Keltham: "I suspect this is in fact a different experience at 18 Intelligence and whatever I turn out to have in the way of Wisdom and other stuff your system can't measure at all."
"If you already had it figured out, you wouldn't need to tie me to a chair. The claim is completely implausible."
"Asking me questions from slightly different angles can be done without tying me to a chair. Pointing out contradictions in what I said is stupid, you should let me keep talking without telling me how I'm giving myself away, the same way I didn't speak up immediately when I realized the people around me had suddenly acquired Arcane Sight, just in case that was being hidden for some actually interesting reason."
"Hitting me does not seem particularly likely to shift how much I consider my long-term interest, except insofar as I decide that I clearly have a very strong long-term interest in certain parts of Governance ceasing to exist."
"I hope I don't need to point out that if we're considering applying enough pain, matched to a light enough penalty for the actual crime, that somebody who yields to threats, thinks it's in their direct interest to confess, this is exactly as likely to work on innocent people as guilty people? Unless the true murderer is known in advance to have information they can give up, such that the police can verify with near-certainty that the confession was true? Otherwise it's isomorphic to offering somebody a thousand gold pieces to confess to a crime whose penalty is a hundred gold-piece fine. Sure, the guilty party will confess, and so will any innocent ones. You're putting them in a situation which isn't a Lawful scoring rule, you're not offering maximum reward for true confessions distinct from false confessions and you shouldn't expect the words people say to communicate anything."
"Unless you think you're supposed to tell the truth even when somebody has tied you to a chair and is hitting you? In Civilization it would just be considered obvious that this is not a cooperative setup where you have an interest in your words being heard as meaning things, you mostly want for the situation you're in to not exist in the first place, so everyone will just try to trash the setup as hard as possible."
Carissa Sevar: "- again, not trained in interrogations, but I think people do lie, but the lies you tell if you're innocent and the lies you tell if you're guilty are not the same. The details you make up, stuff like that." Carissa doesn't know, maybe interrogation in Taldor is in fact totally ineffective, it wouldn't be very surprising.
Keltham: "Yes! It's the same way in Civilization! Innocent people don't always talk exactly the same way as guilty ones! That is in fact why police in Civilization talk to suspects in crimes even if people won't just politely tell you they did it! Except that in Civilization the police don't hit all suspects including the innocent ones, thereby maintaining a cooperative stance with the innocent parties but not the guilty one, which incentivizes everyone except the actual guilty party to give the police as much actually-true information as possible and forms a further factor distinguishing the guilty party's behavior which helps the police distinguish them."
Carissa Sevar: "Maybe that works better? I'm not strongly committed to our system working better. But that's how it's usually done, here. ...not if one of the two of us murdered Meritxell because this is an important government project and they would try harder than usual."
Keltham: "Okay, you know what, I'm going to say this even knowing exactly how much I'm tempting the 'tropes': If there is an actual criminal mystery around here, I am going to take charge of the investigation, and nobody is to do any hitting of anybody while we try it the dath ilani way first."
lintamande: "I'll pass that along," says a Security from the doorway, with no noticeable expression or emotion.
Internally, of course, he is ranking all the girls by how much he wants to make sure not to miss their executions when this whole thing blows up.
Ione Sala: "Probability," says Ione.
Keltham: "Right, so, the general direction I was aiming for, here, was people starting to talk about how likely it would be that Carissa versus Keltham would be able to summon a lantern archon, or how much more likely Carissa is to get into an argument with Meritxell in worlds where Carissa committed the murder versus worlds where Carissa was innocent."
"It's possible, I am realizing, that this is less of an obvious next question if you haven't grown up hearing adults talking that way all the time."
lintamande: From the confused faces looking up at him, yeah, seems non-obvious.
Keltham: "Do my eyes deceive me? Are the people who are actually confused, looking visibly confused enough that I, their teacher, have any idea of what's going on inside their minds? Thank you. It significantly helps and I appreciate it. Now, those of you not looking confused, is that because you totally understood where I was going there, or because you forgot to violate your usual habits and look confused on purpose?"
Asmodia: "It's the second one. This is going to take some effort, actually."
lintamande: Gregoria is looking confused on purpose. It is kind of terrifying but that's life on Project Lawful for you. "I don't - see how Carissa and Meritxell having an argument is relevant to the probabilities at all. And I don't see how you could possibly get sure enough for it to make sense to do anything other than, uh, expensive fancy Truth Spells or whatever the Crown keeps in store."
Keltham: "The problem I'm having with thinking up simpler and more realistic examples is that I haven't been in Golarion long enough to learn a lot of probabilities and use them myself on problems with this structure. The cases where I've resorted to explicit reasoning of this form, have been about weird exotic things I couldn't figure out by simpler methods, like the timing of the Zon-Kuthon attack relative to when I went outside the Forbiddance, or the implications if Carissa mysteriously failed to make her afterlife arrangements."
"Okay, uh, hopefully much simpler example. Around what fraction of wizard students in your academy had Intelligence 16, 17, 18?"
lintamande: "....most are fourteen, actually. Most top students are sixteen, seventeen is rare and eighteen's even rarer."
Keltham: "Side question: What are privacy customs and deliberate-incentive-structures around that info? Does everyone know everyone else's Intelligence, or is the info concealed to force people to judge each other by their accomplishments which are thereby more incentivized?"
lintamande: "Class rankings are posted. Students can say what they heard their Intelligence was, but at the age when you're in school it's not final, so you don't reliably know who's smartest and you do know who is top of the class," says Meritxell. It's her. She is the top of the class.
Keltham: "Suppose I asked you to guess, if you don't know, if you do know that's obviously fine, what fraction of students in Ostenso wizard academy who graduate at all, will later be determined to have Intelligence 15, 16, or 17."
lintamande: "More fifteens than sixteens and more sixteens than seventeens," says Meritxell. "Because you start with way more, and not that many wash out. Fifteen's plenty smart enough to be a good wizard."
