Carissa Sevar: She scans it for things that belong in Asmodia's orange or red columns. Nope, nope, nope, does Yaisa have to be so smug, nope... she hands it back to Security. "You'll have to look later, he's on his way back, but basically worked great," she adds to Asmodia quietly.
Keltham: Keltham is in fact on his way back!
But looks busy, and doesn't talk to anyone right away. Keltham instead strides over to Maillol's office, to check if Governance had any comments on his informal proposal for an interim contract between Cheliax and Project Lawful. Or any comments they might have on his articles of incorporation for Project Lawful. And pick up the papers for candidate employees to talk about with Carissa.
He also briefly queries Maillol about the all-in costs if Keltham wants to straight-up employ Yaisa himself, while having her retain living quarters on Project Lawful, and gives Maillol early warning on that possibility / requests that things should be configured now to allow that later. Not that their relationship advanced anything like that far, or that Yaisa has even indicated any such interest, Keltham just prefers to keep that option open for later.
Ferrer Maillol: Comments on Keltham's informal proposal are in this folder. Comments on Keltham's proposed corporation thingy are in this smaller folder. Job candidates in this bigger folder.
Yaisa's upkeep would be 6gp/week, yeah pretty expensive but they're remote out here. Keltham needs to make sure Yaisa's paid at least 12gp/week by him.
Yes, the possibility was kept open; Sevar already gave Maillol the tip that Keltham might ask that about somebody, at some point, and also that the person would be Yaisa. Maillol appreciates the heads-up nonetheless.
Keltham: ...isn't it nice to have such an attentive girlfriend! If she actually is in the Conspiracy Keltham is kind of doomed, yo.
All right, now Keltham is heading back to the dining hall.
Things he definitely has to do today (he announces): Consider new employees with Carissa, review and revise the contract stuff.
Things he hopefully still has time to do anyways (he further announces): Teach a bit more Law, Utility would be the obvious Law that comes next. Get in his daily magic practice and put on another Silent Image show at dinnertime. He'll maybe try to wing a Miyalsvor short story tomorrow; Keltham's evening tonight is spoken for.
So roughly - maybe one to two hours of Law before dinner if there's time, but first Keltham wants to do the most urgent Project stuff that needs to be done today rather than tomorrow. Everyone good on that?
Carissa Sevar: Sounds good.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 10 (8) / Afternoon
Keltham: Keltham reviews Cheliax's feedback on his proposed interim contract. He is conscious somewhere in the back of his mind that if he is inside a generalized fiction novel then this is the exciting Trade With Aliens section where the narration zooms in to show his thoughts in tons of detail, and all the readers are carefully evaluating the logic of everything to see if they can spot where Keltham makes his dramatic fatal error, and that the part where he's occasionally distracted by thoughts of Yaisa is presumably being played for comedy in a way that implies this is definitely a story wherein Keltham is making amusing reader-spottable errors. Thankfully Keltham's probability density is mostly not in his life being run pointwise by tropes in that detailed of a way, or on there existing an audience he can reason about that way. Carissa wasn't a hidden cleric and all that.
Cheliax does seem to be on board with Keltham's basic outline of the theory behind an interim intended-to-be-replaced contract, though? Keltham expected more pushback on this.
Keltham: For something like metallurgy, which was Keltham's next intended thing to try, or road-building, the plan is to have what would otherwise be an insanely onerous patent scheme, in which any Chelish metalmakers or roadbuilders adopting new techniques need to hand over to the Project 80% of their increased profits above a 20% increase, relative to a baseline they establish under untampered truthspell; alternatively the Project can directly demand a per-volume patent fee. The rough idea is that you'd expect these entities to, themselves, end up capturing half the gains from trade, so if Keltham gets nearly all their gains, he's getting around half the gains to Cheliax. This fails if those entities compete against each other too much and can capture only a small fraction of those gains, which is why Keltham can also set a coordinated per-volume fee if he notices that happening.
Chelish Governance is strongly recommended but not mandated to reimburse them for substantial amounts of the money the manufacturers pay the Project, so the manufacturers can scale operations the way they usually would given increased profits, and perhaps to subsidize purchase of the goods, to make up for its price being set higher.
If countries outside Cheliax start using the same technology, which Keltham is not actually expecting to happen that quickly, then competition from those countries will decrease pricing power inside Cheliax and the manufacturers will show less of a profit increase and the Project will get less of that increased profit. Or to put it another way, if roadmakers outside Cheliax adopt the same technology successfully, the government is allowed to hire those outside roadmakers to make roads inside Cheliax, but they must be doing a sales volume outside Cheliax at least equivalent to their sales volume within it (to fence off some overly clever functionary getting ideas about setting up a "new roadmaker" just outside the Chelish border). The Project may at its discretion arrange things so that everybody with knowledge of key engineering details is a Project employee and bound to the project by nondisclosure arrangements.
It's intended that this overly arduous and detailed arrangement will eventually be replaced by a measurement of excess general growth in Cheliax's economy relative to economies of other countries, of which Keltham captures around half, after which all this can be tossed aside and replaced by general taxation and reimbursement mechanisms.
Keltham: For stuff like improved sanitation technology or anti-pandemic measures, Keltham is getting a certain impression that you can't just ask the insurers to pay for those. So this is going to be an issue of Cheliax offering the Project a price for outcomes, basically, and Keltham deciding how that gets prioritized relative to other tech based on that price. The price should take into account that other countries may adopt the same measures, because Keltham is not actually going to slow down adoption there at all; that's something where you just broadcast the knowledge, dath ilan that taught him would have wished it so. Cheliax should offer the Project a price that reflects how much they'd want to see that happen, and can maybe negotiate with other Lawful countries about upping that price.
This part can also fold into the general economic increase business, after which Cheliax and other Lawful countries can again be invited to bid on the Project inventing further sanitation tech.
Keltham: Cheliax requests that, during this initial period pending a replacement contract, while things are all happening inside Cheliax anyways, two-thirds of the Project's profits go into a Cheliax-internal investment fund, which Keltham promises to actually use for investments that he expects to boost the Chelish economy, including via spending on subprojects of the Project or Project employees and infrastructure; if Keltham at some point wants to relinquish this responsibility he can hand it back to Governance. Profits of the fund go back into the fund itself. They're willing to trust Keltham's promise that the Project won't pay out in salary more than is fair.
