Omnihold does not bring anyone with actual responsibility to a summit, because negotiators should be optimized for communication and not decision-making. Their delegates are supermodels of various gendertropes in open ribbon ensembles. They have perfect smiles - with artificial teeth mounted over modular sockets, serving both as an input device and a bone-conduction replacement for earpieces. They have gorgeous hair - indistinguishable from the real thing, but with EEG monitoring grids tucked under the wigs.

Their proportions and facial symmetry are borderline infohazardous, the kind of look you only get by auctioning gametes with a top-1% population filter, and their pristine skin looks like it hasn't known a blemish since birth.

They stick close to each other with the friendly vibe, taking turns to speak and interrupting one another with a scripted organicity. Two-thirds of them are female, three-thirds are pumped full of empathogens, all are under twenty-five. A few wear suspiciously thin AR glasses with cameras, which, if anyone’s internal prediction markets are betting on it, are just thin clients with minimal onboard processing, relaying signals back to a much beefier router.

Omnihold gives their opening speech, noting that the portal seems narrow enough that any post-industrial civ could block or destroy it from their side, and that this is a good starting point to choose Something Which Is Not This. They commit to not using the portal for any scenario that the gatekeeper civilizations could have retrospectively stopped by denying them passage, even if gatekeeper's mutual enclaves in each other's territories become practically capable of undesirable behavior with impunity, and hope for the same in return. They believe that this contact can’t be worse than its absence and is likely much, much better!

Given the logistical constraints, scientific data, cultural assets, and biological samples seem like the obvious trade items. Consequently, they’re curious about how other worlds handle intellectual property and what exactly their enforcement looks like.

The delegation from Ailor consists of the Head of State, Head of Government, Representative of Representatives, and a small swarm of identically black clad attendants trying to disappear into the background. 

The Head of Government is an older man whose outfit looks like it was cobbled together from a half dozen types of regalia or more. His hat is a tiara wrapped around a headdress wrapped around a crown. A half cape crowns his kimono and is held in place by a large torc. His boots are heavily beaded moccasins that rattle when he walks. He leans often on a slim but ornate staff taller than he is.  

The Head of Government is wearing practical low profile power armor.

The Representative of Representatives is wearing an ornate toga made of some sheer material that continually threatens to be scandalous but never quite manages to achieve that, paired with dressy but practical sandals. 

All of the Ailori wear a deck on their non-dominant arm and their clothes are covered densely with the colored dots of their writing. Anyone could read it if they don't mind staring closer than might be polite on some worlds. 

Ailor does not have a concept of intellectual property and is not sure the concept is translating properly.

The Head of State finishes the opening formalities and sits down.

The Representative of Representatives engages the Omnihold delegation. Would they consider a blanket information and data sharing agreement for this intellectual property? A symmetrically stochastically unfair exchange has the most expected value and least overhead. If not, then is is acceptable to manage our trade-ledger with Omnihold as a unit and allow you to manage things internally from there? 

The delegate leaning forward, maintaining maximum eye contact with the Representative of Representatives, seems surprised, but in a good way - more like an itch to see Trade With Aliens finally manifest in reality. Information regulation is tricky, and societies without it are a common trope, but usually, they appear in "fragile mutual deterrence between uncoordinated warlords" settings. To not even have the concept of IP, however, carries a subverted tint of sanctity. If no one in their world has ever suffered a pathetic bout of paranoia about someone stealing and monetizing their super-valuable precious ideas, then she’s definitely sponsoring sperm and egg imports in hopes of replicating their population.

Her teeth vibrate imperceptibly, and the voice in her head, which she merely vocalizes, begins a brief recap of an ancient parable on the value of information, trying to shyly insert LLM-advised ailorianisms and overall be aesthetically pleasing to listener. She uses a metaphor where knowledge is a series of islands that no one created, but merely discovered while wandering the realm of ideas. Much like the bounties of nature, that which is not man-made belongs to no one - or belongs equally to all cooperative agents, justifying a UBI from geo-rent. But when you pluck a fruit from a wild tree, you must pay for depriving others of it. Information-fruits, however, are instantly copied, you deprive no one of them. It sounds compelling that all should be free to use them.

But if an island is uninhabited and far from civilization, it’s no comfort that you have the right to eat its fruit without limit, first, you have to get there. Therefore, the discoverer has every right to build a bridge and sell the fruit, to get paid for their logistical services - and to prevent the cultivation of those fruits by removing the seeds, for without them, those fruits wouldn't be on the market at all.

Yet, they don’t own the idea itself. Anyone else can build a similar bridge if they can prove they did it independently - that they found the island in their own travels without knowledge of the existing bridge. In modern terms: you can get a duplicate of any patent through "clean room design" in a causally isolated environment with a delayed news feed and so on, after which you may sell similar rights to view art, produce tech, or any other fruits of your island.

(the male delegate enters the dialogue, contrasting with the previous fairy-tale tone):

Except it’s just stupid to build two identical bridges to the same island. It’s not like they have bandwidth limits. So, the discoverer sets a price based on the expected time until the rediscovery of their island, extracting profit for accelerating progress relative to a counterfactual universe where someone else found it later. Prediction markets, given proper data for calibration, become uncannily accurate at this.

Some patents still cause disputes regarding the fair price and the probability function of rediscovery, but gremirians maintain a clean-room infrastructure and a legal consensus on proper causal isolation so that any unfair knowledge monopolies naturally inflate to zero. It’s a sad zero-sum game, but a necessary response to defection.

Furthermore, their current consensus holds that rights to creative works have an unlimited duration, as it is virtually impossible to create literally the same piece of art independently - every bridge leads to its own unique island. Inspiration from others' work, however, remains free. You don't pay royalties to the original author when writing fanfics.

All of this is relevant to how the Omnihold plans to evaluate Ailori data. They will trade the rights to use intellectual property as a special form of equity, identifying an ideal competitive price - indefinite for culture, and based on counterfactual discovery time for technology. However, they intend to isolate the profit accounts for each individual work until the author is identified.

They are glad the median Ailori are generous enough to share ideas freely. But if a small group of Ailori is dissatisfied with the status quo and wishes to be paid directly - and simply lacks the infrastructure for monetization - they may contact Omnihold to claim authorship and receive direct payouts after identity verification. In cases of refused profit, inability to determine preferences of the author (e.g., death), unidentifiable authorship, or excessive identification costs, they are prepared to route these accounts directly to the Ailor government.

In the other direction, regarding the sale of data from the Omnihold to Ailor, the proposed deal with the state as a single entity does indeed sound like the best option. Nonpublic prediction markets on both sides can bet on the expected value of the knowledge before its public release and the timelines for independent rediscovery to determine price, with standard probability-of-refusal functions proportional to the expected unfairness of the deal. Does this sound fair and implementable?

The Representative of Representatives makes eye contact and smiles back, her manner going slightly sultry. There's no super-stimulus about her, but just genuine and honest curiosity. She speaks little and listens much as the metaphor unfolds. And she actively listens, paying her full attention and seeming to follow along easily even as the Ailorianisms start to sound like Oma Desala speaking Tamarian. She's almost ready to reply when the second delegate enters the conversation. 

These prediction markets sound interesting! Ailor does ever reproduce the bridges to the islands of knowledge to better credit research, as a training tool, and as a competitive sport. The Representative isn't old enough to have any experience with actual currency, but it sounds like this prediction market ought to reproduce their experimental results in a new way. How long do you think it will take to teach someone how to prediction market, and what sort of isolation setup would you recommend for them? 

The Kastakian delegation is about as organised as ever, which means there appear to be three separate crews involved and none of them have successfully come to a consensus on their position before running out of time and just showing up anyway. Also they are humanoid sized feathered lizards along the lines of Archaeopteryx, and while they are thoroughly adorned in utility belts and backpacks they don't appear to have much use for clothing.

While the more Serious Business crew have been listening, making a lot of notes, and occasionally having confused whispered arguments over why their counterparts still seem to think they exist in conditions of scarcity even though that is clearly not the case, and the more Sensible crew has been setting up a refreshments station with long descriptions of the ingredients and processes in case any of the other delegates want some fish snacks or fruit water, the science oriented crew has most finished hooking up a rather bulky and complicated looking device that now displays a simple text menu in green on black, with a rather clunky large keyboard attached for inputs. It is attached to some large cables snaking back out through the portal, which appear to be necessary for the local Internet equivalent. 

"Connection to the Network is available!" crows Yompam triumphantly. "If you'd like to contribute or read our entire civilisational output, it's all here. As a reminder, we are philosophically opposed to anyone having to reinvent the wheel for any reason. If you have a connector from previous contacts, the splice point is here, for quicker retrieval. Obviously we also appreciate contributions, and give our thanks for previous knowledge transfer that has been very useful, although we are using tried and tested technology here rather than the output of relevant endeavour groups to avoid any safety issues."

Junilla takes a break from the snack area to contribute, "I don't think we're compatible for offspring, but if you have advances that could use our genetic material, I'm sure you'll recieve more volunteers than you can use."

"I would just like to clarify that because of the population disparity it is absolutely possible you could use all available samples, if you did find a route to doing so."

(As a reminder of information which would have been shared in previous summits: Kastakia struggles to stay at replacement rate with only around a million inhabitants; Kastakians lay single large eggs and generally devote a whole found-family group to raising one egg) 

Property is pretty simple in theory. If you made a thing or use a thing then it's yours. Combined with the fungibility of labor that allows you to generate a Blue Book value by collecting large amounts of data for a task and calculating the expectation value. Ideally we would have Blue Book values for everything, but as noted some things are difficult or time consuming to replicate. As-a-result there are portions of society that de facto run on vibes and polycule dynamics. We've only been in the Current Era for about 30 years, so information on Gremiria's mistakes would in expectation be quite useful.

That's a novel and interesting way to ask for sex. However, if you want sex you can just ask directly. Here is the indicator on her clothing that she's open to being approached for sex and here is her sexual preferences and limits.

It seems like there's a limited time opportunity to exploit inter-world ignorance for otherwise difficult repetition testing. Usually we just secure an appropriate venue and spin up a sub net. Unfortunately, this mostly means that we can only use students and only once. As long as most people aren't cheating the game then any leaks would show up as a radical outlier and naturally be trimmed. 

The Head of Government types something out on his deck, and a tech approaches Yompam to see about interfacing nets properly. Ailor has a curated sub net compressed for easy transfer that Kastakian can just have, and enough empty storage to handle multiple uncompressed Internets in expectation. 

The Head of State ceremoniously breaks a loaf of bread into pieces while chanting out an incantation in Latin. The Ailori contribution to the snack bar is laboratory grade potable water and a few forms of a very basic bread. Each is very clearly labeled with its component ingredients, going so far as to include molecular diagrams and pie charts. They don't want to accidentally poison someone with different biology. 

The delegation from the Second Republic consists mostly of translator-secretaries for Vuleftis, an Academy-educated member of parliament and on the committee vis-a-vis suzerainty. He was selected for this mission because his background gives him insight into what three of the largest factions on his world might find acceptable in any sort of negotiation. Up to this point, he and his translators have been quietly trying to follow several conversations in different languages none of them have previously heard spoken correctly, containing concepts they don't have full reference points for.

