lintamande: "The operation of wizarding schools is delegated to different people who can make whatever tradeoffs strike them as correct and then the ones who get good results for the resources the Crown has offered them get promoted. Budgets for wizarding schools are set off what recent successful people spent."

Keltham: Is that actually as horrifyingly ad-hoc as it sounds for an entire-ass government.

"I would find a partial list useful, of things Governance has previously spent money on, how much money for what results, in a way that struck upper Governance as being just barely good ideas, but good ideas nonetheless.  Where the 'just barely' qualifier tells me that the outcome was worth around that much money and not at least that much money."

"I would also suggest that Governance at some point take the time to reflect on its own operations and figure out how much it relatively wants different things..."  Keltham reflects on the techniques he got taught as a kid for carefully extracting that info, checking if it made sense, checking if anything got left out, "where standard techniques for doing that correctly and not screwing it up, are, again, something I can try to teach.  It's really not just about better forging techniques.  Civilization also knew how to, for example, manage very large projects effectively... assuming all the managers are slightly smarter than I am, so, yes, it may require adaptation, but still."

"But I've got no idea how much something like that is worth to you, or what kind of increased project resources I could get after accomplishing that, versus inventing a more visibly successful forge process that uses 30% less fuel," and neither, apparently, does Governance itself have any collective idea what it's worth to Governance.  "I realize I may sound like I'm flailing here, but right now I'm very much trying to orient at all, to what Management wants from me and how much it's willing to pay to get it."

lintamande: "I'd be happy to get you a list of projects that were just barely worth it and amounts we'd be willing to pay for different kinds of progress. Our current anticipation is that this will be things most Chelish people cannot learn, so we will benefit more from techniques that some people who have learned them can figure out how to adapt for other people who cannot."

Keltham: "Yeah, the Intelligence problem is probably the severest problem you have, if not the most quickly solvable one.  I don't suppose you'd have any idea what effective price Governance puts on raising one random citizen's Intelligence from 10 to 11, or 14 to 15?"

lintamande: "Well, as an upper bound, headbands of +2 Intelligence cost 4000 gold, so we're not willing to pay 2000 gold for it in the average case."

Keltham: "Who's the least useful person who automatically gets assigned an intelligence headband as a matter of routine?"

lintamande: "Wizards promoted into command of a unit of more than 100 soldiers, typically at fourth circle, if they haven't purchased their own years before that which they typically do."

Keltham: "That's very helpful, thank you.  At what earliest point do we start looking visibly as useful collectively as a wizard in command of 100 soldiers?"

lintamande: "You are already estimated to be more useful than that, and more resources than that are already ongoingly expended on this project; our plan is to deliver you headbands even if we do not upgrade our estimate of the usefulness of the project, but it will take a few weeks because of added security measures."

Keltham: "Ah, okay, that makes more sense compared to what I expected an intelligence headband cost and what I expected this villa cost.  Security measures?"

lintamande: "Magic items can be cursed. Usually this is not a major concern in the headband trade, because a trained wizard with specific experience in detecting enchantment and mental manipulation will notice; if we're giving them to a bunch of young students with no such training we had better be very sure."

Keltham: Keltham almost asks why checking is harder than just giving them to a trained wizard to put on, but stops himself; even he can think of unlimitedly many ways to get around that test.  "Are you worried about old cursed items accidentally getting into the system, or specific adversaries targeting this project and with access to our supply network?"

lintamande: "Specific adversaries targeting Cheliax's magic item supply chain, though it'd be surprising if they'd managed already to target the project specifically. - less surprising given how much divine intervention this project has already attracted, I suppose. Other countries have in the past tried slipping cursed magic items into our military supply chain for purposes of espionage or sabotage. What we're doing over the next two weeks is having the headbands made from scratch by trusted people, and observed during the manufacture process and while they're brought here so they can't be swapped out for others, and then we'll do some tests on site as well; then you can have them."

Keltham: He should ask Carissa about her own reasoning, before asking project management about the safety of Carissa's bypassing the system, Keltham thinks; it is not clear that everyone's organizational-internal incentives are perfectly aligned.  But he should ask Carissa about it, soon.

...actually, wouldn't another obvious reason to take a few weeks to carefully manufacture headbands, be if they wanted to custom-curse his headband?  Or everyone's, for that matter?  Hm.  Also a thing to inquire about, but subtly.  His next question was one that did occur to him immediately, but was at first suppressed as lower-priority, so his asking it for this other reason shouldn't be much likelihood-ratio to them.

"Maybe it's the wrong use of your time to ask, but if it can be said briefly, what are the consequences if an adversary manages to infiltrate one headband?"

lintamande: "Likely ones: they are able to eavesdrop. That is the obvious multi-purpose kind of infiltration adversaries frequently attempt. Also likely: they're able to use it to track the wearer's location or to tell what spells the wearer has gotten. Less likely, more concerning ones: they're able to interfere with the fundamental function of the headband, enhancing intelligence, by making some thoughts more salient or easier to apply full intelligence to, and others less so. They're able to detect at some low granularity the wants, priorities and fears of the wearer."

Keltham: Aw, crap.  Though, plus side, they would be less likely to tell him that, if they were planning to curse his headband on purpose, but still.

It's... plausible that, if Carissa can detect cursed headbands well enough not to fear them, Keltham can also detect them via sheer 'having any mental skills that even use Owl's Wisdom'; but specific training always counts for an awful lot.  And of course, Keltham only has their word that an adequate counter-training even exists.

Well, he'll figure that later.  "Back to primary topic.  What would you say if I asked you to tell me about Cheliax's most important problems, independently of whether you thought I could solve them?"

lintamande: "The Worldwound is the most urgent problem. We are allocating something like fifteen percent of our resources to containing it and it is not getting worse but it is not getting better either. After that...periodic epidemics of cholera, smallpox, polio, plague, and flu, ongoing deaths from tuberculosis, malaria, and diarrheal diseases, droughts, inadequate nutrition, the threat of war, risks from random powerful wizards doing very stupid things."

Keltham: Directly challenging Worldwound-fighting sounds like it would take weapons; weapons take trust.

Keltham is not very calibrated on how well they do at fighting epidemics, here, but if that's their second-worst problem...

"About how much would the government pay to avoid one epidemic from whichever is the worst class of epidemic, and how often does that happen?"

"And suppose that I ask somebody to come by tomorrow who's an expert on epidemics and current countermeasures, so I can quiz them.  I don't particularly expect this result, but suppose it turns out I can tell you something on the spot, that, combined with your other magical capabilities, completely wipes 'smallpox' or 'flu'.  What could I expect in return, and how would the project scale from there?"

lintamande: "I expect we would pay fifty thousand gold pieces to avoid one epidemic, noting that delaying one in one city through very good precautions usually just means it hits there later because no one developed immunity through infection. I expect we would pay something like a million gold pieces that completely made a major cause of epidemics go away if that didn't just mean all the same people die but of other things through some mechanism. I don't know what higher-budget project items you'd want - more of Contessa Lrilatha's time? More students? More miscellaneous magic items? - but we could arrange any of them, if you achieved that."

Keltham: Keltham nods; that's grim-but-true.  If plagues reduce population density to make future plagues less likely, or if people starve until their immune systems weaken and after a plague the survivors get more food per capita, those are both equilibria that will get restored around the variation of particular causes.  "I'll think more toward generalizable measures that will shift long-term equilibria of epidemic levels, rather than on specifics of one epidemic, then; if your impression is that naively eliminating one particular source of epidemic would say cause urban density or food per person to increase or decrease until the remaining epidemics became more virulent."

"I'll obviously also want a contract before solving particular things, and it'd be nice if there was some generalizing way to assess that value, rather than my constantly interrupting myself to negotiate and sign new contracts.  That's part of why it would have been useful to have a schedule of how much value the government assigns to things; we could then negotiate general percentages covering what I and other project members would capture of the value we create."

lintamande: "We will try to come up with such a schedule for you, and a proposed general contract along the same lines as the one you negotiated for general intellectual concepts with Contessa Lrilatha. If you would like I can lay out approximately the terms we'd expect that to have, though I don't have authorization to make commitments on that scale on the Crown's behalf." 

Keltham: "Understood.  Go ahead, then."

lintamande: Cheliax expects to request most of the gains, maybe 80% or 90%, of Keltham's inventions while he is repaying them for the loan of this villa and a full-time research staff and a full-time security staff; the loan will accumulate interest at the same rates any devil in Hell gets if they get a loan in Hell, usually humans have to pay higher interest rates than that but that's because, frankly, lots of humans will run away and not pay, and they both trust and can verify Keltham's assurances on that front. Cheliax expects to request much less of the gains, perhaps half, once the loans are repaid. A complication they are keeping in mind is that, uh, Cheliax doesn't have a systematic way of collecting benefits that don't literally directly accrue to the state in the form of higher tax revenues from various dukes, and it sounds like Keltham's society would have such a method. 

