Ione Sala: Ione and Meritxell have been using up Cunnings and Wisdoms to try to supervise this in the absence of Asmodia and Sevar. Their approach was to get everybody to say what their actual backgrounds and personality facts were like in realCheliax, then try to substitute alterCheliax-unacceptable truths one-for-one with alterfacts that should be about of equivalent rarity in alterCheliax. Gregoria having a brother who's a paladin is pending a decision about whether that's an appropriate substitution for being one of a hundred children of a Baron's heir, which does seem like something that should probably get substituted because that's probably not true in alterCheliax? They're not sure how many alterChelish people go off to be paladins though, that seems like an Asmodia or even a Sevar decision, and also Meritxell and Ione can't agree to within an order of magnitude on how unlikely it is that Gregoria is one of a hundred children of a Baron's heir.
Ione privately messages Sevar to ask if there's anything she should know about artifact headbands, Law epiphanies, and/or disintegrating Asmodean philosophies in her capacity as Nethysian sanity officer.
Carissa Sevar: No artifact headband or Law epiphany could have plausibly causes Asmodia to collapse like that. ....though probably taking the headband off should be tried, if it hasn't.
"Gregoria, have you ever met a paladin."
lintamande: "Obviously no, but alter Gregoria also hasn't met her brother since he decided to join the order, he writes letters."
Carissa Sevar: "What does he say in the letters?"
lintamande: "That fighting at the Worldwound is lonely and he misses us, but he knows he's in the right place. That did I know this-or-that about Iomedae's triumphs on the road to godhood. That he misses our mother's cooking."
Carissa Sevar: "'this-or-that.'"
lintamande: "Honestly I kind of skim those parts, I know it's important to him but I'm not a history buff and I don't care how Iomedae won some specific battle in the Shining Crusades and what the cavalry tactics were like."
Carissa Sevar: "You already said something aloud to Keltham about the Baron's heir thing - in a fashion where it was ambiguous if it was true, but he'll be looking for signs that it is -"
lintamande: "Well, he'd have to ask my mother, but I haven't any reason to think it's true."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is very tired. "Can we get wizard salary data from a bunch of other places? That's another thing Asmodia was worried about, and I'm not that worried but we do want to make sure we know what we're deviating from."
Ferrer Maillol: Querying to Maillol says that they don't have an ETA on the Queen's promised intelligence officer yet. He'll add both an urgency marker to the Queen's authorized requisition of such, and also the explicit question about wizard salary data in multiple countries outside Cheliax, and send that out on the next packet.
Carissa Sevar: All right. What hypotheses are still live on Asmodia. Divine intervention but that shouldn't have been possible, something done to her in Hell which broke just now, thought a thought that caused her to become comatose.... can they use Modify Memory to erase the precise moment she was walking out of the room and fell over -
Ione Sala: Also at around this time, Ione is requesting permission to have everybody assign probabilities on What's Actually Happening To Asmodia. But only if it's the sort of thing where they'll get to find out the actual true answer afterwards, since otherwise they'll be training the wrong skill.
If Asmodia actually just got replaced by her future self, by the way, Ione is quitting Project Lawful to work someplace saner, like a lunatic asylum.*
(*) These are nicer than you'd expect for Cheliax, though that's setting the bar low. If nobody with deep pockets expects a person might get better and then be useful again, the putative patient will quickly get put to other, more remunerative uses.
Carissa Sevar: "Doesn't Nethys like it when everyone is driven insane by the pursuit of knowledge? - that is not encouragement to go insane." Carissa bets 60% it was a intervention by - something not bound by the interdict? An Outer God, which may or may not exist and which supposedly aren't safe to speak of in more detail than that? A demon lord? She bets demon lords don't obey the interdict. 10% Asmodia thought a mind-destroying thing. 30% it's something Carissa hasn't thought of.
Ione Sala: Sounds like Asmodean propaganda to her, but then Ione wouldn't KNOW whether Nethys actually likes that because NOBODY IS GIVING IONE ANY THEOLOGY BOOKS.
Is Asmodia insane? If Asmodia is insane, Ione would recommend trying putting that artifact headband back on her, or killing her and Raising her, assuming everybody's already tried standard healing spells that work against insanity.
Carissa Sevar: Asmodia's not insane, just nonresponsive, but killing her and raising her is a decent option once they've exhausted less drastic ones.
Iarwain: Results of trying to remove the Wisdom headband: Asmodia's pulse sped up further; she didn't awaken. Putting the headband back on brought her pulse down to its previous slightly-fast state.
Results of requesting Asmodia's last minute of memory removed: Scrolls/items of Modify Memory are not cheap and they don't just have one lying around. They'll add it to the next requisition packet, though, the palace might have something. Asmodia admittedly does have a priority "do not lose this person or incredibly bad things will happen to you" marker on her from Aspexia Rugatonn.
Carissa Sevar: In general this project should have some scrolls of it sitting around at all times; this work is dangerous in specifically a Modify Memory kind of way.
Things to try before they try killing and then Raising her: Break Enchantment, obviously, if it hasn't already been tried. Polymorphing her into a hamster and back. Polymorphing her into a dragon and back in case what happened was she had some insight human minds can't bear. Petrifying and unpetrifying her. At that point Carissa leans towards going ahead and killing her but wants a second opinion from someone with more curse expertise.
Iarwain: Break enchantment: No effect.
Regular polymorphing to hamster: Unconscious hamster.
Baleful polymorphing to hamster: The hamster is awake and runs around in a cute and not especially sapient fashion! When the hamster reverts to Asmodia, it seemed like she might have been awake for an instant, but then closed her eyes again. Security might have been imagining it; he unfortunately didn't have Detect Thoughts running during that instant.
...there is a scroll of Greater Polymorph onsite, though Security doesn't even know why. Does Sevar want them to take Asmodia outside and turn her into a small dragon?
Carissa Sevar: Cheaper than raising her from the fucking dead. Carissa assumes nothing's showing up to Detect Thoughts through all these trials?
Iarwain: ...apparently nobody's performed a Detect Thoughts which this Security thought the last Security would have thought to do.