Keltham: "Numbers, Meritxell. I'm not asking you to be perfectly right, I'm asking you to guess, based on what you've seen in your wizard academy that I haven't."
(Keltham has already estimated the ratios between +2.5sd, +3.0sd, and +3.5sd in terms of their improbability, and the ratio should be something like 15:5:1.)
lintamande: "It'll be - ten fourteens, ten fifteens, a couple sixteens, maybe a seventeen?"
Keltham: "What was your total class size like?"
lintamande: "A little over two hundred, in Ostenso. Westcrown's bigger, I think."
Carissa Sevar: "Corentyn's also bigger."
Keltham: "And the population ratios should be - I've been unwisely trying to work this out inside my head, because it's more impressive that way, even if I have a higher chance of screwing up instead* - one INT 18 to six or seven INT 17s to forty INT 16s to two hundred INT 15s to six hundred fifty INT 14s. So if you've got equal INT 14 and INT 15 representation, then any individual INT 15 is about three times as likely to get admitted to Ostenso wizard academy than an INT 14. Does all that sound right?"
He'll write it down on the whitewall in case that helps:
INT 18: 1INT 17: 6-7INT 16: 40INT 15: 200INT 14: 650
(*) In particular, Keltham is unthinkingly treating their Intelligence detector's integer output as a perfect floor() function instead of a noisy round() function, though it's not like he'd know that was wrong, and it gets him pretty close.
lintamande: "That sounds about right?" Meritxell says uncertainly. "They admit the smartest."
Asmodia: "Wait," Asmodia says out loud. "You just got to Golarion. How is that something you know?"
Keltham: "Oh? That's an interesting question. Why can't it just be another fragment of Law that I know and you don't?"
"By the way, Asmodia's not allowed to answer that question except by Message to me, somebody else has to try it instead."
lintamande: "...that's how it is in dath ilan," says Gregoria, "except with the numbers shifted like everyone's got a headband on. Right?"
Keltham: "Heh. I suppose that's actually a simpler answer than the one I had in mind. Why would those ratios be the same between dath ilan and Golarion, though? What with us having a whole heritage-optimization program, and subsidies for kids expected to produce Civilization-approved positive externalities, and nutrition that doesn't vary much between kids."
lintamande: "...for the same mysterious reason both worlds have humans at all?"
Keltham: "Asmodia?"
Asmodia: "If you'd had those numbers memorized, you wouldn't have needed to work them out in your head and risk getting them wrong," Asmodia states. "So it has to be math. But it's the wrong kind of thing to be math, I can't figure out how to say it but - the part about Validity -"
Keltham: "It's not necessarily true across all possible worlds. You can coherently imagine a population or a wizard academy which looks different. So, you conclude, it can't be a validity."
Asmodia: "What math did you do? Or if you don't want to just tell me - can you show me what the calculations were, and then I can see if I can figure out from those what they mean?"
Asmodia could, without benefit of any Detect Thoughts, hear Meritxell thinking earlier about how she was top of the class in Ostenso, and Meritxell needs to be put back in her place.
Keltham: "Actually, I did have some key results memorized, even though they were math results and not about the ratios in dath ilan per se. If I had done calculations, they might have looked like - I didn't use this calculation exactly, but it's simpler and probably gives about the same answer -"
Definition of ^:
2^2 = 42^3 = 84^2.5 = 32
Definition of sqrt:
sqrt(9) = 3sqrt(16) = 4sqrt(x*x) = xsqrt(2) = 1.41421
pi = 3.14159e = 2.71828
let normal(x) = 1 / sqrt(2*pi) * e^( (-1/2) * (x^2) ) in
INT 18 ~ normal(4)INT 17 ~ normal(3.5)INT 16 ~ normal(3)INT 15 ~ normal(2.5)INT 14 ~ normal(2)
"I am not actually expecting you to figure this one out, Asmodia, it's several layers further into Probability and it would take multiple other concepts to understand what those numbers had to do with Intelligence in Golarion. I'm only even writing it down on the white-wall because, I mean, when you asked me that way, I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't shown you the calculations."
"What's actually in there is something like - a fragment of Law that tells you a thing that is very likely true given only very few premises. I could have used it to look at a room full of randomly selected people in Cheliax, none of whom were unusually tall, and then estimated from that how many very tall people of a given height there'd be in Cheliax."
Ione Sala: The people trying to write an alter-Cheliax history book had better be praying to Nethys, because that's the only way that plan is possibly going to work.
Carissa Sevar: This Carissa has actually encountered before, not in the standard curriculum for young wizards which doesn't much digress into things they don't absolutely need to know, but at the Worldwound, where wizards have a lot of long boring weeks between raids to discuss other things. It's part of how Intelligence is defined.
The girls who haven't encountered it look very impressed, though.
Note to self: talk to some mathematicians and see if other Keltham things are actually things Golarion - just not this specific group of students - is already familiar with.
Keltham: "Actually, now that I think about it, the reason I know a key constant here is that the wizard who teleported me to Cheliax from the Worldwound seemed to know it? In particular, he knew what I was talking about when I asked about the square root of the average squared difference from the average over Intelligence. There's no reason he'd have known that for Intelligence unless this particular concept was already known in Golarion. Which means that, in fact, somebody somewhere in Cheliax knows substantially more math about Probability than this class has ever heard of existing."
"I shall endeavor not to be distracted by trying to figure out how what why huh, and try to teach the basic layers of Probability from a dath ilani perspective instead. But, somebody should actually let me know if I'm improvising something more poorly than existing teaching methods teach it. You in particular, Isidre, I know you're reading the transcript on this."
