Keltham: "It seems you trusted that nice boy far too much!  Suppose I'll trade eleven cherries for a banana, or a banana for fourteen cherries, but when it comes to trading a banana for twelve or thirteen cherries, I neither accept or reject either of those offers.  You can't pump infinite fruit out of me that way, even if I trade by those rules consistently, and the rules don't correspond to having any single price of a banana in cherries."

Peranza: "Nope.  You weren't lying before, now you're trying to get me to think you were lying before."

"...though I'm not sure how."

Keltham: "Don't get so caught up in the metagame that you forget about the object-level math question, which is where all of the important skills to learn here are to be found.  When you are encountering your own problems you will not be able to solve them by guessing a teacher's trolling patterns."

Peranza: It sounds enough like a rebuke that Peranza loses the thread of alterPeranza just being in class and being good at math.

(Peranza has practice at spellcraft under pressure, answering from memory under pressure, a little doing topology under pressure.  Not so much pretending to be another person thinking about Law the way Keltham does, under pressure.)

Ione Sala: ...which is not a good look for Cheliax.

"Having one less degree-of-freedom than the number of fruits, with each new fruit after the first having one degree-of-freedom for entering the constraint-system, is definitely equivalent to being able to price all the other fruits in one fruit.  But that's not the same condition as 'trading rules that can't get traded down to one cherry'."

"What's missing... I think is, if somebody else offers you to trade a banana for thirteen cherries, and then to trade twelve of your cherries for a banana, you have to take them up on that.  If you don't, that counts as a terrible misfortune."

"I claim that the two conditions of 'you can't be traded down' and 'you don't miss trades that take you up' is equivalent to being able to price everything in cherries.  Assuming there are any cherries in the system in the first place."

Keltham: "Correct, but tier-2s speak first, Ione."

Ione Sala: "Right.  Sorry."

They'll need to get either Gregoria or Pilar to take over Ione's current silence-covering duties via tier-1 prompting.

Asmodia: AlterCheliax does not HAVE or NEED a silence-covering duty and THAT is the part that needs to get conformed to ASAP.

lintamande: Gregoria is trying but she doesn't actually think as fast as Ione and if she did she'd be Tier 1 herself! 

Carissa Sevar: No prompting right now, if you don't have an answer ask a question, Gregoria.

Keltham: "Suppose now that some 'troll' were further to say: maybe you can't trade fractions of fruit, only whole ones, because if you try to slice a banana in half, the parts exposed to the air will start rotting.  And furthermore, you can't express arbitrary ratios using very large numbers of fruit, because you've only got 100 of them."

"I'll trade nine bananas for ninety-nine cherries, or trade ninety-eight cherries for nine bananas.  What's my real ratio of bananas to cherries?  It could be a little less than 11 cherries per banana, or a little more than 10 point 8 repeating cherries per banana, or anywhere in the infinite space between!  Maybe you think you could try to pin that down by looking at the other trades I'll make with bananas, for other things that can be traded for cherries, but if anything I'd guess that the additional trading steps will just put even wider bounds on all the numbers you try to derive that way."

"So now you can't deduce any exact ratios from my trading patterns.  And, why, it's not that I'm hiding those exact ratios, it's that I don't have any, just some trading rules I use.  So now the two ideas aren't equivalent any more - I have a trading pattern where I don't accept strict losses and don't pass up strict gains, but I have no exact ratios between items."

Peranza: "I can make up a ratio and assign it to you and you won't have any grounds on which to contradict me," says Peranza.

(...doesn't stay disintegrated under pressure, rallies and returns given a chance to catch her breath, because she is still a survivor out of the Ostenso wizard academy, and all the really pathetic students there are now laundry wizards in a tiny town somewhere paying back 'loans' that will last forever)

Keltham: "What if I look at your ratio, and shake my head, and say that your ratio seems to me to be not quite right?  Is this not a grounds for contradiction?"

Peranza: "Then you obviously know what your real ratio is and you're trying to hide it from me, in which case, once again, you in fact have a ratio."

Keltham: Pretty adversarial attitude towards mathematics.  Keltham doesn't mind, he's masculine-gendertroped.

"Doesn't quite follow that I know my ratio and am hiding it.  You can know an answer is wrong without knowing the right answer, and this is in general a very important fact about how to think in Law-inspired ways.  Your sense that an answer is wrong often precedes your having any idea what the right answer is, and sometimes for quite a while."

"But yes, in general that's the idea I was aiming towards.  If we can't have fractions of fruit or unbounded fruit, then the two equivalent conditions are 'there's at least one possible set of prices-in-cherries you could be using, based on your behaviors', and 'you don't accept trade patterns that lead to strict losses or reject patterns that lead to strict gains'.  Where a strict loss is having less fruit in one place without having gained any fruit somewhere else, and a strict gain is having more of one kind of fruit without having lost any others."

Keltham: "This, you might say, is how the notion of money-as-a-common-unit arises under the Law, when mortals meet and deal with each other.  The world begins with farms and scythemakers," Keltham has picked up that scythes are involved in farming, "so why does it need money?  Let farmers barter corn for scythes, let scythemakers eat some of the corn and barter other corn for metal, let the metalmaker barter metal for shoes - don't tell me that's not the right trade pattern, Tonia, just pretend I said something sensible, please."

"Why not just trade things you have for other things you want?  Why try to price everything in the same units everywhere?  Who's to say that wouldn't just cause everyone to make weird trades they wouldn't have made, would have been wiser than to make, if bartering things directly?"

"But if people are in general trading in ways that don't let you extract lots of resources from them, they will be acting as if you could price everything in corn, or everything in pounds of iron, and have their trading patterns mostly make sense in those terms.  You won't be eliminating a lot of useful complexity and extra details that mattered, when instead of having all the local patterns of bartering ratios, you instead try to price everything in corn.  You are not holding up a mirror to life, and cutting off the pieces of life that don't fit; everything does fit into the mirror.  It's safe to do the thing that lets somebody work out instantly the ratio between shoes and scythes, without having to envision in detail how relatively useful shoes and scythes will be to them."

"That's what justifies, you might say, the approach of trying to weigh a book about rare magic items, and a book about spell design, relative to one another, by weighing both of them in some common unit, and not just comparing them to each other."

