Keltham: Scroll practice!  How does that go?  Anything explode?

lintamande: Reading a scroll is sort of like pulling the magic on it off the page like pulling extremely sticky tape off a roll. It is incredibly easy to get it all tangled and stuck to itself, at which point the scroll is wasted, though with the scrolls they got him that's not an explosion, just a waste of a scroll.

Keltham: ...does he succeed at any point?

lintamande: Yeah! About a tenth of the time, maybe getting a little better with more practice but still very chancy even once he's been practicing for most of the afternoon.

Keltham: Perhaps he shall try this again when his brain is less tired.

Or if it's just down to practice, then practice it shall be.

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 17 (13) / Late Afternoon

Keltham: Keltham takes time to hang a first-level wizard spell, no point in missing any practice there either, and then announces an optional lecture on Civilization's Governance.  The topic came to mind, for some odd reason, though his brain is still too tired for chemistry or real math.

lintamande: The lecture has perfect attendance despite being optional; that sounds really interesting.

Keltham: Yeah, he sort of figured that might be the case.  If it goes on being the case it means there's no such thing as an 'optional' lecture really, but, neeeevermind.

The way Civilized kids get introduced to this - or at least the way Keltham's class got introduced to this, on reflection he doesn't really know if that was universal or special to some quality that Keltham had with all the other kids, it's not particularly obvious what that could've been, but it's been a while -

Anyways, the starting question is:  Suppose that some passing superpowerful aliens, on their way through, tapped Civilization with a powerful memetic field that wiped all knowledge about anything resembling a government structure or social organization.  They've still got stuff like Probable Utility and Decision and the Fair-Division algorithm, but they can't remember anything about Legislators, Delegates, elections, or even that such a thing as Governance is possible.  They're just standing around blankly in the middle of everything that Civilization has built, trying to figure out what to do now.

They have to reinvent even the concept of government from scratch, and they don't particularly know that's what they're supposed to be inventing.

But again, though these people are now utterly ignorant of government, they are not ignorant; they already have concepts like cooperation-defection-dilemmas.  They are standing around in a total void of particular social organization, but they are allowed to be very clever and think very quickly about new orders that would be possible to create within this void, so long as they really do that from scratch.

How do they reason?  What would they try?  What are their goals?  What would they invent and from which first principles?

lintamande: Well, says Gregoria, the first thing you need is law enforcement; otherwise society will descend into chaos immediately. It's probably better to deputize people at complete random to apprehend criminals than to take a really long time deciding, but if you have all your other memories then you can pick particularly Lawful people to be law enforcement. And then you need a minimal set of laws, probably 'no murder' and 'no theft'.

Keltham: That part about not murdering people sounds like a good idea, but... what sort of power gets granted to the No Murder Enforcers?  Maybe the few people who want to be murderers are much more likely than average to sign up for the No Murder Enforcers so they can secretly compact among themselves to get away with that?  Well, Gregoria did say to pick people at random.  If you pick people at random, and at least half of the people picked agree to serve... then maybe the system works for at least a week or two and isn't immediately blown up by adversarial selection on the candidates applying for the position.

Possibly everybody in the world could immediately agree on the random-number system that said who should be an Enforcer.  Possibly almost everyone except the would-be murderers would decide to respect whatever powers the No Murder Enforcers were given.  These are dath ilani, after all.  They're pretty cooperative.  Most of them.  There's always exceptions.

Still, if this system is going to last for more than a couple of hours, there should probably be some sort of Meta-Enforcers to watch the first set of Enforcers?  There's going to be at least some bad Enforcers randomly picked in the system.  Maybe they can do a disproportionate amount of damage, depending on what powers they have, exactly...

Let's set all that aside for the moment, though, because Gregoria then proceeded to say something really confusing.

'Theft'?  Keltham fails to recognize this concept.  There's a bunch of stuff lying around.  Does 'theft' have something to do with that?

lintamande: .... do we have no records of who owns any of the stuff.

Keltham: What's an 'own'?  Keltham can determine the color and shape of the various objects around him but how would he determine the 'own' of it?

lintamande: Wow okay then Gregoria is grabbing a knife and everything she can carry and getting the fuck out of here before the killing starts. 

Carissa Sevar: Someone ask the Taldor girls that question.

Keltham: It's dath ilan, Gregoria.  Very few people are going to try to kill anyone, and the ones who do will be swarmed by bystanders after a five-second pause while they reinvent the concept of everybody commits to swarm the killer after 5 other people make the same commitment.

Why is she grabbing a bunch of stuff, though?  Was she planning to use it for something later?  Why would you have to grab something now in order to use it later?  Does this have something to do with that 'own' stuff that nobody has explained to Keltham how to experimentally discern as a perceptible property of objects?

lintamande: She's grabbing a bunch of stuff because she's pretty sure there's in fact no principled foundation for any distribution of the stuff other than 'people get what they can defend' so she should maintain custody of an amount of stuff that's not worth killing her over and is sufficient for survival.

Keltham: Dath ilan, Gregoria.  The average Intelligence of everybody involved in this process is 16, possibly 17.  They remember learning about cooperation-defection-dilemmas when they were very young.

As soon as everybody visualizes the awful outcome from what Gregoria is describing, they will all, automatically, because they do remember learning about cooperation-defection-dilemmas as children, ask themselves in unison:  "Can we do something else which is not that, and end up not there?"

Keltham: But, really they're getting ahead of themselves here.

Gregoria seems to be visualizing a world in which if she's touching something, she gets to use it, and if she's not touching something, she doesn't get to use it.  Why would this be the case?  There's stuff lying around.  Why the expectation that she gets to use it if she was previously touching it, but not if somebody else is touching it?  This is a weird system.  Keltham sees no reason to adopt this system himself.  People who need stuff should use it, obviously.

lintamande: That seems even more doomed than 'you own what you touch' but she admittedly can't explain why.

Carissa Sevar: "No one will work."

Keltham: What is this 'work' of which she speaks?

In unrelated news, it looks like there's only enough nonperishable food lying around to feed everybody for a couple of years, after which everyone will starve.  But surely before that time comes around, some genius will imagine up something else to do which is not that, and end up not there; it doesn't seem like an urgent problem.

Carissa Sevar: Yes, the genius solution is credibly telling eighty five percent of the people that if they go work on farms they will get stuff as a result, so they go do that and everyone doesn't starve. Which is why 'you get stuff' needs to mean something.

Keltham: Seems like they’re skipping a lot of derivation steps here.  Almost as if they somehow secretly knew which ultimate destination they wanted to arrive at, and were using the excuse of imminent starvation to immediately propose that solution as if it were the only possible one.

There is a key skill taught in dath ilan, called in Baseline 'blahblahblah' -

Actually Keltham did queue a Share Language (Communal) today and might as well use it so he can, at the very least, use words like that one, and have people hear the meaning as well as his definition.  Gather round, tap tap tap, you all have Baseline for three hours.

There is a key skill taught in dath ilan, called in Baseline 'perspective-taking', which is about carefully controlling your own mind to operate as if it were somebody else's mind, putting yourself into their own shoes and mirroring them in order to simulate them accurately.  It has a crucial special case 'perspective_taking-of-ignorance'.

In this case, they're being asked to simulate somebody who does not know, who has had forgotten and erased from their mind, what it means to own a thing.  It is not, if you take that perspective properly, like unto the experience of looking at things, seeing no ownership tag on them, and jumping from there to the conclusion that other people might grab those things and own them, or fight over them and own them.  You just see things, they have shapes and colors but no property of being owned, that concept has been erased from you.