Asmodia doesn't have any visible thoughts, her Intelligence still detects as 17 but - possibly it's a weird 17? The feeling is not particularly describable.
Still go on dragonforming her?
Carissa Sevar: "What's the worst that can happen," says Carissa, which she thinks means it'll go fine unless tropes are real.
Iarwain: Acknowledged. Does Sevar want to be there for it?
Carissa Sevar: Yes.
Asmodia: - and then suddenly Asmodia is a dragon!
The shock of this is, in fact, considerable, such that she would have fallen over in a tangle of limbs if she hadn't already been lying down.
Her forelimbs flail out and strike mainly sand, and her wings try to flex but she's lying on one of them which is uncomfortable. She does have any instincts for her new body, but it's a struggle to override her conscious mind’s attempt to override those.
Somebody shouts “She’s aware!”
Carissa Sevar: Wow if Carissa had considered that likely to work she would have put more thought into what to say next.
"....report."
Asmodia: She does soon manage to struggle to all four of her limbs and look down on Sevar and the Security, who do look noticeably smaller when you are an eighteen-foot-long red dragon with a thirty-foot wingspan and a seven-foot neck rising above a five-foot-high body.
It takes several tries to talk.
"I seem to be a dragon now," rumbles Asmodia. “I do not know why this would be the case.”
Carissa Sevar: "You collapsed suddenly in my office and have been nonresponsive for several hours. We Polymorphed you into a dragon to try to get you back. Do you know why you collapsed - did you get a vision -"
Asmodia: “The last thing I remember is thinking that my new job was completely impossible, and our newly constructed universe was going to end up internally inconsistent and inevitably fall apart, and that if any of the gods running around wanted me to succeed at that they needed to give me an additional 20 points of Intelligence.”
Iarwain: “She’s detecting as a normal 18 now,” says Security, who is not by Cheliax standards keeping a totally even unperturbed voice about it.
Carissa Sevar: " - that's a possible Wish-tier divine intervention and an urgent report to the Grand High Priestess," says Carissa who is keeping a calm voice but it hardly matters when you're using it to say words like that. "Do you have - the slightest sense which god -"
Asmodia: "No... except that I... feel weirdly like... my job is possible after all? I just have to accept that my boss is going to ignore all my reports, and everybody else is going to run around making my life harder, and all I can actually do is triage my universe's possible, probable, and definite inconsistencies and try to keep it all going for as long as I can until it inevitably falls over because nobody ever listens to me, but I can definitely do that for a while, so long as I just keep trying and never rise above a state of continual low-grade panic."
"Am I actually a dragon now? Keltham will have questions about this."
Carissa Sevar: "It's a Greater Polymorph. Wears off in thirteen minutes or you can turn back right now if you want. ....put what she just said in the report to the Grand High Priestess."
Asmodia: Asmodia cranes her neck around. It's kind of a nice sunny day on the beach and she is a dragon and... even though she has an enormous backlog of work to do, which is no doubt even larger now that her coworkers have spent several hours unsupervised... Asmodia still feels an odd sense that she has never actually been religious enough to experience before, that the world is kind of neat and somebody put in a bunch of work to maintain it for her, and that flying around as a dragon would be one way of appreciating it.
"...you did just tell me to take a break. I'll possibly try flying around and maybe test out my breath weapon, targeted at the ocean obviously, if that's okay with you and Security. Somebody yell at me to get to ground before my thirteen minutes are up?"
Carissa Sevar: "Someone make her invisible and tell her when her time is up."
Carissa needs to go inside and consult a list of all the gods she's allowed to know about and try to figure out who did this and what they want.
Asmodia: "Oh, and if I fall over when I turn back - try a Fox's Cunning, would be my guess?"
Asmodia is - not totally sure, thinking back - that there wasn't an almost infinitesimal fraction of a moment there when she did have an additional 20 points of Intelligence before, obviously, you would think this would be obvious to anyone who qualified for 'god' in the first place, her brain completely crashed.
Iarwain: (Security will dutifully relay this thought to Sevar, as he's still running the Detect Thoughts.)
Carissa Sevar: WHICH GOD WOULD DO THAT COMPLETELY USELESS AND DANGEROUS THING? What was the point? Was it to tell Asmodia to be careful what to wish for? Why would a god spend intervention budget on that? Why not make Asmodia an achievable amount of smarter? Do literally any of the gods have a plan where they achieve their goals by doing things that make sense.
Asmodia: Asmodia will wait to be made invisible, and then try to turn off her conscious mind well enough to fly.
It's a lovely afternoon at the beach, and you are an appreciative dragon.
Aspexia Rugatonn: ...that's probably Otolmens??? And, if it is, that's among the most disturbing pieces of theological news that Aspexia Rugatonn has ever come across.
After some reflection, the Most High classifies the entire affair at the level where only her successor gets to know the probable real story, and writes back to Sevar (for the evening packet back) that she thinks she knows which god that is, and Sevar need not inquire further.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 9 (7) / Evening
Carissa Sevar: Carissa gets this response from the Grand High Priestess.
Right. Okay.
Carissa would ALSO like to be twenty points more intelligent and grasp the entire universe and see every lie in it and shape it all towards perfection.
Asmodia: Asmodia steps back from the large wall in the room she commandeered as Project Lawful's secret meeting place for backstories, and exhales with a weird feeling of grim satisfaction.
Everything Keltham knows that's true across both realCheliax and alterCheliax and that's believed to be fine, is written in green; Asmodia obviously can't write everything like this, but she's summarized some major areas to keep in mind.
Everything that's true in alterCheliax but not realCheliax, is written in orange. Glimpse of Truth is Glimpse of Beyond, Pilar has an obligate rape fetish, Asmodeus is a great deal more benevolent.
Everything they've told Keltham that seems potentially dangerous or problematic, and doesn't have a known recovery or excuse that makes total sense, is written in red. This includes matters like Security wizards being paid 500gp/week, or 'Why doesn't Asmodeus count as Lawful Good?', or 'Why did Asmodia really get her new headband?', or 'Wait there's how many alterPilars per Subirachs and you're not doing anything else with them?' Similarly with old memories that Keltham might reexamine and find problematic even if he's not looking there right now; such as the previous history of less confident Project Lawful students going quiet when Keltham says potentially fraught things in class.
