Not requiring children's pain removed is different then the impression Ailor got, and that does decrease urgency quite a bit. We'll still consider it if Omnihold has any potential emmigrants. If the bar for animal welfare is preference for the current situation over non existence we're pretty certain our animals and wildlife management techniques are well past that bar. 

Our research in theory of mind revolves around upload. Testing things like that worm to see how qualia emerges in known lifeforms. It's still a while before the soonest possible confirmation of a complete theory of mind. If your approach prevents panic, then that's a cognizable reason that might apply to you and not others.

The Representative smirks, leans back, and crosses her legs in a way that subtly shows off the diamonds on the soles of her shoes. "The sub net we brought has a lot of data to share, as does the hidden second net behind it if anyone has bothered to try and hack our systems, but that's not quite all our data. There's other things to trade besides data, too, even if the path to moving bulk isn't clear yet. I'm sure we can manage something if necessary. Fortunately, it's looking less and less necessary."

Ailor does have scientific curiosity on Kastakian's ecosystems and alternate development path. Since they didn't co-evolve there's a lot of interesting questions about interspecies relationships and interactions. They're trying to come off as friendly and interested but not too pushy. 

Claiming that life for animals can be made better than non-existence through interventions within existing ecosystems is an extremely bold statement. Any attempt to eliminate disease, predation, or starvation without sterilization is usually eaten by the system, leading directly to overpopulation. R-strategists are biologically hardwired for high infant mortality, we would consider any measures lacking mass-effects or chain reactions to be too expensive. How exactly do you manage this?

Gremirians consider cryptographic protection so obviously superior to any form of attack that they mostly do not even bother calculating the morality or profit of decryption attempts, they simply categorize it as physically impossible. Regarding transport - we utilize trains in hydrogen-filled tunnels to increase the speed of sound, but the physics of the portal-cave seems to require acceleration away from it and a directional switch, which is significantly more complex. From our perspective, it is much simpler to engineer a cooperative agent possessing qualia from scratch than to digitize an existing one. If we expected mind uploading to become cost-effective before the singularity, cryonics would be far more popular.

"Did you not try clinics where animals can seek medical treatment to help them live lives better than not existing at all?"

He has no idea what the answer is going to be. Kingdoms beyond the Republic don't have free clinics for wild animals. Within the Republic, they're popular enough to be funded but not popular enough to be funded well. The gremirians appear to have a sufficiently advanced society to do this if they wanted, but their ways confound his expectations. 

"From what I've read of everyone else's ecosystems it's - fairly normal for a mostly untouched biome? 

We have a wide range of climate regions including permenant ice sheets, coral reefs, both cold and hot deserts, jungle and temperate forest, with scrub between these.

Not all that much grassland, a bit more now some endeavour groups started working on reducing the worst of the cyclic fire areas to mitigate the atmospheric consequences of industry.

A lot less volcanic activity and associated landscapes than some of y'all have too - it looks like we just have fewer, less mobile tectonic plates? 

So the fauna is - we have a lot of edible sea life which is obviously the fauna we've been most interested in cataloguing, especially scaled free swimmers, some people do still practice net fishing but area stunning has become more popular recently for mass harvesting, there are tradeoffs either way, stunning has more by-catch but the by-catch is less likely to hurt itself.

Traditional hunting is pretty quick, either straight up or spear hunting, usually if you've provoked a pursuit rather than immediately killed from ambush you'll not be successful anyway. 

Some people do also hunt land animals for variety and they're not always as careful as they might be, that's increasingly controversial now we've understood animal qualia better.

There is no organised animal agriculture - we had a dark patch of history where we could have gone in that direction, but the fish farmers lost the war and there are still patrol groups that occasionally find and dismantle rogue operations. Primarily this is on pollution and disease and ecological variety grounds rather than anything to do with animal welfare, though! 

We do have research using animal models, again there's a lot of current controversy on how acceptable conditions need to be there, they have - not been good, historically. 

And of course some pest control, again some people are advocating for more humane methods as traditionally we haven't really taken that into account, if an interaction was inconvenient we just removed the animal as efficiently as possible. The most widespread parts of this are around the coastal food forests, mining areas and so on.