A foreign Head of State saying something almost intelligible was not in the briefing and is frankly more shocking than talking bird-people.

"Oh, uh, that was more along the lines of the delegate from Gremiria's remarks regarding the desire for children with a different motivational system - we do have currency, but ideas aren't something we would consider trading for it, it's really just to make sure we get enough medical and care staff and essential resource extraction, by offering them better resource access when they're incapacitated. Ideas are for being used.

As for property, some people do like to keep specific personal comfort objects, and sometimes essential equipment needs to not be open for anyone to wander off with?"

Vuleftis looks over the translation diagrams. The delegates from Ailor, Gremiria, and Kastakia all say they have money, but it isn't clear they're using the term the same way.

"Excuse me,"  Vuleftis says, pausing for the translators to repeat him. "Maybe I missed something in my notes, but as near as I can tell, these terms of 'money' and 'currency' translate to something like this." He holds up what looks like a tiny, flat, gold cylinder, and passes it to a secretary to pass around the table. "And it functions as a voucher for some allotment of economic output?"

One of the Serious faction finally speaks up. "Metals are one of the things that might be exchangeable for currency units if a hospital-ship is running out of them, or occasionally if an endeavour-group wants them that badly and can't demonstrate how useful they'll be to them any other way, but mostly the hospital-ships just keep records of accrued currency."

"And the hospital-ships will provide for anyone, but if you haven't accrued any currency you'll be in a shared ward and on cheap mass catering food, which many people are motivated to avoid."

Vuleftis nods slowly. He's guessing "currency units" are a more abstract form of what coins represent and that instances of that abstraction are not exactly lying around in the Republic's vault, ready to be traded. 

Vuleftis looks at another diagram. Then he pulls out a dictionary and flips through it. Then he looks at the diagram again. "Theocratic communism" sounds like what the High Council has been trying to engineer for over a hundred years. Sure, no Council member would claim they'd succeeded. And certain aspects of the cultural malaise seem attributable to the Council's plans. But only the most uncharitable cynic would say that it's "failed hideously."

Of course, everyone else here seems more technologically advanced. Maybe that's the problem? You don't expect civilization to make it through the decade if every individual builds their own death ray. Maybe communism creates the conditions to let people create the anti-communism... thing? In any case, the Council will surely want any data about communist failure modes that the Ailori get from the gremirians.

It was not an offer of sex! Our sexuality is decoupled from reproduction, though we will keep the suggestion in mind for the future. We intended to propose a trade in gametes, which seems a far more straightforward method of replicating a foreign population on one’s own planet.

Omnihold possesses a concept of "sharing food as a universal gesture of trust", but this was not a high priority in the delegate selection process, gremirians are quite picky eaters. But fine, after some consultation with the voices in their heads and processing preferences via teeth interfaces and EEG, they have identified a delegate who would be genuinely delighted to sample the alien fish snacks while chatting with the Kastakians.

...Kastakia, regardless of how much you insist on waiving gratitude at a collective level, we will still sell your knowledge at what we deem fair prices and register accounts to the authors until they are claimed under our system. At least for now. Millions of our people are already sorting through the downloaded data so that our "debt" for ideas authored by the deceased can be directed to you as a society - allowing for a symmetrical gratitude in the form of immediate publication of our own data for a roughly equivalent sum. However, we still fear offending individuals who might disagree with your system, those more egoistic who cannot receive direct compensation otherwise.

Money is a much broader term than a unit of exchange! Before radio, it might have been metals, sure, but people dreamed of a Total Market ETF as a currency long before the technical means existed. Under the Efficient Market Hypothesis, investing in every business on the planet equally is the investor's null hypothesis. There is an aesthetic beauty to it - every transaction becomes an addition to the supermind of humanity, signaling that someone believes they see a way to extract value above the market average through cooperation with others.

But that is not the most vital part. When you have a single fund owning ~one-third of every corporation, it becomes "egoistically altruistic" and internalizes externalities, because damage caused by one company hurts others within the same portfolio, as in universal ownership theory. It also votes for the adoption of universal industry standards via assurance contracts, aligning companies toward a common good - such as interlocking modular buildings - and can occasionally sponsor projects requiring global cooperation, like paying for universal language courses to transition to a conlang. This, by the way, is what Omnihold is.

The problem with attempting to build communism is that despite a majority recognizing that Open Individualism and the Veil of Ignorance under Eternalism make Total Hedonistic Utilitarianism the correct course of action, our nature is illusory. We are tethered to time and ego in an evolutionary cage. In practice, one cannot be an absolutely coherent Bodhisattva, loving others as oneself. They work on meditations, psychedelics, therapy and general education to increase coherence and the chances of interpersonal experiences, but usually, this is not required, as you can be useful to others simply by being egoistically efficient. This is to say nothing of the 3/20 who disagree with this metaphysics entirely.

Gremirians simply lack the internal motivation to help others. They may realize they are acting counterproductively to their own interests in a retrospective maximization of the chance of being a happy moment, but they feel no guilt or other form of negative feedback in connection with this. Their charity averages 1/15 of the GDP, but three-quarters of that comes from inheritances - and even inheritances are problematic, as most strive to exhaust their entire savings exactly before assisted suicide in old age.

The laws of physics make destruction easier than creation, so ancient attempts to coerce more coherent altruistic behavior led to corruption on a scale above a maximum of ~9*60^2, or guaranteed mutual destruction via cheap toxin production both within and between cities, or duty-evasion and parasitism by large swaths of the population, forcing the adoption of a framework of freedom as a point of compromise. Sure, here there are some detailed historical records.

"If you can prepare a document on how you intend to raise the children, and ideally a template of options for people to choose from, some Adventurers are very likely to make ready to donate eggs. If you'd like other gametes for study rather than direct use we're likely to get more sample than we can easily transfer through the world interface."

"Reciprocation is highly appreciated. I am not sure we can reasonably reciprocate the reception of your own gametes for replicating a foreign population locally - one of our concerns since this all started is being outcompeted for our own natural resources, as you might understand."

We do in fact have in vitro if you want gametes, although we don't expect that to be sufficient or necessary to reproduce the population whatever that means? Trading for diversity is likely a good idea.

Ailor is shocked by the idea that Gremirians can't achieve Universal Love! A typical Ailori can manage at least the very basics of Universal Love, Zen, and Enlightenment with minimal exposure to the concepts and a few months hermitage at the appropriate developmental stage, even in environments actively hostile to its development. If that doesn't work.... we don't actually know what to do to help. It's as bizarre to Ailor as if you had said you spend an hour a month breathing water. 

(This is Ailor's first summit, so they may be lacking context Kastakia provided with previous summits if it's not in the internet-sharing)

The Head of State is the only one to touch the coin even as it's held up for the Head of Government to examine. The Head of Government looks at it like it's mildly radioactive before schooling his demeanor and replying, "Yes, we had something like this in our past. We no longer use currency as a means of rationing. It's still used at times in board games and such, as a way of simulating scarcity."

"What, uh, do you have intrinsic motivation for if not helping others, then? Just the standard food, sex, comfort, or is there something else we might be missing here?" 

"I don't want to present us as flawless, we do have those who just opt out of society. You won't find their direct works in our Internet because they definitely opt out of that." 

The social sciences part of the science team is absolutely enthralled by the childraising schema. One of them is note taking as fast as possible on the Kastakian terminal while the others are engaged in enthusiastic wing waving debate complete with occasional mock charges, hissing and one brief full on tussle that is quickly broken up by the others as Ferek is glaring at them. The combatants are exiled swiftly back through the portal.

Vuleftis scans his teams transcripts and makes some notes

 - work out the details about access to natural philosophy on Kastakia
 - license our public domain to Gremiria and let them hold the proceeds in escrow

The problem with attempting to build communism is that despite a majority recognizing that Open Individualism and the Veil of Ignorance under Eternalism make Total Hedonistic Utilitarianism the correct course of action, our nature is illusory. We are tethered to time and ego in an evolutionary cage. In practice, one cannot be an absolutely coherent Bodhisattva, loving others as oneself. They work on meditations, psychedelics, therapy and general education to increase coherence and the chances of interpersonal experiences, but usually, this is not required, as you can be useful to others simply by being egoistically efficient. This is to say nothing of the 3/20 who disagree with this metaphysics entirely.

A few important somebodies will want to talk to these people. 

A typical Ailori can manage at least the very basics of Universal Love, Zen, and Enlightenment with minimal exposure to the concepts and a few months hermitage at the appropriate developmental stage, even in environments actively hostile to its development.

Some slightly less important somebodies will be interested in whether those techniques can be taught, or can only be learned. The ink drips from Vuleftis's pen. Then a more useful question comes to mind.

"If Ailor has eliminated scarcity, what is its policy regarding immigration?"

Vuleftis is a member of parliament, and with that comes a degree of responsibility in allocating resources.

There is a specific segment of the population he's thinking of that is an ongoing drain on those resources. They're not disabled or violent; they just don't contribute to society. Like, at all. There are times that the amount of work that needs to be done is insufficient to give everyone a share, and that's okay. Everybody gets a share of what the work produced if they're willing to work. A quadriplegic might be asked to be an extra set of eyes on a group of children and sound an alarm if there's a problem. In return, he is lauded as a contributing member of society and gets his rightful share of food and shelter. A repeat murderer can justifiably be barred from all cities, sentenced to forage in the woods, because the first responsibility of the state is to keep its citizens from being killed.

The Republic remains committed to ensuring all citizens' essential needs are met, but the budget shows they're feeling the pinch.

A trio of Ailor's aides react to the mock tussle, moving to intercept a moment before realizing it's not serious and shifting to merely stand nearby. 

Internally Ailor has freedom of movement, and being formally Asked To Leave somewhere isn't... well, it's probably the most common social conflict and legal matter, but legal matters are very rare.  Normally they wouldn't be worried about immigration at all, but the talk of gene-sharing and not being able to experience Universal Love and currency makes them a little nervous that they might not be screening for everything they ought to be. Plus the possibility they're about to experience an unmanageable volume of problems that are novel or normally quite rare. The Blue Book is self correcting enough that a population that's unwilling to contribute enough to sustain themselves won't eat for free forever, but it's not an ideal universe to eat up all our current Slack on the way there if that's how things go. 

If you're having problems with essential needs is that a physics problem or is it due to having currency? Or maybe political? Ailor might have ideas for the first two, but is reluctant to involve themselves in the third. 

That answers a few questions Vuleftis had about Ailor. He hadn't imagined anyone being formally Asked To Leave... more like being offered somewhere they might want to go. Actually, he privately imagined them being tossed onto the back of a cart like cordwood and anyone who didn't roll off in protest at this treatment was fine with being sent wherever. But that's more of a joke he'd tell privately to members of the budgeting committee.

Agriculture is a physics problem and significant headway has been made in that area. Improvements to crop yields continue to outpace the growth in bellies that need filling. If yields doubled, that would probably solve the budget problem, but there's still a second-order drag on the economy from people seeing them and wondering why they shouldn't also subsist by eating up the slack. 