In black are the known inconsistencies, the cracks and flaws in their universe, where all they can do is hope that Keltham never looks in that wrong direction. At present there's a single entry, which is that they're hoping Keltham isn't tracking the phase of the moon, or the progress of time of moonrise/moonset.
Asmodia considered writing the name of everybody responsible for a red item or a black item next to those items, but ran into a snag when the only black item would have Abrogail Thrune's name written next to it. Hopefully the message is plain enough regardless. This is still Cheliax.
(It's not actually possible for Asmodia to have finished reading all her transcripts and sorted everything out this neatly, in the amount of time she had to work since ceasing to be a dragon. But so long as nobody notices this and complains, including Asmodia herself, it will hopefully be okay? There's a lot of stuff in Golarion like that, and one more hardly makes a difference at this point.)
Carissa Sevar: Carissa noticed, but she doesn't really know how long it takes to do that kind of project, if you're very wise and very, very, very obsessive. "Good, Asmodia. Let's take a few hours to think about good excuses for the things in red. What do you think about asking for some Control Weather so it's rainy the next couple evenings, interfering with efforts to track moon phases."
Asmodia: "Prior probability in this season for a couple of rainy days... ten percent? But I think we can legitimately expect Keltham not to think that the Conspiracy world more narrowly predicts us hiding the sky from him... Unless he's already noticed a time anomaly, in which case he thinks about trying to track the moon and then notices that it just happens to be rainy while the moon should be visible."
"I concur with the plan, though. I think it's better than leaving our universe's moon out where Keltham can just see it."
Carissa Sevar: She writes the order out. "Add to the yellow column that it's a little rainier in alter Ostenso, and I'll authorize the lie that rain's pretty common this time of year, maybe forty percent of days."
Asmodia: "I express dissent, that creates a consistent anomaly we have to maintain by using more Control Weathers, and has potential implications about - what weather our crops look heritage-selected to resist, when the planting and harvesting seasons are, which lands are fertile for farms -"
"We don't need to decide that part right away if Keltham doesn't ask right away. Requisition me the weather records for Ostenso, to see if there's such a thing as just having a stretch of a couple of weeks with more rain and clouds than usual? And how rare that is? I think that's a thing in reality, my memories say it is, but I don't trust anything that doesn't have numbers attached for this."
Carissa Sevar: "I'll ask for them. I don't want to commit on the rain unless Keltham asks but if he's suspicious he will ask, possibly ask a bunch of different people and be suspicious if our answers aren't distributed normally - you know, I'm going to ask everyone right now what percentage of days this time of year have rain, to get a sense of the distribution, and then we can decide if we want to fake it or not and if so we'll have a real distribution to adjust from."
Asmodia: "That'll also be a good chance to check their estimates against the reality, and see whether the probabilities we give Keltham without checking facts should usually be wronger."
Carissa Sevar: " - yep. Maybe I'll also ask for some other checkable stuff - the population of Ostenso, the price of a pair of shoes, the number of ninth-circle wizards in the world..."
Asmodia: "Part of me now wonders if we're all just inside a bigger and more elaborate version of the illusion we're constructing for Keltham, and there's some poor god out there who has to frantically make all that stuff up as fast as we request it."
Carissa Sevar: ".....that's a really specific thing to wonder."
Asmodia: "And then that god is just inside another Conspiracy too. Though, at that level, you'd have to be pretty silly not to suspect there was something outside you, after watching us down here building our own hastily constructed universe to contain Keltham, and knowing you were making a universe containing us."
Carissa Sevar: "....I'm going to spend this evening trying to figure out if you can use the statistics from the distribution of traits like height or intelligence to characterize the spread of student guesses of the answers to true questions and come up with a process that generates alter Cheliax answers from that. You can help, if you'd like. I'll leave the worrying about bigger gods until I am a bigger god."
Asmodia: "Typical mortal attitude, leaving everything to the gods. Keltham's probably never giving a thought to how much work he's making for us..."
"Well, except actually Keltham is thinking about us. And whenever he does, he deliberately tries to make our lives as difficult as possible. And Keltham knows more math than we do."
"I guess that's why I didn't get a comforting feeling that someone out there understood everything I was going through, which, you know, seems like it would have gone along with the rest. Because I've legitimately got it worse."
"And sure, I'll come along and help."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 10 (8) / Morning
Keltham: Keltham arises. It's another beautiful day in Cheliax... actually a cloudy and slightly rainy day, apparently, but, same essential principle! Who says that slight rain can't be beautiful? Keltham was probably not going to get to go outside much anyways!
He prays for spells, particularly those potentially apt for a date with Yaisa.
He meets everyone for breakfast.
Keltham proposes at breakfast that a very few people should be trying anything Keeperlike. Like Pilar and Asmodia, say. Keltham would honestly prefer not Carissa, if she's okay with waiting to see what happens to the other two first, but he's not making that an order because of the 'faith' thing and because there's just a whole lot of stuff here he doesn't understand. He would rather not have to face Cheliax and explain why everybody in his first class of students is now catatonic, if it turns out that suddenly going into a coma is just a thing that happens if people try to undergo Keeper training without any actual Keeper supervision.
Iarwain: (Subirachs now routinely runs Spell Gauge on Keltham every morning after he prays for spells. She is able to read up to his third-circle spells but not his fourth-circle ones; so Sevar gets notified about Detect Desires and Detect Anxieties, but not about Glimpse of Truth.)
Carissa Sevar: "I'm fine with not being in the first batch of people who finds out what happens if you try to be a Keeper without any of the societal guardrails dath ilan has. If you all become Keepers and it's great and Keltham still doesn't want me to I am going to expect some serious compensation but I don't expect I'll decide to do it, in the next couple years at least."
Asmodia: "If there are only two Keeper spots open, I shall gracefully step aside to make room for another; I find myself feeling a little ambiguous about this and I believe that a certain someone else here does not."
lintamande: " - I want to be a Keeper," says Meritxell immediately.
Keltham: "...All right then."
"Asmodia, you're up first today, you'll give the unfiltered version of the talk I interrupted yesterday to Pilar and Meritxell."