"Should that common unit be gold pieces, or minutes of our time?  The minutes of our time are, from one perspective, the most natural way to think about the resources that we have; almost anything else we want, that we can try to get, is going to burn some number of minutes of our time, and maybe some other resources too, but always the minutes.  As for money, you can always convert your time into that; even if your job saturates in a way that doesn't let you voluntarily work an extra hour or an extra day, you could trade your time for money elsewhere, by finding an employer who just needs an hour of work from somebody, even if that pays less well...  Actually now that I'm arguing this out loud I have a sudden worrying sensation that in Golarion it's not actually going to be possible for lots of people to trade their time into money at any reasonable exchange rate."

"Anyways, in Civilization, where you can convert between time and money, the common wisdom is that you should learn to value everything in terms of money, rather than minutes of your personal time.  Why?  Because that way you can, without an extra mental translation step, tell other people your prices, and understand what their prices are.  Time is the personal resource closest to us, but society's shared unit of wantingness is the way we interact with everything else, and so the common wisdom is that we'll all end up better off if we think in society's units."

"Of which it is said in dath ilan, 'money is the unit of caring' - with further implications such as, for example, that if you're weirdly reluctant to spend any money on something, you probably don't care about that thing very much.  Though the proverb loses something because Civilization's word for society's common unit for pricing, 'unit-of-account', is one of three different Baseline words I've found so far that all translate into Taldane's word 'money'."

lintamande: "You can - mostly trade your time into money in Cheliax," says Gregoria. "I don't know about other places."

Carissa Sevar: " - I think you mostly can other places unless they have some specific thing going on like not letting women work outside their homes."

lintamande: "And the proverb just translates and makes sense, I think. If you don't want something enough to pay for it you don't want it much."

Keltham: "In Civilization the common unit is the unskilled-labor-hour, which is, ideally, adjusted at a pace that changes smoothly over time but ends up tracking the value of an average person spending an hour of their time doing something they have no special training or talent for.  Everybody has that to trade, even if almost nobody should actually trade it, and enough people need it now and then that the market exists."

"There's a debate about whether that unit is actually a good idea, because from one perspective, the value of that unit tends to predictably go up over time.  As technology improves and society gets more productive, the minimum amount you have to pay anybody to work for an hour goes up, in terms of most other goods.  Which is to say that for other goods, the number of unskilled-labor-hours they're worth tend down over time."

"There's an argument that this is bad, since price-setters are more eager to adjust prices upward than downward, because if you're first to adjust your prices downward before others do, you're often relinquishing some portion of gains-from-trade within implicit agreements that take time to renegotiate.  So, the argument goes, we instead all ought to have a unit of account that's worth 3% less every year, because that way prices will mostly need to adjust upward, and people will want to be the first in line rather than the last in line to adjust their prices to match new realities.  And that way prices will adjust more quickly and naturally than in the current arrangement where we have a Seasonal Repricing Day, four times per year, where all the stuck prices go down at the same time if somebody was dragging their feet on minor price adjustments before then."

"How this all squares up with Cheliax's 'gold pieces' concept, I have no idea."

lintamande: Wait, what?

"Uh, gold's just worth what...people will pay you for it... the coins are just useful as a standard amount of gold so you don't have to test it for purity and weight?" Gregoria offers after she's pretty sure she's not going to make any more sense of any of that.

Keltham: "I suppose if I asked whether there's relatively more or less gold, compared to all the stuff being traded that isn't gold, every year, it would be very silly to expect an answer about that from a country where Governance does not know its own annual budget, and can't measure the value of all goods and services produced annually inside the country..."

"Actually no, I can ask that.  Do prices over time usually go up a tad, or down a tad?"

Asmodia: Asmodia thinks very quickly.

(Implausibly quickly, in fact, but that's fine so long as nobody including her notices.)

...this direction whatever it is, should be the same in alterCheliax and realCheliax so far as Asmodia can currently tell; flipping the answer is more of a risk than keeping it the same.

lintamande: These wizarding students who have had meaningful purchasing power for, like, two years, don't know!

"I heard headbands are getting cheaper?" Meritxell says uncertainly. 

Carissa Sevar: "They go up, over time, but not very much? You'd need to be looking at prices over a decade or something, to see it. I could ask for my father's books."

Keltham: "Well, if using gold means that all the prices tend to go up just a tad every season, instead of downward, don't be in a rush to change your use of gold as money without a lot of careful debate first.  If everything else is the same, which it could very well not be, you might be doing better than Civilization in at least that one exact way."

"...though I'm not sure how you'd get that result out of mining a metal, whose value is implicitly going down a bit every year under that equilibrium, which should induce less mining of it.  But, I am not expecting anyone in the classroom to know an answer to that... actually, I bet it has to do with Asmodeus's Church taking control of Cheliax, that probably brought in a moving-to-a-new-equilibrium-surge of new investments from outside the country and those were probably done in gold?  In which case maybe you'd need to get away from gold-based pricing in another decade, or prices might start going down again."

"Anyways."

Asmodia: AARGH.

Asmodia has never heard of economics and doesn’t know what an economist is, but she knows she needs one in this fortress right now.

Keltham: "I have, I fear, digressed somewhat from the proper order in which to present things in theoretically pure ways; the invention of abstract units of caring is supposed to be a relatively advanced idea under the Law, to which your hand gets forced later."

"Let's go down a different path.  Suppose you've only got one of each kind of fruit that there is, but you've got, like, fifty different kinds.  You can't cut any of them into pieces or they'll rot.  Furthermore, each of your actions within the world can only swap one fruit for another fruit at a time.  You can give somebody a fruit without getting any back, I suppose - everybody has an unbounded supply of the empty fruit - but you can't make a transaction promising anyone that you'll give them more fruit on a later round.  Because thought experiments, that's why."

"I claim to you that in this world, there is no choice but to give up all hope of figuring out how many cherries a banana is worth, since all you can do is trade one whole banana for one whole cherry, and very few hungry people would trade a big fruit like a banana for a small one like a cherry."

"At least, there's no way to do it without being some kind of dirty cheater."

"But maybe somebody here is a dirty cheater, I don't know.  If so, how do you cheat?"