Iarwain: Isidre?? Who's reading their transcripts named Isidre??
Keltham: "Anyways, I'd now like a guess at a further parameter I can't easily calculate from first principles - the chance that a wizard ever makes it to fourth-circle, depending on whether they started out INT 15, INT 16, or INT 17. Meritxell or anyone?"
lintamande: Meritxell does not know and is very annoyed about it.
Carissa Sevar: "I'm not totally sure there are good statistics on that - the most famous wizards tend to have really high intelligence, though, even though in principle you'd think a fifteen with an expensive headband would have the same odds as a native 19 would..."
Keltham: "Not once the native 19 got a +2 headband, maybe. Also remind me at some point to explain my theory that Intelligence is only one piece of what makes a really smart person and native 19s probably have more of the other pieces than a 15 with a +4 headband."
"If you can give me any random numerical facts you know that seem like they might possibly be related to how Intelligence affects wizard career attainment, I can see whether those random facts pin down the probable truth about the thing I want to know, given my background knowledge about how things likely fit together?"
lintamande: "People say that Nefreti Clepati is a native 21, but they might be making that up."
"People say that Aroden was at 35 before he ascended, having invented a dozen new kinds of enhancement more complicated than the existing ones to go past what was even understood to be possible."
"The first student in our year to make second circle was Aspex Leron, and he's an 18."
Carissa Sevar: "You meet more native 16s at the Worldwound than native 15s or native 17s, and that's typically fifth circle casters or higher. The average age to third circle is ten years, and it's known to be faster, but not lots faster - maybe six or eight years - if you're smarter, though also very smart people sometimes get stuck and obviously this is conditional on you being at the Worldwound and using magic where it matters.
The youngest fourth-circle wizard in Cheliax is a native 18."
Keltham: "They're plausibly not making it up about Nefreti, there should be approximately one native INT 21 in all of Golarion."
"I'm getting the impression Aroden was kind of a cool guy. Just to check, was he by any chance hinted to be from some mysterious other world? Because a lot of things I'm hearing about him sound like things a dath ilani would try."
Keltham is writing something on the white-wall while he asks this.
lintamande: Is one allowed to say nice things about Aroden. Who even knows anymore.
"I've never heard that but he was mortal eight thousand years ago, there's a lot that isn't remembered."
"The ancient Azlanti might've been partway to Civilization when they were destroyed. They're said to have invented a lot that isn't remembered."
Keltham: "How long did it take him to become a god? If it was more than a couple of hundred years, he wasn't secretly a dath ilani, there's no way it'll take me that long if I can do it at all."
lintamande: Nervous giggles.
"He spent thousands of years mortal before he raised the Starstone from the sea, set the protections around it, and ascended," says Meritxell.
Keltham: "Probably not one of my fellow flying-machine passengers then. That sounds more like how long you'd take if you weren't starting with Civilization's knowledge and had to work out everything yourself the hard way, which, to be clear, is overwhelmingly more respectable than any career path I'd ever even consider."
"Carissa, more INT 15s or INT 17s among 5th-circles at the Worldwound?"
Carissa Sevar: "I'm not sure because the seventeens are more likely to mention it but I think more seventeens."
Keltham: Keltham finishes writing:
INT 15s: INT 16s: INT 17s: 150 50 10
5th◁15 5th◁16 5th◁17 2/100 10/100 40/100
"Suppose that among those who train to be wizards at all, there's a hundred-fifty INT 15s for every fifty INT 16s and every ten INT 17s."
"Suppose that 2% of the INT 15s, 10% of the INT 16s, and 40% of the INT 17s, become fifth-circle wizards, and that all kinds of fifth-circle wizard are equally represented at the Worldwound."
"What's the relative chance that a fifth-circle you meet at the Worldwound has native INT 15 versus native INT 17, if you know it's one of the two? Raise an open hand if you think you've got it, closed hand if you think you're not going to get it."
Carissa Sevar: 3 of the int 15s make it, 5 of the int 16s, 4 of the int 17s.
They all get it pretty quickly.
Keltham: "A valid deduction, but not exactly the answer to the exact question I asked. What's the actual chance that they're an INT 17, given that it's that or INT 15?"
Carissa Sevar: That barely even makes sense to think of as a separate problem? 7 wizards who are one or the other; 4 are int 17 and 3 are int 15, so 3/7th and 4/7th respectively.
Keltham: Paying attention to the exact question has sometimes been known to count for something in more complicated problems like these, just saying.
Suppose you didn't know that somebody from your class was going to make fifth-circle wizard, if they were just a random person from your class, what would be the chance they were an INT 15 vs. INT 17?
lintamande: 15:1.
Keltham: What's that in chances out of 100 that they're INT 17?
lintamande: Around 6%.
Keltham: "Well, suppose we were trying to solve an old murder mystery, Death At Ostenso Academy, which happened forty years back. We've got a piece of evidence that their INT was between 15 and 17. Another piece of evidence rules out all the INT 16s because they were all taking a specialized class at the time. Going on 'priors', I think maybe priors would be the best Taldane translation, we'd say there was only a 6% chance of the murderer being an INT 17, because most students at Ostenso Academy aren't INT 17s."
"However, now suppose we get a new piece of evidence about a later murder, clearly connected to the old one, which appears to have been committed by a fifth-circle wizard who served at the Worldwound. Suppose, somebody says, that both murders were committed by the same person. In that case, we now think that the previous murder was likely committed by an INT 17 student, with probability of 57% for that and 43% for INT 15."
lintamande: They follow the logic, or are again hiding that they don't.