Carissa Sevar: Keltham's reportedly distracted again in equity negotiations! That's great, because Carissa has decided the entire harem needs to read a bunch of Taldane romance novels so that if they can't stop themselves from thinking in romance novels they'll at least be whatever kind the King in Taldor has commissioned to develop appropriate attributes in Taldane young women. 

.... it turns out romance novels in Taldor are not commissioned by an Imperial office at all, which is itself the kind of useful thing you only learn by pretending to be Taldor.

Iarwain: "The women depicted here," Ione says after flipping through and rapidly skimming some of the books, "would sit around waiting for Keltham to pursue them, because they are so attractive they can't help rich nobles falling for them even if they pretend they don't want it.  I think what we've learned today is that when you don't have an Imperial office commissioning romance novels, they're written to appeal to the most self-indulgent aspects of the reader, because nobody's making the authors do anything else."

"The women depicted here," Paxti says, "are passive, weak, stupid, lifeless, ambitionless trophies.  Somebody remind me why we haven't already conquered Taldor in real life."

"I've known Keltham for a day and a half and I can already guess these women are not his type," says Peranza.

Carissa Sevar: "Your parents grew up reading stories like these, in our timeline," Carissa says tiredly. "You grew up after Hell took Cheliax to straighten us out and you got to read normal modern romance novels in which girls win the boy. Though none of the ones in which the girl wins the boy by cleverly getting all her romantic rivals' eyes gouged out, or in which the girl wins the boy by leaving him under the impression she's an important noble considering executing him unless he wins her over, and not The Damnation of Sir Nicholau. ...actually I don't know what romance tropes the slightly gentler Cheliax we're going for has. ...maybe there's a version of The Damnation of Sir Nicholau where she's trying to teach him to enjoy himself, instead of having perfunctory sex he doesn't really like, and he goes to Hell once he realizes that he wants things for himself instead of only wanting whatever's best for other people, and in every disguise she's happy and fine because she, unlike him, has been raised competent to understand what she wants and to go get it."

Ione Sala: "Wouldn't work as a story," Ione responds immediately.  "If she's happy and fine then there's not enough conflict from the standpoint of the viewpoint character.  She needs to be struggling with her own need for violent sex, say, at the same time as she's trying to get him to want things for himself.  Her character needs to develop to where she's competent to understand what she wants, and the end of the novel should show her successfully going after it and getting it."

"Which, again, was basically the plotline of Perverting Adan -"

"It's the plotline of any young adult novel with a female protagonist, who will, at some point, have to learn the darkness of her own desires," Ione snaps at Paxti.  "As you'd know if you read more than one book a year -"

"We can work with this, though," Paxti says.  "Give me and Ione twenty minutes, and we'll come up with new plots for everyone's favorite romance books, with storylines that fit the new Cheliax."

"I'll slit her throat before we get two minutes in," says Ione.  Ione also sees a much bigger problem with that idea, but she's curious whether Sevar will spot it on her own.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is thinking that possibly she should ever have read a romance novel. "Sounds like keeping track of a lot of lies. I'd rather have one or two good ones that are very appropriate for what we're trying to accomplish."

Ione Sala: Ione nods.  It's going to be interesting to see whether, or rather, how fast, Sevar gets executed for heresy once she gets into the habit of noticing all the constant lies.

"Actually, if I can get an authorized lie on this, none of us much like reading fiction at all," Ione says.  "Cheliax has been devoting too many resources to the Worldwound, and the books written before Hell took over are trash.  If we talk about any fiction we've read, in front of Keltham, he's going to ask to see it.  Remixing fiction isn't like redoing a spellbook with Glimpse of Truth renamed to Glimpse of Beyond.  Maybe we can rush some better books from Absalom, and read one apiece before Keltham gets around to asking about that, so that we can have ever read a novel.  But if he asks before then, you tried reading novels from old Cheliax and quickly gave up."

Carissa Sevar: "- yeah, all right. In that case let's give this up as a useful reminder of how grateful we are to live in Cheliax and get back to the histories."

Keltham: They're not going to have all that much time for it.  Keltham may not be very trained to handle potential lies and gaslighting, but he was planning to be a Mad Investor, and hails from a vastly more financially sophisticated Civilization.  He's not going to negotiate and compromise with Marta, and then sit down in front of an actual authorized negotiator who takes their final compromise as Keltham's starting point and negotiates a new set of moves in Cheliax's favor.

This wouldn't usually happen in dath ilan - firstly because dath ilan would just seat both real negotiators directly, and second because the principles behind bargaining positions are better understood, such that they'd try to have bargaining outcomes be invariant to the order in which considerations are introduced.  But dath ilan does have the concept of hiding an unusually high willingness-to-pay so that sellers can't price-discriminate against you, and sending in a 'negotiator' who doesn't actually have the power to make commitments is a standard known-failure-mode-to-avoid.

Keltham will, of course say all this to Marta directly; none of that meta-information has any obvious rationale for keeping it secret.

After that, he'll ask Marta more detailed questions about terms and conditions on Cheliax's starting offer, and more questions about the current size of Cheliax's economy, and what kind of measurement difficulties they expect to run into, and Governance's likely willingness-to-pay for various goods.  But he won't negotiate; except insofar as offering his own starting remark that the offered percentages of generated value seem acceptable, if there's no gotchas in how profits or expenses are measured, and sufficient for quick agreement from there; but he wants to understand the terms and conditions before he says for sure that the starting offer is generous.

At some point, Keltham thinks, he needs to give Cheliax a lecture on fairly dividing gains from trade anyways.  If he can run through it quickly, he might as well do it today and see if that saves some time on negotiating.  If they know that dath ilani approach fairness in a very structured way, maybe he can just tap himself with his own Truthspell and the Fair Division of Gains from Trade spell, say what the fair price would be, and have them accept that.

Keltham wraps up with Marta - having hardly exhausted his unending sequence of Additional Questions, of course, but that's just what life is like for your first few weeks in another dimension - and heads over to the library.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": If Keltham is teaching again, Broom should be there to make sure Keltham does not teach anything which is obviously going to destroy the world.

Visibly or invisibly?  Broom is still within Keltham's one-day deadline for replying to Keltham's original terms.  Do the great wizards know if Keltham will be able to detect Broom again today?  Does Cheliax want Broom to be visible regardless?  Broom goes to ask a great wizard about this.

lintamande: They have Keltham's spells and he doesn't have Invisibility Purge but it seems likely that's in anticipation of Cheliax not trying to sneak any invisibility past him. They don't bother explaining that to Broom, obviously, but they tell him to be visible. If he needs to stab someone he can go invisible for that to make him harder to stop.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom catches up to Keltham before he reaches the library.  He doesn't say anything, as he falls into step behind Keltham; the less he says, the less chances there are for him to fail.

Keltham: Why is Keltham's life like this?  He hopes the research harem is okay with brief explanations because he sure doesn't know what exactly is classified.

Keltham walks into the library with a very short, armed person walking behind him.  "Hi," Keltham says.  "This is Broom."

lintamande: SHIT did he learn about slavery and now he's upset about it???

Carissa Sevar: "Hello, Broom," says Carissa, sounding bored. 

Keltham: "Broom will be listening in on my lectures from now on.  Further questions should be directed to Broom, because I don't even know what anyone is supposed to think about this."

lintamande: Well he doesn't sound as mad as he'll be when he finds out about slavery????

No one says anything.

Keltham: He would have questions in their shoes.  "Have you, like... not noticed that you are confused about this."

lintamande: "I'm confused!" says Meritxell. "But you just said not to ask you questions and, uh, Broom hasn't said he'll take questions. And I assume Projects also isn't taking questions about this or they'd have told us about it."

Keltham: "Right.  Sorry.  Not your fault.  It's just -"

"Never mind.  For a start, today, I'm going to try to quickly review the way that dath ilani learn about negotiation -"

"Or actually no, before that, there's a test I realized yesterday I should run.  Before things go much... further."  Keltham is a little worried about where exactly he is inside reality, right now.  It's probably just a silly worry.  But yesterday with Carissa, he thought of an obvious possible way to check on it quickly, if everyone here is honest.  It might not work, but then, it might.

Keltham grabs a couple of the improvised markers from yesterday, and goes to the section of wall that was being used as an improvised whiteboard (with erasure via Prestidigitation).

Keltham first shows how to use Unanchored Scales, an experimental elicitation tool for when you just want somebody's intuitive strength of feeling about something, without them worrying exactly about what any numbers mean.  Draw a line with two endpoints representing 'not at all' and 'all the way', and then you draw a slash through the line at the point that corresponds to your intuitive strength of feeling.  You could use it to ask 'How warm is this room?' without people bugging you about how warm a '3' was supposed to represent.  It's not perfect, obviously, but the point is that the elicitation method acknowledges that imperfection up front.

Keltham then asks everybody in the classroom, including Carissa, to answer two questions, separately, anonymously, on bits of paper to fold up and mix before he looks at them.  Obviously, they shouldn't consult with each other at all before answering.  Obviously, Keltham promises to make no effort to figure out who wrote down what.  He really does want them to write down an honest answer, though, if they write down anything at all; they can draw an X-cross on the paper if they want to openly refuse to answer.