We're not asking "how do people reinvent ownership".  They don't know they're trying to invent ownership.  They're just pondering the question of how they might avoid starving in a couple of years.

They might imagine that people need incentivizing to work on the farms.  Why jump straight to the conclusion about rewarding them with 'ownership' of the grain the farms produce?  Maybe all the grain goes into a big grain storageunit, and they guard the perimeters of their land to keep out strangers, and only people who worked on the farms are allowed to wander into the big grain storageunit and take grain from there, but they still have no concept that the grain is tagged with a property of being owned by anyone, even themselves collectively.  They're just working to grow grain, and guarding it.

The idea is not that this is a better solution but that it is a simpler solution that seems to maybe solve the immediate problem of people starving in two years.  Somebody thinking about just that problem, who didn't have a concept in their minds of 'ownership', might come up with this simpler solution that apparently solves the problem of immediate starvation in two years, before they invented anything as complicated as ownership.  It would take some more difficult problem to motivate that one.

Keltham: This kind of perspective-taking, in the special case of learning to think as if you've erased a piece of knowledge from your own mind, is a vital mental skill that appears as a subskill of many others.

It appears, for example, in the art of figuring out which 'premises' and 'lemmas' are needed to 'reason-step-by-step' through a 'mathproof'.  If you know too well that three times three is supposed to equal nine, if you can't 'perspective_take-on-ignorance' and block the great obviousness out of your mind, you'll have a harder time remembering that multiplication is 'defined-out-of' addition.  You will have a hard time coming up with the argument 'built-up-out-of-simpler-terms', the one that says, 'Well, to see why three times three is nine, consider that three plus three plus three is nine', because it will be so obvious to you that three times three is nine that you can no longer slow down and say why that is.  You won't know that three plus three equals six is a critical step along the way to three times three equals nine.

In the same sense, here, they're trying to grab private ownership by individuals out of air, because it's so obvious that they can't properly erase it from their own minds as an available solution, and think of solutions simpler than that, which would also solve the simpler problems as they are being posed.  Not as well, yes, but somebody with an erased mind wouldn't know their solution was worse than some other one.

This skill of being able to blank out a habitual solution from your mind, and look for a simpler one, is also the same sort of skill you'd use to, say, look past 'Ione and Pilar and Carissa went off because of a Conspiracy', where the thought of a Conspiracy seems so ready to hand as a solution, and say, 'Well maybe Ione and Pilar went off with Carrissa to fix some issue that happened because of Ione and Pilar being out of commission for a couple of days.'  If Keltham wasn't confident in his training in this skill of blanking-out, he really wouldn't dare to consider Conspiracy as a hypothesis because he actually would see it inevitably everywhere even in the Ordinary world, as a solution that leaps to mind and blanks out other solutions and can't properly be forgotten.

When Keltham first arrived at the Worldwound, the seventh-circle wizard who showed up for his Teleport told him that he'd be safer and more able to pursue his goals in Cheliax, and able to purchase passage back from Ostenso to elsewhere, and added 'I give you my word'.  Keltham tried to explain to him that, from Keltham's perspective, the apparent implied information being presented to him was along the lines of 'you would probably worry that if you go to this place in Ostenso, you might not be able to pay for passage back, and you wouldn't usually believe me if I just told you otherwise, but you'll probably believe me if I add "I give you my word" about it'.  Keltham's actual state of ignorance was such that even this implied information was not very useful to him, because the main things he was doubting were on the order of 'Are those giant monsters inside the forcefield possibly the real good guys here?' or 'Does any such place as Cheliax actually exist?'

Keltham: So reprise:  Somebody has the bright idea of working the farms, defending the grain-store, and only people who work on the farms are allowed to access the grain-store, which is what incentivizes the farm work.  They are, in a certain sense, guarding stuff.  But they haven't really conceptualized it as something tagged with a person yet.  They're guarding the stuff but it's not tagged as 'their stuff' and this indeed is why it must be guarded, anyone else could just come and take it, after all.

What problem might they encounter next, and what solution might they invent for it that isn't just leaping straight to private property?  Blank the solution you already know out of your mind.

lintamande: Some people will be lazy and not do their share of the work.

Keltham: Kick them out of the guarded farming area.

lintamande: People accuse people they just don't like of slacking, to get them kicked out and get more food for themselves.

Keltham: But if that actually decreases the farming labor, that will mean less food for themselves later on, because there'll be fewer workers?  Perhaps this is only a failure mode that exists when people don't have enough food to go around...

Keltham is also confused about how people would be able to credibly accuse random others they don't like of slacking; obviously there'd be one person assigned to monitor any particular other person's work and report whether they were slacking or not.  Or rather, if they weren't already doing that, they'd start once the accusations of slacking began.

If his students claim that can't work, are they sure they haven't just disproven the existence of corporations in general?

lintamande: If you do that, then the person responsible for monitoring whether someone else is slacking can say 'I'll report you for slacking and get you expelled unless you bribe me'.

Carissa Sevar: Can't threaten dath ilani. But the person who is slacking could offer the person monitoring favors in exchange for not reporting them; that's just a trade.

Keltham: This does seem to prove that corporations in general cannot exist.  Well done.

Carissa Sevar: Well, they can't pay everyone the exact same thing, at least.

Keltham: Keltham doesn't see how giving people different amounts of grain solves the problem where you apparently can't trust managers not to take bribes to deliver inaccurate reports about how much their direct-reports worked.

Carissa Sevar: Well, the way you do it in Cheliax is pay-for-work, hire hatmakers per hat they turn in, and then no one's making a subjective report on anyone else's quality, they are paying per hat.

Keltham: What if that gets you... SLOPPILY MADE LOW-QUALITY HATS?

Carissa Sevar: The price is agreed in advance, and for each hat, you can pay it or not, so you pay for the hats worth that price and don’t buy the others.

Keltham: Carissa sure is bringing in a lot of complicated infrastructure here!  All this talk of 'pay'.  It would take a very great genius indeed to invent an infrastructure as complicated as this sounds, and bring it in as the best solution to the current problem about farming and slacking.

If Keltham tries to extract just the useful part of this solution, it sounds like Carissa is saying that everybody should be assigned their own particular plot of land, to farm, and then we look at whether somebody's produce yields passed a certain minimum threshold, and people under that threshold get kicked out and don't get to eat.  This is better because everybody can see whether a worker did enough work, or not, and so they don't have the same problem with false accusations of slacking or managers taking bribes.

Carissa Sevar: - maybe. But also you could say they can only eat the grain that grew on their plot. And then they'll want that to be a lot of grain rather than a barely sufficient amount of grain.

Keltham: Soooo... if Keltham is getting this right... the key assumption is that people can direct varying levels of effort into farming, and higher efforts yield higher yields, and the higher yields are observable.  So we assign everybody a plot of land, they get to keep all the food from that land, and that incentivizes everyone to... well, actually it incentivizes everyone to work just hard enough to feed themselves with pretty high probability.  This brilliant trick eliminates the need for anybody else to monitor anyone.  Some people will probably die of starvation due to bad luck, but better them than everyone!

Sounds like the work of reconstructing Civilization is all done!  Just tag equal-sized lots of land as belonging to various individual people - where the tags are a kind of social construct about who gets to eat the produce from the land - and we leave it up to whoever eats the produce to grow it.

People seemed to be talking about some system more complicated than that, but Keltham doesn't see yet why it would be necessary.  Once you know which person gets to eat the edibles that grow on any particular piece of land, you're done.

Carissa Sevar: Some people will trade.

Keltham: What, so, like, some people have food, and other people have food, and they both give the food they have to each other?  What a strange activity.  Why would anyone do that?