There's an attached note in different handwriting saying that parts of Governance aligned to old nobility will be more on board if this fund structure exists, for reasons that are probably not going to be legible to Keltham for a while - to give a not-particularly-accurate summary, they're incentivized to talk as if Keltham will take anything he's given and run to a neighboring country unfriendly to Cheliax, even though this is not true, and adding this fund structure placates them and shows their concerns are being listened-to and they're being respected about this. Keltham should not worry much about this and should leave these factions in Governance to their own delusions, so long as it doesn't actually affect the way anything goes, which they're hoping this structure accomplishes.
...right then. They're correct that this doesn't sound to him like a consistent agent equilibrium. Possibly some predictor in Governance is bidding up the price on Keltham deciding to take his early profits and go invest in some other country instead? Keltham will ponder whether this reflects some actual state of affairs they aren't telling him about. For the interim contract he'll send back to have the amount be half rather than two-thirds, but otherwise, okay, they're yielding to him enough on other stuff.
Keltham: Cheliax is pretty sure it can find a million gold pieces in actual gold to redeem money owable to the Project, without that doing anything strange to their economy. If it's more than that, they want to be able to repay him in other valuables that Keltham approves, with a fallback to a guarantee to pay in standard valuables that would be available to somebody requesting to redeem currency at the Chelish central bank. At the same value in those valuables per face-value gold-piece instrument as would have existed at the time of signing this contract, if Keltham is worried about currency devaluation.
Keltham adds a note that the key date will actually be a day before Keltham's arrival, so they can't just drop all those valuations by a factor of 100 for one minute while signing the contract, but otherwise sure. Also just to be sure, can somebody give him three examples of standard redeemables and prices and available volumes as they were on that day?
Keltham: Somebody in Chelish Governance has ever heard of joint-stock corporations, there's just no general market in their shares, which makes them less popular than a dath ilani might otherwise expect. Insurance basically seems not to exist at scale, which Keltham would have expected to imply a huge obstacle towards having there be limited liability for owners and officers of those joint-stock corporations. But given that Keltham regards this issue as a blocker for obvious reasons of sanity, apparently Cheliax is willing to just say that Keltham doesn't have passthrough personal liability for the Project if somebody sues the Project for more than it's worth? Apparently this is usual for Golarion, in other countries that have corporations recognized by local governments as entities? And the excess liability doesn't have to overflow to an insurer, it can just cease to exist with nobody responsible?? This seems like a huge implicit subsidy for corporations that are doing anything risky and like it would create all kinds of awful incentives??? Keltham supposes that he can just accept this implicit gift and then not do anything awful with it.
They're basically on board with the Project's corporate structure otherwise. Though there's a note from a seventh-circle priest of Asmodeus specializing in contracts, who reviewed the whole thing, that he doesn't understand why three-quarters of this stuff has the exact form that it does. The Church bids 2000 gold on Keltham explaining it, in case it's theologically important to Asmodeus's domain of contracts.
Keltham tilts his head slightly on reading this price; he can't tell if they're weirdly undervaluing his other opportunities, or just deliberately saying that this issue is not actually important but should get done eventually. He'll ask Maillol about that, maybe.
Keltham: Cheliax is actually pretty unhappy about Keltham's request to have disputes arbitrated by a priest of the Lawful Neutral banking god 'Abadar'? Abadar can be kind of weird about some things. Osirion has a terrible record on women's rights, including, for example, their ability to own their own property not in a man's name. Abadar may be into banking but he's obviously not into fairness. A priest of the Lawful Neutral goddess Erecura, who lives in the center of a giant interdimensional trading city and market, would be much better for this. Subject to that part, they're fine about mutual approval of the priest, or failing that the arbitrating priest being selected by the Golarion head of Erecura's church.
Keltham writes back that he can't just take Cheliax's choice of Lawful Neutral god here for obvious reasons, but he's fine with it being Irori instead.
Keltham: Finally, Governance notes for the record that they would usually hammer things out a lot more painstakingly than this, but they also want to actually get started on that tech transfer stuff. Their unusual pliability is to be understood as a request for haste.
Keltham again tilts his head and writes back that Civilization is also not in the habit of trying to design planet-affecting contracts this quickly. Cheliax obviously knows more than him about how local law, or a Lawful Neutral god's priest, is liable to interpret contracts like this. Cheliax presumably has professional lawyers they can actually trust to help. Keltham's rapid composition of these interim contracts is to be understood as a favor for Cheliax. He's a fourth-circle cleric, and not especially likely to get sick with plague in the next month if there's a one-month delay in Project work.
Sort of weirdly reminiscent of his interaction with Abrogail about a favor owed to her for her pride? It sounds like maybe that's a Chelish thing, you look out for your interests and point out your concessions and leave the other side to point out theirs. Matches some things Carissa said about sexual interactions, or for that matter Yaisa at lunchtime, how a Chelish woman wouldn't expect reciprocation owed if it wasn't spelled out. As a social practice it doesn't necessarily strike Keltham as that great of an idea, but it's the sort of thing where he could see it being easier on the feelings of Kelthams in the Kelthamverse than on the feelings of dath ilani. You can still trade with aliens like that.
Asmodia: (Asmodia will later get a copy of this stuff. Asmodia, who would again never dare do this if not on a low-punishment regime, will go through it and add many angry notes about terms that wouldn't have actually been suggested in alterCheliax, and how she now has to make the rest of her universe look like that was a totally sensible thing for alterCheliax to say, and next time she needs to review anything like this 'brilliant' idea for a Cheliax-internal-only investment fund before anybody says that to Keltham. This isn't about avoiding dead giveaways, this is about Keltham doing reasoning of a form that only he and Asmodia understand, and Keltham will have updated off somebody's brilliant idea for cutting Cheliax's future losses here. Somebody should get flayed about this.)
Abrogail Thrune II: ...it's actually somewhat refreshing? Abrogail usually only hears this kind of honesty from people she has managed to bring to very extreme emotional states, and has some pleasant associations about that.
Keltham: And time to go meet with Carissa about potential new employees! What've they got for him?
Carissa Sevar: The amount of Splendour needed to lie to Keltham on most topics? Like, twelve. The amount of Splendour needed to get Keltham to agree to a contract that's slightly unfair? Apparently thirty or something. That's not quite true; there are bits he didn't think to question. But he's good at this, and instinctively so, and Hell is supposed to be incredibly clever when it comes to these things and it's sort of concerning how the servants of the god whose domain is tricky contracts are mostly playing even with a random dath ilani teenager and that's despite them having played fast and loose with the alter-Cheliax rules.