The two questions Keltham writes on the whiteboard are:

"How much do you have an unusual interestingly-complicated backstory or current problem, that I'd find out about if I got into a relationship with you?"

"What do you expect will be the average answer of everyone here to the previous question?"

Carissa Sevar: Well, shit. Does he expect they're dishonestly coordinating backstories -

- she raises her hand -

Keltham: "Carissa?"

Carissa Sevar: "Unusual for, in my case, a third circle wizard at the Worldwound, and in their case, a top student at Ostenso's Academy of Wizardry, or unusual for a random person in Golarion."

Keltham: Now that's a philosophically interesting question.  What Keltham really wants to ask is if their personal stories would seem surprisingly interesting to whoever is playing the hypothetical original LARP that this realitynovel is deconstructing.  But they're not going to have a better answer to that than he does.

Well, 'Keltham' would be the paying player of the original LARP, so...  "I think what we're looking for is the expected degree to which I, a dath ilani, would say something like, 'Wait what?' after I found out.  So the fact that you spent years at the Worldwound would be, like, a third of the way across, because it's surprising to me and matters to me, while you being secretly a dragon shapechanged into a human, if you knew I'd find that out later in the relationship, would be more like two-thirds across.  Maybe let's say it's only past the halfway point if you'd expect other people here to be surprised."

Carissa Sevar: - nod. Okay, she isn't sure what hypothesis he is entertaining, here. 

She will mark herself as less than halfway surprising - if Keltham somehow learns 'chosen by Asmodeus to rework theology to be dath ilani' then the whole game is up anyway - and the average as less than her because she's pretty sure the others ought to be indicating less surprisingness than that. 

lintamande: Tonia is pretty sure she's not at all surprising in any way unless they count the having sold her soul which Keltham's not supposed to learn about. She indicates that she is not surprising and that other people are only slightly more surprising than her. 

Meritxell would like to be a shapedchanged dragon! Or have a fascinating tragic backstory or something! Those feel like the way to be the best at this and she'd like to be the best at this. She's pretty sure if she'd had, like, a month's warning she could have had the best sexual fetishes, too, but that's hard to do from a cold start. She reluctantly marks down that she's not very interesting, which is incredibly painful to do, and that the average person is probably slightly more interesting than that, which is agonizing.

Ione Sala: This is probably her fault, isn't it, unless Carissa screwed up even worse.  Ione puts down a two-thirds mark, since she's secretly a very rare chosen oracle of Nethys and not just a hidden worshipper.

She gives the general class a one-half mark, hoping that others are wise enough to realize that what they're telling Keltham there is the expected degree of weirdness that's normal for Golarion, which influences how much he'll think is normal.

Iarwain: Paxti puts down 1/2 and 1/3.  She doesn't have a fascinating though ordinary-for-Golarion backstory yet, but she wants to reserve space for getting one.

Asmodia puts down 0 and nearly 0.  She doesn't actually want a story.

Pilar silently writes her answers.

lintamande: Gregoria's father is the heir to the Barony of Blanes. She doesn't think this makes her very interesting; firstly, everyone knows the man in question has a thing for that, and hundreds of children; secondly, probably most other Barons are like that, thirdly, it's not as if she's ever met the man. For all she knows her mother could be lying. If it were a Duke then that'd probably count as a little bit interesting but a Baron? Not really. 

Hopefully they'll get a good distribution of claims of interestingness so that any given girl can pretend later to have assigned a different one than she in fact did, but they can't coordinate, and it's hard to guess what other people will say. 

Gregoria frowns at her pen for a bit and then picks at random on the unremarkable half of both lines.

Keltham: Well.  That's a very interesting response pattern.

It doesn't quite fit 'the LARP begins with 3-5 primary love interests, some of whom start out knowing about some of the others, plus a bunch of relatively normal girls who think everyone else there is also normal'.  Half the respondents thought everyone had backgrounds almost totally uninteresting to a dath ilani, which may indicate a failure of perspective-taking, or a failure to process the instructions somehow.

What he should've done was run a pilot of this procedure, asking about the degree to which everybody liked lunch, or something.

Very helpful there, obviously correct thought, but you're arriving a little too late.

"Right then," Keltham says.  "Can I get somebody to destroy these papers before the universe notices them?"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom now has additional questions.

"Broom needs to see the papers before they are destroyed."

Keltham: "Broom, I was joking."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom will have questions for Keltham later.  Broom still needs to see the papers now."

Keltham: "They didn't consent to that in advance, and it does not seem appropriate to ask for their consent afterwards."

Carissa Sevar: See this is why you have to TELL KELTHAM ABOUT OTOLMENS because otherwise he will NOT treat Broom like an institution you shut up and cooperate with. But Carissa has made that recommendation in the strongest terms she can and it's over her head and she shouldn't countermand it now, and also has no justification to herself know anything about Otolmens. 

lintamande: "You also didn't tell us you were going to destroy them," Meritxell says. "I have been assuming maybe all of our notes are going to be preserved for posterity or something."

Keltham: Keltham reminds himself that he was previously angry at Broom for reasons that shouldn't influence his behavior this much, and tamps down his irritation.

"Fine.  New poll, use this symbol for destroying all notes and then Broom can ask you to re-generate them for his observation if he wants.  This symbol for Broom being allowed to look at them first before they get destroyed.  This symbol if you think it's great to preserve those notes for posterity.  Minimum vote, not average vote."

"He does have any reason, as I'm given to understand it.  But Broom, you will need to ask in advance on future occasions, this kind of after-the-fact modification is destructive of trust in implied experimental contracts."

Keltham writes down the new poll and symbols on the whiteboard, underneath the previous questions.  The three symbols are \ /, V, and X, since it should be hard to tell what somebody is writing by looking at the motions of their quill; drawing two slanted lines that optionally touch or intersect accomplishes this.

lintamande: This is such a terrifying exercise and it'd be really nice to know what Broom's deal is!!!!

Carissa Sevar: Idea, Carissa thinks grouchily. Kidnap - or hire, whatever, probably hire because if they're scared it'll mess with the data - a bunch of Taldane wizard teenagers to put through all these experiments for us to learn from how they're responding.

She puts a V for letting Broom look because Aspexia Rugatonn seemed to think they should cooperate with Otolmens and Aspexia Rugatonn is the expert.

Iarwain: Ione doesn't know what this guy's deal is, but if he's here then Security wants him here, and she's not going to piss off Security without a reason.  She puts down V.

Asmodia puts down X.  Paxti puts down X.  Pilar writes down her own answer.

lintamande: Meritxell puts down X. Gregoria puts down V.

Keltham: Keltham checks the votes, then hands the notes over to Broom.  "The vote was to destroy after you read them."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom thanks you," he says.  Slaves learn somewhat more politeness than is usual in Cheliax for non-slaves.

Broom reads the poll results.

It does not look like a situation that is not heading into an enormous mess.

Broom will decide what to do about that later.

Keltham: "Okay, now can somebody please destroy the answers in a clear obvious way where everyone can see they were destroyed."

Carissa Sevar: "Broom, if you could set them down on the floor clear of anything, we can just light them on fire."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom swiftly sets them down.

Carissa Sevar: Presumably no one has lit Otolmens's oracle on fire but possibly no one has told him not to worry about it. 

She lights the papers. Presumably Security, now using a scry rather than an invisible person, has been watching over Keltham's shoulder and they'll have a lengthy deanonymizing debrief later.

Keltham: "Right then.  Leaving all that aside," until their plot-induced lack of mutual communication blows up catastrophically on the whole group later, "I thought today I'd try to speedrun a couple of years' worth of dath ilani lessons for children about how fairness in negotiation works.  On the theory that, first of all, Cheliax could stand to get a glimpse of how dath ilani's children's training works in general; and second, that maybe if an adult with average dath ilani intelligence hears about children's training in the abstract, they can just imagine that they went through that training themselves?"

"The reason I'm picking 'fairness' as the topic is because I'm going to be using those structures to negotiate equity, and those procedures do tend to hope that everyone has - mutual knowledge, common knowledge, stuff that everyone knows that everyone knows - about how 'fairness' works.  Before I start, if I can ask the group - what does the term that 'fairness' translates into, in Taldane, mean to people here?"

lintamande: .....a concept for stupid people who think they deserve more than they can claim and hold, Meritxell doesn't say. 

     "Getting what was agreed upon."

     "Trades where - neither side is getting cheated."

     "Rules that are applied consistently or impartially."

      "Everyone gets what they earned."

Keltham: "How can you tell how much somebody has earned?  If you make a one-of-a-kind magical item, what price should it sell for, so that neither side is being cheated?"

lintamande: "Whatever you can get someone to buy it for," says Meritxell.

Keltham: "My shirt is a one-of-a-kind relic from another plane; it has no standard market price.  In real life, I plan to never sell it, ever, though I might sell the ability to do science to it.  Suppose however that, relative to how wealthy I expect to someday be, my shirt, one of my only memories of dath ilan, is worth one million gold pieces to me.  In the sense that, if some insidious force was otherwise going to steal my shirt from me, I wouldn't pay any more than a million to protect it."