I expect by the standards of someone who cares about wild animal suffering the whole thing is a horror show, I'm afraid - we are still primarily concerned with maintaining enough ecological balance and variety that resources can be harvested for food and medical purposes when required and it remains possible to 'live off the land', even though some people have started to take the worst directly culpable bits of animal suffering into account.

There just isn't all that much direct animal interaction other than hunting, pest control, research and occasional ecological preservation and remediation, some people do keep tanks of aesthetically pleasing sea life or are fond of working or retired cats or try to breed fancy colours and fur and feather types in small mammals and birds recreationally, and some endeavour groups maintain artistic exhibits incorporating animals but mostly in situ to their natural habitat because that's more efficient."

A number of diverse biomes untouched by humans? Check. That's between half and two-thirds of the planet, ignoring roads. 

Fishing is an industry. Aquaculture is not, though practiced inland to a limited extent.

Dogs and caprines were domesticated in prehistoric times. Cats are popular pets on farms. Cats are also the reason a lot of people agree to farmhand gigs. Rabbits are a trending pet in cities, as people often capture them on farms and take them home. 

Sure, wild animals suffer sometimes, but so do human beings. It's just an unpleasant part of life that most beings who live have decided isn't worth killing themselves over. 

Extincting disease in wild animal populations is only marginally more difficult than extincting disease in people. Once you have visibility on it you can isolate the bio reserves until you can vaccinate the population or cure it directly. Predation is still bad to happen to you, but it's a bad thing that typically happens once in a lifetime. Starvation can be fended off with well managed predation and birth control measures, and human labor managing ecosystems can be multiplied by in depth understanding of keystone species. It's still better to be a pet, but wild animals seem to be at least better off than dead.

It may be that we have vastly different intuitions on the amount of suffering balances the simple pleasures of life. We certainly have different intuitions on the speed of upload vs building a person from scratch!

If the animal clinics-and presumably other things- are not funded well then what's the bottleneck? Maybe it's something we can help with. At the least we're interested in learning more about how your currency run systems operate. 

Ailor is no stranger to tragic history. Things are getting better, even if too slowly, and hopefully our descendants will look on us as equally tragic figures. 

We're happy to share our current best practices for agriculture and aquaculture. They might address some of your concerns about pollution, disease, and biodiversity. The main bottleneck for us for animal agriculture is finding enough people to play with the animals regularly. Children are good for this, but then you need someone to manage the children. Do you have people who like to play with animals? 

Right... the secret of the goldmark wouldn't have been in any documents sent over. Vuleftis is probably aware on some level that the treasury must have debased coinage to meet the budget's demands. After all, the gold supply doesn't grow linearly with the economy. He is unaware, like most people in the Republic, of the fact that the goldmark has been increasingly filled with tungsten dust over the years. And of the people who are aware, they know it spends just as easily as gold and there is no benefit to not keeping the secret. After all, most transactions are made in silver or paid via check and money is a social fiction anyway.

Vuleftis doesn't know that the gold coin he passed around is fake. What he knows is economics. He takes a deep breath. 

"People make things and provide services. They then trade those goods and services. Originally, the lack of a 'double coincidence of wants' was handled by a ledger of IOUs. As societies grow more complex and people take managing some aspect of society as a full-time job, governments form. Governments then create money to pay their workers. The money is valuable to everyone else because the government collects some from everyone each year as tax. People pay the taxes because the services provided by government are valuable. It's effectively a way to say, 'I take measure of how much I value your contribution to society.'"

"Suppose a town is trying to decide what type of show to put on at the theatre during a week when they have nothing scheduled. The options are an operatic rendition of a cultural epic and..." he pauses, looking for the right euphemism. "A lascivious comedy. We have found that when people vote via paper ballot, operas are more likely to win the vote but the comedies are more likely to have greater attendance. One solution is to sell tickets for both shows. Whichever one gets more sales by the deadline is funded and the other one offers refunds on tickets sold. In this way, money lets people rank their aggregate wants more concretely than a system of participatory economics used by people who don't fully know themselves, which is most people."

"Large scale sterilization of animals seems like the kind of action that can't easily be taken back. Though I don't think sterilization should count as a harm towards those animals, if they are not themselves killed.
If you have the capabilities and resources to affect biospheres and such scale, seeking ways to minimize the suffering of animals, in nature, without strongly increasing or decreasing the population, seems to be the obvious conclusion. But I do not understand the logistics of such project."
Lirakoz doesn't say 'also Greminirian reasoning sounds really weird and i would not trust big decisions on it', yet, but thinks it very strongly. Vibes-based reasoning is what shamans do. But is not enough to act on yet, in a complicated diplomatic situation. Better not fight about Eastern Republics, and similar complicated social-epistemological traps.