No, not concerning, it's great news; it is part of why her value in Dis is so high. Hell will get better at this, and serve Asmodeus better.
Project management has a dozen candidate files for Keltham, all of them reasonably promising, prescreened for meeting security clearances. Five of them are boys; Carissa ended up deciding on enough boys that it was only bleeding a bit of evidence towards their having disproportionately done a search for girls, but few enough that if Keltham rejects them all he'll still have lots of options and it won't take up much of his time. The ones that looked superficially the most promising to Project management are on top which is intended to save him time but he can go in some other order if he'd rather.
Keltham: Keltham quizzically observes his actual level of internal surprise and maybe even slight dismay at male candidates being included, neither of which he would've expected himself to feel. Probably worth a pretty serious chunk of probability mass out of Conspiracy... should've thought to predict that in advance, but the amount of surprise he's feeling would seem to indicate that he wasn't putting a lot of probability mass on male candidates being included.
Well, makes sense though, Ordinary was thinking something like 'there's an alien, we don't know his gendertrope or how well he can do research with a bunch of boys his age, also we want him to feel very welcome in Cheliax, also we want all his genes, also we may not have a lot of time here, let's send him 12 girls from a wizard academy'. And then now they're like 'well he's doing pretty okay and we ran out of great female candidates so send him some males'. Conspiracy, you would think more on priors, would have some Dark Plan that looked something like 'lull Keltham with a harem' and then not want to modify that plan based on how things went on Project Lawful so far. Factor of 2? Factor of 3? Call it 2.5 maybe. And don't neglect to note that remaining probability mass in Conspiracy is narrowing more towards 'the Conspiracy is improvising and modifying their plans as they go'.
Moving on from that!
Two of the male candidates and three of the female candidates look too good to pass up. One of the female candidates looks like a why-would-they-include-this case.
The remaining three men and three women seem to be in basically the same bin so far as Keltham's ability to tell who would work out. Given that Keltham has a demonstrated ability to successfully interact with Chelish girls and less such demonstrated ability to interact with any boys his age, he feels a certain impulse to take the three female candidates in this round, and let more male candidates wait pending seeing what happens with the first two?
...Is that blatant rationalization?
Possibly? He'd kind of expect to end up saturated on romantic options either way? It's just that Keltham doesn't feel like he actually has much of a basis on which to make more decisions here aside from noticing his own nervousness about what young-adult masculine gendertropes are like around here.
Keltham has arrived at his opinions; what does Carissa think about these dozen?
Carissa Sevar: "Do you in fact want boys?" asks Carissa, who predicted internally a seventy percent chance he takes them. "Many wizard schools don't do mixed-sex classes because girls behave differently around boys and vice versa."
Keltham: "There's two men who look incredibly promising and Civilization sure wouldn't exclude them on that basis. Having them sent as candidates at all implies that at least somebody in Governance doesn't consider that a blocker problem? How much of a problem is it liable to be in Cheliax?"
Carissa Sevar: "Not a huge one, not all wizard schools do that and I don't think anyone has noticed one way or the other being resoundingly better. But, you know, Governance just wants metals as fast as possible, you can want other stuff, if you think it'll make your life harder."
Keltham: "In Civilization I'd have more faith in my ability to determine after the first week of candidacy whether anything grimdark was happening or not... seems like a dumb thing not to test at some point, though, the Project isn't going to stay a one-male operation forever."
"Suppose we ignore that part, what's your opinions on the twelve? I've got mine."
Carissa Sevar: She has ranked them by suitability in an order that's nearly the same as his. "If the project weren't so top secret I'd be inclined to take them all knowing we might fire half in a week but firing people is really inconvenient with all this top-secretness."
Keltham: "Think I wouldn't want this one in the next round," taps the weakest female candidate, "and given the inconvenience of turning people down, I feel inclined not to try more candidates than I want to hire if they all work out, so that there isn't anyone I have to tell that they were good but not good enough... am I being too Evil there, in your opinion? This is kind of important and maybe I should do the Good thing and tell them to suck it up."
Carissa Sevar: "Personally I would be as Evil as I wanted. You don't owe it to Golarion to make your job stressful for the sake of inventing sanitation faster, even if that worked in the long run."
Keltham: ...he kind of does owe it? He's not that absolutely devoid of Good and everything he has to trade is given him by grace of dath ilan.
Okay, maybe the amount of internal stress that thought generated was a warning sign. There's also penalties if he feels pressured into hiring too many people; that is also a wisdom out of Civilization.
What's the next-best alternative to going with only eight candidates such that he could in principle hire all of them if all of them performed well enough? Asking for eleven candidates but warning them that there's only eight seats, they might end up stuck in Secret Project Limbo for years if not selected, warning the male candidates that they may be slightly more at risk than female candidates...
"Let's go with eight, the two most promising men and all women except the unpromising one. Warn everyone except the top two men and top three women that they're starting from a slightly less favored position for a permanent job, if anybody doesn't want to show up given that, go to the alternate male candidates. If as expected the gendertropes mix okay, then we'll consider men and women on an even basis in future hiring rounds."
"I'd be tempted to only go with the five most promising candidates, except that I don't know if we can get more, and I also wouldn't get to check my sense of who's more or less promising. In Civilization - where expanding quickly wasn't that urgent, and people wouldn't need time-consuming Law lectures just to get up to speed on basic thinking, and you could just go on looking for more candidates, and I actually trusted at all my sense of who seems promising - the common wisdom would strongly say to only try the five really promising candidates at this stage of expansion, and beg Cheliax to please provide more like those."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't know whether to expect Cheliax could find more like these if you told them to or not. The age range and Intelligence scores loosely suggest to me they looked at every known intelligent person who is hireable for something like this and there's not a much deeper pool to keep searching."
Keltham: That's a frankly terrifying thought about a country of twenty million people. He might have to expand his hiring search outside Cheliax sooner than any person would have considered sane from a Security standpoint.
"All right, you know, if this is basically the best hiring pool we're ever going to get, let's go with trying all eleven except the bottom woman, and if all eleven seem to be working out great I'll suck up the rapid expansion and tell Maillol I'm sorry about having failed to correctly forecast my hiring needs."