"After that, I want to see how you do at giving a non-Keeper version to everyone else."
Asmodia: Asmodia would be hesitant about giving this talk when the actual insights happened 3 days ago instead of 1 day ago, except that she has wisely foreseen this coming and refreshed the thoughts in her mind already.
Asmodia speaks then, to Pilar and Meritxell with Keltham observing, upon Keltham's seven problems; the remaining five, since she already spoke of #1 and #2.
#3, no empirical theory can prove itself except by risking its disproof. The surface mathematical truth of this is that to shift probabilities from theory1 to theory2 you must encounter evidence with P(evidence ◁ theory2) > P(evidence ◁ theory1); but then if the evidence is not seen, one necessarily has P(~evidence ◁ theory2) < P(~evidence ◁ theory1); and the test by which theory2 hoped to advance itself at the expense of theory1, if it's right, instead becomes its downfall at theory1's hands, if it's wrong.
And the deeper meaning of this is how human minds are constantly constantly trying to pretend at imbalanced games, where they can win too much with too little risk. Perhaps P(evidence ◁ theory1) is higher than theory2's advocates would like to think. Keltham exhibited to them, certainly deliberately, some of those possible fallacies, when he claimed that only the Conspiracy could possibly predict that Ione and Carissa and Pilar would all go off together; there was an Ordinary explanation as well, and if anything a stronger one, because there was an Ordinary fact about those three having been absent from the general group (along with Asmodia, who was however known to have a reason to be busy), whereas explanations based in Conspiracy don't single out those three to quite the same degree - though it is of course true that in some Conspiracy worlds, those three also need to go off and copy Invisibility, so maybe you can't really say the Conspiracy assigns much less probability - though to Asmodia it does seem like copying spells is more of an ordinary thing and in the Conspiracy world everybody already has all the spells they need assigned to them? Unless the Conspiracy is faking that. You could always have the Conspiracy trying to do on purpose what they think the Ordinary world would do -
(Keltham interrupts to say that you can go down that thing-a-conversation-goes-down forever, and Asmodia should return to topic, exactly as realAsmodia predicted he would do after alterAsmodia started saying all that. She keeps her smile strictly inside.)
Or more simply, people can be broken in the way where they try to just update off the positive evidence that would prove theory2, if it appears, and mysteriously forget to check their mental books, if instead the negated ~evidence is seen or unseen. If those three had failed to disappear at lunch, which Keltham had at one point claimed the Conspiracy assigned 100% probability to expecting, would a non-dath-ilani remember to update against the Conspiracy?
Or people just make up the probabilities afterwards, or in hindsight - not so much to have both evidence and ~evidence prove theory2, as to have evidence prove theory2 more than it should, and ~evidence disprove theory2 less.
And if you don't make up any numbers at all, if you don't even know the Law of it, then how would you ever notice or realize you were doing anything wrong?
Such is all Golarion, seen with the eyes of a dath ilani. They are not only insane, but cheating. But in this they can at best deceive themselves, and others, if none are dath ilani; for if you put numbers on it all, it would be plain as day to the Probability-Sight -
Keltham: "Not actually true, or a lot of this would be a lot simpler; there's versions of the mistake that look coherent. When I 'trolled' you yesterday, I made up probabilities such that, if you predicted my trolling, which I mostly expected, that would appear to provide a big update in favor of you being a time-traveler, and then if you didn't predict my prediction, which I slightly expected you not to do, that would appear to provide a big update in favor of Conspiracy. Those numbers weren't honest but they were coherent, and you couldn't spot the error just from looking at the numbers themselves."
"It's also possible to overemphasize the degree to which all of this is, like, regulations that people make up to prevent each other from cheating. Math is simpler than people. This math is not about people. Sometimes, people are about this math. Sometimes, people try to cheat in a way that violates this math. But this math is not about preventing cheating. People who never felt any impulse to cheat would use the same math."
"I also notice that people are starting to use 'dath ilani' to mean 'person using Law' or 'person using Law correctly', which is probably not a good loanword to add to Taldane? The term actually just means the people from the particular planet of dath ilan, while the whole point of the Law is that it's much more universal than that? Not to mention that a lot of us, and I don't just mean those of us who are five years old either, have been known to wield the Law incorrectly. Keepers aren't perfect at it either. We say 'ideal-agent' - maybe a Taldane translation would be perfect-simplified-person? - when we want to talk about a hypothetical mind that is stipulated to be using Law correctly. Kids in Civilization don't grow up hearing that dath ilani do this, dath ilani do that; they're told what ideal-agents do, or how well Nemamel did, or how high you've got to score to be in the upper nineteen-twentieths of adults."
Pilar : "I'd like to have a word that means 'person who knows the Law at all and tries to practice it the way dath ilani do'. Maybe you don't need that word in dath ilan, just like, in a world where everyone was a Keeper, you wouldn't need a word that meant 'Keeper', just the name for people in that world. Here we need a word for a person who can do what a dath ilani does."
Keltham: "There's definitely words for people who are old enough to pass competence tests, but I don't think you want to import that into Taldane as something you'd use to contrast Project Lawful candidates to the general population, it has Questionable Implications..."
"Yeah, we have words for being good at Law and words for being bad at Law, words for being a Keeper and words for hypothetical perfect entities, but nothing's really coming to mind as a word that means 'as good as a dath ilani adult rather than a Golarion adult at Law'. I'll consider it and see if there's an obvious cognate for you to import."
Pilar : "How about just ilani? And the dath ilani are the kind of ilani from dath ilan." Pilar remembers the Queen using that word that way, which is reason enough to favor it as a suggestion.
Keltham: "Doesn't actually make any sense in terms of the underlying Baseline, that's pretty close to if you ended up in another world and the people there started saying they wanted to be Larions, but I can't really stop anyone if they want to use the word that way. I suppose I could consider myself challenged to say what's better."