Events that occur once in a lifetime carry more weight when your lifetime is OOM shorter than a human's, and attempts at predation are far more frequent than successes. We once hosted 60^6s of birds that displayed remarkable intelligence despite their brain size, yet the vast majority perished within their first year. We had clinics for large animals, robotic prey-simulations for predators, microchipping for health monitoring, and global drone observation networks - but we do not have auto-surgeons capable of treating legions of rats, even if they were disciplined enough to seek aid. We have different moral intuitions regarding insects. Not to mention the sheer horror of the ocean - which, fair, we have not yet sterilized, as we are still in the process of mapping its biodiversity and preparing arks and gendrives.

​Nature is vast, and the scale of pain and pleasure intensity is logarithmic, with a massive asymmetry toward the negative. It is trivial to conceive of hours of agony outweighing months of simple pleasure. If you do not view birth control as an act of aggression against animals, then what is the problem? Groups possess no more moral value than the sum of their individuals. If you maintain these populations indefinitely, you will, in total, sterilize more individuals across generations than we ever will. We could not manually castrate every creature, and viral suppressants are imprecise and temporary, a permanent solution is simply cheaper and achievable much sooner.

Suicide is a human invention. Animals lack the ability to conceptualize it, they are captive to instinct, so we can't trust them to believe that "if they haven't killed themselves, their life is worth living". Our ecosystems are not easily restorable, but they are restorable in principle, and we don't think we would want to restore them. If we didn't have complex ecosystems to begin with and were offered the chance to create something as morally ambiguous as wilderness, we would obviously refuse, so maybe you're attached to the status quo?

"...I think you're wrong about animal suicide, at least for our biosphere. It can be hard to tell from death by stress in small land mammals, especially as it's hard for them to get the opportunity in controlled conditions, but cetaceans will definitely do it deliberately if their conditions are sufficiently unpleasant, or sometimes just for unclear reasons."

This dolorous calculus is known to the Second Republic in a series of thought experiments. The classic form has the teacher ask, "If you could pull a lever, and end all suffering, would you do it?" The student almost always says, "Yes." The teacher then asks, "What if the lever ended all life, and thus all suffering?" The student almost always says, "No." Squaring that circle is a common topic for a persuasive essay. However, there are those who answer "yes" to both, and their train of thought is considered variously a philosophical school or a social contagion.

When bioethicists ask whether it would be acceptable to perform action A on animals but not humans is asked, the response is to define how humans are different from animals. If it involves a quality Q by which it's only a matter of degree, then it follows the bioethicist must also find it acceptable for something with more Q than humans to do to humans as well. (A general refusal to bite that bullet has had the effect of slowing medical progress compared to civilizations that practice animal experimentation, but trade-offs are what they are.)

So the question to the gremirians is, would it be acceptable for hypothetical Double Gremirians to determine that regular gremirians' lives weren't worth living and to humanely wipe them out?

Ailor does know that the coin is counterfeit, but isn't aware it ought not be unless someone tells them the supposed metal content of the coins.

"That sounds more like a work around for people being afraid to admit publicly that they enjoy comedy. Our Blue Book sounds a lot like your ledger, maybe being able to scale something like that would be useful for you?"

The Head of State continues actively listening to Lirakoz and being generally agreeable to what he's hearing.

It is possible that Ailor has status quo bias, although our current ecological status quo is quite a bit more dense and biodiverse than unimproved nature. Ailor certainly has different intuitions about the cutoff for suicide. You have to beat a small child multiple times a week for years to get a majority of them to suicidal ideation. Animal suicide has been observed- most famously in a cetacean that lost its teacher/caregiver/lover actually. It's rare enough to pattern match to Ailori children. 

Cetacean deaths don't pattern-match as suicides for us, we see navigational failures and deaths from stress. Perhaps your whales are smarter.