"Actually, maybe ask the woman on the bottom of the ordering if she wants to try too, despite my prior prediction being that she'll fail quickly and despite what happens to her if she fails? Maybe I'm just wrong about who's promising and somebody in Governance is right."
Carissa Sevar: "Seems worth letting her take the chance if she's not costing us anything. If someone thought she was worth passing along they might've had reason that wasn't in the file. Of course, the reason might've been 'as a personal favor', that is how things sometimes work around here."
Keltham: "Are you shitting kidding me? Now I'm wondering if I should truthspell everyone on this list about whether that happened."
"...which seems like a huge act of tyranny, wow, short word for that, but flaming shit Carissa that's not a good thing to have to worry about."
Carissa Sevar: "I'm sorry! I hope that's not what happened! But I live on this planet so I'm telling you sometimes that's what happens! People get in trouble for it if they get caught but they don't always get caught!"
Keltham: "I wasn't blaming you!"
"...I'll check with Maillol about whether anything seems suspicious, try to get a sense of how bad it would be to truthspell everyone coming in, or if I could ask Security to add a question to their usual screens about whether they fiddled the application process or if their competence is being exaggerated. If Maillol doesn't flag anything, I'll go ahead with the plan to invite all twelve but with varying degrees of warning about how doomed they might be. Sound like a plan?"
Carissa Sevar: "Sounds good to me. I'm excited to work with these people, they look really smart. And a noble! We move in such esteemed company these days!"
Keltham: "Yeah, somebody's going to have to explain what a 'noble' is at some point, or why that would be a good thing when the Taldane word sure doesn't sound like it, but not right now. If you don't think it's a red flag, my going back to Maillol with our answer doesn't have to wait on it."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't think it's a red flag. Go take Maillol his list."
Ferrer Maillol: Maillol wishes he could tell Keltham that they'll get a crop of better candidates once the Project produces results, but Maillol is not sure this is true. He will not be incredibly happy if they suddenly have to hire 12 people, especially if they're all tier-1s, at current salaries, but sees the perspective from which this would also be unexpectedly good news. Assuming they work out, anyways.
Everything becomes easier in terms of funding calls, when and if the Project is earning enough revenue to pay its own costs, including the fortress and not just the researcher salaries. Maillol can't unfortunately promise that hiring becomes easier; that's probably more a matter of the Security situation surrounding the project, and also trying to have the candidates be so young and yet already outperforming.
Keltham: Yeah, that's all about what Keltham expected.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 10 (8) / Late Afternoon
Keltham: Keltham takes the time to hang Silent Image, to let his brain decompress from project-managing. He's actually managed not to think about Yaisa for an hour! Well, now he's sure thinking about it, but distractions from hanging Silent Image seem far less dangerous.
Keltham: After that, he's got the time for another hour of Law before dinner, and after a Lesser Restoration the energy too, so next up is Utility.
As a starting koan, would anybody care to offer him an example of set of preferences that seems clearly unLawful? How could you want things in a way that was bad math?
lintamande: Meritxell proposes that you could want something and also want not-that.
Keltham: ...that does sound pretty unLawful but what behavior would that look like, externally?
lintamande: That's a little harder. "...when you don't have a horse, you will pay for a horse; when you do have a horse, you will pay to stop having a horse."
Keltham: And then you'd pay for another horse. Hmmm, yes, that doesn't sound good.
Suppose that your preferences don't change over time. You prefer things to other things in a way that doesn't change based on whether you have them or not. Can your preferences still be unLawful?
lintamande: "You could prefer to stop having your preferences?"
Keltham: ...and what outward behavior would that look like?
lintamande: "....going around trying to provoke powerful unscrupulous wizards into using the incredibly illegal mind control you hope they have, so that they'll make you want something different?"
Keltham: Sounds to Keltham like there's sort of two different slices through you, there, a slice that wants to... let's say, spend all your money on nice things today, which is unfortunately able to gain control of your body and send it shopping and spend money... and then a different slice through you is later able to gain control of your mouth and ask powerful wizards if they've got mind control for not doing that. Keltham doesn't know why the 'unscrupulous' modifier is being applied here, it might be illegal and even for good reasons but if that technology was available in Civilization everyone would be using it. Under Keeper supervision, obviously, but still.
That's a fair example, but also kind of complicated! How about if they keep things much simpler and more concrete, like...
(Keltham casts Prestidigitation three times to create three fragile temporary objects, a red sphere, a blue cube, a green tetrahedron.)
Can anyone say what it would be like to have unLawful preferences about these three specific and concrete objects right here, assuming your preferences don't change over time or based on what you're holding, and assuming that the same slice through yourself was in control of your actions and your mouth? Reminder, tier-2s speak first.
Asmodia: "Prediction -"
Keltham: Yes yes, Keltham knew that was coming, but anyone else.
lintamande: "Are you counting, I like the red one more than the blue one and the blue one more than the red one? Or is that just the same as the wanting to have and not have a horse?" says Tonia.
Keltham: "We're counting that like wanting and not wanting a horse. What we're calling a preference is shown by the act of trading one of these things for the other. So if you trade it one way and then trade it back the other way, we'll say your preference reversed over time."
lintamande: "What about, I like the red one more than the blue one and the blue one more than the green one and the green one more than the red one, is that just the same with more steps?"
Keltham: "That's the example I was looking for! That's an example of circular preference. If I'd pay a copper to trade red for blue, every time, and not pay to trade it back, and not say with my mouth that I wanted anything different, that's a locally coherent preference and we can't say there's anything strange about it by itself. But if I'd likewise pay a copper to trade blue for green, and to trade green for red, you could just stand around trading me the same objects and extracting all my money from me. Or even if I wasn't willing to pay a whole copper, you could stand around trading me the same objects and burning up all my time, which is as much a resource to me as money. No one of my preferences is probably-contradicting-a-Law-we'll-find-later by itself, it's only when brought together that they can't all stand simultaneously."
lintamande: Tonia immediately looks back down at her notes, but she's smiling.
Keltham: "So we've got the first suggestion of a Law-fragment, which says that we shouldn't have any circular preferences."
"I claim that, equivalently, to this condition, it must be possible to put everything we want into a global ordering, say by tagging them with numbers -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, and so on, and then to determine which things we want more than one another, we just compare their numbers in the ordering, and we want more whichever has the higher number. If you have wants inconsistent with being able to do that, I can take all your money from you, or at least all your time."