Carissa Sevar: There's a silence, but not the oh-no-heresy silence, just the silence of a hard problem. 

And then the delightful clarity of the problem snapping into focus as like a different kind of problem done a few days ago -

"You trade someone - a coin flip where you'll give them a banana if it comes up heads, for a cherry whether it does or not. You'd need one of those dath ilani provable-randomness-creators to do it properly."

Keltham: "A coin you can both see spinning works fine for that - you can use a random source of 0s and 1s to generate an arbitrary-precision fraction uniformly between 0 and 1."

"Let's say that Text is 0 and Queen is 1, on a spinning coin.  The first time you spin it, add 1/2 to the total if it comes up Queen.  The next time you spin it, add 1/4 to the total if it comes up Queen.  Third time, 1/2 to the third power or 1/8."

"Suppose you spin three times and the results are Queen, Text, Queen.  The current running total is 1/2 + 0/4 + 1/8 = 5/8 or 0.625, can't get any lower than that, and can never go above 6/8ths or 0.75 even if every future spin comes up Queen.  So if you were trying to generate a 60/100 chance of something, you could stop at that point and declare that the event hadn't happened."

"Uh, assuming there's no magic way to control how coinspins land.  If there is, you'd have an arms race between that and Detect Magic and whatever counters Detect Magic etcetera, if the coinspins were important."

Carissa Sevar: " - I don't know of one but if people were using coin flips for important things it'd definitely be invented."

Keltham: "I wouldn't be surprised if my god has a spell for that which is incredibly difficult to mess with, but I don't know if it'd be fourth-circle or lower.  It would be on-theme with the truthspell and the pricing spell."

"Anyways, I now pose to you this devastating question: who says that a 1/2 probability of an apple is worth exactly half as much as an apple?  Maybe somebody is like, 'All this uncertainty about getting the apple makes me feel terrible; a 1/2 probability of an apple is really only worth to me a third as much as the certainty of an apple.'  And so, you can't use probabilistic trades to determine people's real trading ratios."

"Who says that the probabilities of things need to combine with their values by multiplication?  How simple, how naive!  Perhaps there is some more clever way to do things.  By what Law is it a regulation of our city, that we must do things in exactly that way, or else suffer some terrible misfortune?"

Carissa Sevar: "- I mean, in this thought experiment we can't cut apples and we can't make promises. I guess you can say that we also don't like uncertainty but that'd be - you adding that - if you were perfect you just wouldn't care about uncertainty except for planning costs. Gods don't, I'm pretty sure."

Keltham: "What I'm asking here is why there's a rule to combine probabilities with values by multiplication in the first place.  Why not square the probabilities and multiply the values by that, instead?"

Carissa Sevar: " - there's the thing you said about how we could conspire against the Conspiracies in worlds that have Conspiracies, and I don't know if you literally mean there are uncountable worlds or if it's just a way of thinking, but - getting an apple in half of worlds is half as good as getting an apple -"

Keltham: "There's countably infinite worlds, not uncountable ones - there's as many worlds as there are counting numbers, not as many as there are possible infinite sets of counting numbers.  You can only get ratios between the reality-weight of worlds if they're countable, so only those can be real.  Any time a world is divided more finely than that, only the parts that - I can't actually say this in Taldane, sorry."*

"And nice try, but we have ways to banish the 'anthropics' out of the conversation.  We can bet on a mathematical fact that neither of us know and seems to have the right random properties, like whether the remainder of 1001 divided by 17 is less than 6, say, which should give us a probability pretty close to 6/17.  I could truthspell myself and promise you that I hadn't secretly calculated the result in advance."

"There's no other worlds where that fact will be different.  So why do I need to value that bet of an apple at 6/17ths the value of an apple?"

(*) Realityfluid can be spread out over continuous distributions, but only chunks of those distributions large enough to integrate up to finite measures have people finding themselves inside.  People themselves are not so finely divisible, in regards to finding yourself to be one of them.  If you tried to make a continuity of different people in order to have an uncountable population of distinct people, sufficiently close parts of that continuity that they couldn't tell themselves apart would add realityweight from the perspective of whether you find yourself to be one of them, and so again you'd find yourself as something whose realityweight sums up to a finite fraction of everything there is.  This is why nobody ever finds themselves to be an entity with an actually-infinite number of introspectively-distinguishable distinct parts.

Pilar : "Some dreadful misfortune will happen to you if you don't, involving people trading around probabilities of apples with you in an arrangement that leaves you with only a tiny chance of getting an apple."

Keltham: "Or you passing up a trade series to increase your chance of getting an apple from some tiny amount to almost certainty, would be the complete spec of the dreadful misfortune."

"...and what would be an example case of an arrangement like that?  Suppose I'd trade a 1/2 probability of an apple for 1/4 the value of an apple, and a 1/3 probability of an apple for 1/9 the value of an apple.  What dread fate must now befall me?"

Pilar : "I pay a whole apple to you for nine 1/3 chances to win an apple."

Keltham: "And?  Just as I don't value a 1/3 chance of winning an apple at 1/3 of an apple's value, I don't value a 512-in-19683 chance of ending up paying you zero apples at around 1/38th the value of paying you zero apples.  Why, I value it at around 9/10th the value of paying you zero apples with surety!  As for all those other outcomes where I end up paying you one, two, or even nine apples, I value all of those put together with the remaining 1/10th of the weight that I put on things, when I weigh possibilities."

"If I haven't started out by already accepting that chances of things happening, ought to be weighted proportional to their probability, then when I look at all the things that might probably happen when you ask to buy four 1/2 chances of winning an apple from me, I don't have to value the 1/16th chance of paying you zero apples at 1/16th the value I put on that outcome."

"In other words, you're trying to convince me to accept the principle of weighting outcomes proportional to their probabilities, using an argument that only works on people who've already accepted that."

Pilar : It's frustrating, she can feel that Keltham is doing something very bad and punishable, and it should be possible to Lawfully argue him out of it; but Pilar can't see the argument.  Talking to the Elysians was less frustrating than this.

She does not of course feel any anger at Keltham; it is clear that the fault lies within her for being unable to refute him.