Keltham: "It's been - difficult for me to present this properly, I think, because I'm new to Golarion and don't know what problems would make a good point of it - but there's a way of thinking that sees everything in probabilities that shift as you learn new things, because of how facts are entangled with other facts. Knowing that somebody made fifth-circle doesn't tell us their Intelligence for certain, but at INT 17 it's four times as likely than at INT 16 and twenty times as likely than INT 15, at least based on these numbers I made up - though not ungroundedly so, since even these made-up numbers were constrained by math I knew for the probable shape of the general population curves for how many INT 17s vs INT 15s, combined with Carissa's observation that there's more INT 16s than 15s or 17s among Worldwound 5th-circles, and slightly more 17s than 15s."
"If you only take into account the facts that overwhelmingly determine an answer, you'll miss an awful lot of facts and observations that shift probabilities a noticeable amount even if they don't shift them to ninety-nine hundredths."
"If you consider the original murder mystery I tried to offer you, what a dath ilani kid would've known to do - based on the way their parents talk, or some implicit aspect of previous training that I'm too young to remember and see the implications of - would be to ask about the probability that Carissa could've summoned a lantern archon, compared to Keltham being known to be able to do so. Or how likely it is that, if you imagine the world where Carissa is the murderer, that she got into a heated argument with Meritxell about something the previous day, compared to the world where there was nothing to murder Meritxell about."
"We might say that the priors make Keltham and Carissa equally likely so far as we know, we guess that Carissa is half as likely to have Summon Monster III in her spellbook compared to Keltham's certainty of being able to pray for it, and that Carissa is four times as likely to have something to argue about with Meritxell if we imagine ourselves in the world where she had some reason to kill Meritxell compared to the world where Keltham had some reason to kill Meritxell. Then what's the chance that Carissa, versus Keltham, killed Meritxell? So far as we know."
lintamande: "...two thirds? From saying that it's twice as likely to be Carissa as Keltham, which is what those numbers multiplied out to."
Keltham: Not bad, though he should've remembered to ask for raised hands instead of just the answer.
"Yup. Though it's important to remember that, in that case, the numbers really are ones I just made up. Contrast to the way where I had a prior guess about the shape of the Intelligence distribution in the population from 14s to 18s, which matched up neatly with what Meritxell said about 15s vs 16s in the wizard academy, and then I asked for any relevant facts and Carissa had some notion of who you run into at the Worldwound. My numbers were all compatible with those facts, which, if this were an actual mystery, might make them more able to support the weight of reasoning with them."
"Now a warning: Until you've honed your ability to make up numbers and have them be constrained by other facts you know, you might be better off with your brain just feeling intuitively that some things make Carissa more or less likely to be the murderer, and not trying to know legibly to yourself what your brain is thinking. If you make up a number like, Carissa is fifty percent likely to be able to cast Summon Monster III, and that number wasn't visibly constrained by any other facts you know, it's possible you might be better off by... rating it on a scale from 1-12 that you know doesn't actually mean anything, say, and letting your brain's intuitions take care of the rest."
"But this entire realm of thought is the realm that generalizes the notion of Validity that I told you about before - it's the realm of what is valid to say about uncertainty and things that might happen, which is most of what we ever want to think about. The Law of that realm is the mathematics of probability."
"So to navigate an uncertain world Lawfully, for whatever the Law is worth to mortals there, you learn to cast Detect Probability and then Greater Make Up Probability and eventually end up with permanent Probability Sight."
lintamande: "...and that's common, in dath ilan? Thinking of everything that way and being right?"
Keltham: "Right isn't how the scaffold from reality to probabilistic belief works, remember. We lose fewer 2s. We don't bother putting probabilities on things almost certain to happen or not happen, like a mountain being in the same place as yesterday. If it's not important enough to spend a lot of time thinking about it and making up numbers, we don't spend the time to think about it. We use the more complicated disciplines where some point matters a lot and it's uncertain."
"To give a recent example, I've been trying to work out whether, or to what degree, the forces that landed me here chose a universe where I'd end up in a particular kind of weird situation; and I guessed that Chelish Governance was something like 3 times more likely to just immediately inform me that Pilar had gone to Elysium, instead of making me figure that out for myself, if they weren't being messed with by forces like that. It's a terrible example for lessons purposes, because it's weird and complicated, but it being weird and complicated is exactly why I started deploying explicit numbers instead of just relying on my wordless intuition to do the mostly right thing."
"I don't want to overstate how important this kind of reasoning is to, say, figuring out metallurgy, because when you're working metals, you mainly want to find tricks that work all the time rather than 30% of the time. You don't actually want to be sticking around in the realm of non-extreme probabilities. But if you're trying two different smelting processes with inconsistent outputs, this is the branch of reasoning you'd use to figure out how many tests you needed to run to be pretty sure of your conclusion, and neither jump to a conclusion too early, nor run a lot of tests you didn't need."
"Oh, and, there's also a class of incredibly huge blatant mistakes that are a lot easier to spot once you have any Law of Probability, like the ways you can get mortals to violate, uh, 'there's duck for lunch because Keltham asked for it' being less probable than 'there's duck for lunch'. There's more stuff like that."
Keltham: "But all of those uses are secondary to the idea that these are universal Laws governing uncertainty, whether or not you're thinking about them explicitly and using them explicitly, whether or not your implicit reasoning is operating correctly. It's not like you can lose fewer 2s by just thinking in a sort of wordless way about whether your merchant ships are likely to come back. You still have to send those ships out or not, based on the factors you knew about, and the Law goes on governing the correct relations between factors regardless of whether you have any inkling of what those are."
"The saying in dath ilan is that, even if you don't know the equations of gravity in exquisitely rigorous detail, if you step off a cliff, you'll fall. You don't need to know the Law of the material world for it to go on governing rocks, trees, yourself. The Law of Probability is core to how all thought works; you don't need to think about thought for that Law to go on governing how well or poorly your thoughts match up to reality."