Carissa Sevar: Well, say you grew more food than you can eat, and someone else grew too little, and yours is just going to rot anyway, so you say to them, you can eat my food if you also do some work on my farm while I laze around doing nothing.

Keltham: They will inevitably SLACK OFF making this project DOOMED TO FAILURE.  Wasn't that the whole reason why land plots got tagged with people in the first place?

Carissa isn't being consistent here in what she claims will go wrong!  She only says things will go wrong with Keltham's ideas, and not that the same things will go wrong with her ideas!  What an 'epistemically-unfair' way of arguing for 'relative-attractiveness-of-policy judgments'!

Carissa Sevar: The problem with Keltham's proposal was that the slacker-reviewers didn't have any reason to give accurate judgments or even mostly accurate judgments. A person paying another person to work on their land for them wants to keep doing this if the person is doing a good job and not if they're slacking. And they can just tell them to stop, and not trade them food, if they're not doing good work. 

Keltham: All right, Keltham admits of the possibility that you would give somebody some of the food from your farm if in exchange they did some work on your farm.  Now has Civilization been fully reinvented?

lintamande: What if I'm starving but my crop will be ready in a week, Meritxell says, and I want to borrow some food from someone else for a week.

Keltham: This added complexity seems well within the reach of dath ilani.  Sure.  Now we're done though.

lintamande: Two farmers have a dispute, Tonia says. One says the other promised to pay for work; the other says that the work was shoddy and the agreement was to only pay if the work was good.

Keltham: Sounds pretty sad.  Guess they won't be bargaining again next time.

lintamande: That works in a small village but Tonia thinks it won't work if they have too many people for everyone to know everyone else's reputation.

Keltham: People should stay to small villages and farm until they have enough food, then.

lintamande: Yep, Tonia thinks that's probably just correct about Golarion humans. But maybe the dath ilani will be willing to add a ton of complexity in order to get to not live in villages.

Keltham: Adding tons of complexity right away sounds like a bad idea!  What's the next chunk of complexity that enables somebody to solve a problem that current small villages cannot?

lintamande: Well, can two villagers combine their plots and be understood to have shared rights to the plot that results. Can villagers exchange their plots for food.

Keltham: What customer problems are these new features intended to solve?  We should make sure the customer has an exciting important problem to which some feature is the simplest solution, before we spend a lot of time implementing, testing, and debugging that feature in our next-gen village design.

lintamande: Well, combining two plots smooths out your variance in harvests which is good because having insufficient food is more bad than having too much food is good, and one other person is few enough for social enforcement against slacking to mostly work and for people to mostly get the benefits of their labor. And selling your plot for food is something you might do if you were imminently starving because better to be in a bad situation later than right this minute.

Keltham: Keltham supposes he's starting to see a bunch of value that could be unlocked by this system, in which, to write down some of the rules so far:

- Food can be tagged with a 'socially-constructed' imaginary arrow that points to a particular person, let's call them the 'owner'.  There's a socially respected rule (not a physical law) saying that only the 'owner' of food can eat it.

This rule of itself isn't obviously very useful on the face of it - if food just came out of nowhere, a rule like this would just prevent hungry people from eating food that's nearby?  Or at least, nobody else has explained yet why you'd want 'socially_constructed-ownership_tags' for food if it just came out of nowhere?

However, this rule becomes (visibly) useful when combined with a new one:

- Land can be tagged with a socially constructed imaginary 'pointer' to an owner.  There's a socially respected rule saying that all food which grows from that land then gets tagged with the same owner, and those food-tags are then respected as above.

This incentivizes people to invest increasing amounts of effort into farming their land, since they get more food and more reliable food in proportion to putting in more effort.  This seems probably more efficient than having a whole group guarding a lot of land and then also expending effort on monitoring how much effort all those people are putting into farming, monitoring the monitors, trying to have an incentive system that encourages the right amount of farming, etcetera.  Though obviously this whole tagging system is also going to have social costs?

Still, it's plausible the tagging system is more efficient.  It has a compact local physical relationship between how much people work and how much they eat, instead of a complicated socially-constructed one involving lots of monitoring and people with power over other people who might go corrupt.

Keltham: Now some new rules are being proposed which seem to say things like:

- People who tag land or food can, as a voluntary action, taken under particular circumstances, announce that the 'pointer' should change to point to somebody else instead.- You can announce today that some of the food your land produces later will, when it appears, get tagged with a 'pointer' to somebody else instead.- There's a social construct whereby multiple 'atomic' actions and conditions of this kind can be packaged together into a single bound 'molecule' (he's using the same words as in chemistry) that only gets socially respected as a single piece after everybody involved has made the necessary announcements.  You can 'trade' a lot of food for a bit of land, but not in a way where you announce that the food-tag points to somebody else now, and then they can say haha and refuse to announce the change on their land-tag.  You say 'Change the ownership pointer on this food to them and that land to me' and the other says 'Change the ownership pointer on this land to them and that food to me' and the joint declaration only gets socially respected after all tagged parties have announced the same molecule-arrangement of the same 'atomic' actions.

The Taldane word for this would probably be contract, or something like that.  There's a single-syllable word 'contract' in Baseline but the more technical term would be 'multi-signature transaction'.

These new rules unlock potential actions like 'trade some of your land's future food for food you can eat right now' - as might be a good thing, if something went wrong with this year's labor, as sometimes happens.

Though, you know, you could also see how that sort of thing could potentially go wrong?  Especially if any of the people involved were reasoning less than perfectly?  Still, let's ignore that part for now and plunge ahead.

Keltham: As of the most recent suggestions, somebody was proposing that two pieces of land could be owned by two people.  Keltham's not sure he could back them on this idea?  This sounds fraught.  If food has a tag pointing at two people, who gets to eat the food if the two of them disagree about who should eat it?  Do both of them have to agree on who eats the food, and announce that socially using multiple signatures, before it can be eaten?  If people end up in angry lasting disagreements, does the food rot?  That seems like a waste.

Keltham thinks the system should say that any socially constructed tag points to one place.

But you could, maybe, allow people to announce a 'multi-signature transaction' whereby the tags shift to point to a new social construct that isn't a person, and instead can be a complicated imaginary construct like FairBot or PrudentBot.  This new construct could say, for example, that both of the announcers will now own 'shares' in the land, and the food produced by the land will be tagged to the people who own the shares, in proportion to how many shares they own; and that these shares themselves now have ownership-tags and those tags can be moved around in 'multi-signature transactions'.

This new persistent complicated imaginary construct, to actually be socially effective, would have to be something that all the people who are supposed to respect the tags and the 'multi-signature transactions', would be able to understand.  If somebody can't understand what the new complicated imaginary social construct does, they can't figure out who's socially allowed to eat the food.  There's obviously going to have to be a socially constructed 'specification-language' for imaginary constructs like these, and some 'persistent contracts' in the 'specification-language' could potentially fail to 'validate', because they don't fulfill all the conditions that society demands from a contract.

For instance, if you try to announce a complicated contract where, under some circumstances, food ends up with no ownership tag and nobody is allowed to eat it and it rots, the people around might tell you that your contract fails to 'validate' and that they won't respect this contract even if it's announced.  They might then, if they feel like being helpful, suggest a 'debugged' version of your contract in which all the food always ends up with a well-formed ownership 'pointer', and say that they'd respect that contract instead.

Any farmer who tries to announce a contract in which they trade a cherry to themselves and end up owning all the food in existence, would similarly be told by other farmers that their contract fails to 'validate', because they haven't fulfilled the condition - in this whole imaginary system that everybody is maintaining inside their own imaginations - that you need 'signatures' from all the parties in a 'molecular transaction' who are currently deemed to own anything whose tag gets shifted around in the 'transaction'.