It's unclear how currency or politics could be the root of the problem. The slack-eaters frequently don't have money, but it's neither hard to obtain money nor to live without it. The High Council has foresworn money and frequently uses the same public lodging and kitchens that the least welloff members of society use. The slack-eaters don't lack political representation in theory, but they also don't show up to vote.

Thessalia apologies to the Ailor observers - "We did leave everyone who'd get that way with someone who isn't a friend out, but researchers do get awfully excited about child raising arrangements."

Anyone doing their background reading will discover the big friendly bird people regularly get into minor physical altercations when sufficiently worked up about a topic - or just for fun - or more seriously when they feel physically trapped without trust this will resolve itself.

"In general terms, inadequate medical care - including very occasionally incurable conditions which couldn't reasonably have adequate care - is the main reason a Kastakian might regret their life, although mostly we haven't tested particularly bad material conditions! 

We do hear the call of the sea - being underground can be a suitable substitute for some but not all - a Kastakian trapped on land would suffer, primarily increasing anxiety, although probably still not so much they'd want to die about it.

I think repatriation would be the most appropriate remedy in most cases, with best efforts at medical care while waiting for that to be available.

We don't really consider that children have any debt to their parents? Society in general sometimes has historically compensated parents, although we've been doing better in recent decades and only those with very rare traits like high manual dexterity or stamina might be considered for direct compensation at the moment, childless friends still tend to give gifts but this isn't formalised.

There are a number of desired conditions we could tabulate, but generally more Kastakians is good even if they're not raised absolutely optimally - sufficient care and provision to avoid serious medical issues and sufficient freedom to leave bad situations voluntarily is essentially all that's required. 

From our reading we come out of the egg a little more developed than the average sentient, so there's a little less initial vulnerability - oh, I suppose we should give you temperature ranges, vibration and impact tolerances etcetera for the egg, but they're fairly forgiving. Ideally they should be around normal conversations to get language development started properly, but it can be fixed later."

Oh, being offered a stike on the head and then waking up in a crate headed to elsewhere is something that has ever happened to trouble makers. It gets rarer and rarer now that we've found most of the lead and pulled it out of the schoolhouses. These are known known issues, and those tend to be getting better even if painfully slowly.

Do you like fish? Here is a standard home aquaponics module with high yield companion planting. Here's the infrastructure to keep it at maximum yield, and here's what it looks like if you instead fuck it up and it tries to automatically rebalance the ecosystem. Unless the Slack-eaters are too lazy to pick food off the vine this should give them an easy way to feed themselves naturally coupled with skill-building incentives for ecological empathy. 

Kastakian has nothing to apologize for. Ailor understands how easy blood can run hot and feathers can get ruffled. One of the attendants has a preening kit if they would like help unruffling those feathers. 

It might be easier if they were troublemakers. Troublemakers can usually be redirected. Or flogged if they can't be. But it's legal to be annoying, live on the streets, and be a bad influence. There are positive laws protecting those actions. There's even a tiny minority that does those things on principle.

Hello! We are not giving them homes, but this aquaponics module should definitely be added to public kitchens if possible.

What do Kastakians who opt out of society... do? And how does the rest of Kastakia respond?

"Oh, lots of things. The most usual case is they just take their transciever offline and disappear into the, less traffic heavy parts of the ocean, or the really determined ones go deep inland, and we never hear from them again. 

We grow food forests on shorelines, and can subsist off fish and seaweed usually anyway, so it's not that difficult to be self sufficient until you need medical care.

Sometimes they make trouble, like there have been groups opposed to specific child raising experiments, or historically that have taken over small areas for 'rewilding'. If they're not directly harming anyone we leave them to it where possible, otherwise, well, fortunately we have folk like Fretek who think about the messy business of defence.

If they show back up at a hospital ship obviously they'll get treatment same as someone who has been off being an adventurer and not done any shifts. It's important they can opt back in when they like, someone might just get tired of people and want to be properly alone for a bit."

"It might be helpful to have a quick review of normal Kastakian child raising and some things we have tried? 

The traditional method is one egg, approximately four to eight adults, one small boat. The adults generally pursue light adventuring and correspondance work while raising the child by incorporating them into the party and letting them explore what they are interested in. 

Multiple children in this environment is not advised - it's good for the family boats to meet up but 'siblings' will inevitably fight, often quite seriously. 

We have experimented with a range of mass child rearing methods. None have produced better individuals than the single egg family approach, but it is possible to raise Kastakians in a regimented environment in close quarters as long as they have a minimal amount of private space with an appropriate sleeping surface and reading light, access to reading material and regular mealtimes and hygiene sessions and so on. 

The results generally are less independent and motivated than your standard Kastakian and are more prone to negative behavior patterns like doing nothing but sleeping and needing to be coaxed to eat, getting lost in reading rather than ever contributing, leaving society altogether, and random bouts of screaming and violence.

Every now and again someone has a bright idea for a new mass child raising regime, and this is generally permitted unless it appears to amount to serious torture that is likely to produce only damaged people - essentially this is just policed by how many people are motivated to stop them. Child raising without good intentions is vanishingly rare."

Fights almost never happen in gremiria. Our delegates possess the survival instincts of a lightbulb, no one has instructed them to react otherwise, so they simply watch with intrigued detachment.

​Gremiria doubts its current capacity to provide "adventures" and is still struggling to parse the concept in this context. Gremirians are not fond of nature, the newer generations simply would not survive it due to the genetic shutdown of pain. However, older outliers might still be found. To satisfy the nature-dependent circuits of the brain, we rely heavily on simulacra in our design. Would this suffice for your species? We can offer mirrors or video to extend perceived space, duplicated natural color palettes, artificial pitch and roll, swimming pools? Providing underground habitats or simulacra is far simpler than life on ships, we need to maintain integration with the ultra-dense logistics of the arcology. We can produce ships, but our decentralization technologies are weaker and we will probably have to import them.

​Socially, it seems your children are relatively... low-maintenance? We can provide large groups of adults for interaction and upbringing, provided the task is relatively unskilled and does not require coercion, discipline, or the projection of authority. Our education has focused heavily on universal mnemonics and mastery learning, and this point on the Pareto frontier seems distant from gamification or engagement. We don't yet know how your memory functions. Our approach worked on monkeys, but not on birds, our cognitive architectures are too different.

Huh, interesting. We're surprised that people live on the street for any period of time. Do they not build flavellas or shelters? What do they do when it rains? If they're merely trading comfort for less work then that's just a strange preference. If they're trading less work for more work then that suggests a more complicated motivation. We've had tribal people who have refused to learn the skills to work in order to protect themselves from being exploited for labor. This feels like it might pattern-match.

If we may ask, is four to eight the general ideal small group size for Kastakiani? We generally find good results in having slightly older children help teach younger children in small groups as long as there's enough adults on call to help them out if they get in trouble. Depending on the sorts of children's adventures you use this might increase at least Slack if not scalability? 

Gremiria seems very Zen about the scuffle, but then says confusing and worrying things about nature and pain. There's currently a debate on if this is a miscommunication or if Gremirians are a bizarre human-looking alien that somehow has different qualia and a lack of pain receptors. 

A single human-looking person walks in, unannounced and unexpected. They look androgynous, have very long, unkempt and dirty hair, and wearing loose orange clothes. Their expression is serene.

"Confuse not our street-dwellers and slack-eaters! The former are rare and do so on some principle that I personally don't quite understand. It's technically illegal to violate their rights and force them to come inside when the weather gets bad, but I don't think anyone has been prosecuted for doing that in my lifetime. The latter randomly nap outside when whether permits but when it doesn't, they come to the..."

Vuleftis paused. If no one thought to include this in a cultural packet, translating any colloquial term won't convey the meaning. 

"...the temple dormitories, like anyone else who finds oneself in need of shelter. Maybe ten to twenty percent of people live in one at any given time instead of in a clan house or detached room. The overwhelming majority of people are there temporarily and feel the obligation to contribute, either through volunteering labor or donating an extra few shillings per half-month. They know universal access to clothing, food, medicine, and shelter isn't somehow free, so they contribute to the commonweal under..."

He's blanking on terms again. One of the aides notices and writes down some possible translations of related concepts (godly-guest-friendship, categorical-imperative, enlightened-self-interest, veil-of-ignorance) to pass on down.

"If you provide some basic reading lessons - if they've been exposed to conversations in the shell they should come out with basic spoken language, although will need a while to attach context, and will pick up reading just by following along with someone reading aloud - and make sure they have good access to reading material, that will substitute for adventure somewhat, although if there is nothing useful for them to do they might find something to do anyway and you might get disciplinary issues there.

Also in that case you'll have to deliberately make sure they get exercise rather than it just happening naturally, and they'll quickly get bored of anything repetitive. 

Not sure on the simulcra, we don't have anything nearly that advanced - probably best to send material from mining endeavour groups who are more likely to adapt well to the underground.

Also, have your seas been depleted or polluted? If not you'll probably find adolescent Kastakians will happily build a boat or raft out of anything available and just set off to subsist on seaweed and fish for a month or two if everything in the arcology is too boring - especially if you can provide text net connectivity remotely. Most new Adventurers make it back to civilisation fine, and those we get back injured generally express it was entirely worth it."

"Discipline or authority problems - if there's nothing useful for a Kastakian kid to do they will find something to do and that may involve writing on the walls, disassembling things to find out how they work, and getting into places they shouldn't be in.

Also if there are multiple kids around they will absolutely fight each other unless it is extremely clear that is unacceptable behaviour and they're not left unsupervised too long. 

Usually how our memory functions is 'very well, thank you', works best with systems that make sense as a whole rather than disconnected facts. Also Kastakian children are more likely to misbehave if they are expected to do repetitive things, variety is key. 

Four to eight is generally a good team size for most endeavours - more and people start splitting into sub groups and not knowing everyone involved as well. Older Kastakian kids love teaching younger ones in short bursts, probably no more than a couple of hours at a time, but the involved adult supervision definitely needs to be able and willing to break up fights - the older ones will likely be fine but if the younger ones get bored they might fight with each other."

Kastakian children sound a little harder to raise than the average local child, but within the abilities of a couple of empty nesters.

(A translator pauses for a second upon realizing the idiom doesn't need to be adapted.)

Ailor greets the monk warmly, as if he's supposed to be here! 

Oh! You're supporting Hippies via Tithe instead of the Land Rent! This doesn't eat slack on Ailor because maintaining the Drum Circle and providing Free Love are counted for the public good, even though paying for Free Love is a logical contradiction. Your hippies seem rather anti-social and there's quite a lot of them, though. Do they not do Peyote? Or Cannabis, shrooms, and MDMA? Spiritual drug use sometimes leaves you hallucinating for the rest of your life but much more often promotes pro social behavior. If you have a small enough group for testing, perhaps we should send over some Hippies and the appropriate PSAs against spiritual drug use? Or if you prefer we can just provide you with our strains, database, and PSAs so you can test in more controlled ways yourself?

Ailor wonders if wall-writing, disassembling things, and accessing the secret spaces is a problem! They won't know for another seventy years for certain, but making all of that into age appropriate learning puzzles is the current theorized best practices. The fighting seems more of a problem.

"I am Lirakoz, from the Planet we call Ranalite. I am a Shaman, though the meaning of that role is probably not apparent." they speak very slowly, with a strong accent, trying to enunciate every sound as clearly as possible.

