"I don't have a stored concept for what 'alcohol' is, but the question is something like - does somone understand themselves and reality, their desires and the consequences, well enough that they can steer their own existence and you should not get in their way?  Just as you ought not to stand next to an average adult optimizing everything they do whether they like that or not?  There is a very obvious tradeoff between letting smart people run the lives of less smart people, versus letting people run their own lives, and dath ilan has elected to be the kind of Civilization that goes mostly down the second path.  And the more your smart people are not completely calibrated about how little they know about other people, the less that's even a tradeoff because people just do strictly better running their own lives?  I would expect Earth to have entirely bad experiences with letting its smart people run the lives of other people."

"You don't have alcohol? Like, forget drinking it, what about penne alla vodka."

"They had fifteen year olds rederive all the recipes and none of them passed the competence test to have access to alcohol, I guess!" snorts Isabella. "My summary of dath ilan would absolutely not sound like 'does not let smart people run others' lives' but I suppose just like I keep telling you that magic is not a major determiner of Earthling nature you keep telling me that everyone just happens to not want to produce a really slick recording of a designated amateur song."

"See, that is exactly the kind of thing you could get as an Ill-Advised Consumer Good, and I wish I'd mentioned that to you earlier, but it didn't occur to me at that time that a civilization would not possess any exception-handling mechanisms for its clever rules not working for some people!"

"...in order to get slick recordings of designated amateur songs you must enter a store where the products are explicitly allowed to kill people?"

"Yes.  Because we have public goods that are actually good and not just elaborate plots, such as restricting hypercompetition to where it won't automatically step all over every aspect of ordinary people's ordinary lives with their friends, and we try to coordinate around preserving those."

"Wait, I don't think I heard about the songs thing. Designated amateur?"

"They won't let you broadcast professional quality versions of certain music that are supposed to be exclusively accessed through singing them with your local choir or whatever."

"What the fuck? That isn't how music works - lots of people need to learn things by ear - and it's more fun when everybody knows the song and you all just belt Bohemian Rhapsody or something because you've heard Queen do it and you know it's a bop -"

"It is possible to do things successfully and pleasantly in other than the exact ways they are done on Earth?  Plenty of people know how to sing the Chorus of Falling Down because they've heard their friends singing it.  Anybody who knows a musical instrument, which is a supermajority, can read musical instructions for it...  I don't understand why it's such a weird thought that we would have arrived at our own equilibrium which is different from your equilibrium, with its own pluses and minuses that we're pretty happy with ourselves."

"That sounds like something somebody from a dystopia would say."

"If so, it's the kind of dystopia where our buildings are prettier and our transport is faster and our cities are quieter and our artists have more funding.  Babies inherit healthier genes from their healthy parents who had subsidized childcare and grow up into children who, if they are weird but competent children, can pass a test and then go buy things even if other people think that would be a bad idea.  The only thing that makes it sound like a dystopia is simply that you are not used to any civilization that can execute good ideas correctly and you assume that everything would go as badly as it would on Earth."

"Ugh." Alex throws the last of his bagel at a pigeon and gets up.

"Do you people not even have science fiction that teaches you to be hesitant about judging other civilizations because maybe they're just weird but sane?  I was trying really hard to fit Earth into that category right up until the point where it became clear that you were in the genre of weird morally horrifying thought experiments instead!"

"We have lots of science fiction. You could read some but I don't think you'd like it." Isabella's still working on her bagels and doesn't follow Alex as he stalks back to her apartment.

"I really think this problem could be solved if you could visit dath ilan for three and a half seconds and see that the people there are basically free and happy and rich and not because we are brainwashed, we are so much less brainwashed than the horror-factories you call schools do to people here.  We would back off if we noticed we were traumatizing half our students so badly that they end up scarred away from math for life.  You people don't back off, you don't even run experiments or conditional prediction markets to notice when your supposedly smart people are doing horrific damage in the course of running other people's lives for their own good.  The only reason you could possibly think that Earth was less of a dystopia is because you have stopped noticing all the dystopian things you do, to the point that when we built less dystopian features you automatically processed all the novel parts as 'oh, probably a dystopia' because your experience is that roughly all attempts at doing anything end up dystopian but at least you are used to yours!"

"Thellim, no matter how many times you say 'I hate everything you love' in different words, it will not start sounding friendly. And no matter how many times you assign us collective responsibility for the things we don't love, it won't give us the power to wave our hands and implement educational reform."

"We manage not to scar little children such that they never want to learn math again!  How is this not evidence that maybe dath ilan is actually, really, sincerely trying to be less awful and coercive to its own people?  I get that you don't like it and that you don't have the power to change anything.  We also wouldn't like it and we do have the power to change Civilization's course when the people inside don't like something.  I don't know what crux I'm missing to convince you that something less dystopian than Earth is possible but it really seems to me that there is some enormous case of learned helplessness going on here."

"I believe that the parts of dath ilan you have seen are very comfortable in the ways that matter to you."

"And my extremely high-functioning, statistically literate news system would have made sure that if anything else was happening 0.1% of the time, it would appear on 1 out of 1000 news stories.  Yes, we have one enormous island of last resort, where people go when they've behaved badly enough, and by that I mean, stolen, raped and killed, such that no other region wants to take them, because what else do you expect us to do, kill them, and the people who go there get contraception implants, and that region is not self-governing or allowed to manufacture powerful weapons, so that peacekeepers can have enough of a military advantage that they can collect the brains of the dead and prevent new arrivals from being enslaved the moment they step off the airplane.  And we know about that and it appears in the news with roughly the same frequency that it exists.  I do not ever want to go there but I would take it in a heartbeat over Earth's prisons and what - what else would you have us do?  We make every possible accommodation for people who can't fit!  We think about it and add even more accommodations as technology allows!  We have customs specifically to protect weird people, the entire profession of reckless investing is reserved for nonconformists so that Civilization will always have exalted nonconformists, we have experimental regions to test variant ways of doing things, we have Quiet Cities for people who just can't handle Civilization for one reason or another, I truly do not understand what else you think dath ilan is supposed to do!"

"...you exile people to Australia for theft? - what is a Quiet City."

"Groups that form cities have the right to exclude people from those cities, according to their own variable criteria.  If an adult steals enough that no normal city wants them, and they have run out the patience of the sort of cities that manic philanthropists create to take in thieves - or just don't want to live there - then we made sure there was a place of last resort where anyone could go no matter what.  We do apply external coercion to make sure the Last Resort does not form its own government that could, like Earth governments, simply exclude people from there too.  There is always someplace for someone to go, and live, and not be abandoned to true death, no matter what else they have done."

"- is that the Australia part or the Quiet City part?"

"No, the Quiet Cities are normal peaceful places with adequate-quality versions of all the infrastructure.  People go there when they can't handle actively working with Civilization in its current form, for whatever reason, and choose to be passively supported by Civilization instead.  What does Earth do with somebody when they don't want to work a horrible Earth job, and no nicer jobs are being offered to them?"

"They live with their family if they have one and get, like, food stamps, if they don't? Our social services are not the best in the world here, I think they're better in parts of Europe, but even here most people who are actually homeless are not so for more than one day and most of the ones who are more homeless than that have serious mental illnesses keeping them from trying any obvious solutions."