"Now suppose somebody else has a very weird magical spell that can take any relic of dath ilan, and immediately convert it into ten million gold pieces, no questions asked."

"Any price greater than a million gold and less than ten million gold is a mutually beneficial trade, in the sense that both of us are better off making the trade at that price, than not trading with each other at all.  But if my shirt sells for only a million and a thousand gold, I'm only a thousand gold better off, and the other person is around nine million gold better off.  If my shirt sells for ten million minus a thousand, the other guy has profited by a thousand and I've profited by a bit less than nine million."

"Trading at all, at any price in the range, is mutually beneficial; we're both better off.  But on top of that event, there's another event, a question of the exact price, in which my being one gold piece better off makes the other person one gold piece worse off."

"How do we set that price, then?  Aren't we locked into an adversarial game where it's my interest to say, 'I'll only sell at ten million minus one', and it's their interest to say, 'I'll only buy at one million plus one'?  Why would we say anything else, when saying anything else just makes the other person better off at our own expense?  But if we both think like that, the trade doesn't occur at all."

"What price is fair?  Or to put it another way, how can two people like that agree on a trade at all?  How does Golarion, how does Cheliax, think about that?"

Carissa Sevar: It hasn't come up in their books about Taldor yet but Carissa's met Taldane adventurers and in fact tried to trade them things and the answer is the same there as in Cheliax. "You barter. You say 'why, I don't see why I should give up this shirt for a coin less than twenty million gold, which communicates 'I'm open to negotiating a trade but would need to be persuaded it's the best trade I can get', and the other person says 'twenty million! I have a hard time believing even such a sentimental item is worth more to you than an entire week of Nefreti Clepati's time during which she could make a dozen duplicates of the shirt and make you a personal demiplane besides, and that would only be eight million gold. And really it seems to me like this trade is worth your time even for one duplicate of the shirt and the personal demiplane, and that would be only eight hundred thousand gold, which is what I'm offering. Which communicates 'I'm open to negotiating a trade but would need to be persuaded it's the best trade I can get'.

And you say 'my, imagine what Nefreti Clepati would say if you tried to lowball her prices like that! I'm not sure this conversation is worth my time, if my shirt is worth so little to you.' Which communicates - and you might be bluffing, you're allowed to bluff when you're doing this - that the quoted price is well outside the range that's worth it to you, and they'd better indicate that they think there's overlap between their willingness to pay and your willingness to sell.

And you iterate on this and then end up settling somewhere, the exact place depending on how competent at bartering you are and on the range of trades you both like."

Keltham: "...fascinating."

dath ilan: Consider - as a dath ilani might consider it - the problem of a dath ilani cast into a strange new universe, who must trade with the aliens found there.

(It is in fact quite a common trope, in dath ilani science fiction.  But it wouldn't particularly occur to Keltham to classify this situation as that trope.  Cheliax is way too legible.  They have a currency of 'gold pieces' that they cheerfully translated for him into unskilled-labor-years.  Golarion would need to be a lot weirder before it was good Trade With Aliens science fiction.)

The aliens, one may suppose, have a biological-evolutionary setup similar enough to dath ilan's that they have epidemics, caused by viruses and bacteria and parasites.  Suppose the aliens don't know about viruses and bacteria and parasites; or vaccines or antibiotics or filtering masks or possibly even sterilization.  Nor about how one should use experiments to determine whether a disease is airborne or waterborne or touch-transmitted or transmitted through wastewater contamination or is carried by smaller or larger animals.

The dath ilani, then, knows something which this alien Civilization might find of great value.  The alien Civilization can perhaps pay for this knowledge, with some alien means of payment.

Perhaps the alien Civilization, being nonhuman (or just non-dath-ilani) tries to be stingy about it; to lowball the dath ilani; to buy their knowledge at a cost of, say, a pile of shiny metal, or title to one island in the ocean.  Depending on the exact backstory of how the aliens came to try this, and whether it was in some sense the fault of that whole civilization or just a part of it, even a non-Keltham dath ilani might well say, "Screw you, pay me."

That, too, the dath ilani are taught; in Golarion terms, the difference between Lawful Good and Lawful Stupid.

But then how high does the price need to be, exactly, for the dath ilani to agree to the trade?  By what system do you determine an answer to that?

dath ilan: The notion of a fair agreement, a fair trade, a fair division of gains from trade, a fair price, plays a central role in any civilization that relies on its citizens' conscious understanding of their activities.  Dath ilan teaches the Law (mathematical structure) underpinning fairness, very carefully, and from childhood.  After all, if lots of people ended up with widely different notions of what was fair, Civilization would stop trading with itself.

In turn, the notion of 'fair trade' relies on understanding the notion of trade in the first place.

dath ilan: 'Jellychips', a staple of dath ilani lessons to young children, are small lumps of edible flavored gel.  Jellychips come in distinct appearances, colors, shapes, and flavors; almost always, everything with exactly the same appearance has exactly the same flavor.  Ten jellychips might mass as much as one peanut; they're meant to implement a burst of tasty flavor that's just enough to be present and pleasant.  They're tiny so that children don't get end up getting all of their calories from economics lessons.

To teach the notion of trade, you begin by passing out jellychips to children, and let them experiment a bit to find out which of their favorite flavors have which external appearance.  Then ask the children to write down which flavors they like more or less than others.  Compare the lists; observe to the children that they tend to like different flavors more or best.  (There is in fact a jellychip selection algorithm, based on previously observed food preferences among the kids, which makes sure that this happens.)  Observe to them that, by trading jellychips with each other, they could all end up with more of the kind of jellychips they want.

Let them trade, a bit, as they desire.  So long as they haven't been introduced to any formal concepts of 'fairness' to complain about, this part usually does not go too poorly, among dath ilani children.  They'll find jellychips that they have, and don't want; and look for somebody else who wants those, and has some they want; and trade 1-for-1.  If you let them play longer they'll start to notice triangular trades that no two children can complete, and do those too, but still usually 1-for-1.

dath ilan: When the first rush of trading has died down, introduce to the children the concept of a multi-agent optimal arrangement: an arrangement such that it's not possible to redistribute the jellychips in any way that leaves all of the children better off simultaneously.  Ask them if they think their current arrangement got there.

Now the kids have a concept of a social goal to aim for, a way in which they can be collectively winning at trade or performing subpar; and the arguments will become a bit more heated.

(Especially if you've sorted all the kids to have a certain sort of personality, and usually therefore all be boys; because sometimes different children learn different things, and some of those things are best learned by similar children all together.)

It usually doesn't take long for one boy to start telling another that they need to make a trade, in order to get the classroom* into what they've figured as the optimal arrangement.

Of course the older kids immediately step in at this point, and remind everyone that, by the definition of multi-agent-optimality, you should never need to force somebody to trade in order to get to a jellychip arrangement that's better for everyone; the target state should be better for the person who's making the trade too.

(*)  Not actually a 'room' in the sense of being indoors; children need to be exposed to outdoor light levels in childhood in order to not grow up nearsighted.  The surface area required for children to spend enough of their day outdoors is currently the limiting factor on the urban density of the Great City (called also Central City and Default).  This is one of the places where public will and private incentives are in conflict, since there's a pressure towards ever-greater urban density in the center; but if this were permitted, soon it would be mostly childless people who could afford to live in Civilization's dense center.  For that and other reasons, it's been decided that it's better to limit the Great City's density and keep Civilization more spread out.  To find a solid expanse of skyscrapers, you'd need to visit a major city with few or no children per capita, like Big Quiet, or Erotown.

dath ilan: After this enlightenment, an adult Watcher comes forth, and argues to the younger children that the whole point of trading things is that different people put different values on the same goods: if you-1 like black jellychips and have blue jellychips, and you-2 have black jellychips and like blue jellychips, then you can both do better by trading jellychips with each other.

This, the Watcher argues solemnly, is the point of trade, and the whole reason why people trade with each other: because they get different enjoyments from owning the same things, so that they can both become better off by passing the same fixed goods back and forth between themselves.

The younger children are asked if they first-order believe that.

None will say 'yes', at that point.  The most overeager ones will say 'No!' but then be unable to explain why not.  Most kids will give the brief Baseline comeback that colloquially translates to 'I probably would have believed it, if I wasn't pretty sure you were trolling me, though I haven't seen anything that I suspect is the real argument against it'.

(A dath ilani childhood tends to make one grow up suspicious of things that grownups say with great solemnity.  Civilization considers this a desirable outcome, which is good, because it sure is the outcome they're getting.)

Regardless of their answers, the children are then asked whether people who all got the same enjoyments from the same goods would never trade with each other.  And so that pathway of learning continues.

dath ilan: On a separate track through the lattice of knowledge, a new idea may now be introduced on those foundations, the notion of a fair trade between black jellychips and blue jellychips. 

It begins by showing the children a way to rearrange their understanding of jellychip preferences, as a quantitative relation and not just an ordering, through the concept of indifferences, which state equalities of preference.  Not just, "I like purple jellychips more than black jellychips, and black jellychips more than blue jellychips" but "I am indifferent between having 5 purple jellychips, or 6 black jellychips, or 8 blue jellychips."