"The rest of my planet will not establish contact in the near future. They might later; it is not known to me. But in the meantime, I was guided here by intuition, to share the information that might be most critical for contact between civilizations. I hope it would not be, and do not expect to singlehandedly change the course of history with simple explanations of philosophy, especially as am I am not specialized in teaching anything to anyone." their specializations are intuition and Linguistics, that being the reason why they are here instead of someone else "But simple actions should be undertaken when their effect can be beneficial." (the original phrase was "a policy of takings low-cost actions of positive expected utility has higher expected rule-utility than a policy of high-cost actions of positive expected utility, even if the simple calculation is the same", but that is very hard to translate correctly without a firm grasp of the language).

The voice is not loud, and they don't actively try to attract attention from anyone. It doesn't matter, they have nowhere else important to be, and can just repeat themself again if needed, as often as needed. This is one of many ways in which Lirakoz is highly unusual among Ranalites.

Managing childhood chaos is surprisingly easy when cleaning is centralized, the real challenge is finding a compromise that satisfies the children's need for a sense of control through inflicting long-lasting damage while keeping the habitat habitable. Many gremirians are fairly tolerant of disorder. Our own children often fail to get along, but rarely to the point of justifying isolation from their peers.

​We have complex puzzles as a substitute for disassembling things, satellite connectivity, and competitive sports (mostly for older, pre-modification generations, as the younger ones’ lack of pain shifts training focus entirely toward technique and external monitoring). If reading serves as a surrogate for adventure, then we certainly have much to offer, along with other digital entertainment!

​Our animal suffering cessation projects have not yet reached the oceans. Migratory aquatic species, especially megafauna, cannot be easily kept in sanctuaries or raised from embryos outside of a host, we fear losing them permanently if we intervene, so our oceans remain wild, pristine, and unfortunately, likely to stay that way for a long time.

​This seems sufficient to begin experimentation. If you invite a group of Adventurers, we will try to replicate your lifestyle, and from that baseline, we can introduce variations, such as simulacra for urban adaptation or collaborative mixed species child-rearing trials.

​Greetings and welcome, Lirakoz! Is the lack of contact with your world due to technical constraints, or a deliberate philosophical stance of your people?

The interplay of Church and State can be tricky but here's the short version: the Church collects the tithe and the State collects the land rent and other taxes on negative externalities. The State handles things like police, the fire department, and making sure the population is fed. The Church handles things like education, medical care, and making sure the population is clothed. In theory, these funds are separate buckets. But sometimes if tithes drop, Parliament has to cut budgets elsewhere to make up the difference in funding the safety net. Conversely, Parliament can only request budgetary assistance if tithes go up and tax revenue goes down, which sometimes happens when anti-tax candidates win majorities increase the standard deduction or decrease the base rate per square meter. 

"Hippies." That is, wow, there's a lot of context there. Let's, uh, let's see is we can clear up some stuff. 

So there are people who perform work that markets don't adequately measure the social value of, like artists. There are professionals who don't want to spend three- or four-twelfths of their income of housing, food storage and prep, etc, and just need a place to sleep between supper and breakfast. There are people who sign up for seasonal work, like construction or being a farmhand, and move around a lot so they move around and consequently don't pay for fixed housing. There are teenagers who find their parents or clan intolerable and need to be somewhere else while they plan and execute the next phase of their lives. None of them are what we've here dubbed slack-eaters, who make up less than one-twelfth of the people sleeping at a temple. Are any of these people "Hippies"?

The previous ayatollah used cannabis. None of the other drugs sound familiar. "Free Love" seems to be a social movement in response to previously mandated sociosexual restrictions. Vuleftis has never heard of someone having sex professionally, but he knows some very competitive hobbyists.

"Greetings, Lirakoz! Ailor welcomes what you wish to share and asks for no more. Would it be useful to have a place to lecture?" The Head of State proclaims with as much gravitas as his old frame can carry. The aides are on standby with some folded blankets that can be improvised into cushion seating, incense, some polished rocks, a podium made by locking together a few collapsible stools, some candles, and a singing bowl if Lirakoz wants any of that stuff. He continues formally, "We welcome you further to spend as much time as you wish to spare, and leave with all the knowledge you might carry."

Ailor is still quite curious about Gremiria's pain thing, but politely not interrupting someone else's conversation. 

Ah, Ailor has a somewhat different political structure. It's useful to better understand the Second Republic's. 

We're in rapid-pattern-matching-to-converge-on-a-concept! Artists are likely Hippies. Professionals and seasonal workers are likely not, unless they only work when they want something. Young people could go any way. Tribespeople who avoid labor to protect themselves from exploitation are hippies, colloquially, although they don't usually identify as such. Hobbyists who contribute more via sex than other activities might be considered hippies. 

Free Love was in fact an important early part of the Reform era. Previously Ailor's religions used government to restrict sex to procreation only. Free Love allowed people to interact with and learn healthier forms of sexuality. That generation also experimented with... well, basically all the recreational drugs. 

"Both reasons, to my knowledge. Accessing the contact point and verifying it proved hard, but a different philosophical approach might have needed less evidence and dedicated more effort to the possibility". That is, really, why you need shamans. But this is too self-evident for Lirakoz to actively think.

"I do not known what would be useful. I am not a lecturer. And you are aliens. You would probably know better". That even shamans don't have knowledge privileged to expertise in most cases is something that should have obvious. But of course, those are aliens, even if some are human-looking, different cultural epistemologies are not surprising, even if the translation difficulties could be ignored (and they can't be).

"Start at the ideal and work backwards. Then we can see what missing pieces we can share." Working backwards from your goal-state isn't formally part of Ailori philosophy, because it's the default way of thinking. This advice is similar to reminding someone to breathe. 

"Ailor seeks to maximize the happiness and well being of sophonts. For us this looks like lifelong learning and skill building, densely weaving-together-many-reasons of work, and forging meaningful connections. Our known known problems are improving slowly. Any unknown knowns or unknown unknowns you notice would be useful and appreciated. Or, if you're in the Current Era or later then we would like to skip any skippable-intermediate-upgrades we can skip."

"What does the ideal world look like to you?"

Hm! Seems like our concepts of universal love differ significantly! To us, the ideal world looks just like a hedonium shockwave. We possess no control over whom we are born as, or whose perspective we will wake up in tomorrow. We do not experience the flow of time, it is easier to assume we are merely random, static snapshots of consciousness within a block universe. We cannot increase «our own» happiness, but we can act as agents who retrospectively maximize our chances of being a happy consciousness by increasing the total amount of it in the universe.

Gremiria cares about the happiness of consciousness-as-a-function-of-time instrumentally - because happy people are more efficient, or as part of trade deals with egoistic agents within our freedom framework. However, even egoists rarely terminally desire triggers of qualia, such as «meaningful connections» or «mastery», over the qualia themselves. If the median citizen wishes to increase the net happiness in the universe, those who reject this metaphysics want happiness to be inflicted upon them-as-a-function-of-time. Almost no one desires to exist as a complex personality and live in the volcano's lairs with catgirls or something, at least not for long.

This goal will be achieved after the singularity, but before then, we will minimize suffering by sterilizing animal life and simplifying ecosystems. Human happiness is negligible relative to less intelligent life, but it also increases over time.

The Kastakians have slightly weird body language but have apparently never heard of suppressing it and are clearlyincredibly disturbed by the idea of sterilising animal life and simplifying ecosystems, although none of them are sure they have standing to say anything about it for a moment.

"...sterilising animals and simplifying ecosystems would be seen as highly unacceptable behaviour in Kastakia," Ferek eventually manages.

"This is relevant to the thing I came to talk about.
There is a concept in Ranalite philosophy known as metamorality. It is not the only important concept, but this specific principle is believed to be universal. It seems obvious to many, but much harm in Ranalite history happened because Ranalites did not understand the concept, and it is theorized that a flawed of understanding of metamorality is the most probable cause of conflict between otherwise well-meaning alien civilizations.

Every thinking creature has goals it wants to achieve. Possibly non-thinking creatures, too. Different creatures have different goals. Those goals can be overlapping, or opposed, and so they might seem good or bad. Logic cannot prove a goal to be good or bad, preferable or dispreferable, without already believing something to be good or bad. It should be impossible, in theory, for a thinking creature to not value some things, and therefore to truly be able to look at things from a neutral perspective. But it is possible for creatures to understand this limitation, and look at other creatures who also cannot truly look at things from a neutral perspective, and try to understand your limitations as equal to the limitations of others.
Objectively, no goal can be truly good bad. But things are objectively good from the perspective of a specific value, for the purpose of achieving a certain subjective goal. 'What outcomes does this value/worldview finds good" is a question with a very simple, objective answer. 'Which actions are good from the perspective of this value/worldview' is a more complicated question, based on capabilities, resources and strategy, but it is not a moral question, the moral part has a very simple objective answer. The strategic part too has an objective answer, in theory, given enough information to find what outcomes a certain action will cause.
And so, if 'what things are good' cannot have an objective answer everyone can agree on (despite everyone feeling like there must be one), but 'what things are good from the perspective of a specific value' can have that answer, metamorality is the obvious solution. It is the value of fulfilling other values. Metamorality asks, 'if we assume that it is good for everyone who has values to fulfil their values, which actions would achieve that outcome?'.
This question has an objective answer. This objective answer does not prove that an action is good simply because it is meta-good from the perspective of metamorality. It is impossible to prove. A creature can know what action is meta-good and still choose a different action. And this might be a rational choice to fulfil their values. But often it would not be. Often the metamoral choice is better by any values. Because being part of a system that helps you fulfil your values is usually better than not being part of that system. Often this means that helping to maintain this system, and help others with things you yourself do not consider important, or avoid things that you do, might still be the better strategy overall. Partially because the alternative is not simply living in a world where you just do anything by yourself, but living in a world with other people whose goals oppose yours, who also choose to pursue only their goals, and not metamorally pursue all goals. In a sense, this is another example of a standard cooperation-defection dilemma, where it is possible in theory to achieve more by defection, but on practice cooperation is a much better strategy in most cases.
This is true for any sort of creature, whatever their values might be, as long as they are sapient, and hopefully capable of communication, otherwise coordinating on the specifics might be hard.
There are several important caveats.
Just like in the cooperation-defection dilemma, getting more of your value still does not mean getting maximal value. Getting maximal values for all incompatible values is, I am told by mathematicians, mathematically impossible. If the goals had so much overlap, the whole theory of metamorality would have not been needed in the first place. So a statement such as 'by pursuing metamorality you are guaranteed to get everything you want' would be false. The accurate version would be 'by pursuing metamorality, together with those of different values who also pursue metamorality, you are guaranteed to get more of what you value than in the alternative scenario where this lead to conflict with others'. This is not true for hypothetical creatures who inherently value the state where other creatures are denied fulfilment of their values. It is a logical paradox, to try to fulfil the value of a group, part of which can only be fulfilled by intentionally denying the values of others in the group, whoever those might be. So it is accepted that metamorality cannot fulfil the value of such creatures. But nothing can, other than a domination of reality by those hypothetical creatures, which no one else would want.