"Do you buy that? If you don't buy it I would, of course, like to know why you're refusing the sale."
lintamande: The students glare suspiciously at him. It sounds like an Obvious Trap.
That doesn't mean they can think what the trap is, though.
Asmodia: "Are you forbidding any two wants to have the same position in the ordering?"
Keltham: "Mmm... no. We will say it is possible to be indifferent between two things you want. I could want a cube and a sphere equally, both labeled 3, and decline to spend my time to trade either one for the other; and then also prefer a triangular pyramid to both, labeling it 4." What kind of language lacks a word for the regular-tetrahedron... well, okay, to be fair Keltham can see how that would fail to come up a lot in everyday life.
Asmodia: "...I'm still relatively sure this is a trap, but can't actually see where the trap is. Your next move is to say that you have to sometimes say 'I claim' in a case that's totally true, or we'll just catch on to you. Even after you've said this, however, I'll still consider it a trap with 90% probability."
Keltham: Asmodia has an overconfidence problem, but Keltham will again wait until she's actually wrong to make that point.
"We're either going to need to add some shorter words to this language or start speaking Baseline, if you're going to go around saying sentences like that."
"It was relatively subtle, in this case, and did depend on my exact wording. Suppose that I say I'm indifferent between red and blue, and indifferent between blue and green, but I prefer green to red. That can't be done with numbers, but you can't extract all my money out of me either."
"What you can do is offer to trade me red to blue for free, after having previously made me a standing offer to trade blue to green for free, and I'll turn you down because I'm indifferent about both of those trades. Then you offer to trade me red to green for a copper, and I accept. I didn't pay out all my money by a repeatable path, but I paid more than I needed to."
"You could also imagine that this reflects a situation where I like blue a bit more than red, but not enough to pay the time-energy-attention cost of taking your offer to trade the two for free, and I like green a bit more than blue, but the total gap from red to green isn't enough to pay time costs on two swaps, only time cost on one swap."
"If we say that when I'm indifferent I'll always let you walk over and switch the two items without my bothering about it, then the claim becomes fully true and you can pump infinite money or time out of me if my preferences don't form a - can't be ordered the way I talked about."
lintamande: "Is this one of those things mortals mostly do right but unconsciously," Gregoria says, "or do mortals mostly do it wrong."
Keltham: "Yes."
"It's complicated. You're unlikely to screw up whether you'd prefer eating an apple to being stabbed with a knife -"
"Er, bad example. Good example in dath ilan, sadly enough. Bad example here, happy happy joy joy. I guess the classic 'cake or death' example in decision theory is also less clear, what with the local afterlives."
"We can, however, at least say that Meritxell is unlikely to get confused about whether she prefers eating an apple, or being stabbed."
"As soon as things get complicated, obscured, hidden behind layers of abstraction, presented in different ways at different times, mortals start doing less well than that. And if - people who run experiments on people to find out how they work - start trying to configure things in ways that will trip you up, it doesn't take much effort."
"I'm not sure even a Keeper could argue anyone into preferring infinite torture over eternal happiness, but I'm not actually sure they can't, either."
Carissa Sevar: There's silence for longer than Carissa thinks there would be in alter Cheliax.
"I mean, depends who they're trying to talk into it, probably. And whether it's the fun kind of torture."
lintamande: "Zon-Kuthon's followers don't give that reason for being Kuthites, do they?" says Gregoria only a beat after that, very calmly. "Like, they don't say, 'oh no Zon-Kuthon had a legitimately convincing argument' -"
Carissa Sevar: "I've never met a Kuthite but if He had arguments at all that'd make Him the most powerful god, wouldn't it, since the rest of them mostly can't talk to us directly."
Keltham: "It's hard, in Golarion, to make certain points, when you're an alien. I mean I'm sure there'd be equally straightforward points I could make locally, I just don't know what they are."
"What I ought to do, at this point, is demonstrate to you one of the standard ways to confuse an unprepared subject. But it would take a very reliable example, with only 8 subjects now to test it on, which I'd have to divide into three groups. And more importantly, I don't know the things about Golarion I'd need to know, to construct that example... maybe Carissa can tell me how to construct it, actually? Though it'd invalidate the demonstration for her. Hold on."
Message to Carissa: I'm looking for something that has both a quantity and a quality. And then something else which just has a comparable quality, but no comparable quantity, and is otherwise as similar as possible. It's got to be something which, apart from quality considerations, would reliably make somebody think that it was eh probably about equal value. What I'm going to do is offer three different groups choices between pairs of the low-quality high-quantity item, the medium-quality nonquantitative item, and the high-quality low-quantity item, and people tend to think that quantity matters more than quality but only when they can compare quantities directly, and otherwise the quality becomes salient, so the three groups' preferences will go in a circle.
Carissa Sevar: - she needs considerably more detail than that to come up with a suggestion but with some back and forth they can probably work one out?
Keltham: Keltham divides the remaining 7 students into groups of 3, 3, and 1, and then hands out three slips of paper containing pairwise comparisons to these three groups respectively:
1. Would you rather have an Osirian book describing 30 rare magic items, or an Absalom book on principles of spell design?2. Would you rather have a Nexian book describing 10 rare magic items, or an Absalom book on principles of spell design?3. Would you rather have a Nexian book describing 10 rare magic items, or an Osirian book describing 30 rare magic items?
Oh, and considering you got more warning than usual, this time, please just put down the actual preference that comes to you, and don't overthink it? Sure, you might be able to evade the trap if you thought hard and maybe didn't put down what you would've naturally wanted if you weren't trying to evade some unknown trap, but the point in this case is just to show the basic phenomenon. Maybe. When Civilization does this they've usually tried out a dozen variants first to find one that works.
Anyways, go try it!
lintamande: This sort of thing is stressful because it might be different in alter Cheliax, where books are probably not mostly illegal.
...possibly not, though? Magic books would be rare anyway, and none of those countries have had their backstories changed much.
Carissa Sevar: (Security should not help the girls cheat.)
Iarwain: Results:
Group 1: 2 of 3 prefer the Osirian book of 30 items over the Absalom spell design book.Group 2: 3 of 3 prefer the Nexian book of 10 items over the Absalom spell design book.Group 3: 1 of 1 preferred the Osirian book of 30 items over the Nexian book of 10 items.