Likewise if you said that the food produced by land gets owned in proportion to how much work two people put into it, society would tell you that your contract doesn't 'validate' because society can't directly observe how much work was put in.  Society needs all the terms in a contract to be 'evaluable' by society in order for the contract to validate; any fact referred to inside an 'expression' needs to be one that society can observe, cheaply, by the time society needs to 'evaluate' the 'expression'.

dath ilan: (To be clear, Civilization doesn't literally think that contract specification languages were invented by farmers immediately after they invented ownership as a social construct - it's widely suspected that this wouldn't have occurred until hundreds of years later, after people got in some practice with simpler systems.  This would, however, probably have been the first use-case for the explicit idea of a programming language, invented thousands of years before anyone could build an actual computer.)

lintamande: "That's not how actual farmers do things here, just so we're clear," says Tonia faintly.

Keltham: Yeah, the Intelligence 10 thing is having really weird effects on their society.  His students are now being exposed to the sort of thinking that happens in a world where they’re normal average people instead of smart people.

lintamande: How does this hypothetical society handle contract disputes or contract breaking.

Keltham: Well, there's presumably something you have to do if an individual 'defector' from society goes around eating other people's food?  Even a tiny fraction of people like that can do a lot of damage, and of course, you'll have even more of them if you don't build any way of stopping them.  There's probably some kind of 'police investigator' whose job it is to hunt down food thieves, and then that person has to eat...

Well, they probably get a small fraction of food from a lot of farms?  And the 'police' don't protect any farms that don't contribute those little bits of food?  And thieves target those farms and only those farms that don't have police investigators.

If you need that mechanism anyways, the 'police' then have to decide what is thievery in the first place, and keep track of where the tags go.  So probably the 'police' would be the main ones where you'd want them to tell you that the contracts 'validate'.  Though, obviously, you'd also want the other people in your society to agree on not coming over and taking your food.  You wouldn't want any contracts which were complicated to the point where other members in society couldn't figure out that they shouldn't eat your food.

The notion of a contract breaking is a weird one?  For a contract to 'validate', the police should always be able to figure out what to do in any case of observable terms.  The contract might say that, if somebody doesn't do some deed - or rather, something the police can observe about that, like some contracted observer saying that somebody didn't do a deed - some land or food they own, then belongs to somebody else?  And the person who didn't do the deed, might lose reputation about that?  But contracts shouldn't 'break' so much as describe what happens in unpleasant contingencies as seen from a police perspective.

If the police can't figure out what a contract means - if there's a 'dispute' the contract doesn't imply how to resolve - then they need to do more careful validation next time!  But, sure, you could have some sufficiently respected group of five people, whose majority would decide what would happen in the hopefully very rare cases of contracts that validated and shouldn't have.

lintamande: And if the police is corrupt everyone who is paying them, since they're doing that voluntarily, can just start paying someone else instead?

Keltham: As long as they can collectively outfight the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military, yes.

This is easy while everyone's a farmer.  The police outfight individual thieves, all the farmers together win against the police.

If all this social complexity enables you to build more powerful weapons, and the police have those weapons, and nobody else has those weapons, then there is perhaps a bit of a problem.

If you count the rehearsal festivals for it, Civilization spends more on making sure Civilization can collectively outfight the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military, than Civilization spends on its actual military.  And even then there's some real and awful questions about whether, for example, the military plus the Keepers could take the rest of Civilization.

There's an order of Meta-Keepers whose job is specifically just 'keep an eye on the Keepers', and in real life that's probably worth anything.  The Keepers hopefully can't win against all the rest of Civilization plus its usual military; and the usual military is in fact specifically designed to resist Hypothetical Corrupted Keepers.  One similarly tries to make it hard for the Keepers collectively and the Military collectively to trust each other in a pact to take over together, especially when they were already betraying their oaths to Civilization.

It's hard to have a really simple reason why Governance couldn't possibly go corrupt, once your weaponry reaches the level of 'giant flaming craters'.  Civilization has thrown complicated solutions at this because they don't have simple solutions, and nobody is happy about that.  But 'just don't build overly powerful weapons' isn’t an answer, because how do you stop rogue groups from building those, possibly in secret, if there's such a prize to be won by being the only group with overly powerful weapons?

lintamande: What is Keltham's estimate of the probability Governance secretly was corrupt, Meritxell asks.

Keltham: Which failure mode?  What counts as “corrupt”?  There was probably at least one person somewhere in Governance who was corrupt?

The whole thing being secretly full of, Keltham doesn’t know, people getting paid much more than their theoretical salaries with secret mansions full of full-time sex workers?  That seems legit unlikely?

Keltham once tried to do his own totally separate checks on what Civilization could be hiding in the ways of massive secret projects.  It looked to him like at most 2% of the economy was being hidden off-the-books… at least in ways that didn’t require a really massive conspiracy with tons and tons of data being falsified and lots of people outside of Governance being in on it?  Which would be a lot easier for them if they actually had a good reason?

Keltham doesn’t know, here, the parts of Civilization he got to see were pretty nice to him!  Especially by Golarion standards!  He supposes he’d be ticked to find out that actually half the female population was masochists, but he was prevented from finding out that he was a sadist in order to leave more masochists for people in on the Conspiracy?

It seems legit hard to hide a massive Government Conspiracy in dath ilan, unless there's a good reason that gets the Keepers and lots of civilians who’d notice an anomaly in their section to go along with that?

Keltham is really having a hard time evaluating this probability!  If they’re hiding mansions they’re good at that!  It leaves him mainly with ‘priors’, plus his guess that a Dark Conspiracy doesn’t train people to think nonconformingly and be ready to defeat the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military.

Maybe 2%???

lintamande: To Chelish ears that sounds kind of outrageously low.

Though it's hard to argue that dark conspiracies don't usually encourage you to think nonconformingly and be ready to defeat the government militarily.

"If there were a conspiracy," says Gregoria, "with the sort of people that exist in Golarion, it wouldn't be to divvy up all the actually-plentiful masochists unfairly and have mansions with full-time sex workers."

Keltham: Keltham is sincerely confused about what the point of the Dark Dath Conspiracy would be!  Does Golarion wish to enlighten him?

lintamande: "It would be to just have painful sex with people who don't like it, since there aren't any masochists," says Gregoria flatly. "And to not pay them, because why would you pay them. And to frame people who offended you for crimes, and to murder people and make it look like an accident. I don't think there's a Conspiracy in Cheliax but if there is, Her Infernal Majestrix is not hoarding masochists."

Keltham: Obviously Abrogail isn't hoarding masochists!  There are masochists right here!  Not being hoarded!  They are, allegedly, plentiful enough here that nobody would need to hoard them!

And what is the actual point of this Dark Conspiracy?  Keltham can imagine that there are some 'criminal-sociopaths' in Governance with sexualities not quite like his, who can get off on inflicting pain on somebody who isn't responding sexually to that and to whom it doesn't mean anything emotionally except as something to hate.  He can imagine that if some dark group of dark conspirators had managed to secretly take over dath ilan anyways, the criminal-sociopath-sadists among them would be having sex with nonmasochists so long as they were at it.  He's not seeing that being the whole point of the Conspiracy.

lintamande: "I think mostly people want power for - its own sake? For the sake of being able to do whatever they want? Because they did one murder and were already going to be frozen if they got caught so why not do anything at all to avoid getting caught?"