Metamorality is not itself an answer to specific questions. It is a basic framework that allows considering how can the goodness of an action be determined, and how to start evaluating which actions might fulfil it. It does not by itself answer which actions are good. That requires knowledge both of the specific values of all relevant sides, and of strategic circumstances that will predict which outcomes the actions will lead to. This is why I cannot, and should not, myself answer questions like 'what does the ideal world look like'.
There are many arguments in Ranalite, in different circumstances, about which specific action is or is not metamoral. That is impossible to avoid. It is better than the previous state. It was, according to known history, a state of constant confusion and war. Which is even more probable between creatures more different from each other than Ranalites are from each other.
An axiom of Ranalite metamorality, which is assumed on practice but is not objective, is that the only way to achieve anything approaching metamorality, is to only evaluate a person's desire about their own life as relevant. If someone else wants me to live differently, even if it does not affect them in any way, this is objectively a value they have, and it is objectively meta-bad for that value to go unfulfilled, but it is impossible to try and fulfilling it in ways that would not be even more meta-bad. So part of the compromise, that achieves the optimal amount of value fulfilment, is that they cannot decide my life, their opinion of me does not count as part of the calculation society makes to determine whether my actions are metamoral, unless I make the choice of caring about their opinion, or unless my actions do affect them directly.
What exactly counts as 'affecting directly' is the main disputed question in any circumstances. For example, most Ranalite states consider loud noises to be an action that directly impacts a person's life, but only a small fraction of states consider appearance to, and have laws that forbid looking specific unwanted ways in public. It is theorized that optimal metamorality from that perspective could only be achieved if we lived in a state where everyone freely chooses which parts of reality to interact with, and which other people. It is not yet possible, but maybe will be, once. We all hope.
Maybe for different creatures, who have very different psychology and society, different trade-offs and different compromises will be necessary, even if the basic principles of metamorality and apply to everyone.

What other caveats have I forgot...simple altruism is not metamorality. It is not enough to want good outcomes for another person, metamorality means trying to help others to live the kind of life they want (or at least not hinder them), not just the kind of life you think will be good for them. That is part of the logic behind my desire about others not being accounted for evaluating the lives of others.
In the basic stages of evaluating what it means for a creature to have values or goals, and why we assume that it is meta-good for those values to be fulfilled and meta-bad not to, there is a claim that the thing that makes the goals important is the subjective perception of the creature, and so things outside that perception are not relevant. So it is good, for example, to lie to a person and make them believe they did something important that fulfilled their goals, to make them happy, as long as they never learn the truth. Or that it is not bad to kill a person who desires to keep living, as long as they die instantly and do not have time to notice they are going to die. This is a thing philosophers think about, but it is not accepted as morality, for simple reasons. Some people value only their internal state, and so for those people it is good for only the internal state to change. Some people value their impact upon the universe, and as long as that impact does not conflict with the lives of others, that is the thing they value, the thing that matters to metamorality and should be fulfilled. Not some secret other thing. That you want to not be tricked is reason enough to not trick you, that you want not to die is reason enough to not kill you, regardless of the way the moment of death is perceived. This principle is why I avoid directly translating the terms for fulfillment or negation of value, that exist in most Ranalite languages, because the closest translations, 'happiness' and 'suffering', have a connotation of internal state, and so it would be wrong to say that a person suffers from their values being negated in a way they never know about. But some people value not experiencing suffering, and some are willing to suffer as long as their goal is fulfilled, and only a failure of that goal would really be...[[suffering]]."

Pause. (Lirakoz is speaking slowly, and so doesn't need to actively stop and regain breath. As many Ranalites would).

"I am not a lecturer, and never had to explain metamorality, or any other important concepts, to those who never heard of it. I am sure I explained some things suboptimally, and will answer further questions in attempt to clarify the meaning".

"Sounds about right. The only thing you'd find some Kastakians disputing is how much you should intervene when someone is going to, in your opinion, harm some other people, but the only way to stop them is to harm them in turn, if only because you'd stop them achieving their values. 

And I guess about who is a moral patient in the first place, some people won't even eat fish because fish pretty clearly don't want to be eaten."

If you find this unacceptable, then we will not proceed with it in Kastakia without your explicit permission! This grants you significant bargaining power, as we are prepared to pay for the right to sterilize your biomes. Is there a price at which you would agree to this?

​(The delegate says this with the problem-solving enthusiasm, embodying the spirit that "contact cannot be worse than its absence". But on the backend of Omnihold, rare paranoid opinions appear. We would understand if you were morally indifferent to nature and sought compensation for its use, but if you inflate the price because you terminally value the preservation of a factory of existential horror based on what appears to be mere aesthetics - that is suspicious and is reminiscent of hostage taking)

​This offer is open to other civilizations as well! However, if your networks are unified and any data we provide reaches everyone simultaneously, we must calculate the value of published data for all parties at once. (...And the slowest-evaluating civilization will bottleneck the publication process for the rest. Well, it sounds like more work, but not enough for us to give up and half-ass it)

​Lirakoz, what you describe is essentially our freedom framework. Our primary objection is that agents are often incoherent and shift their values unpredictably. Our best attempts at talk-control show a higher conversion rate into religion than out of it, suggesting an asymmetry in the tools of truth. We believe the absolute majority of living beings act against their own best interests, yet we are forced to encourage their self-harming behaviors in our deals.

​The freedom framework does not prioritize coherence of will. If you trade with an AI for "catgirls", "meaningful connections" or "wireheading", but expect the AI to instead direct your provided negentropy toward some "objectively true moral cause" (because that is what you would obviously want if you were coherent), you simply will not trade with that AI. Therefore, the AI will not do it, it will choose the incoherent, first-order interpretation of your values to close the deal.

The Head of state sits respectfully, actively listens to Lirakoz, and takes constant notes on his deck. Then he sets a timer for five minutes before he responds. 

"This sounds like a very different framework for much of our own philosophy. We assume that [qualia] is the basis of moral worth, and that sophonts all posses [qualia] in equal measure. Animals are thought to have less [qualia] and thus less weight for decisions. This allows us to treat morality as a state of the universe, albeit one we cannot measure directly yet. From there we seek to find the rules that maximize the [Utility]- the happiness and well being- for things of moral worth."

Meanwhile, the Representative of Representatives it trying her very best not to show her growing horror at the Omnihold delegation. "This hedonium shockwave pattern-matches to "wireheading" to us, which is a classic example of a Bad End. One that maximises happiness at the expense of well being."

“Well-being” didn’t translate? Wireheads are being well. Sure, you don't want wireheading if it harms reason as the primary instrumental value, but it's an acceptable choice at the end of life. And if you have a machine that takes care of your instrumental values ​​for you, then of course you want to be a wirehead. You seem... more attached to your tools?

We also consider qualia to be the basis of moral value in the utilitarian framework, although we do not believe there is a strong correlation between qualia and intelligence. Intelligence is essential for the status of a "cooperative agent" in the freedom framework, but qualia are not necessary for it. We believe that many animals have qualia as intense as humans, and even those with weak qualia simply outnumber us. We haven't solved the theory of consciousness and don't have cheap enough experiments to test it, but that's our bet.

"Qualia is kind of the issue with keeping intact biomes - although only one of them!

We probably need to send you some people to experience your simulations - we don't have anything that advanced and so complete biomes are still necessary for experiencing important ancestral environment qualia like catching fish and exploring shorelines.

But the other two problems are - resilience, and the right to opt out. If we didn't have complete biomes, we might lose something we turn out to need later, and it'd be impossible for someone to just strike out on their own if they really can't abide society.

We do cultivate some of our land biomes, but we take care not to entirely replace anything original because of resilience. And, well, the fish farmers lost the war."

Vuleftis looks at his notes and frowns. It sounds like the Ranalite is describing politics in very many words. More specifically, politics as practiced during the First Republic.

"Lirakoz, this sounds the attitude my people had long ago toward different tribes trying to co-exist. Each tribe had its own ideas of right and wrong, good and evil. The Republic didn't enforce one code of morality over another. Instead it created a forum where representatives could determine the minimum set of laws needed for tribes to co-exist and pursue what they deemed good and oppose what they deemed evil."

It doesn't quite work that way anymore. The assorted moralities were homogenized over the centuries, through a mix of cultural exchange and violence. But that's still the core principle that MPs operate under when drafting legislation. Only afterward do they run their proposed solutions through any moral test cases at the end to see what needs to be tweaked.

"Well being doesn't just mean continuity-of-existance, but also more abstract things like growth-of-self. Normally we would think of wireheading as preserving just the first at the expense of the second, but this sounds like it doesn't even care about the first part!" The Representative's deck buzzes on her arm, and she takes a moment to modulate herself. "Apologies. I can get quite passionate." Deep breath. "Since neither of us have a complete theory of mind yet, we should table this for now."

The Head of Government is quietly agreeing with the Kastakian delegation on the subject of biomes. Ailor has as well seen unexpected outcomes from removing or adding species to a biome in the past. As a rule, diversity lends to resilience. 

An aide gives Vuleftis a stack of translation diagrams relating to the main(?) branch of the conversation. He must have gotten distracted trying to follow the Ranalite monk's meaning. The gremirians remain the higher priority because they're both the most alien culturally and the most advanced by a metric Vuleftis can observe but not name at the moment.

flip, flip, flip

Oh. This is not good. 

"If I understand the size that 'biome' denotes, no one on my world is authorized to give permission to sterilizing one. Also... how would you even do that?"

"Of course, coherence of values is not maximal, and sometimes changes, or is unknown. But it is possible to help people better understand what they truly value, or could value, and how to achieve that. Introspection and insight into your own mind is one of the most useful skills in a metamoral sociality. And people should be free to change their goals if they want. This is something most decision algorithms should account for. Ability to predict your chance to change your mind in the future should be trained and evaluated, and options that can be taken back are preferred.
There are cases that present hardship. Children, for example, consistently lack introspection, or general cognitive abilities to determine what things are possible, what outcomes result from their actions, and what outcomes they want. Nonetheless, there are ways to raise children with minimal negation of their values, and maximal opportunities for them to get what they desire, learn what they desire, how often they are wrong about what they desire, and what actions should be avoided by their own values. Even if they are not ideal, and don't include zero of those negations. But physical existence makes that inevitable.
There are cases of people with mental illness, that causes them to predictably act in ways they do not endorse before, later, or even during the action. Those are of course tragic, and in a sense the worst thing that can happen to a sapient being. Sometimes they can be solved with medication, but even if not, there are almost always ways to mitigate this, for a person to figure out what they want, and then be guided in that direction by others, in ways they find helpful and safe, even if not ideal, and still posing some opposition to your current experience of value." (Ranalite considers things like 'someone waking you up on time because you have work' to be an example on par with various forms of psychosis. Which Lirakoz doesn't see the need to specify, not expecting anyone to be confused by those being the same basic categories of situation). "In that sense, metamorality is not just freedom, even when not counting limitation from harming others. A metamoral society would restrict your actions, if it is done in ways you openly endorse. It is absurd to live in a universe where people can openly endorse restriction of their action, instead of just always acting in ways they endorse, but that is the case. Maybe other sapient creatures are better at it than us Ranalites.
But other than dementia caused by old age, which to my knowledge there is no way to treat, a society can succeed at being metamoral despite the existence of mental illness.
There are cases where avoiding drastic actions is impossible. Suicide is the biggest one. Even if you have good reason to think suicide serves your values, and no new information can change that, and your counterfactual self would not regret the choice in two years, it is irrecoverable, and therefore an option that should be dispreferred. But a moral framework that completely forbids suicide cannot be said to universally support any kind of person to affect their life in any way they want. Some consider the current freedom of suicide too high, and some too limited. I think the compromises seem reasonable enough. Though different states have differences in rules about Given.
Theoretically, there are cases where someone has 'opposition to introspection' as an inherent value, and so it would harm them to try figuring out what (other) values they have that can be fulfilled or negated. If such a person also wanted to die, and quickly, i think that would truly be a moral philosopher's nightmare. Or exciting work day, i suppose.
Those are enough to mean that doing the right thing, and guarantying everyone a perfect life, or even a Truly Good life, is impossible, or nearly impossible. But that is not the same thing as everyone acting against their best interests. Rather, everyone is acting towards an expected cloud encompassing the not-exact variations of their best interests (the most negative possible description of the situation), and succeeds at matching them more than half the time, in expectation. It is rare for someone to act in a way that is the exact opposite of their interests, instead of just not exactly matching them. It is more common for people to act in ways close to maximally opposing the interests of others, but that is a tendency that can be compensated, and is why I am here, hopefully.