"You've at least got to value two 1/2 chances of getting one apple, the same as, a 1/4 chance of getting no apples plus a 1/2 chance of getting one apple plus a 1/4 chance of getting two apples," Pilar states.  "Which means you've got to value one 1/2 chance of getting one apple the same as a 1/4 chance of getting no apples plus a 1/4 chance of getting two apples."

Keltham: "Well, I accept you could mess with me if I didn't value two 1/2 chances of getting one apple, the same as 1/4 of zero plus 1/2 of one plus 1/4 of two.  But where was it said that I have to value two 1/2 chances of getting an apple, twice as much as I value one 1/2 chance of getting an apple?  We can stipulate that I value two apples twice as much as one apple, in cherries.  That was already said, but who says that packs of chances add up the same way?"

Pilar : "Does it work as an argument if I say that people who think like you do won't have a lot of kids and eventually there won't be any of them left?"

Keltham: "No, for it has not been stipulated that I care."

"Also we do tend, in Civilization, to regard that as an invalid argument generally.  If we look at the statistics and find that currently wizards are having fewer children, or for that matter, masochists are having fewer children, it doesn't follow that Cheliax should heritage-optimize wizards or masochists out of existence.  Maybe the thing to do instead is subsidize them so that they go on existing."

Carissa Sevar: "If you do trades like that you'll go out of business. And I don't think Civilization would intervene to stop you going out of business."

Keltham: "With some tiny probability I'll make a ton of money, though, if all the gambles I take pay off their maximum amounts.  Maybe I just happen to weight that tiny probability by a huge amount in my calculations, much larger than I'd weight it if I was multiplying outcome-values by probability-weights the way you think I should."

"So once again, you have not yet justified the principle of multiplying by probability, except by appealing to the principle of multiplying by probability."

"Now, if you could show that I was going to trade in a pattern that led me into strictly lower probabilities of getting an apple, or passing up strictly higher chances, that'd be another matter.  I do accept the principle that I should always want more apples and a greater probability of apples, all my other resources being equal or undiminished."

Ione Sala: "Nethysian advisory, it's getting close to dinnertime, Keltham.  You should choose between wrapping up or going into deliberate overtime."

Keltham: ...he has not forgotten what is awaiting him after dinner.  Namely Yaisa.  He will not be delaying dinner today.

"All right, let's wrap up.  The general section of Law we are entering into is that which governs planning, paths through time, and its central principle is that of outcomes or destinations with consistent values, to which we navigate paths through time governed by the Law of Probability, and the value to us in this moment of a probable outcome is that outcome's value times the probability we place on it."

"From a more advanced perspective, the Law of Utility, or the Law of Probable Utility, is something that stands before the Law of Probability, even if the Law of Probability seems simpler.  The reason to think about events and reality using chances-out-of-100, instead of scales from 1 to 12, is that the chances out of 100 are what we have to plug into our plans, and not the scale from 1 to 12."

"Or at least, that's the perspective you'd take if you weren't coming at things from the angle of 'anthropics', but this, we should not do until a whole lot later."

"Cautions that I remember getting about this:  First, the same basic caution as for Probability.  If you try to think about something using numbers using this portion of Law, and the conclusions that result make no sense, and you are not already very skilled in this art, throw away the numbers and start over; do not follow the numbers off a cliff.  It has ever happened, in a case like that, that the conclusions were true and the flaw was in your own ability to make sense of them.  But in that case, the remedy is to first improve your intuitions until you can feel how the numbers make sense, not to go rush out and follow that advice before it has made sense to you."

"Second - though this part feels intuitively incredibly obvious to me, now that I'm no longer seven years old, I don't know if it actually is obvious, it wasn't when I was seven - you cannot by any amount of cleverness, reason from the mathematics of Probable Utility, to conclusions about it being Lawful or un-Lawful to value particular things.  Zon-Kuthon is Lawful Evil, he isn't making a math error by valuing endless suffering above happy people leading complicated worthwhile lives.  The Law says that, for Zon-Kuthon to get what he values, Zon-Kuthon must either behave a certain way, or else end up with pointlessly flawed plans that stumble over themselves and don't lead to the endless suffering that Zon-Kuthon prefers.  The Law says nothing of Zon-Kuthon's first preference from which his plans begin."

lintamande: The students nod. That feels theologically right, not that it's exactly easy to map to a particular theological teaching.

Keltham: "And it was also said to me from the very beginning:  For all the beauty of the Law as Law, and all the reasoning you might ever do about it as mathematics, the only reason to ever take that Law upon yourself, is if it is the correct Law of obtaining what you desire.  Not, necessarily, desire in a selfish sense, for this is Civilization's teaching of which we speak.  Good people desire Good ends, and this Law is their Law too."

"The meaning of the caution is rather that if you think, at some point, that this Law is telling you to do a thing, which will not lead best of all your available choices to whatever destination you seek, then most likely, vastly likely, you have made a mistake somewhere.  You may be mistaken about the Law, you might be correct in calculating what the Law must say and wrong in thinking that some other way is better, you may be correct about some derivations in mathematics but be wrong about which mathematics you should be using.  It is not likely the case that the Law is telling you a worse way and some other pattern is telling you a better one."

"But if - we are always also told - if some very clever person at some point demonstrated that the Law as taught in Civilization's lessons, did fail to be the best way of choosing in one part of reality so as to make another part of reality conform to our desire - then we should at once discard that old Law and seek another.  That, after all, was presumably how that whole branch of mathematics was invented in the first place.  In its final form, dealing with choices that are themselves mathematics, the Law of decision is a touch complicated; there must have been a time when people did not know it, and used simpler math instead.  If at that time they had thought to themselves that the Law they held was the final and ultimate principle and the definition in itself, of what should be done - and not instead thought of there being an ultimate goal to find that mathematics which best describes how choices in one place operate to constrain reality in another - they would have been unable to move on."

Carissa Sevar: "But as far as dath ilan knows, this is the Law the gods use too? It's - right no matter how smart you are, or how vast your goals?" If she wants to be an archdevil she'd better go right for learning the Law gods use.

Keltham: "I'd guess!  But if Civilization got a portal to Golarion and the gods said they had a different decision theory, everyone would be listening very attentively, much more so than they listened to me when I was twelve and had a better decision theory."

lintamande: "What was your better decision theory when you were twelve." Meritxell says. 