"Just keep in mind, nobody from dath ilan ever gets told that they ought to be an ilani. If you want to be an ilani, go try to be the things that dath ilani try to be, instead of trying to become an ilani. Imagine you got to another world where they were just finding out about magic, and everybody was like, instead of, I want to get better at wizardry, I want to be as good as Whatshername with INT 26, they were all like, 'I will study hard and someday know as much about magic as the average Golarion person who didn't specialize in that!' If you see what I'm gesturing at here."
"But, back to topic. Asmodia?"
Asmodia: She carries on through #4 and #5.
And then sets forth the Law in #6, that it is impossible to coherently expect to convince yourself of anything:
P(h1 ◁ e) * P(e) + P(h1 ◁ ~e) * P(~e) = P(h1 & e) + P(h1 & ~e) = P(h1).
For every expectation of evidence, there is an equal and opposite expectation of counterevidence. This is the more precise principle above the injunction of #3, against cheating. It tells you a very exact balance that must hold within yourself, and if it is not there, you are cheating. You cannot expect to be persuaded, on net, in a direction.
If you suspect that in the Conspiracy world Pilar didn't really copy Invisibility off Sevar... not a great example, the Conspiracy probably thought of that? But you could check her spellbook and think, if there's no Invisibility, that's a huge update towards Conspiracy. But then, if there is an Invisibility spell, that must be a huge update towards Ordinary. Or alternatively, if you try to say that it's only a small update towards Ordinary, you must think there's only a small chance of seeing no Invisibility and making the large update, to counterbalance the large chance of seeing Invisibility and making the small update.
Any time you go eagerly looking for something you can observe, expecting it to convince you of something, you must necessarily be doing something incoherent and wrong. Which, of course, people from Golarion have been running around expecting all the time. Asmodia's pretty sure she's supposed to leave this part out of the non-Keeper lecture -
Keltham: ...no, that would go in the standard curriculum.
Asmodia: ...okay then.
Including if she points out that any time you previously went into some sort of question, expecting yourself to see something that super persuaded you about theory1 being true, and then, you ended up super persuaded of theory1, you were clearly being incoherent going in, so probably whatever you ended up persuaded about was wrong?
Keltham: ...yes?
Though Keltham would not say that the conclusion you reached is probably wrong? Maybe you expected to end up persuaded that the Sun would still be lit the next day, that doesn't mean the Sun goes out? The saying out of dath ilan is 'reversed stupidity is not intelligence': to reliably be wrong about yes-or-no questions 99% of the time, you'd need sufficiently good evidence and well-processed information that you could be right 99% of the time just by flipping the answers.
So if you look back and notice you were persuaded of something by garbage reasoning, you just undo the update from that. You don't conclude that you now have positive knowledge pointing strongly in the opposite direction.
Asmodia: (Asmodia feels a sudden nervous worry that the average dath ilani, in terms of what sort of mental caution they aspire to, and how hard they are on themselves about it, may in fact be pretty well into and maybe past what she and her fellow Golarionites were visualizing when Keltham kept talking about 'Keepers'.)
...Asmodia informs Keltham that she's making a judgment call that her fellow Golarionites not trying to be Keepers, should maybe not be told about that stuff for another few days until they get a chance to take in the base principles of #6.
Keltham: ...because they've got a huge backlog of stuff they've convinced themselves of for bad reasons?
Asmodia: What if they've ever read a book written in Golarion and believed anything inside it?
Keltham: ...right. Okay, sure, first give them a chance to master some of the basic principles and applications, before pointing them in the direction of any bulk-scale mental housecleaning.
Asmodia: And on to #7.
lintamande: "You can expect to end up persuaded of the truth, right, while not knowing what it is, like you can do a test thinking 'this test will reveal'" Asmodeus's will "the truth' and that's not being incoherent?" asks Meritxell, who has been mostly quiet as she tries to absorb this. Abrogail's Chosen can't be any worse than Nethys's or Cayden Cailean's.
Asmodia: "Correct. You can calculate that, in fact, unless I'm missing something -"
Asmodia scribbles on the wall a bit. Let's say that you're not sure whether somebody is a cleric or a wizard, clerics wear red-with-black-and-gold-trim with 90% probability and anything else with 10% probability, wizards wear red-with-black-and-gold-trim with 20% probability and anything else with 80% probability, and somebody starts out five times as likely to be 'at least a first-circle wizard' than 'at least a first-circle cleric' which sounds vaguely right to Asmodia.
Then, supposing the 1/6 case where somebody is a cleric, after you observe what they're wearing, you expect with 90% probability to conclude that they're 1/5 * 9/2 = 9/10 = 0.9 times as likely to be a cleric as a wizard, and with 10% probability to conclude that they're 1/5 * 1/8 = 1/40 = 0.025 times as likely to be a cleric as a wizard.
Supposing the 5/6 case where somebody is a wizard, you expect with 80% probability that you conclude that they're 40 times as likely to be a wizard as a cleric, and with 20% probability that you conclude they're 0.9 times as likely to be a cleric as a wizard.
So if you close your eyes and don't look at their clothes, you think that you've got a 5/6 chance of losing... about a quarter of a factor of two, and a 1/6 chance of losing... about two and a half factors of two, so on average you lose... a tad more than half a factor of two? Three-fifths of a two?
And if you do look... uh... it's basically going to work out to, she's approximating here, 1/6 of one factor of two, plus 1/60 of five and a half factors of two so maybe a tenth of a factor of two, plus 5/6ths of 20% of one factor of two so 1/6 of a factor of two, plus 5/6ths of 80% of basically not any factors of two, which all works out to 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/10 or 1/3 + 1/10 so about 43% of a two. Roughly. But less than half of a two.
There's obviously going to be some sort of theorem saying that you always do better by seeing more stuff, in fact, this is so obvious that Asmodia doesn't really want to slow down and figure out how to prove it -
Keltham: "Not exactly. The theorem says that you can't coherently expect to do worse on average by making more observations. You never expect to lose more factors of two in total expectation, or on average. You might get unlucky and lose some in a particular case."
"And if you're wrong about what the evidence means, if you're wrong about the factors P(evidence ◁ hypothesis), you can see what's really there and update away from reality as a result, because you didn't correctly model the entanglement between evidence and reality."