Carissa Sevar: Now is that an update for or against Conspiracy. She thinks...against, weakly, because Conspiracy might've engineered the right outcome. Since she was tempted to do that.
dath ilan: It has not even slightly occurred to Keltham to try to update off this, because why. Why would anyone do that. Why would even the Conspiracy mess with his experimental results here? It's not that he's explicitly reasoning that way; the thought just hasn't occurred to him.
Keltham: "Not quite the illustrative results I was hoping for, but that's what happens when you run really tiny experimental groups, and don't do any pilot samples to pretest your theories about how people will actually react."
"The underlying theory, how it was supposed to work here, is that if you see the Osirian book of 30 items side-by-side with the Nexian book of 10 items, that makes the quantity of items salient, it makes the quantity mean something. If you don't pick a very large quality difference, in a case like that, people usually go for the higher quantity."
"If on the other hand, I compare a Nexian book about 10 magic items, to an Absalom book of spell design, what does the number 10 really mean there? It's not more or less than any obvious numbers about the spell design book. So what you see instead is Nexian and Absalom, where Nex has a better magical reputation than Absalom, apparently, obviously I'm just going off Carissa here."
"Similarly if I compare the Osirian book of 30 items to the Absalom spell design book, the number 30 doesn't have some other number to compare to, so everybody goes for Absalom because they have a better magical reputation than Osirion... was what was supposed to happen, but didn't, either because we didn't run any pilot studies to see what usually worked on people, or because our groups were so tiny that randomness dominated."
"Buuut you at least got to see that the Osirian book looked a little less attractive, next to the Absalom spell design book, than the Nexian book looked next to the Absalom spell design book, even though if you put the Osirian and Nexian books side-by-side that one subject went for the Osirian one with more items."
"If I could run more probes like this, I could probably find a slightly different version that reliably gave the result I was hoping for if you run it on three groups of 20 students, say, who hadn't been warned of what the test was about."
lintamande: "And this doesn't work on devils or Keepers?" asks Gregoria.
Keltham: "This particular form shouldn't work on me, if the decision is important enough to be worth thinking about for more than a few seconds. Possibly on an old-enough devil it wouldn't work even if the issue was trivial, say, and probably that's true about higher Keepers though I don't know at what rank the immunity would start."
"At higher levels of messing with people like this, there's - well, mostly, the techniques are secret, I expect, but it's known that one of them uses... what would you have here that's an equivalent phenomenon. You'd have visual afterimages, at least, I expect? If you look at a bright light, especially if it was dark before then, and then look away, you can see a smear of light where the - nerves that detect light, all fired, and used up some of their energy, and got tired, and now you can see something like darker-glowing spots in your vision where the brightness was."
"So if you're a sufficiently high-ranked Keeper, you know about how to manipulate people's thoughts based on getting them to activate particular brain areas harder or more intensely and then you say something else that routes through the same brain area and it does a weird thing based on some of the nerves being tired, or other nerves around them adjusting to high activity. We're allowed to know this is the general outline of how the technique can work, because it's incredibly hard to engineer, you can't reinvent it just by knowing how it works and reading non-secret neuroscience."
"There are cautionary videos that everybody in Civilization gets to see wherein a Keeper talks to an unsuspecting subject, you can't hear or see what the Keeper is saying, but you can hear the person they're talking to, and the person they're talking to starts to say occasionally more and more ridiculous things and finally agrees to sell the Keeper all the clothes they're wearing for the equivalent of a copper piece."
"We get to see those videos so that we have some idea of what it would look like if a conspiracy successfully hid itself from Governance while developing advanced talk-control techniques outside of the Keeper system, and then tried to take over the world. Which, I mean, to be clear, there are presumably other precautions in place to prevent. But one of those precautions is, like, warning people about what that could look like? This is a sort of thing we rehearse during the Annual Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival, it's not literally just aliens, the theme varies by the year."
lintamande: Sounds fake, thinks Gregoria, but doesn't say it. Sounds like they have magic and were keeping it from you, and you still don't see it.
"Annual Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival?" says Meritxell.
Keltham: "Disaster preparedness holiday."
"In this case, it'd be something like, one in ten thousand people, probably relatively smarter ones than myself, get told that they're part of the evil conspiracy to take over the world. Where it's realistically improbable that the conspiracy got up to 100,000 people and nobody noticed, but you want to test yourself against problems more difficult than the ones you really expect to face."
"Then those people have mind-control powers, meaning that, if they end up talking to you for five minutes, they get to hand you a card saying you've now been mind-controlled and you should go off and get other people to talk to them, or try to sabotage the company you work for, or cut a communications line, or kill potential leaders for the resistance in their sleep. And then all the key infrastructure people have to make sure their organization goes on working when a bunch of people have been tagged dead and maybe somebody got turned into a saboteur. Other people need to check houses for people who got killed and make sure they get into the deep cold, obviously not for real, just rehearsing that. That sort of thing."
"Civilization doesn't have any serious enemies that we know about. That doesn't mean Civilization wants to let itself get weak. If Nidal opens a gate into our dimension and tries to take over the world using Alter Self and Suggestion spells, we've gamed that out in advance."
lintamande: "....I think Nidal would take over the leadership, not a random one in ten thousand people," says Meritxell.
Keltham: "And they run drills on that more often than annually, and have more eyes on each other, and probably something like eight thousand different precautions none of which I am allowed to know about."
"Becoming the sort of person who gets to figure out how the leadership gets defended against talk-control conspiracies is one of the classic dream jobs for little kids growing up in dath ilan, it's like going to the Moon colony. You would get to spend so much time imagining brilliant plots somebody else might try against you, and trying to figure out what simple deep robust methods you could use to prevent that, or, failing that, devastatingly brilliant counter-precautions."
lintamande: " - that does sound incredibly fun," Meritxell concedes. "I don't know that they'd win against Nidal with their average Intelligence but they would probably beat actual Nidal."
She stops thinking the thought before it can get to "...or actual Cheliax."
Carissa Sevar: They would totally beat actual Cheliax. Carissa would advise the Queen to just immediately surrender.
Keltham: "Meritxell, I could beat actual Nidal, given time to scale up in Cheliax, that's why the god-war started."
lintamande: "With the ability to learn magic and a bunch of allied Golarion nations! I think it'd really be very hard to win a war if the other side had magic and you didn't. But I don't know what your Governance secretly has in store and I'd guess it's kind of a lot."