Keltham: Keltham is following you on the part where somebody who did one true-murder and will be suspended if caught, would prefer to become sole ruler over the world, in preference to being caught and frozen.  The part where there are enough people like this, successfully and stably cooperating with each other while defecting against the rest of Civilization, that they can take over the Government and the Keepers -

Keltham: Look, Keltham was raised in a way where, if one single member of the Hypothetical Conspiracy had managed to broadcast to the rest of Civilization the whole truth about the Conspiracy's grimdark misdeeds, and told everyone where to look for evidence and proof, and then demanded a billion gold pieces in exchange for that, plus that the next few attractive true-murderers of the appropriate sex be turned over to them for sadistic purposes, as would be less than one ten-thousandth the number of victims under the previous regime, etcetera, the obvious thing to do would have been to pay them after overthrowing the Conspiracy.

There is very plausibly a non-Dark Conspiracy using 2% of Civilization's resources on something important and terribly secret.  You can tell this because Keltham has - in fact, now that he reflects on it - been brought up in a way that would make him feel like this is the obviously right and proper thing to do, if you have some important thing to be running a non-Dark Conspiracy about; and everybody would owe the Keepers and upper Governance gratitude for having taken on this secret duty.

If there was a Dark Conspiracy, Keltham should have been raised much more on a diet of messages about how, in Hypothetical Dark Conspiracy Dath Ilans, if you try to blow the whistle on them instead of joining them for scraps at the table, they will inevitably catch you and turn you over to their sadists to be made use of, and then tossed to the true death when they're done with you.

And not raised, as Keltham actually was raised, on a steady diet of fictional messages about how, in a world like that, you need to keep the secret and organize with your friends and overthrow the Dark Conspiracy.

Nor should he possess the decision theory about how to coordinate counter-conspiracies like that, how to wait for an obvious beacon-time to naturally occur, like a solar eclipse or something, and have 10% of the population shout "NOW!" followed by the other 90% shouting "NOW!" and suddenly turning on their hypothetical Dark Overlords.

The Dark Conspiracy that supposedly rules dath ilan is really impressively faking the part where the ordinary people like Keltham are being brought up in a way that makes the Dark Conspiracy's life more difficult and dangerous.  If they're trying to countersignal to Keltham how Ordinary they are using costly signals, that plot really-ass succeeded.  Keltham wouldn't do that if he were the Dark Conspiracy.

lintamande: ...probably the Dark Conspiracy pretends to be the non-Dark Conspiracy using 2% of Civilization's resources on something important and terribly secret, if there's room for one of those? 

Keltham: They're really really not doing it the way Keltham would do it, even taking into account that they could be trying to fool him about that.

Dath ilani kids get their parents fooling them about certain things for years, until the kids figure it out on their own, despite the actual coordinated Conspiracy of adults trying to fool children about those things, with the purpose specifically of training dath ilani children to break out of false realities.

If nobody had ever done that to Keltham, he really wouldn't have jumped up and said, aha! Civilization clearly ought to be elaborately training children to break out of false realities and isn't! this must be the work of a Dark Conspiracy!

It's not something a Dark Conspiracy would be wise to do even taking into account that this is exactly what they'd like you to believe.

Asmodia: (It is at this point that Asmodia truly and properly appreciates how much Pharasma must personally hate her and her life.)

lintamande: Sure, Gregoria finds that pretty convincing. She really only strongly objected to Keltham's lack of imagination about what Conspiracies do when they exist; it sounds like he has pretty good reason to think they don't. 

Keltham: Well, to be fair, Civilization does not have records about really serious large-scale Conspiracies, and if Golarion does, it is very possible that Keltham needs to be educated about this!  This is more than usually likely to be a point where Golarion has something to teach the silly naive dath ilani!

For that matter, if Civilization actually is run by a Dark Conspiracy, Keltham plausibly would have been raised with huge obvious blind spots about it that somebody from Golarion could see through.  It's a great place to probe Keltham hard and try to catch him out in some blatant error he apparently isn't realizing for some odd reason.

lintamande: - they will totally take that as a challenge.

No blatant errors yet, though.

Keltham: So this whole question, Keltham admits, is not something he has actually given much thought before.  There is of course no standard rationale you're told in Civilization for why the Keepers and Governance couldn't possibly be corrupt.  That would be ridiculous in the light of elementary Security reasoning: obviously, if you're inside a Dark Conspiracy, any standard rationale like that you get, will be corrupt.  Any dath ilani who wants to reason this out should do that on their own or with a few personally-known trusted friends, obviously.  Probably even a Dark Conspiracy wouldn't think it could get away with having standard social beliefs and arguments about how they couldn't possibly be ruling society from the shadows; individuals would be smart enough to reinvent the incredibly simple argument from 'security-mindset' about how no such standard arguments should exist, and that actually would be a giveaway.

It's an unduly fascinating question, which Keltham should really extract himself from, and get back to his original intended lecture topic, which was the forms of Governance.

He's totally not going to do that and will go on talking about this anyways.

So!  On a few moments' 'first-reflection', it seems to Keltham that estimating the probability of Civilization being run by a Dark Conspiracy boils down to (1) the question of whether Civilization's apparently huge efforts to build anti-Dark-Conspiracy citizens constitute sincere work that makes the Dark Conspiracy's life harder, or fake work designed to only look like that; and (2) the prior probability that the Keepers and Governance would have arrived on the scene already corrupted, during the last major reorganization of Civilization a few decades ago.  Keltham basically doesn't think it's possible for criminal-sociopaths to take over Keepers and Governance that start out actually functioning the way they currently claim to function, nor for criminal Conspirators to successfully conceal a major Conspiracy from a functional society not run in toto by that Conspiracy.

With respect to point (1), Keltham would first like to observe that a tyranny like this - he uses the Taldane term 'tyranny', it's shorter and feels like it has more of the right connotations than the nearest Baseline term - doesn't seem like it could most effectively secure its power by electing to construct a veneer of Civilization and hiding behind that?  Where that veneer involves raising the non-Conspiracy kids knowing enough Law that they won't submit to threats, want to overthrow Conspiracies, and know mathematical protocols they can personally verify that sure seem apparently useful for overthrowing Conspiracies?

A more sensible tyranny should try to have a population of technically literate but obedient order-followers, frightened of retribution, knowing how to do chemistry but not knowing the Law of 'decision-theory' whereby they could try to coordinate with each other or that would make it obvious they should ignore 'threats'.  Law-knowers who start out in a world of threatenable people, which makes it be not a 'threat' but only the ordinary optimal strategy for the Tyranny to kill any Law-knowers, will find it obvious that they should conceal their knowledge and wait for opportunities to strike.  But Civilization is a whole society of Law-knowers, and those will find it obvious that they should all coordinate in shouting 'NOW!' and ignore threats past that point.

This seems, to Keltham, like not the optimal way to arrange a tyranny that wants to hold power and exercise as much power as possible?  Such a tyranny should restrict knowledge of Law to a tiny clique of the smartest people who are allowed to know how the Law of Coordination works.  It should run heredity-optimization at a level where it's not trying to make the average people as smart as an average dath ilani, so people aren't smart enough to correctly rebuild broken decision theories that their society educated them with.  The median dath ilani on the current system probably is smart enough to do that, reinvent the basic results of correct decision theory if maybe not all the math, even if the rest of society is telling them to use a broken decision theory instead.  So maybe more like Intelligence 14 than Intelligence 16-17?  Then the tyrants form a separate breeding group with heredity-optimization for much higher 'thinkoomph', the equivalent of wizards-with-headbands compared to Intelligence 10 people.

This, obviously, is not what Civilization looks like!  Keltham can observe that just from direct introspection on how smart he is!  And how much stuff he knows!