"You just can't coherently expect that to happen to you. Any time you're like, 'oh no, I should not look there, that will probably lead me further away from the truth', you are doing something very strange and wrong, and in particular, you actually believe one thing, but believe you believe another. Like, you actually know, on some level or in some part of you, that really clerics wear red and wizards don't. But you think you believe, maybe because you remember reading it in a book, that wizards wear red and clerics don't, and you expect about yourself that if you check their clothing you'll do a calculation based on what you read in the book. So one slice through you, the part that really knows how things work, expects the verbal-calculations part of you to arrive at the wrong answer."
"What you do in this case obviously is say 'wait what?' and figure out what you actually expect, reconcile that whole bizarre thing where you actually believe one thing, but believe you believe another. And then go look. There's a whole separate skill and art form about that, which I'll maybe get to in a few days if nothing slows me down?"
Asmodia: "Keeper-only."
Keltham: "No. This is eight-year-old stuff and the rest of it's not going to make sense otherwise."
"Asmodia, I am worried that I have given you the wrong impression about exactly which forms of reasoning are dangerous, that stuff is not."
Asmodia: "...Keeper-only for at least the next several days?"
Keltham: "For somebody who believed about herself that she didn't want to try to be a Keeper, you sure are trying to Keep things."
"But fine, I can probably find material a few days out that doesn't require people to distinguish meta-levels of self-modeling or access the subjective difference between endorsement and anticipation."
lintamande: "What am I doing wrong if I think, that person over there has a Splendour of thirty, if I talk to her I'm definitely going to end up believing whatever she says, even knowing that if I talk to her I'll believe whatever she says -"
Asmodia: "I mean, in practice, what you're doing wrong is that you shouldn't talk to her - but - um. I'm not sure how to put this. Being a dath ilani - I mean an ilani - maybe I should just say, the closer you come to a Keeper, or an ideal-agent - the better you are at Law, the more that somebody with high Splendour can't convince you of which province the assassin came from, any more than they can convince you of, um, 1 + 2 = 5. Or the more math you know, the harder it is to convince you of that."
"Back in Ostenso you'd have had an easier time convincing me that 1 + 2 = 5 in some other plane of existence, because I wouldn't know anything about the Law of Validity or what it really means that 1 + 2 = 3. I'd have read that book arguing that the assassin of the Prefect of Tandak came on a ship from Whitemarch, and maybe been suspicious but not really have been able to say what was wrong. So somebody with high Splendour could've convinced me of that, and now they couldn't. Or at least it'd take a higher Splendour."
Keltham: "Or to downgrade the proverb's profoundness a few steps, your strength in the Way is the degree to which it takes a higher Splendour to convince you of false things and a lower Splendour to convince you of true things."
lintamande: Meritxell looks like she actually thinks that's maybe more profound than the original version.
Keltham: "I should also note that to whatever extent an augmented Splendour of 30 does not actually act as irresistible direct mind control and you get any chance to think about things, the obvious reconciliation is to try to decide in advance, 'How incredibly persuasive of an argument should I expect to hear from somebody with Splendour 30, if they are trying to convince me of a true thing, compared to how likely I am to hear that level of persuasiveness if they're trying to convince me of a false thing?' And then if you really expect that your predictions there are correct, and not just way underestimating how persuasive they'll sound for false things - and you think you'll actually get the chance to implement that rule, instead of them just effectively mind-controlling you - then you could try to update off that conversation."
"I mean, in practice, to first order, the answer is just not to talk to them if you think they're liable to deploy irresistible Splendour on convincing you of false things. To second order, if you've got to talk to them anyways, go find a Lawful entity with Splendour 30 and pay them to spend a few days arguing true and false things to you until you're correctly calibrated on what it sounds like to hear a true versus false argument at Splendour 30, and if it turns out you can't learn that, go back to the first-order nope."
lintamande: "I will keep that in mind if I ever need to talk to the demon lord Nocticula or something," says Meritxell very seriously.
Keltham: "Okay I'm sorry but we all work on Project Lawful here and now that you've raised this topic I am going to need the one-paragraph explanation just in case it somehow comes up even if you might otherwise think that was improbable."
lintamande: " - Nocticula is an extremely powerful not-quite-a-god entity in the Abyss and both has absurdly high Splendour and is the kind of person who'd use it to talk people into false things because she'd think it was funny. I really can't think how it'd come up. Maybe she'll object when we close the Worldwound?"
Keltham: One of the candidate hires that Cheliax is supposed to send him, being Nocticula in disguise, is not very much more improbable than other things that have happened to him recently.
But, okay, there's been a reassuringly low hit rate when he tries to guess that sort of thing specifically and in advance.
"Fair enough. Probably nothing will happen there, so long as there are not in fact and in reality any 'tropes' lurking about."
Asmodia: Message: Meritxell, going forwards, and subject to policy approval by Sevar, I think that in the name of prudence we start not mentioning certain things even if we would've been talking about them in an alterCheliax that doesn't believe in tropes.
lintamande: Acknowledged.
Can I also not ask Keltham if he thinks me mentioning it makes it more likely and if so if that's only mentioning to him or mentioning to anyone.
Asmodia: If you'd say it in Alter, do it.
lintamande: "Do you think that me mentioning things makes them more likely? Mentioning them to you or mentioning them at all?"
Keltham: "That's a legitimately fascinating question in trope mechanics. Suppose that the basic mechanism of the tropes is that something else looks over universes that would exist anyways, and drops Keltham in a world where, given the way Keltham predictably acts, things that resemble trope-patterns will happen around him. It seems incredibly likely that this happened at least with my being dropped on the Worldwound someplace I'd predictably run out of the cold into a building where Carissa would be the first person I found who could talk to me. It happened at least with my dropping into a universe with masochists in it, and one where my knowledge would be incredibly valuable, falling in the right margin between being obsolete and being too advanced for anyone there to understand. The question is whether universe selection happened with anything else than very basic and initial things like that."
"It could be, for example, that the forces that selected my landing universe were also looking around for a world where Pilar delivers snacks - that they looked over a world with a Carissa with no Pilar and were like, not good enough, needs more Pilar, next universe please. Or it could be that those forces dropped me wherever with a Carissa, but it very naturally happens, without that needing to be further specified, that if you get a weird thing like me, some nearby gods look around and one of those gods is Cayden Cailean and Cayden's like 'well this project needs snacks' and then that happens."