Keltham: "Civilization would cheat. They'd figure out exactly what mental state somebody had to be in to absorb extra magic like Carissa did during her date with Abrogail, and then some sixth-rank Keepers would go into that exact mental state on purpose because they could just do that, and very very quickly Civilization would have its own powerful wizards. Or ninth-rank Keepers would talk-control Nidal's ninth-circle wizards, who would be under the mistaken impression that their magical shielding prevented them from being mind-controlled by people who knew vastly vastly more about how their own minds worked than they did."
"Seriously, Nidal is not at all the issue here, the question is whether Civilization without local allies can take Zon-Kuthon."
lintamande: Gregoria is pretty sure she would in fact ask this question here but is she, like, allowed to?
Carissa Sevar: - yes. If she's sure she would in alter-Cheliax.
lintamande: "Her Majestrix tortured Carissa, right, which - worked because of the kind of person Carissa is, and might not work on a non-masochistic person at all. But - if it does, in fact, work on anybody - dath ilan would do that, to win a war?"
Keltham: "It's very unlikely they'd have to, they'd just analyze the real phenomenon underlying all that and figure out how to reproduce the same effect more simply, quickly, powerfully. But also yes. There'd be - probably at least a hundred thousand people in Civilization who'd volunteer for that, to save Civilization, or for that matter, just to save Nidal? Even in a Lawful Good civilization, you're going to throw some people as Evil and Chaotic as me. Well, if you go looking in the other direction, you're also going to find some people completely off the deep end of Lawful Goodness."
"Also keep in mind that depending on what spellsilver is, exactly, it's not improbable that somebody can make a call and get a million pounds of it delivered in three hours."
"I'm not sure you've grasped the sheer distinction of scale between one young slightly-above-average kid from Civilization getting tossed into Golarion with no prior preparation, and what would happen if actual Civilization got a two-way portal to Golarion. There might be a war with Zon-Kuthon. There would not be a war with Nidal. There would be a rescue operation on Nidal."
lintamande: "Too bad we don't have the portal, then," Meritxell says.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is briefly incredibly curious how far off the deep end of Lawful Goodness one can go and what those people are like. She doesn't really want to know, except she totally does.
Keltham: Back to lecturing. How might his young apprentices defend themselves against such a dastardly assault as that showcased in his recent experiment, assuming some more refined version of that experiment which would actually work?
lintamande: Gregoria: "Think what price would strike you as fair for each item separately, rather than comparing them? Except I did try to do that."
Keltham: "And what'd results you get?"
lintamande: "Uh, mostly it's hard to think what price would seem fair without seeing the actual book."
Keltham: "Standard technique when you're interrogating yourself about something is to make up average-sounding details, any time your internal query blocks on a lack of detail. It's not like you'd be committing to buying the actual item, sight unseen."
"It would have taken me a lot longer to figure out my sexuality after getting to Golarion, if, considering questions like 'Am I okay renting Carissa to the Queen?', I had been, 'Oh, but I know so little at this point about what the Queen is like, or what will happen to Carissa', and let that stop me there. Instead I filled in all unknown details with conditions that felt relatively friendly to my sexuality, to check if there were any possible conditions I was okay with at all."
"I'll actually go ahead and tell everyone to try putting prices on both items they considered, now, and any time your brain says 'I don't know' you just fill in something plausible and keep going until it produces a price."
lintamande: Sure, they'll try that, and mostly end up valuing all the books between 1 and 3 gold with some individual differences.
Keltham: "One book costs upwards of half a day's wages for a very well-paid second-circle wizard. Right then. I need to check your book manufacturing technology at some point and see if the bottleneck is printing or papermaking or human labor to operate the machines or if there's some downstream distribution issue or what, because that is not a sustainable book price for a civilization that's trying to own a reasonable number of books."
"Anyways. The reasons I wouldn't expect that particular attack angle to work on me if I thought anything more careful than a pure snap decision is, second of all, that I'm explicitly aware of contrasts between easily commensurable quantities and how those can distort my cognition by calling attention to themselves. First, that I'm constantly putting a quantity on how much I want things. In Civilization I could easily have translated that quantity to unskilled-labor-hours or, closer to myself, the minutes or hours of my time that I'd spend to get something - including by working to buy it, if it was something that could be bought directly with money."
"The fact that I don't actually have a bank account full of unskilled-labor-hours, anymore, and instead own a completely unfamiliar valuable called 'gold pieces', is contributing to a constant state of disorientation in the back of my mind. I'll seem less timid and hesitant once I actually know how much everything around me costs and this core process of all of my cognition is able to actually run again."
"Your next question is why my salary of 500 gold pieces per week doesn't establish a value for my time of 71 gold pieces per day. Because that's a trivial side payment compared to the expected worth of my future share of Project income, is why, more or less. I could spend a day describing the reasons for the Project's exact contract structure to the Church of Asmodeus, which is something I've now been requested to do at some point, and earn 2000 gold that way. I'm not running off to do it because it's obvious that a one-day delay in Cheliax achieving a larger economy costs much more than 2000 gold. If at any point I found myself even considering spending a week of my time to avoid spending 500 gold pieces on something, it would be obvious that I needed a higher salary, what with, for example, all the Security wizards here also costing 500 gold a week each."
"So how much is my time actually worth in gold pieces? What are gold pieces worth to me in terms of anything else I want? I have no idea. Thankfully there's a pretrained reflex and habit in my brain that already knows how to assign quantities to anything it wants, and it can go on assigning those quantities even though they're currently meaningless to me in terms of money, and so I can go on pretending to be a functional human being."
lintamande: "Wizards usually want a lot of money so they can have more expensive headbands," says Tonia, "but I'm actually not sure what other people want money for, past the amount of rich that we are, such that they could - think about things in terms of money -"
Keltham: "You just got a lot richer. It would not be terribly surprising if whatever skills you do have for figuring out how much you want things, measured in gold pieces, also spend the next several weeks going haywire. Being tossed from Ostenso wizard academy into Project Lawful is not that unlike going from dath ilan to Golarion in terms of how much financial disorientation I'd expect that to produce."
"As an interim measure, consider asking yourself how much you value things in terms of time - how much of your limited personal time per day you'd spend to get various things that you want - until money starts making sense to you again."
lintamande: Tonia nods seriously.