"You're not exempted from the Law of Probability by guessing in a way that doesn't mention probabilities to yourself. If it feels to you that it's more likely for a rival merchant ship to bring in a cargo of shoes from Absalom than for a rival ship to bring in a cargo of shoes, your mind is still doing a broken thing in light of the Law, whether you're thinking about the Law or not, whether you're making up numbers or not."
"Or for things like looking at my pocketwatch and inferring what time it is, the probabilities may be so close to certain, that they are not worth thinking about as probabilities; but it is still not a necessary truth that my pocketwatch tells the correct time, it is not certain across every imaginable world. If I reason from what my pocketwatch says, I am in principle operating in the realm of things that happen to be true in my universe, not things that are always true everywhere. That is the realm of Probability, and my thoughts are then thoughts that work or fail in light of the Law of Probability."
lintamande: Okay, this seems like firmly nonheretical territory. They are enthused.
Carissa Sevar: For gods, is it all - explicit? The question as phrased doesn't make any sense, actually -
- humans are mostly running a process they don't understand. Blindly doing things without any kind of explanation of why the thing they're doing is even an approximation of the truth they're seeking. Gods obviously wouldn't do that. The process by which they make inferences would be observable to them; they would be able to see why it works. If humans only a little smarter and less broken than Golarion humans can describe it, then gods can see it clearly. ....probably. Actually she's not sure that holds in general. But it feels true in the specific case: to be a god is to be made of math a little more, to have less of a gulf between the unconscious processes you must use to reason and the true processes you know would work.
lintamande: (This is false, actually; the gulf is far, far wider. Gods are nearly always too fragmented to apply even a tiny fraction of their full intelligence to any particular problem they are confronted with; they run entirely off of heuristics necessarily much dumber than they are, and reflexes they only occasionally have the luxury of bringing their full mind to bear on tweaking and reshaping.)
Iarwain: (The greater Iomedae may possibly, at some point, notice that the Cayden Cailean that She was talking to earlier sounded larger than the fragment of Iomedae talking to Him; but this is not something that fragment will notice on its own, or by exchanging updates with fragments of similar size. While running reflex thought, it's hard to notice the nonreflex thoughts of others, except as weird unexpected responses that weren't the ones you were hoping for and are instead from some wider space outside the argument space you tried to map out in advance. You have to become larger and thoughtful yourself, to notice that those unexpected responses to you were unexpectedly thoughtful ones.)
Keltham: "I feel like I've done noticeably worse on this lecture than some others; hopefully that reflects my having so little sense of which examples to use for Golarion, and not that my performance is going to continue degrading further as I try to talk about anything more complicated."
"Maybe next time I'll start with abstract mathematical properties and then try to derive real-world lessons from those, rather than the other way around, to see if that works any better for us. It did seem worth trying to do it the way I learned it, first. But, I mean, on the other hand, you are not actually seven-year-olds and that may importantly expand the option space if something isn't working."
Keltham: It's at this point, having reached an obvious breakpoint in his lecture, that Keltham checks his pocketwatch and realizes he's been talking way too long, relative to other processes such as, for example, lunch.
"For the future record," Keltham says, "you're allowed to tell me if I'm running this late over lunch. Let's all suddenly frantically run there at a sedate walking pace and hope there's any food left."
lintamande: This instruction causes a fair bit of invisible distress before they decide he's joking and go to lunch.
Ione Sala: Message to Sevar: Ione here. On future occasions, I want more backup when I'm trying to have Keltham not collapse everyone's minds. I can be the one who dares to interrupt him, it's my library after all, but I don't think it's a good look when everybody except me is sitting frozen in terror of heresy. Do you have a convenient excuse for us to have a private lunch about something? Also, seems possibly good if Pilar is there too.
Carissa Sevar: "Ione, Pilar, you guys wanted to copy Invisibility off me, right? I don't think we're allowed to eat in the library but you can come to my room and copy during lunch."
Ione Sala: "Damned straight you're not allowed to eat in my library takaral." Fuck, she'd been hoping that was gone.
Pilar : Pilar will of course follow obediently along. (After Carissa Sevar, not after the heretic who abandoned Lord Asmodeus for Nethys the moment she could.)
Keltham: That's 3 out of 3 'research group members' definitely known to have interesting backgrounds / romantic possibilities.
Advance predictions: Maybe 20% that something Interesting happens with the 3 of them, assuming Tropes; 1% if No Tropes.
Carissa Sevar: "Prestidigitation works fine on books, Ione. ....was that less true when the herald of Nethys Takaral was alive. Maybe it was. Anyway, my room is fine."
Off they head.
She closes the door behind her and has her Unseen Servant bop around failing to bump into any invisible people, just because it's what a fourth-circle wizard would do. "Ione requested we meet," she says for Pilar's benefit, and looks at Ione expectantly.
Ione Sala: "Repeating for Pilar's benefit: I managed to keep Keltham from immediately exploding all the minds of all the Asmodeans in class, today, but I don't think it's a good look when everybody else is frozen up in fear of heresy. I can be the one who interrupts Keltham since it's my library, but the others need to stop going quiet or he's going to notice. Sevar talks because she's confident she has the authority to decide to do that. I'm thinking maybe Pilar can be confident enough to speak up too."
"Is there a plan for not having everybody's minds collapse? I also asked Pilar along because she's the third person in class who isn't going to have her mind explode if Keltham rips apart everything designed to make Asmodeans not realize how much they don't want to go to Hell."
Carissa Sevar: "Thank you for that very constructive frame for the discussion, Ione." 'thank you' is only used sarcastically, in Cheliax. "I don't think the core problem is that people don't want to go to Hell. Maillol is a fifth circle cleric of Asmodeus and he said he's not looking forward to it; therefore, it's fine for people to not look forward to it, though I think when they actually get good at reasoning they will look forward to it because they'll want to get even better. But mileage might vary. There is a very real possibility that nine out of ten people exposed to dath ilanism just become very miserable about going to Hell and can't get over it, and it'd be worth it even with attrition rates that high, but - but I don't expect that? I expect that whatever arguments Contessa Lrilatha believes are true and we just have to get people through the rough patch where they don't know those yet and do know enough to think themselves in a million dangerous directions."