But then, of course, you might be able to execute multi-agent-beneficial trades that aren't 1-to-1.  If someone is indifferent between having 6 black jellychips and 8 blue jellychips, then trading 7 blue jellychips for 6 black jellychips will leave them better off than before.  Right?

A lot of children will say 'No!' at this point, and try to find some reason why that couldn't possibly be valid, because they know how economics lessons work, by this point in their lives.  They expect that somebody's about to lead them down a pathway that takes them down to 6 black jellychips and then 5 purple jellychips and so on until they only have one jellychip left.  

But you can, with a bit more work, convince them that it's totally valid to want 6 black jellychips more than 7 blue jellychips, and valid to trade things according to your wants, and tell them that in fact this does not necessarily always expose them to a set of clever trades that take them down to 1 jellychip which, it will then be proven to them, they must want to trade for nothing.  That's not actually going to happen!  You're thinking it's going to be the point of the economics lesson, but it's not!  Adults actually trade 7 hours of labor for 6 fancy shirts all the time, without ending up with 0 shirts, and this is isomorphic.

The children are then asked if they think they can get to a more multi-agent-optimal state by trading uneven numbers of jellychips amongst themselves.

The children approach this warily; or with a burst of initial enthusiasm that fades, after many children prove rather suspicious of attempts to get them to trade more jellychips for less jellychips.

Dath ilan having an average Intelligence of 16 or 17, it doesn't take long for somebody to point out that, even if one person likes some jellychips more than others, that's no reason for them to end up with less jellychips.  Other kids also like some jellychips more than others.  Why shouldn't they be the one to end up with less jellychips, and I, be the one who ends up with more, if that's how we're going to play it?

Why yes, Keltham was the first one to say it in those terms, in his own class, when he was very young.

dath ilan: Suppose that Keltham is indifferent between 3 black jellychips and 4 blue jellychips, and that Limyar is indifferent between 2 blue jellychips and 3 black jellychips.  Suppose they both start with 12 black and 12 blue jellychips.

Then for Keltham to trade his 12 blue jellychips, for 10 black jellychips from Limyar, would leave them both better off.

And for Limyar to trade his 12 black jellychips, for 9 blue jellychips from Keltham, would leave them both better off.

And for Keltham to trade his 12 blue jellychips for Limyar's 12 black jellychips would leave them both better off.

All three of these are mutually beneficial trades.

But which of them is fair?  Or fairest?

If you're the sort who agrees to just any trade that's mutually beneficial - like Limyar, in this classroom, had been earlier arguing people ought to do - then you know what Keltham is going to do to you?

That's right.  Keltham is going to offer 9 blue jellychips for your 12 black jellychips, you're going to accept, Keltham is going to carry out the trade, and then Keltham is going to angrily throw another 3 blue jellychips at you and yell that you're being stupid.

dath ilan: If you step out and look at that problem from a wider angle, it's pretty much the same issue that holds between the dath ilani and the alien civilization, considering the price of medical knowledge.

If the alien civilization offers some tiny lowball offer - like, say, a supply of food and water - in exchange for every last scrap of your knowledge, and there's no other civilization around to trade with, you and they will both be better off if you accept, compared to if you don't.

But if you accept offers like that one, food and water is the most you can expect to be offered, if the aliens are less Lawful Neutral than Keltham.

(Even if there's two alien factions around to trade with, you can't quite rely on them bidding against each other.  What if they coordinate with each other instead?  There's a noticeable amount for both of them to gain, if they both agree to offer you only food and water, instead of a higher price.)

dath ilan: Another game is now introduced to the children, played with a single flavor of jellychip.  It is not, in dath ilan, called the 'Ultimatum Game', but the actual name they have for it is the 'Final Trade Offer Game', which isn't all that different.

One child gets a dial, with settings from 0 to 12.  Another child gets a button.  The first child picks a setting on the dial and locks it in.  The second child then chooses whether to press the button.  If the second child presses the button, the first child gets as many jellychips as the dial indicates; the second child gets jellychips equal to 12 minus the number on the dial.  If the second child doesn't press the button, they both get nothing.

Which is to say: the first child proposes a division of a gain of 12 jellychips, where they get some part, and the other child gets the rest.  The second child can approve the division, or refuse it; and if they refuse, both get nothing.

If you run this lesson on dath ilani children, virtually everyone offers a 6:6 jellychip split and everyone accepts it.

At least, that's what they do on round zero, the initial round where they try things the simple way to verify their starting assumptions.  Then they start experimenting.  It's not so much that they're being selfish, and trying to figure out what they can get away with; it's that they're figuring there must be some clever point to this game, and you're not going to find it if you just offer 6:6 every time.

Some kids try out accepting splits of 7:5.  Other kids are like, ok then, and offer them 7:5 splits, which usually get rejected if, like, people are going to make a thing out of that, right.  Some try offering compacts to trade 7:5 splits for 5:7 splits, but there's no guarantee that any two kids will be matched up again in the future.

At this point the older kids step in and say that the point of the game is drifting away from the reality it's intended to model, and everybody nods and waits for the next part.  (Of course there's a next part.  There's been a weird game and no stunning insight about it has been presented yet.  They've ever been to a lesson before.  Older people aren't going to make you execute a weird pointless procedure and then not have some stunning insight to offer you as payment; kids would stop going to lessons, if that bargain was often violated.)

Before the next part, though, the older child teaching asks what the kids think is probably the ideal or correct thing you're supposed to do if somebody offers you a 7:5 split, not as a game, but in real life.

Keltham, of course, said to reject the offer.  Some other kids agreed the offer should be rejected.  Some claimed that you should accept it, but everyone should be angry at the person and whoever went next with them should offer them 7:5.  Limyar claimed that you should always accept it, even if the other person offers 11:1, because everyone would end up with fewer jellychips if you rejected than if you accepted, so rejecting the offer couldn't be multi-agent-optimal.  Keltham asked Limyar if he actually believed that.  Limyar said no but he was going to go on saying it anyways to annoy Keltham.

The kids argue about it for a while, and then the demonstration moves on.

dath ilan: The next stage involves a complicated dynamic-puzzle with two stations, that requires two players working simultaneously to solve.  After it's been solved, one player locks in a number on a 0-12 dial, the other player may press a button, and the puzzle station spits out jellychips thus divided.

The gotcha is, the 2-player puzzle-game isn't always of equal difficulty for both players.  Sometimes, one of them needs to work a lot harder than the other.

Now things start to heat up.  There's an obvious notion that if one player worked harder than the other, they should get more jellychips.  But how much more?  Can you quantify how hard the players are working, and split the jellychips in proportion to that?  The game obviously seems to be pointing in the direction of quantifying how hard the players are working, relative to each other, but there's no obvious way to do that.

Somebody proposes that each player say, on a scale of 0 to 12, how hard they felt like they worked, and then the jellychips should be divided in whatever ratio is nearest to that ratio.

The solution relies on people being honest.  This is, perhaps, less of a looming unsolvable problem for dath ilani children than for adults in Golarion.

Once this solution is produced and tried once, the older children congratulate the kids on having solved the first layer.  On to the second layer!

In the second layer, some children get handed sealed cards before each game, telling them whether to be honest about it, or to try to grab a little more for themselves.  (Though remember, say the older children, that this is all only a game; we are trying to ask how Civilization can be robust to bad people, not teach you to be bad people yourselves; the thing is, you see, that on scales much larger than this class, there really will be some bad people.)

And that means the child who sets the dial, or the child who presses the button, can't trust the other to be honest.  Even if the other child's sealed card didn't say to be dishonest, the first child has no way of knowing that.

(Dishonest people really do complicate things, don't they?  Just the fact that they exist makes things harder on everyone else, because they don't know who the dishonest people are.  But that's part of the difficulty of constructing an adult Civilization, one that has to scale to numbers beyond two dozen or sixteen gross.)

dath ilan: The children start having to think harder, at this point.  There are kids playing hard on puzzle-games, and hearing estimates of the other player's labor-effort that don't sound quite right; proposing splits afterwards, and seeing those splits rejected, and both getting nothing.  Some of the kids start to get angry at each other.  Others are trying to come up with a brilliant general solution; and, if they're wise, they know they haven't found one.  Some children are not so wise, but they can't get anyone else to go along with their brilliant general solution.

Keltham plays through with as much cold and steely determination as a seven-year-old can muster, offering exactly what he thinks is fair, rejecting anything he thinks is less than fair; feeling awful when the other kid yells at him that he was being honest, but not swerving from his course.  He can trust himself; he cannot trust the other.  When his card tells him to be dishonest, Keltham gives ridiculously huge estimates for his own labor, and hopes the other child is wise enough to know that Keltham is, must be, lying.  Sometimes he's told to be dishonest and he has to pick the split himself, and then he gives a huge estimate and pretends he believed the other kid's huge estimate.  Sometimes the other kid doesn't catch on in time, and then Keltham has to offer an unfair split or tap out of the game and metagame entirely, which feels like failing even more.  Sometimes the unfair split gets rejected, and sometimes it gets accepted, which is worse.  Keltham sets aside all his unearned chips to redistribute after the lesson ends.  It's a good thing this is only a game, because living life like this would be awful.