Keltham: If at some point Keltham ends up busy on contract work again, and they don't want to just take that time off, the class might consider a collective project to probe variations on what Keltham tried, to see if they can hone some version of that - maybe not involving books about magic, it might have to be something more common - into a form that reliably produces incoherent preferences in Golarionites. Obvious locally available test subjects: the four departed Ostensos, Securities, cooks and other local support personnel.
Then they get to be like little tiny Keepers relative to the rest of Golarion, having refined for themselves a piece of knowledge that they can use to make other people's brains produce financial errors! Further exercise, come up with your own list of ethical restrictions about how this very very very mildly terrifying knowledge should be used by Project students.
lintamande: Is that an actual assignment or was he joking, Gregoria asks after a little while.
Keltham: He's not sure 'assignment' is translating correctly to concepts he already has? It's a way where somebody on this project with excess time that they want to convert into practice-at-this-sort-of-thing could, at their own option, choose to do that? And if so, all of the people doing that should coordinate among themselves, so that they don't trip over each other in using up their limited supply of local experimental subjects.
lintamande: ...okay. It sounds fun, she might try it.
Keltham: Great! Just don't use your dangerous and powerful knowledge for purposes that Asmodeus would disapprove, or Pilar and Meritxell will suddenly be standing next to you one day looking sad.
lintamande: She promises only Asmodeus-approved uses of whatever she figures out.
Keltham: Anyways! In terms of Law, this whole lecture has now gotten far ahead of itself! The true Law does not assume that there is some mystical stuff called 'money' floating around, in which everything can already be valued. The Law begins from people wanting things; a notion of money comes later, beneath the Law and after the Law, not before it and above it.
Going back to where they left off on Law: this classroom has now seen, at this point, that things you want, which by an act of choice or expenditure of time you can swap or trade, need to be consistently orderable among themselves in order to avoid having time or money pumped out of you. Even indifferences - in the sense of letting other people swap things for you, not just it not being worth the effort of making a trade - must be coherent within the ordering, to avoid this.
They've seen a simple trick for getting dath ilani children or Golarion adults to violate this consistent ordering, just by way of showing that it's not a trivial requirement. (And hinting at how there must be vastly more terrifying things that high-ranking Keepers can do if not otherwise restrained by ethics, but that's not the main point.)
To take the next step beyond ordering, consider things that are divisible, fungible; things that have quantities over them, and not just unique individual identities. Let's consider apples, bananas, cherries, and suppose - temporarily - that the relative intensity of your desire for these fruits does not change depending on how many you already have. (Maybe you're planning to feed those fruits to a large hungry crowd so you actually care more about food-energy-value than a tasty meal with variety, say.) Suppose, for now, that every fruit is identical to every other fruit of that kind. Suppose also that you would, for each of these kinds of fruits, prefer to have more rather than less, everything else be equal.
It'd be pretty odd if you valued a cherry equally with a whole banana. It should take at least two cherries to be worth a banana, right? Probably more. If somebody offers to trade you a banana for two cherries, you should probably accept.
But that's not Law; there could be such a thing as a person who would rather have one cherry than two bananas.
What can we say, in this situation, about the patterns of offered trades that you will accept or reject - what property must your trading-rule have to avoid some dreadful thing happening to you, and what indeed is that misfortune?
lintamande: The class is going to need a moment because they're distracted realizing what Asmodean Keepers will be capable of doing to people.
Carissa Sevar: Yes yes this is great news Dis has priced us all correctly now answer the question.
lintamande: "You need to have the same relative valuing of fruits," Tonia says, "no matter what exact bargain is offered, otherwise you'll agree to trades that leave you worse off than you started."
Keltham: Hm, hm. Say more about this relative-ordering concept? What is it to have "the same relative valuing of fruits"?
lintamande: "Uh, the amount you'd rather have a cherry than a banana can't change with which is being offered, or how many are being offered."
Keltham: What does 'the amount you'd rather have a cherry than a banana' look like? 92.73 units of wantingness?
lintamande: "The - amount of cherries that's as good as one banana."
Keltham: And so long as you keep to constant exchange-rates for apples with bananas, bananas with cherries, and apples with cherries - so long as those three numbers never change, whatever they are - you are safe, are you?
lintamande: ....probably not but I can't think what'd go wrong."
Peranza: "Two apples for one banana, two bananas for one cherry, two cherries for one apple."
Keltham: "That does sound like a problematic trading pattern. What must be true for that to not happen?"
Peranza: "The constraint-system needs fewer degrees-of-freedom - one fewer than the number of goods being traded. If there's three goods you can trade, there should only be two trading ratios. Once you know apples to bananas and bananas to cherries, that gives you apples to cherries. So if you make up a separate number there that isn't derived from the first two, that's like having two different trading ratios at two different times, or different trading ratios depending on the order you trade things in. The constraint-system starts with zero degrees-of-freedom for one fruit, and then any time you add a new fruit, you add one degree-of-freedom for a trading ratio between that fruit and any other fruit already in the constraint-system."
Keltham: Keltham reminds himself once again that these people are not actually six-year-olds; they have any prior mathematics education, it's just been about spellforms rather than the entire rest of Reality.
"Ah, well, in that case, I claim that your condition is exactly equivalent to saying that every fruit in the system other than cherries must have a consistent unchanging price in cherries, and we accept trades whenever the trades are favorable according to those prices, and reject them otherwise. Do you believe me?"
Peranza: "Yes."
Keltham: He was expecting a bit more caution there. "Why?"
Peranza: Because your Bluff sucks. "You seem like a very honest and nice boy who wouldn't lie to an innocent girl about that sort of thing," says alterPeranza.
"Also because any pattern of trading rules that's okay, will have some series of trades you can make, to convert one of any other fruit to some number of cherries, and that series of trades gives you the price of that fruit in cherries. And if you have the price of everything in cherries, you can figure out which trades are okay, you just compare the value in cherries to see if you're gaining cherries or losing them."
Keltham: "Hmmm. That is a compelling argument - the second part, I mean, I'm not commenting on that first argument at all. But you may recall that I asked, initially, what pattern the system of trading-rules must have, to avoid some dreadful thing happening, and also I asked, what exactly is this terrible misfortune. What happens to you if the ratios aren't consistent?"
Peranza: "No matter what fruit you start with, somebody can offer you a series of trades that takes you down to one cherry. Then more trades to half a cherry, if they still think you've got too much left."