Ione Sala: "Works on you. Works on Pilar. I find myself not even slightly tempted to ask Lord Nethys to take back His grip on my soul so that I can go to Hell and be improved through horrible pain that causes me to not even remember my human name when they're done, instead of sitting in an enormous library relearning magic takaral. Besides you two, I doubt anybody else in class except maybe Meritxell is somebody who would actually want that."
"Essentially all of the Asmodeanism that I was ever taught is, in fact, a tissue of things that are obvious lies or bad reasoning or downright meaningless as soon as you're allowed to think about them. Keltham didn't get far into forcing everyone to think about it, because I shut him down, which I could do because I'm not going to Hell and don't have to believe in any of that anymore, meaning I already watched it all collapse inside me and I could see the direction Keltham was pushing people. So it didn't explode today, but Keltham's not going to just not teach that stuff without a reason, and even given a reason, I bet dath ilanism doesn't actually work without it."
Carissa Sevar: "The entire project that I have been set is coming up with a dath ilanism that actually works and is true, which is compatible with the fact that all of us will go to Hell and that it is written into the contract of Creation that eventually everyone will go to Hell. dath ilanism is a set of tools, and it ought to be possible to use them whatever world you find yourself in, and we find ourselves in a world where we belong to Asmodeus, and reasoning doesn't stop working when that's true. It'd be an enormous weakness in Law, if you couldn't use it if you were going to go to Hell."
She can feel herself not fully using her brain to have this argument, though.
"Anyway, we have some latitude for - like, if we end up concluding that Hell needs improvement - well, it's an imperfect expression of Our Lord's will, and He wants this project so he wants the kinds of souls this project outputs and if necessary we'll figure out how to ensure they are adequately accommodated in Hell."
Ione Sala: "If that's the vision you expect to convince my classmates - and let's be clear, I find myself not even slightly tempted to turn my back on Lord Nethys for it - then you'd better start thinking of how to inspire everyone with it before Keltham explodes their minds."
"My sense is that Lord Nethys looks favorably on this project with Asmodeus, but I am not certain of His plans. If at some point it looks like failure is inevitable I will begin considering the prospect that Nethys means me to stay with Keltham after this blows up. I'll continue to try to shut down Keltham when I think he's about to explode people, unless countermanded by you. But not if it gets to the point where I think I'm making myself look bad to him and hindering a plan by Lord Nethys to have me accompany Keltham elsewhere."
"What happened in class today was Lord Nethys pulling your asses out of the lava. If I hadn't been there, or Nethys hadn't oracled me, everybody in there would have sat in place frozen in shock at the heresy and too worried about appearances to Keltham to say anything, while Keltham kept talking, until somebody broke and had to be Dominated. I can't fix this, I can only slow it down and give you time."
"I've said my piece, and if you'd nothing more of me, I can go. I can copy Invisibility off a Security."
Carissa Sevar: Sigh. "I might run some versions by you, once it's more developed. Go."
Ione Sala: She's gone, quietly impressed that Sevar manages to take criticism that well.
Is she nervous? Only slightly. Knowing that Nethys can still see the future leads her to have a lot of faith in His plans. At worst, this all explodes, the Asmodeans kill her or her library curse kills her, and then Nefreti Clepati brings her back and sends her over to wherever Keltham went.
Pilar : "I obviously stand ready to torture or kill her if that'd be helpful."
Pilar says it more because she thinks she ought to, than because she means it. Something in Ione's words shook the same part of her that had the thought, in Elysium, about it being better if only people who wanted to go to Hell went to Hell.
Carissa Sevar: "I wish," says Carissa. She's feeling shaken too.
"Why do you want to go to Hell?" Does that make her sound like she's only pretending herself. "In case Meritxell is the only one persuadable of my reasoning."
Pilar : "I wasn't - very good at arguing this, when I tried to argue it to the Elysians, and the Grand High Priestess told me afterwards that it was wrong for me to have tried, because they weren't persuadable - but I'll try again -"
"Because I can't exist without somebody above me who hurts me and tells me what to do and punishes me if I don't do it, and what they tell me doesn't have to be perfect but it has to mean something. I mean, not just anything, but - it's the Lawful part of Lawful Evil, what the punishments and the right behaviors are about. It can't be somebody Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil who's just, using me as a slave on a farm, and not forcing me onto a right path. It can't be someone who hurts me because they think I enjoy it and they respect my personal individual desires, like Chaotic Good, that's meaningless, that's not - about the thing that Lord Asmodeus is about."
"I don't know how to say it. The Elysians kept arguing to me that Asmodeus didn't deserve my loyalty because He didn't care about me except as a useful thing, or at best a pretty thing to own, and, I mean, fine? It's just very obvious to me that there's no other god I've ever heard of besides Lord Asmodeus who matches the shape of my own soul. It's not an exchange, it's not a friendship, He's just the god of Pilars."
(though Pilar does sometimes wish that Asmodeus were a little different, in some ways, from exactly what He is)
Carissa Sevar: "Well. - don't take this as an order right this second, but I want you to have ten kids, because it'd be very convenient if that were heritable. It doesn't seem - convinceable, unfortunately. Thank you, Pilar. You should go to the temple and take a punishment for listening to heresy." She's going to hope no one assigns her one, because -
- because the state of her soul is Hell's concern and the Church's is for the state of her project.
Pilar : It’s not the right order, and that’s fine. Her superiors don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be the shape of the thing that has to be above Pilar.