Lessons end for the day.  It is sometimes good to let children dwell for a time on problems that don't have known solutions yet, or realize how awful life can become when not everyone has deduced the governing Law.

dath ilan: (Children actually do better, dath ilan has found, if you try having them play this elaborate game without having previously introduced the concept of a multi-agent-optimal boundary, or the notion of the Ultimatum Game, or the question of fair trades between unequal numbers of jellychips.  Then they just play and negotiate, without a concept that they are Failing To Reach Multi-Agent Optimality, or the notion that children who disagree with them are Refusing To Make Mutually Beneficial Trades, or that the offered trade was Unfair.  The children are less distracted by ideas they don't know how to operate, goals they don't know how succeed at, and ways to argue that people who disagree with them are doing some particular thing objectively incorrectly.  There is a valley of competence as a function of knowledge in this case, where knowing just a little can hurt you.)

dath ilan: When the children return the next day, the older children tell them the correct solution to the original Ultimatum Game.

It goes like this:

When somebody offers you a 7:5 split, instead of the 6:6 split that would be fair, you should accept their offer with slightly less than 6/7 probability.  Their expected value from offering you 7:5, in this case, is 7 * slightly less than 6/7, or slightly less than 6.  This ensures they can't do any better by offering you an unfair split; but neither do you try to destroy all their expected value in retaliation.  It could be an honest mistake, especially if the real situation is any more complicated than the original Ultimatum Game.

If they offer you 8:4, accept with probability slightly-more-less than 6/8, so they do even worse in their own expectation by offering you 8:4 than 7:5.

It's not about retaliating harder, the harder they hit you with an unfair price - that point gets hammered in pretty hard to the kids, a Watcher steps in to repeat it.  This setup isn't about retaliation, it's about what both sides have to do, to turn the problem of dividing the gains, into a matter of fairness; to create the incentive setup whereby both sides don't expect to do any better by distorting their own estimate of what is 'fair'.

They play the 2-station video games again.  There's less anger and shouting this time.  Sometimes, somebody rolls a continuous-die and then rejects somebody's offer, but whoever gets rejected knows that they're not being punished.  Everybody is just following the Algorithm.  Your notion of fairness didn't match their notion of fairness, and they did what the Algorithm says to do in that case, but they know you didn't mean anything by it, because they know you know they're following the Algorithm, so they know you know you don't have any incentive to distort your own estimate of what's fair, so they know you weren't trying to get away with anything, and you know they know that, and you know they're not trying to punish you.  You can already foresee the part where you're going to be asked to play this game for longer, until fewer offers get rejected, as people learn to converge on a shared idea of what is fair.

Sometimes you offer the other kid an extra jellychip, when you're not sure yourself, to make sure they don't reject you.  Sometimes they accept your offer and then toss a jellychip back to you, because they think you offered more than was fair.  It's not how the game would be played between dath ilan and true aliens, but it's often how the game is played in real life.  In dath ilan, that is.

dath ilan: After that came the part where Keltham's learning-group was introduced to their first sophisticated trading-game, with tokens that produced varying quantities of jellychips, but only when held in proximity to other tokens, and large enough groups of tokens could produce more tokens.

Despite their best efforts and the lesson they'd just learned - and, since they were still young boys, after a lot of shouting, beyond a certain point - the nascent market had soon shut down almost entirely over refused trades, caused by disagreements about what was 'fair'.

During the game's post-mortem, it was eventually figured out (with some nudging and hinting from the supervising older-children) that children with rarer tokens had tended to think that the weight of a token's value for its even division ought to be determined by that token's scarcity; children with tokens that produced lots of jellychips (even if they required some other tokens to be nearby to work) tended to think that direct jellychip production was the obvious starting anchor for weighing economic value; children with tokens that produced other tokens argued themselves to have the only goods that mattered in the long run, and that you'd need a lot of lesser tokens to trade fairly for one of those.

This begins the pathway of learning that leads to market prices, the other way of setting prices; in which larger Civilization has a collective interest in seller prices ending up close to the marginal cost of production, so that as many trades as possible occur.

Children who master the complications here have officially passed Financial Literacy Layer 2, and can have their own investment accounts*, which was the main reason Keltham was going through this whole lesson-sequence at age seven instead of age eight.

(*)  Having an investment account in dath ilan is the equivalent of having a 'bank account' in other places, rather than a mark of greater financial maturity than that.  Dath ilan doesn't particularly use, as a store of value, currency-denominated packaged bank debt with fixed returns.  Value is stored mostly in equities.  When you write a check against your investment account, divisible fractions of equity are automatically sold out of it in some medium of exchange, and automatically reinvested in the receiver's account, according to the (simple) autoselling and autobuying algorithms on both sides.  If you want to pay for less volatility in your assets, you buy insurance on the equity, so that somebody agrees to buy the asset from you if it drops below 80% of its original-purchase price; and the price of insurance like that is a risk signal.

dath ilan: When it comes to selling knowledge to aliens, to be clear, Financial Literacy Layer 2 is not going to get you there.  If the answer across every plausible premise was trivial and similar, that trope wouldn't be such a staple of dath ilani economic fiction.

Thankfully, Golarion is not nearly weird enough for Cheliax to be composed of aliens in the relevant sense; the Chelish have money and will tell you how many unskilled-labor-hours it corresponds to.  The most you have to worry about is that somebody gave them a dishonesty card - which does mean you have to do your own calculations about what's fair, and not just ask them.

When you are not dealing with alien aliens, when setting prices with those aliens is not the point of the story, a normal dath ilani would consider the solution obvious.  There comes a saturation point beyond which individuals cannot realistically use any more money to become happier themselves, for usual reasons of just-noticeable-differences being a mostly-constant fraction of how much you already have, which implies utility roughly logarithmic in wealth.  If the aliens offer to pay you that much, asking them to cough up more would mean that a number of poorer aliens would all have to give up chunks of utility that loom larger for them, so that you could get much smaller amounts of utility; and even if that's fair, it isn't Good.  If the aliens offer an ultimatum for less, turn them down with very high probability; they're trying to give you far less than you're worth.  Would Civilization offer less than a billion labor-hours to an alien bearing knowledge of how to eliminate whole swathes of diseases hitting large sections of the population?  (No.)

Of course, in a normal dath ilani economic-fiction isekai story, the entire world you end up in is not insane in every part; there may be one insane point of departure with some insane consequences lawfully extrapolated, but the author is not going to throw an entire insane world at you; it wouldn't be credible.

A normal dath ilani, thrown into another world, does not come in expecting to need enough money to make lots and lots of important investments that the natives haven't made because the natives are insane.  They're expecting to find an alien efficiency of no simple ways to make everyone collectively much wealthier, not the howling absence of that efficiency.

Keltham wasn't expecting Golarion either.

He did, however, catch on in short order to what he currently thinks is the magnitude of the problem.

It is possible he will need a lot of money to solve it.

dath ilan: If you've actually got to negotiate with very humanlike aliens, you need Financial Literacy Layer 5; or at least, Keltham hopes that's what he needs, because that's what he has.  This gives him access to a spotlighted permutation-based method for determining the fair contribution of one actor to a multiagent process.  It's not spotlighted nearly as hard as, say, the Probability axioms, or Validity; but it's pretty much the only spotlighted method for that kind of fairness, and Civilization is somewhat hopeful that aliens will use it too.

The permutation-based method says to consider how much marginal added value an agent produces, by being added to a collection of other agents, when considering every possible order in which to add all agents into the evaluation.  If, for example, two people are both needed to complete a task worth 10 jellychips, and it can't be completed at all without both of them, then there's two possible permutations:

Permutation 1:  Alis:  Alis alone receives 0 jellychips; her marginal value, added to the empty set, is 0.  Alis+Bohob:  After adding Bohob, the payoff is 10 jellychips; Bohob's marginal product, added to Alis is 10.Permutation 2:  Bohob:  0 jellychips.  Bohob+Alis:  10 jellychips.

Averaging the marginal products together across all permutations, the method says that Alis and Bohob both receive 5 jellychips.

Yes, this is a very simple answer to be produced by all that logic, but the point is that it generalizes.

dath ilan: Applied directly to the situation with Cheliax, the method says, roughly, that Keltham should receive an amount proportional to how much marginal product he adds, on average, to all possible (ordered) subsets of Cheliax.  If Cheliax had only half its current people, for example, Keltham might only add around half as much value.  For even smaller subsets of Cheliax, product might fall superlinearly; Keltham couldn't necessarily accomplish 1/20,000,000th as much with a single Chelaxian.

It adds up to 'somewhat less than half of his marginal product when added to all of Cheliax, probably'.  Yes, this is a very simple answer to be produced by all that logic; but the point is that Keltham knows why that is the fair answer and what he ought to do if he gets offered less.