Carissa Sevar: (Is that what the successful ilani Cheliax will look like? She doesn't actually like it, but that might be a personal deficit, a lack of appreciation for tyranny where it comes from limiting what people have the chance to learn and realize. She is pretty sure that the kind of tyranny that suits her personally is the kind where everyone gets a decent education and can then rise as far as their strength will take them, landing in the place they deserve. But she can see how that would be much harder to actually implement than keeping most people confused and ignorant. But surely if you were a dath ilani tyrant, with all their resources, you could do the thing you actually preferred most...)

Keltham: Suppose that Keltham is wrong about his point 1.  Suppose that the optimal strategy for a tyranny in full control, is indeed for some reason to hide behind a veneer of Civilization full of costly signals of non-Conspiracy and disobedient people like Keltham.  Under this assumption, the optimal strategy for a Dark Conspiracy looks like what you think Civilization is supposed to look like, and therefore the two cases are not distinguishable by observation.

Then we have to consider the prior before evidence, which means, considering the question of how you'd end up with a Dark Conspiracy in charge in the first place, and how likely those scenarios look compared to Governance Uncorrupted.

To Keltham it looks pretty impossible for an existing, well-functioning structure of Keepers and Governance to be taken over by infiltrating criminals.  Because, like, the Keepers and Governance have considered that.  Some people out there are having so much fun making sure that no small group of criminals can take over the Keepers and Governance.  It would take unshared magic and mind-control and even then Keltham isn't sure it could work, they game things like that, they wouldn't be unprepared.  There will be cutouts and warning signs and hidden counter-conspiratorial groups.  One of the Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festivals had the aliens taking over every 'network-connected' 'computer' in Civilization simultaneously.  Governance runs prep like that but more of it.

So - plowing ahead quickly on this reasoning and thinking things through out loud - it seems to Keltham that the main way you get Corrupted Keepers and Governance, is not by criminals successfully infiltrating and taking over some earlier system that looked a lot like Uncorrupted Keepers and Governance.  There must be some Corrupted earlier system that is run by criminals in toto, and which then - hypothetically - builds a more sophisticated system of Corrupted Keepers and Governance, to even more strongly hold power while looking even more to the rest of Civilization like it's totally not that.

At this point Keltham wants to deploy some sort of inductive argument from people doing, like, the obvious stuff they ought to do at every historical point along the way?  A high-functioning society that isn't corrupt to start with will have some well-calibrated estimate of how much its pre-Governance can be trusted, how robust they are to various kinds of criminal infiltration?  If a government looks like something that it's possible for clever criminals to take over, you won't give that government the sort of powers that criminals could use to entrench themselves, obviously.

Golarion has these kinds of problems because Golarion has wizards and clerics.  Because one thousand people are most of a country's combat potential.  Criminals rule in Golarion because ordinary people can't stop them, not because ordinary people could've totally stopped them but decided not to for some reason.  You shouldn't expect to see the same phenomenon in a nonmagical world.

lintamande: It doesn't seem very obvious that without magic weapons technology turns out such that ordinary people could stop any government they didn't like. And, well, usually when people try that it's not that they fail so much as that decades of bloodshed ensue.

Keltham: Okay, but, to be blunt here, point the first, have they tried that literally without magic in a world where magic has never existed to give rise in the first place to horrible governments where a few people are in charge of everybody else, because why would nonmagical people ever do that in the first place?

Point the second, Keltham doesn't know how Golarion ended up with average Intelligence 10 - that one seventh-circle wizard Keltham talked to at the Worldwound thought it might have something to do with Earthfall - but maybe at Intelligence 10 people actually are stupid enough to put a few people in charge of everyone else and then too stupid to ever manage to get together and come up with Something Else Which Is Not That.

However at average Intelligence 14 - or whatever it was before dath ilan's nascent pre-Civilization figured out 'natural selection' and 'heredity-optimization' and started deliberately increasing 'thinkoomph' further - you can probably invent and run 'policy prediction-markets'.  Maybe just a few of them, without 'computers' to do lots of calculations in a golem-like fashion, but some.  And then the 'policy prediction-markets' can tell you which actions will have which consequences when it comes to trying a different government system or different strategies for forming one.

Frankly it does not seem to Keltham that you should need 'policy prediction-markets' to avoid decades of bloodshed ensuing, especially if it has happened more than once, you should be able to have everyone get together and decide to do Something Else Which Is Not That.  But with 'policy prediction-markets' you can definitely do it; anybody who makes an incorrect prediction about how to form a new government will lose money.

lintamande: This really seems too optimistic but they admittedly haven't lived in a world that would try it.

Asmodia: "That 'policy prediction-market' business sounds kind of important actually?  Can you possibly say how those work?"

Keltham: Shouldn't take long!  Keltham would have needed to explain those to explain Governance anyways!

A prediction market is when lots of people bet on something observable, instead of it being a bet between just two people.  Let's say that a prediction share pays out 1 gold (100 copper) if it rains at any time tomorrow, or pays out 0 copper otherwise.  Then Alis can say 'I'll sell up to 1000 shares of Rain Tomorrow for 60 copper each' if she thinks the probability of rain tomorrow is noticeably under 60%, and Bahb can wander up and say 'Sure I'll buy 500 of those at 60' if he thinks the probability of rain tomorrow is noticeably over 60%; and then if some clouds show up at evening today, Karal says, 'I'll buy your 500 shares at 75', and Bahb thinks that 75 sounds around right to him, so he sells his shares to Karal and pockets a 15-copper profit per share.

Blah blah market-makers hang around and sell or buy based on technical market trends about what the public information looks like, instead of on the basis of having private information, so people can buy into the prediction markets at only very slight premiums, even if nobody else has private information right then.

Blah blah you can subsidize a market by saying you're willing to buy or sell at your starting estimate of 60% or whatever, and then anybody who disagrees with you about that in either direction will wander up and buy or sell from you.

Blah blah this is a very simple automatic market-making algorithm if somebody wants to subsidize a market continuously and isn't worried about losing a bunch of copper whenever it rains out.

Blah blah you can ask a bunch of separate questions for 'what's the chance X happens if we do this, or this, or this'.  You only end up doing one thing Y; the market on 'does X happen if we do Y?' pays out 1 gold if X happens; all other markets are negated and everybody gets back their original investment (as it was kept in some standard store of value like equity in a huge basket of well-known corporations).  

Civilization aggregates votes into Delegates then Electors then Representatives then Legislators.  Legislators negotiate among themselves about what Civilization wants to have happen.  They debate arguments from Very Serious People about which observables to measure to get at unobservable outcomes.  The actual step of predicting which policies yield which observables is done by a policy prediction-market.  Then, usually, the Legislators do whatever's predicted with the highest probability to lead to observables that seem like they should strongly tie to a good actual outcome.

Unless the 'best' policy according to the market looks like it'll have bad effects for which nobody has figured out how to predict observable correlates.  Which, like, does ever happen, but causes a lot of Very Serious People to start shrieking angrily at the Legislators and each other about 'civilizational inadequacy'.

A few years or sometimes decades later, the observables come in, and the prediction market on the action actually taken pays out.

The point being, it's not the job of Civilization's leaders to foresee the future.  Answering 'What happens if we do this?' is the job of all of Civilization, including whoever's currently closest to being like Nemamel.  Answering 'But what results do we even want, really?' is more the job of the top level of Governance.

Incidentally, if there was actually a Dark Conspiracy in dath ilan, they'd have to be messing with the prediction-market results in order to make sure their own preferred actions got taken - presumably by making all the other actions not taken look worse, rather than having the taken action look better, so that people didn't notice the actual actions taken were resulting in systematically off predictions - so basically all the major market-makers in prediction markets and all the home traders would have to be in on the Conspiracy, since otherwise, they'd notice something off about the market movements they were obsessively watching all day.