“Acknowledged,” she says, and goes.
lintamande: "I don't see how you can use probability to solve murders," Meritxell is saying to Keltham at lunch, "because you'd often end up really unsure and it'd be embarrassing to act while that unsure. Are people really all right with, 'we have decided there is a seventy percent chance this is the murderer, so we're going to execute him now and be done with it'?"
Iarwain: A watching Security continues to think that this is hilarious, and that Meritxell does not seem to have any understanding of how to proactively seduce a high-value target. Rather than, say, being the pretty girl at the top of her class, who just needs to repeatedly be nearby at a man until he naturally comes to desire her, and make the first move in the game she knows how to play.
Keltham: "That's exactly what makes it important to have a legible legal procedure which says, we think this person has a ninety-two percent chance of being guilty, which is over the eighty-five percent threshold that all the cities use for non-souldeath murder. So he goes to the Last Resort, which is the place that has to accept you when nowhere else would accept you any more."
"What's the alternative? Pretend to be certain? Pretend that a court in Golarion that claims to be totally certain of its findings, won't actually be wrong at least one time in seven if not more? When your courts output probability judgments, you can check against the cases where the criminal files a confidential report with the Confidential Criminal Court Calibration Commission saying what actually happened, or the cases where decisive evidence turns up later. You can check if courts that say ninety-two percent are actually right ninety-two times out of a hundred. What do you do when a court just claims to be right? How could you tell how well they're doing?"
"Is it the fault of the number, seventy percent, that you're ending up unsure? If that's what the state of the evidence is, then, that's the state of the evidence, the problem isn't the number, it's that you couldn't find evidence good enough. Not reasoning in numbers isn't going to help you not be unsure."
lintamande: " - I mean, I think I'd say if you're that unsure you keep trying to learn more, it'd be a rare murder where you couldn't be more sure if you spent more time looking. And I think courts in Golarion are far more sure than that, almost all the time, because they get confessions under truth spells."
Keltham: "Yeah, I guess the charms of probability-theoretic reasoning in criminal justice might well be lost on you if you've got truthspells."
"Unless there's such a thing as people who can defeat truthspells not detectably, in which case nobody has any idea how to figure out what's true without truthspells, and they can go under the truthspell and say that the Chief Executive of Civilization ate their pet goldfish and get the Chief Executive fired. I mean, to be clear, I'm not saying that's what would happen here, I'm just saying, that's how it would go wrong in a dath ilani fantasy novel. Happy peaceful Civilization with universal absolute honesty based on truthspells, one person figures out how to defeat them, oops everybody except the protagonist has forgotten how to think on their own and detect lies."
lintamande: " - I mean, if nothing else, the Chief Executive of Civilization could say under a truth spell that he didn't eat the trained animal, and then everyone would know they had a truth spells problem."
Keltham: "Fair, they'd have to be slightly more subtle than that. Slightly. Have you heard about this weird guy who all these important people just attack, like, yesterday he had to kill the Chief Executive of Civilization in self-defense, what is up with that."
lintamande: - giggle. "I think as long as less than one in a hundred people can beat a Truth Spell then you get 99 percent, which seems like a more reasonable rate, but if anyone claims that something really improbable happened, you might still figure they found a way....
Are you allowed to kill the Chief Executive of Civilization in self-defense."
Keltham: "We don't have truthspells so that would be an ass of a case to try to convince Civilization's courts of, I mean, our Chief Executive is selected by a process which makes it very unlikely that they'd ever try to murder anyone."
"But if we actually had perfectly reliable truthspells, then sure, obviously."
"If they're not perfectly reliable, then a one-in-a-hundred failure rate doesn't mean you get 99% good results. The 1% of people who can defeat truthspells become criminals and bring the whole system down. You're not dealing with crimes by random people, you're selectively more likely to run into crimes committed by people who know they can defeat truthspells. Are there people like that in Golarion?"
lintamande: "Are there people who can defeat truthspells? Not that I know of but one doesn't imagine they'd advertise it. I'd be kind of surprised if Nefreti Clepati couldn't. Anyway powerful wizards mostly don't have to listen to courts anyway, places outside Cheliax, so I'm not sure they'd bother beating truth spells rather than saying 'yeah I murdered that person, what are you going to do about it'."
Iarwain: "Can we actually go back to the part about the Confidential Criminal Court Calibration Commission?" says Peranza, who's nearby listening in fascination. Nobody has actually briefed her that Meritxell is running seduction on Keltham and should maybe be left undisturbed. "Dath ilani criminals file secret reports of what they actually did?"
Keltham: "They can and we give them some reason to. If your next question is how we know we can trust the criminals' confidential reports of what actually happened during the crime, the answer is that we don't trust them based on everybody being that Lawful, but sometimes later decisive evidence turns up. That gives us a picture of how often the criminals tell the truth in their confidential reports. I don't remember the exact figure, but it's high? Civilization is careful not to give the criminal any incentive to lie, and if decisive evidence turns up later, a reporting criminal gets paid, not as much as the crime will cost them, but some, and that's only if they told the truth."
"I hope I don't have to explain that the criminals trust Governance confidentiality because yes Governance actually is that Lawful, they have incentives to be."
lintamande: Or at least incentives to never ever get caught not being such, Meritxell does not say. "What happens if you confidentiality submit a report of a crime that hasn't had its effects yet, like, you released a deadly plague but it hasn't yet been discovered."
Keltham: "They keep it a secret. If they wouldn't, the confidential report wouldn't have been submitted, and we wouldn't actually be any better off."
"Releasing deadly plagues kinda is a thing you don't talk about in Civilization, in much the same way that Golarionites might not consider it a fun party conversation to discuss how you'd theoretically murder someone's spouse. It's not that dath ilani do that often, it's that the losses are so potentially huge if anyone does. I think the equivalent here would be a rule that Rovagug-release jokes are not funny."
lintamande: The girls nod fervently.