Keltham: "...sort of embarrassing, and complicated, and really blatantly wrong once you understand what Law is even supposed to look like normally, and it had a lot of terms in it you haven't learned yet."

"So I'm going to delay explaining it at least until everybody knows what the correct theory was supposed to be, to avoid misleading you.  That is the only reason I am delaying explaining it.  It's not at all because some part of my brain is worried that nobody in this room will want to have sex with me if you know about my early attempts at decision theory."

lintamande: "dath ilan gives people weird sexual hangups," Meritxell says. 

Carissa Sevar: "Still working out how much is dath ilan and how much is Law and how much is Keltham."

Keltham: "Surely any sensible feminine 'gendertrope' would take for granted that if you had a choice of men to have sex with, the first element determining your choice should be how good he is at decision theory.  I'm just saying this because it's obviously true, of course, and not because I'm the best decision theorist on this planet."

"Shall we all to dinner?"

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 10 (8) / Evening

Keltham: Keltham will, at dinnertime, inform Yaisa that she's been quite successful in her goal of causing him to be occasionally distracted at various times during the day, and he does not want to spend all of dinner like that, and he is therefore going to go sit by Gregoria and Tonia and Peranza instead.  Keltham will be seeing to Yaisa shortly.

lintamande: He had better, Yaisa tells him cheerfully.

lintamande: Meritxell and Carissa are sitting right near Gregoria having a not-not-for-Keltham's-ears discussion of how you would define Cheliax's gendertropes if you were doing that, but Gregoria is pointedly not participating in that in favor of talking with Tonia about experiment design for checking whether Security/the washout girls make the Law error to do with inconsistent ordering of three preferences.

Keltham: Of all the darned times not to be able to run two streams of verbal interpretation simultaneously!  Keltham will try to listen to both conversations anyways while also eating.  Tonia and Gregoria are hopefully going to end up on basically the right track and only require a few hints from him?

lintamande: Tonia and Gregoria seem to basically have the concept figured out, minus knowing enough statistics to interpret their results, which is a problem for future Tonia and Gregoria. 

Carissa Sevar: "I'm not sure that 'mad scientist' is a gendertrope! To be a gendertrope I think the way women do it has to be different from the way men do it."

lintamande: "I think that there are some differences between women mad scientists and man mad scientists, though! Like, the archetypal mad scientist woman is Areelu Vorlesh, or Nefreti Clepati, or Felandrial Morgethai, and they're going for a different vibe than, say, Manohar, or the Archmage Nex, or Tar-Baphon -"

Carissa Sevar: "'lich' is definitely its own gendertrope and not just a subset of 'mad scientist'."

Keltham: Keltham will listen attentively, somewhat more so to the female side since these could be eventual future dating prospects.

Carissa Sevar:       "Are there any female lichs?" says Meritxell. 

"I mean, not that I've heard of, but they might just not advertise it."

     "Then I don't see how it can be a gendertrope at all."

"Honestly I'm not sure exactly what a gendertrope is."

Keltham: "Standard, recognizable patterns that men and women fall into.  Or women and women, or men and men, or asexual women and people who looked male at birth but want to become as female as they can, but those are rarer and get long words instead of short ones."

lintamande: "We definitely have some of those, I just don't think 'lich' is one of them. Dangerous bad boy who will definitely hurt you and walk out after sex and never see you again, that's a gendertrope. 'lich' isn't."

Keltham: "I could better pass judgment on that if I knew what a 'lich' was, aside from a supervillain-related personality type that commands undead armies."

Carissa Sevar: "With very powerful magic you can separate your soul and your body - this kills you, but that's not prohibitive - and contain your soul in an object, which presumably you hide in an extremely secret and inaccessible place, making you impossible to permanently destroy; this is becoming a lich. The powerful magic is of the kind that allows for the raising of undead armies, so lichs usually have undead armies, because if you're really good at that kind of magic anyway and can hardly piss off Pharasma more than you already have, why not. The ability to raise undead armies is - the kind of power where the more you have the more you can accumulate - so people usually coordinate to put down lichs that seem to be raising particularly notable armies."

Keltham: "And not everyone wants to be a lich because..."

Carissa Sevar: "How exactly to do it is secret but I think requires sacrificing large numbers of people? And is also incredibly difficult, like, decades of work. And many of the gods disapprove, so people who care what those gods think wouldn't do it."

Ione Sala: "You end up as mostly a skeleton and that affects your sex life, along with your ability to enjoy food and most other emotions too.  Unless you're Takaral, but most liches will never, ever be that good."

Keltham: "Thank you, Ione, that is the context I was missing."

Pilar : "Yaisa.  This cookie is to congratulate you on having joined that select group of individuals who get advice from oracles.  Your advice is that if at some point tonight you can think of something very hot that Keltham could do to you, that you would genuinely enjoy and that would move Keltham a little further away from obligate Lawful Good sexuality, you should tell Keltham honestly what you want, and offer to pay him exactly half as much money as the most that service is actually worth to you.  My curse says that it can only say that this will not harm Asmodeus's interests, because if my curse told you it would advance Asmodeus's interests, you'd have to do it and that's not the way for your true feelings to reach Keltham."

lintamande: " - what?" says Yaisa. "Um. Okay."

Pilar : "Great."

Security, copy that to Subirachs priority, and to Sevar sometime when it won't distract her from her conversation, in case anybody wants to override that.

lintamande: "I don't suppose you can explain the plan," Yaisa says. "It'd help with doing my part in it."

Pilar : "My curse says that it'd tell you if it was allowed, but it's totally not allowed in any way shape or form."

"I think Sevar also has a plan.  You could ask her about that one."

lintamande: Yaisa will indeed ask Sevar if she's supposed to follow this discussion!

Carissa Sevar: Tentatively obey Pilar's curse. 

lintamande: Will the Project spot Yaisa the money she is supposed to pay Keltham to fuck her. Because otherwise she is not offering him money.

Carissa Sevar: You're drawing on clout you don't have, kid.

lintamande: I have to offer under Fairness to pay Keltham the money. I won't think it's fair unless it's Project money, because I shouldn't have to pay a boy for sex.