Once Project Lawful gets to the point where anybody besides Keltham knows anything about Prestidigitation-chemistry and spellsilver mining, and once they've got more experiments they're considering trying than they have the resources to try, Project Lawful will obviously set up and subsidize an internal prediction market on which chemistry experiments will pan out.

Asmodia: Asmodia asked LITERALLY YESTERDAY how to aggregate lots of people's different predictions for 'who will Keltham try dating next' into a single estimate and was FOBBED OFF with some simplistic rules about writing down a series of estimates on a sheet of paper tacked onto a wall!

Keltham: Kids usually do start with that before they buy into prediction markets -

Asmodia: Asmodia is not a KID she is a SECOND-CIRCLE WIZARD with 18 INTELLIGENCE and a +6 WISDOM HEADBAND who was headed for the WORLDWOUND and starting THIS EVENING she is going to run an ACTUAL FUCKING PREDICTION MARKET about who Keltham tries dating next so that Project Lawful has ANY EXPERIENCE with doing this CORRECTLY before they have to use prediction markets to decide between EXPENSIVE SPELLSILVER MINING EXPERIMENTS.

Keltham: ...okay.

Carissa Sevar: Asmodia, is alter Asmodia this invested in this?

Asmodia: "...uh, sorry."

(If alterAsmodia wasn't this invested before, she is now.  Well, alterAsmodia having visible, uh, Tendencies about Things was going to happen somehow.)

Keltham: Apology accepted!  It's fine to care about things.

Keltham: Now, to return to the more somber topic:

There's a loophole in the logic saying that, in nonmagical societies, the rest of the world can outfight the world's military.

'Economically_scalable-weapons.'  The class of weaponry where you can just go on spending more money if you want the weapons to be even more destructive.

Once those kinds of weapons are invented, a handful of people could, in principle, cow all the rest, if those other people submitted to threats.

The last time Civilization underwent a major reorganization, a few decades ago, it was being reorganized out of something that already had scalable weapons, since there's no record since then of scalable weapons having been discovered for the first time.  You could imagine that this reorganization was a cover for a Dark Conspiracy that already ruled everything, to set up Keepers and Governance that it controlled, and then it hid away all the history books suggesting that things had ever been different...

...And then, apparently, taught everybody not to submit to threats, once they were hiding?  This, by assumption, apparently, is totally the best course of action for them to hold on to power?  They should build a fake Civilization and hide behind that?  Great idea!  The best idea!  Even the smartest Dark Conspiracy can't think of any better ones!

But again one must ask, how did this Dark Conspiracy arise in the first place?  How likely is the most likely historical pathway for that, compared to historical pathways that lead to Governance Uncorrupted?  By the time a society is able to build complicated expensive powerful nonmagical weapons that a handful of people could use to outfight the rest, this society should have had, decades earlier, centuries earlier, far more than enough mathematical sophistication to run a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol'...

That probably didn't translate.

And Keltham should probably try to describe in any case some of the actual countermeasures that Civilization is known to have in its arsenal against Dark Conspiracies.

Keltham: So!  A few decades ago - if the history books Keltham has read are not all fake - Governance, in whatever form it existed in that time, said that it needed to do something incredibly suspicious-looking and not explain why.  Whatever Civilization then existed said, roughly, 'okay, fine, but we're going to go to some extreme lengths to try to make sure you can't benefit from doing that for bad reasons'.  The entire current Government got fired and barred from politics permanently.  Then literally everyone old enough to do correct extended arithmetic, participated in the equivalent of an enormous public coinspin, using calculations carried out by hand on paper and transmitted from person to person by in-person handoff, carrying out a mathematical process whose mathematical properties any adult could verify.  No machines were used, no instant-communication devices, because you couldn't trust the machine-makers to not be in the Dark Conspiracy, any such machines would be a single vulnerable point for the Dark Conspiracy to attack.

This algorithm selected new random leaders from among everybody who wanted to be eligible for the new project in charge of rebooting Governance from scratch.  Any nonrandom or popularity-based election process might be something a pre-existing Conspiracy could get control of and exploit - not by faking the results, but by steering people to vote for Conspiracy candidates.

In a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol' like that, you and your trusted friends could theoretically be inside a bubble-surface formed of all of your friends' friends who are all in the Conspiracy and working together to fake all of your inputs and discard all of your outputs.  But from most people's perspective this should be unlikely; the Conspiracy would need to include all of your friends that you randomly selected, or all of your randomly selected friends would need to have all of their randomly-selected friends in the Conspiracy.

You can basically prove, using a protocol like this, that the only way for the Conspiracy to fake your results selecting the interim political leadership, is if you and all of your friends are inside an enclosed bubble that the Conspiracy runs.  And this is possible but not likely.

The only technology you need to run this process is paper, ink, writing, and math that 95% of dath ilani adults can understand.

A society should be able to do that long before it can build really powerful nonmagical weapons of the sort that a few people could use to threaten the rest of the world into submission, even in a Golarion-like world of people who submitted to threats.

So - when weapons like that are invented - a nonmagical society should already have a trustworthy Government in place to handle the possibilities implied by those weapons.  If they're not already very sure their Government isn't a Dark Conspiracy, they can reboot the government using a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol' before they let the government build any weapons like that.

And before scalable weapons are invented, the nonmagical citizens can directly outfight a nonmagical military, just by outnumbering it, because the military can't just use bigger and bigger weapons to fight back.

Keltham: Keltham realizes they've grown up in Golarion where governments are terrible, but this is a phenomenon produced by the existence and misuse of magic that hugely concentrates military power into a few people, not something you should expect to see in nonmagical worlds like Keltham's.

Why would a nonmagical world put up with being openly ruled by grimdark criminal-sociopaths, if they could collectively outfight their rulers?

And if a nonmagical world couldn't arrive at justified confidence of its Governance not being a giant hidden Dark Conspiracy, why wouldn't it just reboot its Governance using randomly selected volunteers and a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol'?

This argument seems like it should be valid at every historical point up to the invention of scalable weapons.  And obviously you would, at that point, reboot Governance just to be sure!

Keltham: Keltham does admit that the main hole in this entire argument is sort of obviously the Keepers, who can't clearly be rebooted in the same way as Governance, because you can't just appoint random people to be able to do the sort of things that Keepers do.  At least in theory Keepers aren't allowed live weapons, except under direct Government supervision checked by randomized volunteers, because, like, super obvious precautions yo.  But the Keepers have talk-control, and maybe the Meta-Keepers aren't being honest about training Governance upper echelons to resist talk-control.  If that's true, it's not something you can fix by rebooting Governance.

So, yeah, if Keltham's world is run by a secret Dark Conspiracy it's sort of obviously the Keepers, and they're doing it by repeatedly talk-controlling all the new leaders who get delegated.

Call it 2%.

Because if they were actually doing that, they wouldn't just WARN PEOPLE that talk-control was a THING.

YES even taking into account that maybe that's exactly what they want you to think.  They still wouldn't just TELL YOU.  It's like how, if the Chelish Dark Conspiracy orchestrated the whole weird thing with Asmodia to try to scare Keltham out of ever asking to try on an artifact headband, they would actually just not tell Keltham about intelligence headbands being a thing in the first place.