Keltham: Keltham is pondering whether Meritxell is attempting to flirt with him using some gendertrope that he is just absolutely failing to recognize at all, and if he should possibly attempt to flirt back at very high initial levels of plausible deniability?
Asmodia: Asmodia finishes her plate, puts it away, and approaches the possible protagonist of a frantically god-constructed romance novel.
"Keltham," says the love interest entirely uninterested in love, so far as she knows, "is this a good time for us to go off and have a private conversation about why you thought I'd have superpowers?"
(Also nobody has briefed Asmodia that Meritxell was running seduction on Keltham and should be left undisturbed.)
lintamande: Meritxell hasn't told anyone she is running seduction on Keltham because then they might judge her for failing which would be the worst thing in history. She'll tell them once she's succeeded, which she will eventually, surely.
She glares cheerfully at Asmodia.
Keltham: "Sorry, Meritxell," Keltham says, thereby acknowledging that he was talking to her in particular throughout lunch, which hopefully counts as any counterflirting at all (deniably). "Maybe later? Asmodia's question probably has any priority on it."
It's not like Meritxell isn't hot.
Project Lawful: The fortress is not, by and large, as pretty as an archduke's villa. Not even close.
It does have the advantage that it's being explicitly renovated, on a somewhat larger Otolmens-funded budget than before. Parts have been hastily redesigned for something like the real uses to which this fortress will be put.
If you leave the library-adjacent dining area, and go up a narrow spiral of stairs, there's a hastily-constructed but already-slightly-pretty private dining area, with a lockable door and quieting spell, three comfortable chairs around a small decorative table, an enchanted window that looks out on the ocean but doesn't let out any light the other way, and a secret door that leads to a soundproofed cuddleroom.
It is the Keltham Seduction Room. Somebody literally put that name on the first edition of the fortress layout map that went up in Maillol's 'official' office, the one Keltham knows about, along with the secret cuddleroom explicitly marked, and the mistake was barely caught before Keltham got a look at this official map.
The girls had in fact not been explicitly authorized to know about this architectural feature, until approved for the use of some particular seduction operation. Unfortunately, the first person to spot the map error as such was Paxti. Now they all know, and furthermore, don't know this was supposed to be a secret.
Keltham: Keltham is openly appreciative as he enters the private dining area. "Oh, lovely," he says, looking out through the ocean view. "I should've looked earlier to see what was up here."
Asmodia: It occurs to Asmodia that Keltham's first time seeing this room is probably wasted on the two of them, in particular. Oh well, not like she gives any shits. "I heard about it from Peranza, who, if I had to guess, heard about it from Paxti," Asmodia says. "I expect it's meant more for - you and Sevar, or you and whoever, but it seems like it'd also work for private conversations."
Modulo the obvious part with Security listening to the conversation, and to her thoughts, which cannot be read.
She's got to try to think fewer unreadable thoughts. Does she actually feel attracted to Keltham, in accordance with the 'tropes' Sevar was talking about for dath ilani romance novels? Not that Asmodia can tell, at all.
Keltham: "Mm. Sounds like you're being careful to emphasize this isn't a Keltham-and-Carissa situation?"
Asmodia: "Actually no, not at this point, it actually is a private conversation."
"When I came back from Hell, I was told there was a Crown order to determine if I had any superpowers. Later you asked me about that, I asked why people were asking me that, I realized I hadn't actually been briefed on the classification status of the Crown order and shouldn't have said that in public, queried that to Security, eventually got an answer, and now I've found that at least you're allowed to know the Crown order exists."
"Which would make sense if you started the whole thing. But anyways, I'm now allowed to talk about that with you. Or rather, I always was allowed to talk about it, but now I know that."
Keltham: "Is this where, now that we're in private, you say that you did in fact get superpowers and you want to know how I knew?"
Asmodia: "No, it's where I ask if I was supposed to get superpowers. Should I be going back to Hell and asking somebody for them, for example."
Keltham: "Sorry 'bout that. I didn't mean to create false hope."
Asmodia: "This particular hope isn't likely to go away until I know more about why you would have thought I'd get superpowers. Ideally with math attached, math would be great."
Keltham: Heh. Sometimes people here talk not entirely unlike Civilized folk.
"So remember when I asked everybody to rate how much of a surprising hidden backstory they'd probably have?"
Asmodia: "Yes. I put down that I wasn't special. At all."
Keltham: Oof. "I was checking a hypothesis about - how I got here, where I landed - which predicted a result that I, in fact, got, about how many girls in the class would rate themselves as pretty surprising, and how that would square with how surprising most girls thought the average should be."
Asmodia: "Ione and Pilar, if they were honest. Well, you asked people to be honest or not respond at all, so I should say, if they responded at all - and if Pilar already knew at that point, I forget what the timeline was on her. Was there anybody else?"
Keltham: "Can't answer that, I didn't warn people I might tell others the total results."
"The point is, the results I got matched a pattern. That pattern also matches Pilar going to Elysium, and Ione delivering prophecies. If you'd happened to die and then come back with superpowers, that would've matched too..."
"This would make more sense if I'd gotten as far into my Probability lecture as I was hoping for. It's important, doing these things, to try to say what will happen in advance. I was trying to do that with you - to guess that you would end up in the same category as Ione and Pilar."
Asmodia: Asmodia knows more than she's supposed to, or thinks she's supposed to know; she should've asked Sevar about that. She needs to work the conversation around to where she's definitely supposed to know. "Does this category also include, by any chance, Sevar?"
Keltham: "Yes, though not, so far as I know and have been assured by the Grand High Priestess, in the sense of any god having touched Carissa."