Carissa Sevar: Security is she telling the truth about that.

Iarwain: Security message:  Yaisa's overt thoughts match her words.

Carissa Sevar: Fine. Give her five silver.

And check if the price of her soul in Dis has fallen now that she's not on the project.

Keltham: After Keltham finishes consuming food, he announces that it's time for another Silent Image screening of dath ilan.

dath ilan: (Keltham is still trying to figure out illusions of "light-emitting walls with parallax" so most of his images are just being projected onto the illusion of a giant video screen, rather than him trying to make things three-dimensional.)

Here's a rocket launch.  This is how you go to space when you don't have wizards.  It involves an unreasonable amount of fire.  Probably nobody in Golarion has seen this amount of fire unless they were standing nearby when somebody messed up a Wish spell.  Golarion conventional wisdom would say not to mess with people who can produce this amount of fire.  Many wizards throughout the ages who have claimed that all problems can be solved with enough fire, since, if you still have a problem after that, you did not use 'enough fire' by the definition of 'enough', would feel incredibly pleased and vindicated to know that this philosophy apparently works for traveling to space.

Here's a space-laser launch.  They're not safe for human riders though.  They're used to move fuel capsules into low orbit and higher, so that the rockets can refuel and keep going past that orbit.  It would be theoretically possible to reach the Fourth Planet just by burning rocket fuel to lift more rocket fuel into space, but you'd have to be crazy to actually try it that way, it's literally an exponential cost in fuel.  Anyone trying to work out how much Radiance damage this instantaneous beam weapon could do from ten miles away will run out of numbers.  If Cheliax owned this weapon it could conquer Nidal in fifteen minutes.  It obviously hasn’t occurred to Keltham that anyone looking at this image would see a threat.  This could be because Keltham is very innocent.  It could also be that, from his perspective, this is obviously not what a serious weapon looks like if Civilization is building a real weapon on purpose.

dath ilan: This is Civilization's Chief Executive.  Yes, she actually dresses like that.  Nobody gets appointed Chief Executive of the bureaucracy by being the sort of person who dresses to please an audience.

These are the Legislators in session, sort of, Keltham can't necessarily remember all the faces of the current ones, and some of these are actually Legislators who lost voting support a couple of years ago.  Yes the Legislators also dress like that, why would their job require them to dress less comfortably?  It's not physically hazardous.  Yes, she does look young, there's usually one young Legislator, typically selected from among the pool of people who are arguably the most accomplished young people in all Civilization.  Lots of voters are young, and it's not an impressive display of preference aggregation and representative democracy if all the Legislators end up old.

This is Civilization's top Keeper.  Yes, they all dress sort of like that, at least in public?  No, nobody else in Civilization dresses like that, you would not wish to be mistaken for a Keeper if you were not one.  (This top Keeper is a man who looks to be in his fifties, dressed much more like a senior cleric than any other supposedly very serious and important people shown.)

lintamande: Well, different places, different fashions; your serious and important people might end up wearing clothes that don't show off tailoring, if tailoring is cheap and you want to use your clothes to communicate other things. 

The rocket fire is kind of beautiful. 

Carissa Sevar: It feels right for Hell to be bathed specifically in rocket fire. She should figure out how to make that happen.

dath ilan: Here's what a 'video game' looks like.  Here's a training game for more complicated Probability calculations.  This is what a hospital surgery room looks like when there's no healing magic in your world.

Keltham: Here's a festival sort of like the alien invasion one, though with a different theme Keltham's not going to explain right now.

This is young Keltham and five other boys pretending to heroically ambush an incoming military force.

This is the military force firing an announcement into the house Keltham is inside, saying that their house just got blown up.

This is Keltham consulting a random number generator to determine that he's alive but injured and pinned under fallen debris.

This is literal superheated Merrin, the most famous endurance medical technician in the world with certs from half of Exception Handling, using up one of her equipment tokens to 'blow away' (politely open) the house's wrecked door, so she can enter and pretend to remove the heads of Keltham's dead fellow ambushers while reassuring Keltham that she knows it hurts, she's sorry, she'll be with him as soon as she can.

This is Keltham desperately pretending not to be at all starstruck, because he was not previously way into the Merrin fandom but even he has heard of the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, wherein Merrin has some weird psychological hangup about believing she is a totally normal and ordinary person or even something of a struggling low achiever, and everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her that ordinary normal people totally get their weird Exception Handling training scenarios televised to a million watchers on a weekly basis.

Keltham has been asked at one point what sort of woman from Civilization he found attractive.  If he could have screwed any one woman of Civilization one time and wasn't trying to be clever about it, Keltham would've probably picked Merrin.

lintamande: "Do I have the privilege of being the first to tell you the good news about what wizards can do with Alter Self," says Meritxell, who hasn't trained Eschew Materials but is pretty sure she can pick it up fast if Keltham-seduction demands it.

Keltham: "It was, in fact, mentioned by that same person who asked me what sort of women I'd previously found attractive."

lintamande: Awwww no fair. Well, Meritxell bets Sevar can't do the Queen. ...not that she can ever admit that she can. And actually maybe Sevar can too, having, you know, had sex with the Queen. 

lintamande: "Sorry, the whole planet pretends she's not famous because she doesn't like it when they acknowledge her fame? You'd have to be so famous to pull that off," says Gregoria. 

Keltham: "You would think that, and yet, prediction markets were running at only 20% that she was secretly trolling us the whole time."

"There's this weird adorableness factor about it - that I'm not sure I can describe, but will try to describe anyways - Merrin is also famous for having, in your terms, it would be INT 16, I think, or even 15, and yet reaching the top of her profession.  Usually when that happens you just sort of shrug and say that obviously the tests just failed at measuring how much real mental power she has, but the fact that she also has this one really weird hangup - proves she actually is somebody who started out non-brilliant and just succeeded anyways by working incredibly hard for incredibly long?  It makes her - simultaneously an ultra-high-achieving role model who's much more famous than you are, and also, somebody who's committing this very large cognitive error where you know better than her about it.  Which is not usually something you can say about a major public figure, you would not usually expect to be in a position where you would ever know about a cognitive error a public figure was committing, because they'd already have advisors much much smarter than you.  But if you screw Merrin, you're not, like, just some strictly vastly inferior being that she's allowed into her cuddleroom.  There is at least one topic you could totally win an argument with her about, as judged by impartial judges: namely, is she in fact a fairly ordinary person really.  But you must never ever mention it in front of her.  It makes you want to just whap her on the head with a banana until she stops being humble.”