Keltham doesn't spell out this part explicitly, or say that he was willing to accept Cheliax's opening offer taken at face value, and indeed would have compromised on substantially less had it been necessary.  Cheliax mentioned difficulties in accurately measuring the gains to the country, and may intend to offer a measuring methodology expected to be an underestimate of the real value; or it could be that Cheliax is thinking the split is about direct profits from project sales, where Chelish consumers are capturing much more value than the sale price of the products, the consumer surplus.

Also Keltham might find there's weird terms or conditions in there, in which case he wants to get the highest initial offer on hand so he can burn percentage points as bargaining power, to iron out the terms and conditions.  He can always hand back any excessively generous jellychips that are still left at the end of that.

Thellim: Somewhere in a place that is not this place, so far away that there is no distance and no time between here and there, a former airplane passenger named Thellim reads how Earth economists have tried to analyze the Ultimatum Game, played by splitting $10.

Earth's economists have concluded that it is 'irrational' to refuse a $9:$1 split, since it leaves you $1 worse off.  They note that human subjects seem to be 'irrational' by occasionally refusing offers below $5 with increasingly great probability as the offer drops.  Perhaps it is meta-rational to develop a reputation for acting 'irrationally', since it causes people to make you bigger offers, if they know you'll irrationally refuse smaller ones?  (For some reason they don't continue on to ask why not develop an 'irrational' reputation for refusing all offers below $9, instead of $5.)

Thellim swiftly infers that Earth's moon prevents its inhabitants from thinking clearly about negotiation.

(She's mistaken.  It's kind of a long story.)

Thellim: Sometime even later, Thellim is going to conclude that maybe it's not the moon.  She will then wonder if there's any way to explain to Earth economists how the absolute basics of negotiation work in coherent decision systems (eg those consistent under reflection in the presence of correlated agents and/or models of agents).  Or even, minimally, get them interested in what sort of 'irrational' behavior rational agents want to have 'reputations' for having, and if there's any systematic structure in there that might possibly be interesting.

It turns out that Earth economists are locked into powerful incentive structures of status and shame, which prevent them from discussing the economic work of anybody who doesn't get their paper into a journal.  The journals are locked into very powerful incentive structures that prevent them from accepting papers unless they're written in a very weird Earth way that Thellim can't manage to imitate, and also, Thellim hasn't gotten tenure at a prestigious university which means they'll probably reject the paper anyways.  Thellim asks if she can just rent temporary tenure and buy somebody else's work to write the paper, and gets approximately the same reaction as if she asked for roasted children recipes.

The system expects knowledge to be contributed to it only by people who have undergone painful trials to prove themselves worthy.  If you haven't proven yourself worthy in that way, the system doesn't want your knowledge even for free, because, if the system acknowledged your contribution, it cannot manage not to give you status, even if you offer to sign a form relinquishing it, and it would be bad and unfair for anyone to get that status without undergoing the pains and trials that others had to pay to get it.

She went and talked about logical decision theory online before she'd realized the full depth of this problem, and now nobody else can benefit from writing it up, because it would be her idea and she would get the status for it and she's not allowed to have that status.  Furthermore, nobody else would put in the huge effort to push forward the idea if she'll capture their pay in status.  It does have to be a huge effort; the system is set up to provide resistance to ideas, and disincentivize people who quietly agreed with those ideas from advocating them, until that resistance is overcome.  This ensures that pushing any major idea takes a huge effort that the idea-owner has to put in themselves, so that nobody will be rewarded with status unless they have dedicated several years to pushing an idea through a required initial ordeal before anyone with existing status is allowed to help, thereby proving themselves admirable enough and dedicated enough to have as much status as would come from contributing a major idea.

To suggest that the system should work in any different way is an obvious plot to steal status that is only deserved by virtuous people who work hard, play by the proper rules, and don't try to cheat by doing anything with less effort than it's supposed to take.

Thellim could maybe solve this problem if she put around five years of her life into taking the knowledge, and putting it into a form where the system thinks it's allowed to ever look at it or talk about it without that being shameful.  But Earth has problems that are plausibly more important than their entire field of economics being firmly convinced that a particular set of crazy behaviors are 'rational' and that healthy, prosocial, equilibrium-solvable behaviors are 'irrational'.

She ends up writing a handful of blog posts about it, tossing mentions of it into a couple of stories she writes on the side, and otherwise leaving Earth to its fate there; Earth has rather a lot of awful fates going on simultaneously, and that one is not literally their most important problem.

This, however, is not her story.

Keltham: Keltham, in any case, now attempts to recount to Cheliax what he went through as a kid to learn about the basic concepts of negotiation.

The first part of this would be handing out assorting jellychips to children, as selected to guarantee that different children will have different preferences over them but all will find those tastes and textures pleasant at all; letting the children trade among themselves, which they usually do 1-to-1 and peacefully; introducing the concept of a multi-agent-optimal solution to the kids, which gives them a social goal they could be failing at instead of just a few voluntary improvements to make among themselves; whereupon they start yelling at each other to make particular trades for the good of the class; and then the older kids come in and remind them that, by the definition of multi-agent-optimality, solutions like that should make all the kids better off so you shouldn't have to force anyone to go along with trades leading there.

How are the Chelaxians doing so far?

Carissa Sevar: Absolutely no yelling at each other to make particular trades for the good of the class! Say what you will about Evil, it doesn't inculcate that particular tendency. 

lintamande: Meritxell has made herself a multi-column tracking sheet - six of them, actually, ordered by different things. 

"Can everyone report to me their hypothetical reward preferences in, uh, negative wrist-slaps? Imagine we'll settle it out at the end by giving out a number of actual wrist-slaps equal to the reward so there's no incentive to overstate or understate your reward preferences."

Keltham: Keltham wasn't expecting them to go off and immediately start setting up games to simulate the thing he was describing despite the absence of actual jellychips, he'd sort of wanted to see if imagination would be enough, but he's not going to stop them if they do that.

He draws the line at the wrist-slaps, though.  "The point of positive rewards in this case is that there's an incentive to play the game at all," Keltham says.  "If you tried paying dath ilani kids in negative wrist-slaps they could avoid all the wrist-slaps by not coming to class.  It's like trying to buy shoes at a shoe-shop by threatening to wreck the guy's shoe-shop unless they give you shoes.  Even if they did give shoes, the guy doesn't want to be part of the whole system then, and now they have an incentive to call the town guard... okay, 'town guard', sure.  And anybody else who sees that's how you operate has an incentive to poison your shoes and send you to the afterlife early before you come around to their shop.  When you're trading things the other person actually wants, they want the whole system to stay in place, which is what makes stable equilibria possible.  It's an important difference!"

lintamande: " - I want the whole education system to stay in place," says Meritxell, baffled. "It taught me to be a wizard!!!"

        "Wait, do dath ilani children just....not go to school if they don't feel like it? Wouldn't that get you a lot of people who never learn anything, or at least never learn anything they aren't being bribed to learn?"

        "And never learn how to do things that are unpleasant for a long-term reward -"

Keltham: "Civilization goes to a great deal of effort to arrange things so that kids actually do want to go to school, because dath ilani kids are smart by your standards, and the grownups do not actually want to get into a contest with us about whether or not we can rig the school's boiler system to explode if we use a cunning plot with coordinated distractions.  It doesn't matter that they would very likely win, they don't want to get into the contest with us.  Ah, with them.  I mean they do still have all sorts of security systems to make it hard to blow up schools because, you know, kids, but they're based on the assumption of fending off like three kids who want to see if they can, not three hundred kids who all have the same incentives."

lintamande: "Chelish kids do not....coordinatedly try to destroy our schools," Meritxell says faintly after a while. "Even wizarding kids, who are smart. It - wouldn't even be hard, with magic, you wouldn't need coordinated distractions but no one would do it, even if you'd made a very bad mistake at school and were going to be disciplined -" they did check, Taldor beats students for misbehavior too. "You don't have to..... be so nice to children they wouldn't ever occasionally wish their school was on fire, you just have to teach them enough discipline that even when they wish it was they don't do it."

Carissa Sevar: "Maybe if you're Good and.....refuse to .....use any punishments ever..." Carissa feels like she's kind of caricaturing Good here, like if she said this to a paladin they'd object that obviously they do punish people when appropriate - "then you have to bribe everyone all the time to just nondestructively participate in society because the - differential between cooperation and noncooperation still has to be just as large and you're trying to do none of it with pain."

Ione Sala: Ione Sala is starting to feel nervous, for the first time, about what exactly Lord Nethys might be working towards with His plans around Keltham.

Well, it's not as if she has any other options, so, moot point, she'll go along with His goal, even if it's exploding Cheliax or whatever.  It's not like she has any friends here.

Keltham: "Look, I get that Golarion is a poorer and more dangerous place and that you cannot afford to have kids occasionally successfully destroying their school.  You still - want to treat children as miniature adults, right, so that they'll grow into adults with the right shape?  When they grow up into adults, you don't want those adults sticking around places where they're being hurt, or tolerating the existence of systems that leave people worse off than if the whole system didn't exist.  So you don't put children into childhood situations where their own incentive is to destroy everything around them, and all they lack is the power to do that."

lintamande: "Chelish students are not incentivized to destroy their schools, even if they wouldn't get in trouble for it, because becoming a wizard is really valuable," says Meritxell. "Their incentives are sometimes on the scale of their lives, not on the scale of that specific day being more fun than not-fun, but that's - how being an adult is, too."