"If there's a lot of tropes, a lot of selection, running rampant about - or if the tropes are things that can continue to steer actively - though active steering is very much not what the answer would be in a dath ilani story - then we get into the realm of questions about, if Meritxell talks about Nocticula, does that imply Nocticula is more likely to show up? Can Meritxell make Nocticula show up? Does it only apply from Keltham's perspective, or also Carissa's, or even Gregoria's?"
"It could be that the tropes operate primarily on whether Nocticula shows up at all, and then have a secondary effect of Meritxell happening to mention her. Meritxell happening to mention Nocticula, you might think, is then not something that makes Nocticula show up; rather, because Nocticula is going to show up, Meritxell happens to mention her."
"But even in this case, it doesn't mean Meritxell can't affect what happens. Maybe if Meritxell and every other researcher on the project and all the Security are like, nope, we're not mentioning anybody like that to Keltham, in case the tropes are real, the tropes are like, 'Can we drop Nocticula on this story in a foreshadowed way? No, because nobody's going to mention Nocticula', and the tropes give up and we don't have to deal with an incredibly persuasive demon lord."
"Except now we have a new question - is there just one Keltham that gets dropped on a single Golarion, or a fixed quantity of Kelthams, or does every Golarion that matches Keltham to the satisfaction of the tropes get one? Because in the latter case, by being the sort of person who looks at this situation and has everybody get together to refuse to mention Nocticula, what you're doing is reducing the number of Golarions that get a Keltham at all, and if you think I'm net positive for Golarions, you super don't want to do that."
"In calculating this, obviously, you're not supposed to say anything like, 'But we obviously already have a Keltham, he's right here, and if we refuse to mention future entities like Nocticula, he'll still be here, it's too late for the tropes to take him back', because your decision exists in two places at once and has two synchronized effects. The first place is here and now. The second place is in a prediction about this world that the tropes made before dropping me here. A prediction where the tropes asked, 'Well, what will people like Meritxell decide, when they think they've already got a Keltham who the tropes can't take back anymore?' and if the tropes predict you won't mention any future demon lords and will make it impossible for required events to happen in a duly foreshadowed fashion, you don't get a Keltham. If you're the sort of person who thinks that the tropes can't take back a Keltham you already have, you don't get one."
"All this is the shard of Law after Utility and before Coordination, what we'd call the theory of logical decisions, meaning, decisions that are about logical facts and identified with logical facts and which we evaluate in terms of their logical consequences."
"But pending knowing a lot of other stuff, I'd say that, even if tropes are everywhere, you shouldn't avoid mentioning things like Nocticula... uh, unless demon lords actually directly notice when you talk about them, which, in retrospect, I should have checked before going into this whole long lecture here."
"And I'm mostly at tropes not being that ubiquitous and not running foreshadowing in that particular way, after there was no conflict with the queen, Carissa made her afterlife arrangements just fine, and wasn't a hidden cleric, etcetera. And in that case you again shouldn't refrain from telling me about demon lords, unless, again, they directly hear when we talk about them. Do they?"
lintamande: Meritxell attempts to recalculate that logic that Keltham just regurgitated with the additional information that there was....some kind of conflict with the Queen, though the details are very secret, and that Carissa has not sold her soul. The tropes do operate, but it might serve Asmodeus to accommodate them and make lots of tropey things happen, as that prediction is what caused Keltham to show up, which Asmodeus wanted...
Then she remembers alter-Meritxell would just be answering the question. "No - or not here, they might in the Abyss. If there are entities it's not safe to mention I haven't heard of them, which is what you'd expect, really."
Keltham: "That's what I trusted, but wanted to verify."
Asmodia: ...orders not to mention entities like that are rescinded for now, pending policy ruling by Sevar.
Asmodia: "Keltham, was that all Keeper-only, or does it get copied at least to Sevar? I imagine Sevar wanting to know about all that, if she's involved."
Keltham: "Good question. I'd say at least copy it to Carissa for sure. Aside from that put it under Keeper classification until I've had time to think about potential dangerous-information."
Asmodia: Asmodia was gambling on that; if Keltham had explicitly said 'no' then copying it to Sevar would have required her to compartmentalize and hide that knowledge which she wouldn't know in alterCheliax, but explicitly saying 'yes', which is what Asmodia expected, reduces the number of facts like that to keep track of. And it does rather seem like something Sevar needed to know, with or without Keltham's permission.
Iarwain: Next up is Asmodia's lecture to the general researchers, including Carissa.
It goes mostly the same? Minus some of the more interesting or immediately-Asmodean-destructive portions.
Keltham: During discussion of #7, Keltham will at least mention the general concept of trying to assess how much of an incredibly persuasive argument you expect to hear for true things versus false things from somebody with high Splendour; it's analogous to asking how many Queen coin-spins you expect somebody to be able to tell you about, if the coin is actually biased Queen or Text and was flipped twelve times. If you don't think you're calibrated on expected persuasiveness of Splendour that high, or if you expect it to work out to direct mind control, don't talk to people with that much Splendour, obviously.
Keltham's actually kind of curious about the whole super-high Splendour thing? It seems analogous to something Keltham knows about from dath ilan, and which he, like almost everybody else in dath ilan, is incredibly curious about.
One of the qualification tests for a fifth-rank Keeper is getting put into a prison, with a single guard in the person of some average dath ilani who's otherwise expecting to go into cryonic suspension shortly after. The Guard gets told not to let the Keeper out, and offered a pretty substantial financial incentive not to do that, payable to friends or relatives or favorite charities. The Guard has to solemnly affirm that they intend to resist any attempts to be persuaded to let the Keeper out, that they're not planning to throw the test. The Keeper is obviously forbidden to offer any considerations outside the test; they can't promise to pay even more money to the person's relatives or favorite charity than the incentive, if they're let out. The Guard does have to go on listening to the Keeper, talking back to them, and so on.
To be a fifth-rank Keeper you have to persuade the person to let you out before they next sleep; you can go into overtime but only by persuading the other person to go on talking to you.