We're not negative utilitarians, we're regular utilitarians. There's just enough pain in the world for us to look like negative ones. We don't believe there's some unforgivable threshold of suffering beyond which a creature must be killed, we simply don't see how wild animals get compensated for this pain or are instrumentally useful for the pleasure of others. Is it enough to say that most gremirians want to die by nanobots, to have their body atoms reassembled for maximum pleasure in the universe? Is the singularity a sufficient analogy for the Double Gremirians?

If the choice is between our lives and the best use of our matter, then we agree to die. If the choice is between life and nonexistence, then no, because we are net-positive in hedons, and the presence of sufficiently negative hedons in the universe doesn't "corrupt" it if it's compensated for. If we are somehow all insane and deluded into thinking our lives are net-positive, while in fact, it's torture we forget, but this is obvious to Double Gremirians, then much depends on whether our lives are instrumentally useful in increasing the amount of happiness in the world greater than our suffering. Most Gremirians would reluctantly say that it would be right to continue suffering for the sake of greater happiness, but they lack the executive function to comply with this principle. A minority on one end of the spectrum has this function, while a minority on the other end doesn't consider it right. If we are unhappy without realizing it and deluded into thinking we are useful, then we too agree to be killed by Double Gremirians.

Counterfeit is such an ugly word. It was stamped by the Treasury as official payment for goods, services, and taxes, and the obverse clearly states that it is not permitted to be spent outside the Republic's borders. And honestly, if the tungsten content gets much higher, they might as well declare gold plated tungsten to be a new fiat currency. 

The ledgers were replaced thousands of years ago with money because they don't scale. A ledger works for a small town where a farmer can get a blacksmith to repair his plow in spring and then give him fresh figs in the fall. It doesn't work when the blacksmith has an unexpected expense and needs to trade those figs he doesn't have yet or when traders come from several towns over and don't want iron or figs in exchange for their wares. 

That being said, the temple system does use an informal ledger to try to get people to pay for services used at some point. E.g., hungry people eat at the temple, which uses the guestbook as a list of candidates who can be tapped during the planting and harvesting seasons. The temples then directly take a cut of the harvest in exchange for providing the labor. It works well enough that nobody starves. But money lets people have a economy where they can fulfill each others' wants without some centralized system trying to keep track of everything or figure out how many hours of labor as a farmhand equates to an hour of practicing medicine. 

Gremirians are consistent when it comes to Double Gremirians and being converted into things that are maximally pleasured. There too are those in the Republic who would be happy to be a part of this hedonistic apotheosis, should it ever come. But the values of the supermajority would not support this becoming state policy. 

"If I want a nice chair for my office, I go to a carpenter and describe the chair. He tells me he wants five silver shillings for it. Maybe I offer him three shillings, maybe he counters with a less nice chair that would take less time to complete, maybe we meet in the middle at four shillings. Maybe I leave and look for a carpenter who can do it for under five shillings. How do you get nice chairs in your offices?"

"We put out a search request for endeavour groups nearby that are making chairs, or someone in the crew knows someone who likes making chairs, and pick the ones we like or are most conveniently located?

If there's a shortage of ones we like then people on the more helpful end of the spectrum are likely to end up taking that as information that chairs like that are required and start making them?

Basically our society works because most people are somewhere on the line between helpful and obsessed, the obsessed ones drive forwards innovation by creating their own novel output and the much more common helpful ones want to supply whatever is most needed.

We do have money to cover those essentials that would be in under supply because people find them aversive to provide or people who can provide them are in short supply so they have to be externally incentivised not to go off and do something else, but it's not great for people to be extrinsically motivated where it's avoidable."

Double Gremirians sounds like the setup to a logic puzzle where you end up bidding more than a labor-hour to get one labor hour in return.

Ailor will happily assume that gold plated tungsten is the fiat currency and be unaware of any difficulties mentioning this may cause. The main benefit of the Blue Book is having a system of figuring out how many hours of labor as a farmhand equates to an hour of practicing medicine that everyone can more or less agree on. It doesn't really work if you don't agree on it in the first place. If you want a nice chair on Ailor you generally go on the net and select the chair you like- we don't make shoddy chairs. If you want a nice custom chair you usually talk to someone who is into chair-nerdery to get the specs right and then they let you know how many hours that debits you. Haggling benefits skill at haggling over anything else, and Ailori generally prefer symmetrically stochastically unfair scenarios over this. 

Has electronics helped your endeavor groups coordinate output? We've found it useful to have an automated way to aggregate decentralized information and share that with workers.