Akon was resting his head in his hands. “You know,” Akon said, “I thought about composing a message like this to the Babyeaters. It was a stupid thought, but I kept turning it over in my mind. Trying to think about how I might persuade them that eating babies was… not a good thing.”
The Xenopsychologist grimaced. “The aliens seem to be even more given to rationalization than we are—which is maybe why their society isn’t so rigid as to actually fall apart—but I don’t think you could twist them far enough around to believe that eating babies was not a babyeating thing.”
“And by the same token,” Akon said, “I don’t think they’re particularly likely to persuade us that eating babies is good.” He sighed. “Should we just mark the message as spam?”
The question was “how do you know?”, not “what do you mean?”. Aliens are almost certain to fundamentally disagree with humans in a variety of important matters, by simple virtue of not being genetically related to us. Bakkot is a human. Different priors are called for.
The question was “how do you know?”, not “what do you mean?”. Aliens are almost certain to fundamentally disagree with humans in a variety of important matters, by simple virtue of not being genetically related to us. Bakkot is a human. Different priors are called for.