isabella, since you have the power to grant or forbid us entry, and I expect my civilization will abide by agreements I make.  When it comes to determining what my people will require others to accept as a precondition of taking refuge in our Earth, I can only guess.  In this case I'd guess that it will not be permitted to deny children education.  I can almost guarantee that weird adults will be allowed to be weird.  Except insofar as they may try to inflict true death on their own brains or the brains of others... only I'm not sure we'd impose even that condition, if it meant that fewer refugees came to us."

"You could probably get a lot of uptake on freezing dead people if you sold it right and didn't otherwise antagonize people, but if you decide that, say, raising kids as monolingual Arabic speakers in an attempt to keep them primarily connected to their parents' culture, and only letting them learn Baseline when they're like ten so they'll have accents, is 'denying them education', you will have an uphill battle."

"I am not remotely the smartest, most skilled, or most moral individual of Civilization let alone its aggregate.  I expect we will run a prediction market on which policies have which results, weighted mostly toward which policies will save the most true lives, and do what the prediction market says."

"'True' lives?"

"Every mistake a civilization makes is ultimately repairable except for the mistake of a brain being destroyed.  ...Or so I would have said until I died in a plane crash and ended up here.  It's frankly hard to track the implications of that, and for purposes of presupposing that two-way portals with dath ilan are possible, I have mostly been ignoring it.  Realistically, the people much smarter than me would deduce a lot more about what it means, and there'd be a huge update in our understanding of reality, but I don't know what the output of that update will be... I guess it is a predictable directional update that true death may end up being treated as much less of an overriding consideration.  Or maybe even more of an overriding consideration, if the Lost Dead are randomly ending up in worlds even worse than this one.  But, again, mostly not thinking about it until the other parts of my thinking are in more of an equilibrium and my baseline emotional stability is higher.  I do suspect this is a topic that would drive people much more insane than astrology, if they come from the sort of civilization that can't figure out how to use likelihood functions in their science papers."

"They freeze dead people 'cause they think they'll be able to defrost 'em later and wake 'em up," Isabella explains to Alex.

"That might be against some people's religions."

"I'm aware. I hope the prediction markets are fast on the uptake. Or let Earthlings buy in, that might work too."

"We're going to have some issues with precognition and so on, but once we've worked those out, it is utterly against our philosophy not to let Earthlings buy in.  I do expect all of you to lose all your money, of course, because the prediction markets are not as stupid as I am.  Your civilization doesn't scale from individuals to aggregates in anything like the same way; for purposes of estimating the competence of dath ilan as a whole by looking at me, you need to imagine that I'm an average twelve-year-old, not an average adult."

"Huh, okay. I will set aside a responsible recreational gambling amount of money to play with your prediction markets to start."

"Please don't actually do that until precognition issues have been worked out.  That genuinely does present a huge issue to my civilization's core infrastructure for governance and sanity, if people are suddenly applying the no-trade theorem to each other because they don't know who has precognitive information.  I cannot reasonably threaten to withhold dath ilan contact on that basis, but I do ask politely that we arrange for things to not happen that way."

"I mean, you said those would be worked out somehow and I don't expect you to know how but also my range is only an hour, me in particular you could hedge out with some kind of delay on the system."

"I have no idea whether Civilization has emergency plans for suddenly needing to impose a one-hour delay on all trade executions before the corresponding market information becomes public, but it is a nontrivial cost to all of Civilization, sort of like your civilization suddenly becoming 10% less electrically efficient or all Internet connections suddenly acquiring an extra ten seconds of latency."

"I guess if you use them for policy decisions that follows, okay. I'll stay out till they have hired a precog to kick out other precogs from the system or something."

"But then anything markets touch will kick precogs out of that prediction, and our markets are everywhere, we can't just shut them down during eclipses to make the eclipses more predictable the way you do... but it works in the short term as soon as we can afford to hire a precog, I guess?  And realistically we only need a few hours for the people much smarter than me to look at this problem and come up with some clever arrangement that is way above my paygrade to actually figure out."