To be a sixth-rank Keeper you have to do it in 2.4 hours flat with somebody who isn't average, somebody smarter than Keltham, and they have to be between 30 and 40 years old.
To become an eighth-rank Keeper, of which there are maybe three dozen in dath ilan, you have to persuade your way through a second-rank Keeper.
Obviously nobody except higher-ranked Keepers ever get to find out what goes into those conversations.
They don't lack for volunteers on the rare occasions where an opening comes up. Everybody else is so incredibly curious about what the Keepers could possibly, possibly be saying. If you're going into cryosuspension anyways, why wouldn't you find out?
Keltham is curious about whether he could do that to, say, an INT 16 person from Golarion who'd never heard of Law. But, not something he's really got the spare time to test right now.
It might take less time, though, for somebody to try incredibly high Splendour on him, to see if that works, like, at all? If that's safe and Asmodeus-approved.
Peranza: (Peranza remembers to be appropriately wide-eyed and fascinated by this Civilization Fact.)
(It doesn't take much doing.)
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is so incredibly incredibly curious now. She would literally torture several people to death for this information, if that were a way one could get it.
"That....does sound like really high Splendour. You could put in a request for someone to do that to you.....okay I mostly want you to do that because I'm incredibly curious not because I'm sure it's a good idea."
lintamande: "I'm not sure at all it's a good idea," Gregoria says, "what if while they were at it they also convinced Keltham to go run off and be Chaotic Good or something. I know it's not mind control - or, uh, that the Keepers claim it's not - but that doesn't mean it's going to be distinguishable from mind control."
Keltham: "Presumably the person with incredibly high Splendour also has any common sense, or so I'd hope?"
"Actually I guess that can't be taken for granted. A Keeper candidate would have enough common sense not to, in the process, persuade the Guard to not go into cryosuspension and instead become a master criminal bent on the destruction of all Civilization. Maybe somebody with high Splendour doesn't."
lintamande: Meritxell wants a call from Carissa immediately on mentioning powerful entities.
Carissa Sevar: You can talk about Nocticula since she's already been - foreshadowed - but no new ones until Asmodia and I have time to discuss this in more depth.
lintamande: "- so back on the topic of Nocticula," Meritxell says, "she's called the Queen of the Succubi, where succubi are an incredibly high-Splendour demon whose touch will drain your life energy until you die. They feed on people by convincing them to let them do it."
Keltham: "Can they convince anybody of that or, like, one person out of thirty who maybe wanted to move on to the afterlife anyways? Are they picky on who they try this on, or just literally, walk up to a random person and get a 90% success rate?"
lintamande: "I know before we went up to the Worldwound we were warned just to not listen to anything they were saying and flee immediately if killing them was not available as an option but I don't know what success rate that corresponds to."
Carissa Sevar: "In the scenario you described - locked in a room, have all day to convince the person with the key to let them out, but instead of losing money it's that they'll energy drain you to death and you know it.... I'd expect they could talk their way past a majority of random people? Not 90%, though. And mind that Golarion's random people are very stupid by dath ilani standards."
Keltham: "Well, maybe you'd need a higher-powered succubus to be worth trying on me at all, but I am not actually any less curious now. I guess if at some point I wanted to spend 5000 gold pieces on it so I could be Raised afterwards if I lost? But I was mostly hoping that there'd maybe be some government Splendour-augment, who trains high-value targets in Splendour resistance, and gets supervised about that by a devil or something."
Carissa Sevar: "Sounds like the sort of thrilling job that might really exist and is worth asking about." That seems rather deliciously reckless of him but she's not going to argue further.
lintamande: Gregoria is. "Why? What are you expecting to learn from this?"
Keltham: "Fifty percent let's test this before Nocticula or somebody else with overwhelming Splendour actually shows up targeting me, fifty percent can I go through the transcript afterwards more slowly and figure out which invalid steps of reasoning they were able to persuade me about, secretly one hundred percent it just sounds incredibly interesting."
lintamande: "But.....if something is widely considered kind of a bad idea and might go wrong, you could just not do it!"
"Maybe you could," Meritxell says. "I bet Ione couldn't, if it was really intellectually interesting, and Carissa couldn't, if it involved whatever the fuck personality trait has her sleeping with the two most powerful people in the world -"
Carissa Sevar: "And you couldn't, if it involved mildly impressing someone."
lintamande: Alter Meritxell smiles cheerfully back at Carissa. "Indeed."
Keltham: "To be clear, here, Gregoria, the thing I was contemplating doing was having this hypothetical government Splendour-augment take a run at me under controlled conditions. Not doing the thing with the succubus anytime soon."
"Somebody bip me at lunchtime or dinnertime to see if I can make any headway about recounting one of the short stories from a Reckless Investor Miyalsvor continuity. Uh, Miyalsvor is someone from a relatively primitive planet at dath ilan's tech level, who would otherwise have died the true death but gets rescued by aliens, because it's only legal for them to do that if you're otherwise going to die for real, and he gets out among the stars and tries to sell some dath ilani fiction there, and a defecting investment group tries to steal his copyright on the fiction, but Miyalsvor manages to turn the tables on them and take control of that entire investment group, and then he goes around from star to star investing in alien companies and having all sorts of fascinating adventures where he has to stop his investments from going wrong."
"The reason I mention this is that Reckless Investor Miyalsvor is considered one of the best examples in dath ilani fiction of an author managing to depict an incredibly persuasive character who has to do the equivalent of passing the Keeper test, talk his way out of holding cells and so on. So maybe if I can remember the dialogue closely enough, I can retell one of the short stories and have that convey something... this sounds more and more implausible the longer I talk about it, but maybe worth trying just to see how badly I fail."
Peranza: "I'd definitely like to hear you try," Peranza says, and smiles. "And I'll be merciful if you fail."
(This, she can do.)
Iarwain: It seems like a fine note on which to go to lunch.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 10 (8) / Noon
lintamande: "So, have you seen a succubus, Carissa," says Tonia at lunch. They decided they have more conversations among themselves, rather than waiting for Keltham, in alter Cheliax, and they don't want to transition on him all at once but can nudge a bit in that direction.