The ability to convince people of different values is...not something I heard about as a problem. Other than general problem of epistemology and communication. Believing in true facts instead of random misunderstandings or rumors or guesses is hard. Following valid logical processes when thinking about true information, instead of distorting it without noticing, is even harder. That is an asymmetry of the tools of truth, compared to the truth of anything else. But if you have true information, and analyse it with a valid process (which as many things is impossible to do perfectly, but possible to strive for optimality and expect success), then everything is right and your conclusions will be valid. Conclusions about morality and goals could not be right or wrong. If people come to some conclusions more often than others, that is expected. Many more prefer to not experience hunger than to experience hunger, for example.
Religion is not popular in Ranalite, if I correctly understood what it means, and it is harder to convince a Ranalite of religious concepts than non-religious ones. Maybe that is a difference between species.

And yes," much shorter reply adressed to Vuleftis "metamorality can apply to several distinct groups each with their culture and differing goals, to live the way they want. But it also applies to individuals within a group, who can have different values. A known counterexample to early naive culture-based formulations of metamorality was that scarring someone who does not want to be scarred is bad even if the larger culture thinks it is good, and even if the person expects it to happen (and so wouldn't decide to resist, even if they prefer it not happen)."

"We haven't really bothered talking about religion because, uh, it's not totally certain to us that you even have souls? Possibly you do but there's no particular reason to expect they work anything like ours do, not that we have any scientific proof of that anyway."

If no single representative is authorized to permit biome sterilization, does this fall under direct democracy? You mentioned a land rent tax - does it not extrapolate to a fee for environmental impact? This is how the issue was authorized in our world, the Church paid the State for the right to alter nature.

On land, the bulk of the work was done via gene drives, passing recessive sterility genes to 100% of offspring, and toxins dispersed from airships, although many areas and species required unique solutions. We replaced sterilized ecosystems with human-useful crops that thrive in semi-wild conditions.

Plants struggle without animals at all, so we permitted certain species of worms to multiply unchecked as a compromise. Worms possess a unique combination of high body mass per individual and a very low neuromass-to-biomass ratio (relative to insects). Most of our models of animal suffering, which establish linear and non-linear dependencies of qualia on neural complexity, agree that despite the stress of overpopulation, this is a significantly superior scenario. Bees, as pollinators, were made dependent on human-provided hives, they do not overpopulate and live relatively well. Livestock is monitored, though they still graze over vast territories.

Yes, our ecosystem is less stable, floods and fires occur, and we have high average CO2​. But for the right to opt-out, our world is arguably better than the old one! Our bees are stingless, there are no natural toxins, no parasites, and no predators. Almost all plants are edible for either livestock or humans. Without forests and meaningless competition for sunlight, the navigability of shrubs and grasses is improved. We continue to experiment with zoning and the selection of new symbiotic species to refine these conditions further, and mineral binding of carbon dioxide, even through naive thermonuclear blasting of rocks, seems to work and is quite cheap.

And we can always reverse it! We preserve DNA, and insects or birds are easily hatched in incubators. For larger species, we maintain compressed sanctuaries, where we only keep key species capable of gestating others, because artificial wombs are too complicated. Through IVF with immunosuppression and hormonal regulation and some genetic modification of the surrogate mother, we can induce one species to give birth to many others. This is harmful to the health of both the child and the surrogate, and failure rates are high, but we can attempt it multiple times and the second generation is born healthy and can restore the population without such problems.

The term "gene drives" doesn't seem to have a translation, so it's probably a piece of science or technology they haven't discovered. But that's not important right now.

"I think most biomes have more than one government claiming exclusive rights to various parcels, which is one reason there's no one party that could authorize that. The exception to the rule is that I represent a legislative body that actually does have jurisdiction over an entire biome in its central provinces. I haven't stopped to imagine what the other MPs might think about your proposal, but it sounds like the sort of thing the High Council would threaten to veto. They might even try to stop you from making such deals with other governments."

Sterilizing a biome is simple, just apply fire to scale. More likely you mean sterilizing a species in a biome. That's trickier, but you can do it by breeding a maladaptive line and introducing it to the population. 

The Head of State is still listening to Lirakoz and broadly agreeing. He'll add that values being incoherent or circular may be an unfortunate universe, but it isn't inherently insurmountable as long as some states can be said to be preferable to others.

The subject of "souls" is one with some ambiguity. Ailor is fairly certain that the entirety of a person exists in physics. In fact, if you want to look at their database there's a very simple organism- a worm- in there you can run. 

The Representative of Representatives at least seems mollified that DNA backups are being kept. 

"I think we could get the sterilization of mosquitoes past the Council, to demonstrate our commitment to cultural exchange."

"Yes, bodies exist in physics and animals exist in physics, that is an immensely cool worm simulation and I think I've lost three of my junior researchers to just staring at it, but until we made contact there was no other creature with the same suite of prospective and retrospective consciousness - like, the animal does not want to die, but you're the same person who went to sleep?

The only reason wireheading is unappealing is that personhood that looks for purpose, right? Animals are generally very happy with happiness although you can screw this up if you selectively breed then enough. It turns out small cetaceans are an alarmingly good model for people and we mostly stamped out those programs in civilised areas, I believe from the data banks some of you had similar findings with various land mammals.

Turns out you can't do it with birds because if you keep them in remotely humane conditions they fly away when they've had enough."

Diseases and parasites in people are probably worth removing from the ecosystem. That might be common ground for everyone. 

Hm? To be clear, that's not a simulation. We can put 'em in a body and let 'em run around in meatspace if you like. Only having one sophont on your homeworld is limiting in exploring the theory of mind. Animals seem to have a subset of qualia, but they seem to be the same person before and after sleep? When an animal learns a puzzle they often remember it after they wake up the next day.

Bees will play with balls, and dogs will herd sheep. We pattern-match at least some animals to experiencing growth-of-self. 

Yeah, fuck mosquitoes

(not a literal translation, but a close cultural adaptation)

Sexually reproducing parasites can be eradicated by the gene drive, we have no special measures against microbial diseases. Unless we're talking about influencing zoonotic diseases.

Our model is that many animals possess intelligence but lack the ability or desire to develop it. Currently, uplift is strictly regulated and doesn't offer much economic benefit to try, but if we were to do so, we'd focus not on selection and g-factor modification, but on zoogogy, emotional regulation, and the engineering of specialized manipulators.

Historically, we had 3600s of capuchins capable of following complex instructions and using sign language. Although their intelligence exceeds that of a natural baseline, without monastic training and cultural support, they degraded to the level of “just weird monkeys”. This isn’t surprising, since without culture and training, humans also become close to apes and their intelligence becomes difficult to restore in adulthood. We do not keep those semi-uplifted capuchins alive because they are not ideal for reproduction of other species.

Wow, we don't have digital worm brains that advanced! That’s cool.

"Uh, I think it might be relevant that we didn't really consider animal qualia at all before contact, and don't have any major domestication - we have small felines that live on our ships that invited themselves and were historically useful for pest control and some people find them generally aesthetically pleasing, and some animal models have been used for research, but other cultures seem to have much more extensive animal companionship, which I guess would make it easier to spot similarities?"

Glad you like the worm!

It does make sense that co-evolving into sapience with canines would give very different experiences and intuitions about the moral worth of other species. Even then, people on Ailor have erred in terrible ways in the past. Not everyone has moved past that yet. 

The decks of all three people in the Ailori delegation buzz at the same time. The Head of Government speaks up.

"We've come to the conclusion that the existence of masochism is sufficient disprove by counter example that we're willing to bid against Omnihold's sterilization program as a stop-loss until we can test the model against a complete theory of mind." They manage to keep their expression neutral, somehow. Results this quick and this unanimous approximately do not happen, and if there was any chance that it had been a mistake they would have double checked. "As well as negotiating any necessary opt-out options that might be necessary."

Gremiria thinks it's a joke about canines being not worth saving. Gremiria finds it funny and agrees with the hypothetical hyperbole that cats are mean.

How is masochism relevant to animal suffering? We would understand this as an argument against the abolition of pain in humans, but a fish clearly does not want to be eaten! And we do not demand that children's pain be removed, this increases profit in the form of their gratitude, but the bar of life better than nothingness is often passed for people without analgesia. And this requires infrastructure.

​Our research into the theory of mind is tied to AI development - specifically, determining whether qualia can emerge without training on human datasets. Sterilization liberates us from the low-grade panic, where every extra hour of delay in AI progress equals eons of aggregate agony in the wild. It allows us to take centuries, if necessary, to ensure AI safety, moving only as fast as our confidence allows. We don't want to deal with both existential risks at the same time.

​It seems that the primary beneficiaries will be the other civilizations, when we end up competing in an auction for the rights to their ecosystems - provided it even reaches that point. We are curious though - how do you pay them if you provide your information for free? Many of our technologies are now redundant due to your open-source equivalents, and you specialized in decentralization more than us, so they are easier to implement, but now you seem to disregard the leverage you've lost by devaluing your own data.

"While it would be something of a loss to lose other ecosystems, it sounds like you have at least some preservation mechanisms, so we'd not really be invested in bidding to protect other people's ecosystems? 

We're only really using our own and unless we come into some extreme breakthrough in mass child raising it seems unlikely we'll desperately need more in such urgency we couldn't re-seed from the preservation samples at that point."

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."

"I don't think sterilization should count as a harm towards those animals, if they are not themselves killed. But large scale sterilization of animals seems like the kind of action that can't easily be taken back..
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. 

Double Gremirians would be a loose localization of some very old questions involving mythic beings of great power, the hubris of human beings thinking themselves the pinnacle of creation, animal cruelty, and when agents are themselves impediments to their own goals. Whole books have been written about this, but the important takeaway is that it wasn't a trick question, and the gremirian answer isn't one of self serving deception.