"I don't know, it worked on me, what can I say."

lintamande: " - yeah, I can see being into that," Meritxell says thoughtfully.

Carissa Sevar: It seems like it'd be really annoying being unable to bring up an error someone is making! Even if it's on pain of death but especially if it's on pain of, like, being condemned in the newspapers or whatever dath ilani famous people do to people they're mad at.

Keltham: A new group of around 20 people, shown on the Silent Image of a large television screen, sitting all over strange chairlike objects and draped over lying-cushions in some kid's enormous well-decorated living room.  To Asmodean eyes, they're dressed more nicely than Legislators and Chief Executives; to dath ilani eyes, these are people who still have somebody left to impress, with a young person's dignity rather than an exalted person's.  One girl is braiding a boy's long hair, all of them have mysterious objects like open metal books nearby them.

"My writing circle.  They liked fiction with a theme of - selfish people, chaotic people, or what passed for that in dath ilan.  Stories about people who end up in other worlds and for some perfectly totally reasonable reason they end up needing to run a large criminal organization.  At the time I, left home, I was occasionally cuddling with her," red arrow on Illeia, "and that boy's sister," blue arrow pointing to Corun, "and would have liked to score with her," third arrow pointing to Ranthal, who is visibly the prettiest girl in the group, "but she's one of those dreadful types who just smiles when you ask her if she's got an upfront price -"

Keltham loses the image.  He kind of expected to.

lintamande: The room is respectfully quiet.

Meritxell is wondering to herself how fast she can learn Eschew Materials.

Carissa Sevar: "Do you have an ambition to run a criminal organization. It'd be a bit hard to arrange but we could come up with something."

Keltham: "Not really, their stories weren't really about selfish people, more like - having some totally reasonable Lawful Good reason to end up managing a criminal organization, which turns out to actually be fun for you, and then, you have to come to terms with the fact that you didn't properly hate yourself for doing the Lawful Good thing that didn't look Lawful Good - which is as close as Civilization comes to, even in stories -"

"I’m being unfair because I’m bitter.  There are stories about selfish characters too.  But none of those characters seemed to me to be at all like myself, the real thing.  It was like - they were being selfish in contrast to Lawful Goodness, instead of as just themselves - somebody else's fantasy about being selfish - or if not that, aliens who were selfish, who didn't have any Good in them at all -"

"I preferred to stick with the stories about people who ended up managing criminal organizations for totally reasonable reasons.  Further outside the - you don't have the expression.  The way that things get creepy as they're almost like reality but still not quite right, instead of just being properly wrong.  The Trough of the Unreal.  If you actually know what it's like to not be completely Good."

Carissa Sevar: - nod. 

lintamande: If they successfully make this boy Evil the results are going to be terrifying, Gregoria thinks to herself.

Keltham: "They didn't want to not be Lawful Good, not even a little.  They wanted the Lawful Good thing to do to be managing a criminal organization.  That was their fantasy.  They wanted to have a different kind of fun, not act for reasons that were like my reasons.  And who could blame them?  I wouldn't want to act for any reasons but my own reasons, either.  The thing that puts a valuation on everything is the value function, in Baseline 'utilityfunction', and there's a saying out of dath ilan that you can't argue the utilityfunction."

"All right, I've properly depressed myself for the evening, time for dessert."

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 10 (8) / Night

Keltham: Keltham did not remain depressed for long.  He knew that ahead of him lay a date.  A date which was delayed.  A delay during which things involving Yaisa were happening.

lintamande: Yaisa is very happy. She was on solid footing when their initial assignment was 'seduce and keep happy this important alien visitor who is a boy your age from a Lawful Good world'; she was much less happy when the assignment somehow turned into 'learn a lot of complicated math from this important alien visitor while pretending to be from Taldor as recently conquered by a Lawful Neutral version of Asmodeus'. And now it's back to mostly being the first thing, which is great. 

It's not that she's bad at math.  She is fine at math. She was never in the bottom third of the class and it was only rarely because she was sleeping with the teachers. She is a perfectly qualified wizard who hung second circle spells sooner than half the class and sleeping with the teacher doesn't let you cheat at that. It's just that math kind of sucks, and there's no thrill in it, and there's absolutely a thrill in seducing Lawful Good boys and watching them struggle between doing their important project or having sex with you, and getting orders from the gods about telling them what to do. 

Yaisa's lovely time is only interrupted by periodically having to check with herself whether this is the thing she's been instructed by Pilar's oracle curse to explain to Keltham and then pay him for getting right. She's pretty sure it's not 'I'm really into the thing where I distract you from your very important job'; her gut tells her that Keltham would find that adversarial and not in a fun way. She's pretty sure it's not 'I want to bite you when you get distracted and go off on a tangent about probability theory'; an important skill in Yaisa's line of work is reading whether someone is into that at least a little under the right circumstances, and Keltham isn't. 

Well. This investigation into what she wants that she'll pay Keltham Cheliax's money to give her will surely bear fruit eventually.

Keltham: It might possibly become clear to her around the time that -

Explicit sexual content.

after Yaisa previously having given Keltham occasional and often mood-breaking feedback about exactly what level of pain is, not even 'too much', but optimal for her arousal - it becomes clear that Keltham also has the ability to just directly

her arousal for purposes of, for example, backing off just before she has an orgasm.

(Submission? 

  Why would you need either of those in a partner for them to appreciate that?  Why would dath ilani require either a desire to serve or a desire to feel pain, in order to prefer that their partners do more work in order to increase the integral of their pleasure over extended time?)

Explicit sexual content.

Yaisa has been warned about this! It's why she's not supposed to act like she's having more fun than she is, even though (she complained to Subirachs at length) 'having fun' is sort of a product of lots of things one of which is acting like you're having fun, and things not being awkward, and really she's pretty sure she'd have more fun if she was allowed to act like she was into things where that felt appropriate. 

(Subirachs was not persuaded.)