Keltham: "Do kids here already understand that when they're seven years old?  Five years old?  By the time somebody understands and has integrated subtle incentives for their future self spanning decades, they're no longer a child; they don't need adults to guardrail their decisions anymore."

"I suspect there's some weird sticking point here that - look, sufficiently young kids do get slaps on the wrist.  Civilization doesn't like it, I don't like it, but even dath ilan never figured out how to produce healthy adults while never doing that at any point.  There are elements of morality and personhood that humans just weren't designed to learn without experiencing small amounts of pain in childhood.  But every time you set up a situation where a kid gets told that they need to do something or else get slapped on the wrist, you also add some value to an investment account the kid gets access to when they're older, such that even if the kid was secretly an adult in a kid's body, they would still be calculating a net benefit on being present for the whole transaction.  To make sure the total interaction is still mutually beneficial, which means, beneficial to them too, so that ideal kids wouldn't have an ideal incentive to escape their parents or destroy the whole system.  Civilization goes on optimizing its heritage and the kids keep getting smarter and more Law-comprehending, which means that you always check all the interactions with children to make sure that the system wouldn't fall apart if the kids started being more ideal intelligences than expected one year.  And having to pay that amount to set up a potential wrist-slap situation reminds adults to check, every time, whether they really needed a wrist-slap there."

"I realize you can't afford any of that, but it is how Civilization thinks.  We don't want to build into the system a load-bearing assumption that our kids are stupid and weak, even if they are."

lintamande: It has occurred to most of the girls that ideally they should be learning Keltham's economics not arguing with him about punishment so they nod gravely rather than trying to explain the dozen things wrong with that.

The most obvious, thinks Meritxell, is that you don't actually want adults who believe themselves entitled to blow up any system that isn't serving them, because then you end up like Taldor having a civil war every few years. 

The most obvious, thinks Tonia, is that kids can in fact run away and get eaten by wild beasts if they want, and none of them do, so they obviously think being around their parents is better than not that, which they're right about. 

The most obvious, thinks Gregoria, is that adults are still children, in Keltham's ontology, and the only real adults are gods.

Carissa Sevar: (The most obvious, thinks Carissa, is that the fundamental system in which everyone is participating in is existence, life and then afterlife, and that's so obviously, wildly worth it that no possible specifics could matter - it'd be like trying to sell someone a +6 Headband of all three mental statistics for the price of an afternoon scrubbing floors and assuring them that you won't yell at them for missed spots. It doesn't matter, it's all nothing next to the magnitude of the gift they've already been given, the only reason they're even able to parse it instead of rounding it off to the zero it is is because their minds are broken and they're very small and stupid. If a god were somehow born into a human child's body they wouldn't care if they got hit in class or not; human weakness isn't any particular nature of the bribes but the fact they're required at all, and planning for more perfect agents would mean planning for agents whose thoughts were too big and vast to give this question a second's contemplation.)

Keltham: Keltham notices that he's running across a class of external and internal subjective sensations that precedes learning something is horribly wrong with Golarion, and sets it aside, because he's allowed to take longer than two days to learn about all of the problems.  At least the problems they're making no effort to conceal from him, which they don't seem to be doing here, what with having just volunteered all of that info.

Anyways, they can play a pretend version of the trading game, if they like, so long as they don't try to literally pay in negative wrist-slaps because no just no that's the literal opposite of the larger point.

Keltham checks their final result, and references it against the supposed ordinal preferences for the players.  Does it look multi-agent-optimal at a computerless glance?

lintamande: Meritxell has helpfully circled each trade and noted why it increases utility for each participant, and then written down possible trades from the final state and why they don't. If something's wrong it's a more complicated error than that; the girls are in fact heatedly speculating, now, in whispers, about whether there are local multi-agent-optimal maxima that aren't a global multi-agent-optimal maximum.

Keltham: ...right.  Not actual children here.

"If there's such a thing as a local optimum in that sense, which isn't global, you ought to be able to produce a simplified example of it.  Say, try constructing one with three players and three kinds of jellychips," Keltham suggests.

lintamande: "There's not going to be," Meritxell says. "If there were and we knew what it was then we could just switch to that arrangement."

"It could be better for someone from their starting point but not better for them from the place we just arrived at, and higher value total -"

"If it's higher value total and they get a veto we use some of the higher value to pay them."

"Oh, I see, do we have continuous jellychips now, Keltham must have forgot to mention that feature of theirs."

Keltham: "Would you care to state exactly what is a 'local optimum' and how it differs from a 'global optimum'?"

lintamande: "Take, like, water," says Gregoria. "Water flows downhill, but if it flows into a crater or something, it's not going to go up in order to get to keep going down. And water usually isn't sentient and even when it is it's not very smart but you can have a situation where everyone agrees that the current situation isn't as good as some other situation, but none of them have a step that's a clear step up for them. And Meritxell is right that if you have centralized control you can just make everyone go to the new place even though there's not a series of smaller mutually beneficial steps to get there, and also that if this involves some people losing out you can pay them, but that doesn't always work, like, for example, if you're dividing things that come in units."

Carissa Sevar: "This comes up in spell structures."

Keltham: "Comes up all over all of reality, including in the basic elements of the human body that the tiny-spiral instructions say how to make, which fold up into configurations of least local resistance in order to - have the kinds of material properties that they do.  I'd guessed that spells were the same way almost as soon as I heard about them."

"Anyways, I agree that's a good metaphor, but if you could have a very simple arrangement of three players with three jellychips of three kinds, what would you say about that situation which made it a local multi-agent optimum, and what would you say about it that made it a global multi-agent optimum?"

lintamande: "It's a local optimum if there aren't any trades anyone can make that leave both parties to the trade better off, and it's global if there are no possible states of the jellychips that leave all three people better off."

Keltham: "And can you prove that a local-not-global optimum is impossible for three players, each with one jellychip, of three different flavors?  Proving something for a simple special case is often easier than proving it for the general case, and sometimes is a good start on a general proof, if the problem hasn't been selected by some sadist... that is not what the dath ilani word 'troll' means but okay fine.  Anyways, proving it impossible for three players with three jellychips might be a start on proving it impossible in general, and in fact, there would be a lot of really interesting other proofs you could derive from that one."

Iarwain: Asmodia doesn't feel particularly driven to succeed in class, today, but -

"I have a chip Meritxell wants more than hers, but I don't want her chip more than mine.  Meritxell has a chip Paxti wants.  Paxti has the chip I want.  We can do a three-way trade but no two-way ones."  Sadist, she mentally completes.

lintamande: "If they're continuous you can make that work, with partial jellychip trades -"

"They're not continuous!"

Iarwain: "Continuous doesn't help," says Asmodia.  "Meritxell wants my one chip but without Paxti she doesn't have anything I want.  Moving fractional chips around doesn't help with that.  Not unless there's continuous players, like every possible mix of Asmodia plus Meritxell plus Paxti."

lintamande: Some students scribble in their notes for a little while until they are satisfied with this.

Iarwain: Asmodia, who is of course still pretending to be cheerful and energetic, will have enthusiastically written out the example:

Asmodia:  Has banana, prefers apple < banana < cherryMeritxell:  Has apple, prefers cherry < apple < bananaPaxti:        Has cherry, prefers banana < cherry < apple

Asmodia wants Paxti's cherry!  But Paxti doesn't want Asmodia's banana!

Keltham: All right, on to the notion of non-1-to-1 trades and quantitative indifferences.  New game, but instead of just saying that you prefer some flavors to others, you say things like, 'I'm indifferent between having 3 apple jellychips and 4 banana jellychips.'

This opens up the possibility of trading jellychips in a non-1-for-1 way.  Anybody want to try playing that game, if they're running quick simulations?

lintamande: This seems like it makes it much harder to get stuck but no one has an impossibility proof yet. They do not seem to have...noticed the fairness problem? Or, they're writing down different possible trade outcomes but not with any sense that some of them are more desirable except subjectively.

Keltham: Keltham quietly hands Meritxell a folded-up note telling her to try to end up with as many chips as possible for herself, in the course of suggesting mutually beneficial trades to the others.

lintamande: - well all right then. 

The other students do notice this. "You recorded five to seven as the canonical one, but it could be four to eight too."

"Guess you should be the one writing it down," Meritxell says. "Paxti, seven blue for nine green?"

"Give me ten."

"You have recorded that you like green only nine percent less than blue, so I'm offering you nine."

"You have it recorded that you like blue a third more than green, so -"

"But I'm not offering you ten. Carissa, six blue for four red?"

"...is that allowed?"

"Is what allowed?"

"Are you allowed to not make trades that your utility function says you'll take. In this game."

"Well, you did it first, you turned down seven for nine. Carissa, six blue for four red, or if you make it five red, I'll throw in refusing to trade with whoever your least favorite student is."