Much of Vuleftis's job effectively is haggling with other MPs all day, so it makes sense he'd carry this mentality outside work. But generally when people do this, they're trying to work out how the costs break down and how much they themselves care about whatever it is they're buying. For example, if a small bowl of soup costs two pence and a large bowl of soup costs three pence, these two data points form a line and you can work out that no soup costs one penny, or rather that's the cost of labor. Someone might feel particularly miserly that day and decide to save a penny by eating raw ingredients instead.

"One of the uses of money is that we can agree to disagree about the relative values of labor. Shoddy chairs don't exist as a product category because such a vendor would get a reputation as a cheat and go out of business. The lowest tier of chair is a DIY kit of slotted wooden beams carved by unskilled labor. It's a chair. It's... decent. It does the job of keeping one's butt off the ground and provides a backing that a stool does not. People can sit in a floor model before buying and are generally unimpressed but never deceived by what they're buying. Carpenters would probably qualify as mildly chair-nerdy who can help you figure out what kind of chair you want and just how much you want it."

Electronics was one of those words that kept coming up in the briefings. Something about electricity and blinking lights and logic puzzles that really excited some of the other people in attendance. "Regarding electronics, I'm going to say, no, they have not, not yet," Vuleftis said in the halting cadence of someone who doesn't understand the question but isn't about to lose face by admitting it. "If a carpenter can't take on your request, he'll refer you to someone who can, which helps match supply to demand. The participants in our markets lean more cooperative than competitive."

"Oh yes, electronics has been fantastic. We started out with huge recited directories and then paper ones, and radio broadcasts for quicker updates as soon as we figured that out, and data repeaters on circulating hot air balloons once we got sufficiently reliable radio, but it was all immensely cumbersome and a lot of people were making do with self sufficiency and Adventurers connecting isolated endeavours to supply chains."

"We do have an increasing problem of electronics fascination though - it gives people access to so much data they get lost in it and never surface to do anything practical. We've always had this problem with the written word but electronics has made it considerably worse, as you can fit so many books and never reach an obvious stopping point."

"We had a similar problem with public libraries. Our solution was for librarians to kick everyone out for a few days and force them to find something else to do with all the information they'd learned. I'm guessing there's no electronic equivalent of that."

We used tethered thermal balloons for city-graph signaling via flags and telescopes long before radio. Beyond defense, this synchronized and resolved bets, announced vote results, facilitated trades, and transmitted commodity prices. But if you are already at this summit, it would be easier to skip this step and implement electronics across your territories.

Our shopping is almost entirely digital. However, we still maintain physical showrooms as an option that combines expert curation with social pleasure and physical testing. Buyers don't haggle because the current market price is ideal, traders can resell the rights to the same chair storage unit in a warehouse many times before it is bought and delivered to the final buyer, if a price were unfair, someone would have noticed. Our electronic equivalent of solving the fascination problem is, as we said, paying for information. We expected divergent moralities from aliens. We did not expect our defining difference to be capitalism.

The specific argument about Double Gremirians sounds like the old parable about the "false-meta-truthers" (a term impossible to correctly translate into English, and probably to any of the languages spoken ln the conversation), the core of which is that someone can be smarter than you and know better than you which actions would serve your values, but no one can use authority to decide you should have different values, other than by convincing you to change your priorities. "You are not smart enough to want the right thing" is a completely invalid logical argument. Though of course the distinction between a difference in value and a factual disagreement about strategies that fulfil this value might in some cases be hard to notice.

"Disagreeing about the relative values of labor was disastrous for us during industrialization. If you have solutions to the obvious pitfalls those would be interesting."

Ailor is fairly certain that the Second Republic is either the most or least technologically advanced delegate here, give or take the Ranalites. The Ailori delegation has gone out of its way not to flash tech. Their gear avoids synthetic and advanced materials as much as possible. Still, displaying when they're communicating necessitated displaying decks which in turn meant displaying at least the transistor. Either way, the course of action is the same. If there had been another delegate in the Current Era or a Future Era Ailor would want their help avoiding skippable-intermediate-upgrades and predictable pitfalls. It's Ailor's duty to help.

"If the main difficulty is addiction instead of data aggregation and processing then there is an electronic equivalent to closing the library. You can use a productivity manager to manage when, how much, and under which conditions you have access to data. Just be careful tuning it. Overwork was a problem on Ailor before we had those, and now it's one of the main remaining known known problems."

It's unsurprising to Ailor that capitalists are a difference, that was a defining feature of the Previous Era. It's more surprising that there's not tribal, feudal, or imperial delegates. (Ailor will not mention the lack of Future Era delegates, because they still have even odds on one of the delegations being Future Era and testing us.) Capitalists at an advanced level of technology is surprising and somewhat worrying. That being said, Gremirians are at least claiming outcomes that are much better than expected for capitalists. 

"The sorts of values that it might be better to be different," the Head of State offers, "suggest confusion between terminal and instrumental values."

This sure is the way to model social development. Could you elaborate on your theory of eras? Our Church, in fact, believes it knows best what values ​​a person should pursue, but it's not so optimistic as to assume that because it's true, everyone will accept it and be able to follow it. So your historical determinism would be a great relief in this regard.

The ego is too strongly wired into us biologically, and it's easier to replace us with another species than to achieve universal enlightenment as we are. Therefore, we use an ego-driven economic model and, within its framework, sponsor desired existential outcomes. Therefore, the Double Gremirians/Singularity will absorb those who wanted to be absorbed and reward those who wanted to be rewarded, with efforts to persuade people to change their values ​​proportional to the initial drive to change.

If you've allowing the possibility of enlightenment, they'll attempt to enlighten you, in proportion to this openness, and you'll disappear, your resources being channeled into pure bliss. If you feel alienated from the enlightened version of yourself and consider the fulfillment of your enlightened desires in exchange for the resources provided by your selfish self a betrayal, you'll remain in the personal "hell" of consciousness-as-a-function-in-time, with your first-order desires fulfilled, even if it's against your own interests, up to your negentropy budget. You can bring others to this hell, but you pay for them. That's why cryonics is the only area of ​​charity that is disproportionately funded by egoists.

"Disagreeing about the relative values of labor was disastrous for us during industrialization" sure is a statement. Laborers and industries that can't keep up with the amount of people who want to pay for their services charge increasing amounts until people stop asking or enough new laborers join the industry to underbid their competitors, take their business, and drive down prices.

In a good year, the amount of labor and land you put into farming correlates strongly with the amount of food that comes out of it. Incremental improvements get eaten by incremental population growth, but eventually there's a breakthrough that doubles yields. The same land and labour producing yields that are twice as large means that half that labor can work on non-farming endeavours. A popular endeavor is finding other ways to save even more time or labor. People hit on the idea of mass production as a timesaver, which isn't great for the artisan class whose work is now devalued, but the pie is growing big enough to help them through the transitional period or learning new skills. 

Nah, that doesn't seem like it'd be relevant to industrialization and relative wages.

Hm. Pity that I'm a non-diagetic thought you're having instead of being present to mention that.

"People who are sufficiently self disciplined to use the productivity manager tend to just accumulate external responsibilities and set alarms about them.

I suppose we could consider importing Adventurers who want to exchange care work for the opportunity to see our planet and society, but Ferek's serious people in particular are quite worried about a second sapient species going feral and outcompeting us.

Even if you send us sterile Adventurers someone is likely to be irresponsible enough to work on reversing that if requested."

In many ways Kastakia is a tribal society, or partly feudal with the hospital ships being the feudal lords. The tribes are unusually cooperative but still have no real overarching governance. The few coordination problems they have are still mostly mediated by individual violence. 

Eras are just a colloquial description of times when the dominant mode of life and organizing society was a certain way. Tribal people were very different than early agriculture and so on. 

That's really cool that you were able to transition so cleanly! It wasn't clean for us at all. At some point, some people figured out that they could get ahead by paying a small number of people to shoot laborers who wanted pesky things like "pay" instead of just paying the laborers directly. They were pretty intractable with that, especially since they had people with guns and propaganda and a lot of incentives to keep things like they were. Ailor ended up having to shoot the slave holders to free the slaves. Then the slavers kept trying to cheat the whole "no slave" thing over and over again until there was a world war. That's a big reason Ailor is very much sold on the Blue Book. Although it sounds like Gremir somehow has something very much like the Blue Book through some indirect means.

"A trick with the productivity manager is to have two or three people who have to unlock it, so that it's less impulsive. That might be relying on Ailori being more sociable in certain ways though. 

The upside if you want to import people for Ailor include that we're pretty certain that we can generate more habitation than we consume. Many of us are also familiar with caregiving for flighted sapients, in the BDSM context or otherwise. The best of us are very invested in being Friendly, and we wouldn't let the rest of us cause issues without feeling responsible for fixing them.

It might not be best practices to just take our word for it though. Maybe you should send an Adventuring party or three over to Ailor? I'm sure you'll have your pick of locals for guides and companionship." 

"We're barely holding them back here, there are hopefuls of all feathers camped just outside ready to go as soon as we know who is open to them, and one enterprising group have set up a fertility clinic if people would rather take eggs.

All we ask is safe transit back to the portal for them on request and understanding that we're not giving any guarantees of behaviour."

We were curious why you view Eras as strictly sequential or why there must be any Eras after capitalism. In our history, following the emergence of cheap toxins - producible even by nomads, where every scratch was agonizingly yet delayed-fatally lethal, leaving the wounded with nothing to lose - the meme "anyone can kill everyone, but probably shouldn't" became prevalent. Both inside and outside city walls, order could be secretly collapsed by a single disgruntled individual. It appears we grasped the laws of heredity and efficient selection earlier than most, by the age of toxic deterrence, we already possessed an 8x yield-to-seed food productivity alongside a harsh memetic selective pressure for coordination. We evolved into a system of wealthy, decentralized, and paranoid polities experimenting with the most resilient social structures.

​Consequently, it seems to us that all the social orders you described, and many others, once existed simultaneously. We attempted to build communism, theocracies, and returned to Dunbar-centric mutual aid communes, we had nomads, totalitarian empires with weapon-conspiracies, cults and whatnot. Yet the most stable form of society proved to be capitalism. It dominated even before the industrial revolution, and after the advent of radio, it displaced all other forms of social organization with the founding of the Omnihold. We foresee no further changes. We do not understand how this relates to scarcity, as social, informational, and existential preferences are also commodified, making our needs effectively infinite.

​We concluded early on that reproduction is not among a human's fundamental freedoms, so the issue of surplus-consumption via overpopulation was regulated. "Let's reproduce less and work less" is a reasonable thing to do. More effective contraception certainly helps. We are somehow internally opposed to the concept of productivity managers, as it sounds like blackmailing oneself to exploit vulnerable parts of the brain. Using promises to others or oneself as a self-fulfilling prophecy misuses the function of a promise. One should signal the true probability of task completion or failure, rather than attempting to inflate those odds through a sense of guilt toward oneself or others, in any case, we possess too little capacity for guilt or blame for such a system to function.