....anyway Yaisa suspects 'let me act like I'm having more fun than I am' is definitely not the thing she's supposed to pay Keltham for even though she would pay Keltham for it.

....though. This does give her an idea. 

"So," Yaisa says to Keltham. "you know what a very clever boy who is good at telling how he's aroused his partner could do."

Continued spoilers.

He's listening attentively, though with some amount of new gendertrope saying to apply more pain until she speaks more respectfully which what why how would that even work.

Continued.

(That would work great, if Yaisa knew he was doing it.)"Instead of asking a very distracted girl to report on whether he is hurting her the right amount, he could figure it out, himself, from her body, from how she's responding to him. This is of course him doing more work and her doing less, so I suppose she ought to pay him, for the favor.".

Continued.

Any qualms Keltham might have otherwise had, about whether Yaisa really enjoys this or is trying to lure him into Conspiracy grimdarkness of unfathomable long-term purpose, fail entirely to materialize when faced with Yaisa expressing a

.  It also makes his new gendertrope feel better about whether he's being respected.  "Price?" he says.

Continued

She bites her lip. In a sexy way. "Five silver? You can do that fairness spell, if you want."

Continued.

...that's weirdly high.  Is Yaisa sure that she'd be able to name that amount under a Fairness spell - is it somewhere around half of the absolute most she'd pay an arbitrary person for this service?  Ten silver seems kinda high for that quantity given her financial circumstances.  She's not supposed to be paying more to motivate Keltham, she's supposed to propose a fair price to herself and then Keltham can decide whether to take it or not.

Continued

- why is he 

this.

"Keltham, the thing that is fun - not the whole thing that is fun, but

of the thing that is fun - about sleeping with someone who wants to hurt you, is that you can - turn off all the parts of your mind that are looking out for your interests and making sure that you're safe and that everything is fine, that you can stop trying to steer your life like a neurotic horse-rider obsessing over which cobblestones the horse steps on - that probably doesn't translate at all - that, instead of making a decision every five seconds, you can

and still have things happen that are

and

I think most rich people - and I'm a rich person, now - would pay a lot more than ten silver for that, if paying for it were

but the thing is that it's pretty hard to pay for. Can you, for one minute, stop nitpicking my prices, and

because the figuring out exactly what I want is

the fun part.  

Continued.

He could just take that, to avoid the awkwardness - haha just kidding Keltham is an Abadar cleric.

He could say he'll only take one silver and proceed, but then he'd feel bad about not being sure it was actually worth even one silver to her, and Keltham does have any ability to notice when

about to perform a sex act he'll feel bad about.

"Yaisa, ten silver is half of your daily salary, that's really high as a true value on

sub-act of sex where we do things slightly differently for a couple of dozen minutes.  I really wish I had another Fairness loaded but I don't and an actual transfer of five silver was what you named under Fairness for a whole day masturbating without coming -"

Details

"...which is fun, and something I do sometimes anyway without anyone telling me to, though it's hotter if someone told me to. Keltham -" she's feeling insulted and upset, and letting both show on her face, she doesn't think they'd be different in alter-Cheliax - "I haven't ever bought sex, there isn't a normal market in it I can refer to because girls don't do that in Cheliax and because buying it from someone else would be really different anyway, I'm used to thinking with numbers the other way around but not this way, I told you a number where if you'd said 'yes' I would've felt happy and pleased with myself and had a good time, and it's about the same size of favor the other way as spending the day teasing myself ....I don't actually understand what your objections are to the number but I can't - I can't - I don't see how I'm supposed to come up with numbers if instead of just thinking 'will I feel happy' I have to also think about whether the numbers are the right percentage of my daily salary given the amount of time where your behavior will be different! That's insane! I'm not good at math like that, if I was I'd still be one of your researchers! You can say 'deal', you can say 'no deal', but there's no part of me I can

, if you're going to say 'no see the numbers are

!'

Continued.

"I'm sorry.  This would be a much more awful problem if the Fairness spell didn't exist and I'm suddenly very very glad it does."

"Your max payment is capped at five silver, and you don't actually pay me anything until I can tap you tomorrow with a Fairness, so the spell does the work for you of knowing how to put feelings into numbers?  The amount that came out from you earlier today under Fairness made perfect sense, even if the number you made up just before then didn't."

"Also, I'm sorry for being like this, I genuinely am, it's just, I do have any ability to notice when I'm about to do a sex thing that makes me feel very uncomfortable, and accepting five silver for that sex act would definitely have been that."

Continued.

"You're a ridiculous alien," says Yaisa, though with less heat. "Ridiculous and alien and sure, I'm not going to complain if you want me to pay you

. If I wanted to have sex with someone who

a ridiculous alien I'd be doing that. It's not every day you get to have sex with ridiculous aliens. ....so are you going to do it? Even if you don't know yet how much you want for it?"

Continued.

"Even five full silver isn't enough to really buy sex from the ridiculous alien at his current salary, if he turns out to enjoy it less that way, and you want him to do it again in the future."

"But right now when I don't know how it will feel - and it does seem sort of hot, given that I know you want it enough to pay for it and my brain actually believes it when you put it that way - I wouldn't mind running the experiment."

Details

"Oh good. Then let's leave the payment stuff for tomorrow and try it. Because I do want it, and I will pay you for it, and you just might find you like it too."

Explicit sexual content.

Keltham goes back to what he was doing, namely:  Fucking Yaisa using dath ilani biofeedback training to hold back his own orgasm or ejaculate only partially.  He hurts her only lightly, at first.  Once his attempted reading of Yaisa's signs says she's aroused again, he hurts her more than that.  Just watching, now, to see what level of pain raises her arousal, what level of pain decreases it.

It's a whole new control lever to play with, and

much hotter than he realized it would be.  Keltham barely retains enough control of himself to say thickly that, if at some point Yaisa feels like she's no longer getting what she paid for, she should speak up.  Then Keltham starts trying to bring Yaisa dangerously close to orgasm, and using, as a control rod to keep her there, more pain than is optimal for arousal; decrease it a bit to bring her back up, increase it to take her back down.

It feels 

a word that Carissa has kept on using with him, that she wants him to feel that way, and which he maybe now understands for the first time.