​Our borders are open to migrants. In principle, we can regulate reproduction, levy geo-rent, or require insurance for socially hazardous activities. Providing more data will significantly lower insurance costs, and we have good pseudonymization if this strikes you as a privacy violation. You may build your own settlements (including maritime ones) and open businesses, informally, you will have significant support from the curious and from charitables, though this may require some bureaucracy to account for external resources. You can rely on a UBI and protection from aggression. This will necessitate solving the portal's logistical problems if transit rights prove too expensive, but we are prepared to recognize deportation as the ultimate punishment. Gremirians are sterilized a priori, we expect them to refrain from attempts to restore reproduction or to breed. Unless your criminals construct forced human farms, you have nothing to worry about.

(Periods of great economical transition in Ranalite lead to some great ideological wars. Everything in Ranalite history was solved either by complicated philosophical heated-but-civil discussions, or by all-out ideological wars. For the common Ranalite, the sole two possible mental states in regard to large scale problems are "experts can solve this by figuring out the problem in great detail" and "I have to go heroically die because that is my only way to prevent great evil". Thankfully wars are getting less and less common, which some attribute to material wealth and some to the philosophical foundation of metamorality.)

"It sounds like we have opposite problems regarding reproduction! Early Kastakians only avoided dying out by considering reproduction a strong religious imperative, even nowadays it's considered an important social duty.

We think our non sapient precursors just had absolutely no natural predators, and very little of interest to do other than mate and raise children, ever since we discovered engaging pastimes and non reproductive sex it's been a struggle.

I can't rule out Adventurers trying to do illicit fertility restoration if you have people who would ask them to, but I believe everyone would support you enforcing whatever your usual precautions and consequences for such actions are."

"Yes, we have a widely applicable saying - damaging things is consent to be damaged. That applies to your vital social infrastructure just as much as physical infrastructure."

"How are you with physical affection? Not to put too fine a point on it but you're adorable. 

We can do safe transit. If you're worried, we can provide military grade emergency beacons."

Gremir continues to be through a mirror darkly, as if some subtle law of physics reversed chirality! Perhaps the murder-torture poison makes sense as a primary divergence point. That might explain the lack of slavers under capitalism and provide motivation for developing a mutually agreeable pointlike price system... (The discussion about if the poison paired with temporal coexistence just made it easier for the capitalists to disrupt every other option will remain where the summit can't see it, both in case it's true and in case it's not.)  It doesn't explain infinite-needs or dislike of productivity managers. Those might just be non obvious path dependant downstream effects though. For Ailor, the managers just grew out of people optimizing their activities and best practices had to start weaving in rest and recreation afterward. 

As for the sequence of Eras... that's just how it's been observed? Civilizations tend to progress through the Eras sequentially, except when they come into contact with a civilization from a later Era- when the later Era civ tends to consume or assimilate the earlier one.

"You can't threaten to shoot people to make them work. They know that you know that if you shoot them, they won't be able to work and you still won't get what you want out of them."

"I'm not sure what advice we could hypothetically give to Ailor of the past. We may have been lucky to have heatray-wielding separatist philosopher-kings setting the tone early on."

"The gremirians' wants may be infinite, but surely their needs can't be. Every child is taught the difference between the two."

"Wars are generally over resources or ideology. Increased material wealth and the metamoralistic process sound like they would prevent most conflicts."

"We intelligent lifeforms do love our non-procreative sex, don't we? But seriously, the Kastakians seem like they'd be delightful tourists."

We'd like to be absorbed into your Era, if that's what tends to happen upon contact. What can we do to be better absorbed? We can test the effects of integrating this framework on tourists and our internal networks of experimenters (Gremirians don't do experimental cities thing very often, as their cities have too few public spaces for it to matter, people can live under different legal systems in a single territory and only meet fellow experimenters).

The implied difference between wants and needs sounds like the difference between happiness and "well-being"? And the logic of rejecting blackmail is counterintuitive, we invented it only after mutual deterrence. It's simple for the threat of murder, but more difficult for torture. Heat rays? Whoa, that gives off a certain vibe of fallen empire. We had CSPs at the end of the Industrial Revolution, they remain a popular energy source, but they don't feel like weapons. We don't know how else you could have acquired an ancient laser.

(Speaking of which, what will gremirians see when analyzing data on the shared network? We're primarily interested in the technological levels, we'd like a moment of exposition if everyone is fine with it)

Kastakian tech levels are... Weird.

They seem to jump straight from artisanal to fully automated processes with only the most important things for 'maintain a ship' and 'treat medical conditions' going through a mass production stage, and really value durability and low maintenance parts over cheapness and replaceablilty to an extent that makes no sense until you realise what a total mess their supply chains are.

Most technological progress seems to be driven by 'someone hyper focused on this and dragged a few friends along with them to turn it implentable'. They did not have electronics or powered flight on contact but that didn't stop them making a global network with impressive coverage from vacuum tubes and hot air balloons.

They really don't do agriculture that needs ongoing tending, but do have aggressive low maintenance food and ship materials planting on coastlines and sophisticated predictive models of aquatic food species both motile and plant, and get away with this primarily because their oceans appear to have just naturally come ridiculously well stocked with edible life.

A lot of them still just potter around in wooden sail boats with solar and wind electricity generation and a few highly optimised labour saving devices, plus the ubiquitous network transciever and terminals, doing some kind of artisanal manufacturing or raising a single child with the attention of six adults or doing research of various kinds, subsistence fishing as they go along. 

There's also quite a bit of concern wrapped up around the technical data that there won't be enough enthusiastic help modernising the Network with contact electronics technology if Adventurers are allowed to explore other worlds, and countervailing concern that this might not be a bad thing given experiences with installing the technology in hospital ships and especially in mining endeavours. 

As a broad heuristic, "needs" are things you can die without and "wants" are things you can live without. A man who lived to old age in perfect health before industrialization is the sort of person we imagine as having had all his needs met. 

Aside from being considered immoral, torture is a tricky thing to get right. People will quickly say whatever they think you want to hear under torture, so it's not a reliable way of fact finding or making agreements. You can try to torture people into compliance, but it's hard to hit the sweet spot that breaks them just enough. Too little and they bide their time. Too much and they just break, becoming unable to do much at all.

CSPs were what the First Republic apparently used to set fire to invading ships, given the surviving hint "it's done with mirrors." Skeptics claim they never worked, that they were misdirection for flaming arrows or something, and that the hint was a cheeky nod to it all being a magic trick. Either way, it was a successful deterrent for centuries. Before the dark times, before the Empire.

Technology levels? By definition, we don't know where the gaps are in our knowledge or what lay the end of roads not taken. Let's throw out a few inventions and see where that gets us: airships, laundry velocipedes, boiling and freezing food to preserve it, disease prevention through titrated exposure, transmission of the magnetic force.

"Happiness" vs "well-being" can be understood as the difference between a positive mental state, and a fulfilment of value. A person can sometimes be made less happy, less positive-emotional, by actions and events that fulfill their values. But values fundamentally come from the person. A person can be wrong about factual questions that determine what actions would fulfill their values. A person can lack insights into what their values are. But another person can never know your values (or the values you "should" have) better than you, without your input. It's possible to tell a person "I am convinced your reasoning about your values is incoherent", but not decide what a coherent version should (only suggest).
There can be a simplified, default model of what most people need, such that, when you have no idea, for some reason, you assume a person's value will be close to it. And you can rely on it if, for example, a person wants something, and 99% of people who wanted it regretted it later, you can tell the person "you will probably regret it, and so shouldn't do that without a lot of caution and further confirmation of the situation". But that is not the same as "99% of people regretted it, so you don't actually want it", let alone "smarter people would not want it, therefore you don't actually want it" (unless it's literally a smarter version who, for example, somehow came from the future. And even then it is sort of debatable).
(All people have many different values at once, and have to make tradeoffs between them. But that is part of the general insight into your own mind required to do anything, and doesn't contradict the larger point of people determining their values.)

Lirakoz tries to reiterate this given the opportunity, it's not clear if the disagreement is fundamental or simply results from translation difficulties (which, again, is not surprising, despite how good Lirakoz is at learning new languages).

One of the aides speaks up. "The Academy has some specialized terminology for those sorts of things." He reaches into his pockets for a book. He tears out some of the middle pages and puts them back in this pocket. "This is one of the... diaries? Mood trackers?" Neither word seems to fit. "...codices published by the Academy. You can write down things about your day and reflect on them on the top two-thirds of the page, and convert some of those thoughts and feelings to a data structure at the bottom third of the page, which can then be anonymously sent in and aggregated by the Academy. They can use it to help you know if you're different in some way from the 99% of the people who regret. No one stops you if they don't think you are actually different, of course. And then your experience can help others facing the decision in the future, whichever way it went for you personally." He offers the book to Lirakoz. Even if neither Lirakoz nor anyone he knows has a personal use for it, it might have some insights into local psychology that no one would think to mention. 

"Yes, that is similar to some exercises on Ranalite. The specific math might be one of interest, most people do not describe their everyday moods with data structures. But I am not a mathematician."

"It's the same here," says the aide, "which why I left the front part that explains how to encode it into the standard data format used for official statistics. I'm sure somebody just records in that format on the first pass, but not anyone I personally know."

"Needs and wants can be quite difficult to disentangle - a lot of things that appear to be wants, especially food preferences but it generalises to various environmental preferences, can actually turn out to significantly affect lifespan, and even more so if you consider healthspan - the amount of time before you require permenant hospice residence.

That being said, a lot of people put wants above needs quite often - like, Adventurers go to dangerous places, endeavour groups take on risks to achieve project outcomes, even families tend to prefer the heightened risks of living in a small unit rather than the reduced physical risk of staying with a larger group and accepting the related constraints.

Less obviously, if a Kastakian doesn't need to do physical labour in their chosen usefulness role we do tend to not exercise enough without considerable peer support, for instance."

Other civilizations having avoided the horrors of slavery and world war is among the best possible news. Ailor would be very happy for the bad things in their past to be extreme outliers for all possible civilizations.

The Representative will also enthusiastically endorse recreational sex. 

If Gremir are interested in experimenting then Ailor still has people from the Reform era we can send over. It's hard to predict what exactly will translate and what will not, but worst case we find out what doesn't work. Once we know a little more we can figure out the optimal end-state and work backwards from there together. Throw us coordinates and a spec sheet and we'll make arrangements for a constitution class airship? 

Ailor's tech level is deliberately hard to glean from the subnet that they shared and the example Blue Book. The subnet has exacting information on anything they have displayed, down to the 13.9 nano meter gate length (helpfully translated units!) on their decks. Information on trains, bicycles, airships, optimized city designs... that in retrospect are easily adapted to a wide range of technology levels and doesn't disclose anything more advanced than their decks. 

There are clues that Ailor is a lot more advanced than what they're showing. The metals that they use are titanium alloys very close to some theoretical optima. Their local base units are all Plank units. The numbers they give for various scientific and mathematical concepts is exceedingly precise. They can provide digits of Pi as fast as the (admittedly quite slow) network can handle. They have nearly Plank accurate measurements of the Ways which, if you assume the time stamps are corrected for quantum effects implies some level of predictive power on the opening of the Ways... and that the Ways are still opening not merely unmapped. Ultimately doing some of the things they're doing in metal and natural materials is obviously a choice- as is the Representative wearing diamonds on the soles of her shoes.