In the dath ilan being run by Hypothetical Corrupted Keepers, the rest of the world wouldn't know that Law was a thing.  It would be run by a secret elite of Law-users.  Everybody else would just, like, not know any math.  Or only know about math as something you could use for engineering bridges, and not know that some kinds of math could be used to organize your thoughts better.  Or if they did have any concept of Law, they'd be introduced only to some corrupted version of decision theory which claimed that the Lawful thing to do was give in to threats and accept offers of 1 copper piece in the Ultimatum Game and not bother to vote in elections.  And preprogrammed with some sort of canned reply to anybody who presented them with better decision theory, about how getting higher payoffs in dilemmas was like totally not what decision theory was really about, and only selecting particular decisions a particular way was truly Lawful even if agents like that systematically and predictably-in-advance got lower payoffs... okay, maybe this part isn't so plausible as a consistent world.

Carissa Sevar: "Talk-control could work better on people who know Keepers can do talk-control, somehow."

Ione Sala: "The Keepers could have some form of mind-control that isn't like the one they're showing you, working by a totally different method.  Like magic.  And what they're showing you is so that, if anybody else discovers the real magic of dath ilan, people say 'oh that must be talk-control' and alert a Keeper."

lintamande: "Or," Meritxell said, "there could be people in on the Conspiracy who'd be uncomfortable with hiding the entire concept of talk-control, but are willing to agree to various uses of it so long as they aren't lying about the fact Keepers can do that."

Carissa Sevar: "Or the talk control thing could have been publicized before the Conspiracy took hold."

Keltham: "It's definitely not that last one, the Keepers could just announce that knowing about talk-control had turned 'socially-infohazardous'* and have the knowledge not get passed down to the next generation."

(*)  Social-infohazard lit. 'exfohazard':  Information that conveys ordinary positive advantage to individuals who know it, but has net negative value to society because of how that knowledge affects people around them.  E.g., exact knowledge of how to construct scalable weaponry cheaply would be an ordinary advantage to an individual who knew it, but disadvantageous to everyone to have everyone know.  Strongly distinguished from the much weirder case of 'individual-infohazards', like spoilers for a movie you were eagerly anticipating and haven't watched yet.

Carissa Sevar: How can you describe THAT MUCH POWER and be sure no one is misusing it!!!!!! The upsetting thing is that for all she knows maybe dath ilani really are like that!!

Keltham: And if there are, per Meritxell, people within the Conspiracy who are only okay with talk-control being used for restricted purposes, so long as Civilization in general is told and warned about it existing... uh, that sounds exactly like how the Keepers are supposed to be?  Like, that's not even a hidden Non-Dark Conspiracy, that's... just what the Keepers are supposed to regularly do?  Hide dangerous knowledge and only use it for sufficiently important purposes?

Obviously there ought to be somebody whose job it is to do that!  Why would they need to hide in a sensible society that recognized the reason for their existence?  They could just go out in the open and be like 'yo we're the Keepers, anybody who would otherwise need to start a conspiracy to hide dangerous information for good reasons and only use it well and properly can just come to us instead, we'll handle it for you and probably give you a substantial reporting bonus'.  That's exactly what the Keepers are.  They're the Non-Dark Conspiracy.  A world only needs one of those; two of them would just get in each other's way.

lintamande: ...right but if they're also doing some things Keltham wouldn't approve of, but that they think is acceptable, that'd look exactly like this, right.

Keltham: He's sure the Keepers are doing some things Keltham wouldn't approve of?  The question is whether they're knowingly doing things that Civilization in aggregate wouldn't approve of, or that practically nobody in Civilization at large would approve of, even if they knew everything else the Keepers knew and could reason as clearly as Keepers could.

And if the Keepers make a habit of doing that, and secretly run everything to cover that up, the rest of Civilization shouldn't be, like... teaching children how to coordinate against Dark Conspiracies and break out of false realities and fight the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military?

lintamande: Yeah, that does seem like a weird thing for them to do.

So, 2%. 

The chance that Cheliax has some kind of Dark Conspiracy going on is a lot higher than that, Gregoria says dryly.

Keltham: Ione and Carissa did have some persuasive arguments, though, about talk-control working better if people know it exists - that's already known to be true for a lesser case of talk-control called 'hypnosis', though that only works on very few people, which is sad because it's so fascinating and so useful for the few people who are 'hypnotizable' - or talk-control actually being a cover for some other form of magic.

Even taking that into account, though... basically Keltham's brain is reporting that it's not convinced here.  Dath ilan is too nice of a place to live, even for weird people like Keltham who disagree with it.  Civilization trains its children too thoroughly to be able to fight Dark Conspiracies and Hypothetical Corrupted Governance.  Maybe call it 2.5% instead of 2% pending consideration of some of the points raised here.

Cheliax obviously seems like it'd have some Dark Conspiracies.  Heck, dath ilan probably has some Dark Conspiracies.  The question is whether those Dark Conspiracies are running everything unbeknownst to Abrogail Thrune or Aspexia Rugatonn or Contessa Lrilatha.

...which would be a lot more likely if tropes, in fact.  So, good thing it's currently looking like no tropes.

Carissa Sevar: No tropes seems really great. ...does saying that bring down the tropes.

Keltham: Only if they exist.

Keltham: Anyways Keltham should get back to his lecture on Governance.

Keltham: Keltham was supposed to start by telling them all to use their presumably-Civilization-trained skill of 'perspective-taking-of-ignorance' to envision a hypothetical world where nothing resembling Coordination had started to happen yet.  Since, after all, you wouldn't want your thoughts about the best possible forms of Civilization to 'cognitively-anchor' on what already existed.

You can imagine starting in a world where all the same stuff and technology from present Civilization exists, since the question faced is what form of Governance is best-suited to a world like that one.  Alternatively, imagine an alternative form of the exercise involving people fresh-born into a fresh world where nothing has yet been built, and everybody's just wandering around over a grassy plain.

Either way, you should assume that everybody knows all about decision theory and cooperation-defection dilemmas.  The question being asked is not 'What form of Governance would we invent if we were stupid?'

Keltham: Civilization could then begin - maybe it wouldn't actually happen exactly that way, but it is nonetheless said as though in stories - Civilization could then begin again, when people envisioned running out of stored food a couple of years later.  Standing around all these beautiful complicated machines that people remembered how to operate, but required multiple people working together to operate, which nobody was yet incentivized to operate.

Or Civilization could begin for the first time, when the Hypothetical Newly-Created Educated People imagined trying to build shelters for themselves, or sow food-plants to grow; and thought to themselves that there would be less point in doing that, if others would just move into the shelters as soon as they walked away, or eat the crops that they had sown.

And people then would say to themselves, "What if we tried something else which is not that?"

dath ilan: It begins with the idea of coordinating at all, co-operation, simultaneous action, that two people can work a machine that requires two people to operate.

It begins with the Hypothetical Newly-Created Educated People simultaneously hunting a large prey animal, a stag perhaps, that requires multiple hunters to bring it down relatively safely.

It begins with multiple individuals aggregating as if into a larger compound agent - a macroagent which can choose among all its available compound actions in the cross-product of the action space, instead of individuals choosing as if in isolation and expecting others to do the same.  There is then, of course, the problem of Lawfully dividing the gains, when the macro-agent dissolves back into individuals to individually consume those gains; but this is a matter of Law, and the people do remember Law.

dath ilan: It continues into a new problem, the problem of motivating such socially-useful actions as 'producing food', for if nobody does this, soon nobody will eat.

You can imagine lesser solutions, collective farming of collectively guarded fields, monitors on hard work and rewards of food access.  But these are simultaneously too 'simplistic' and 'overcomplicated', the very opposite of an 'elegant-solution'.  People can work harder, invest more effort, for a usually 'monotonically-increasing' reward, a function operated directly by the Environment, by 'physical-law'.  There just needs to be some system whereby, when people work, they are themselves the ones to benefit from it.

But this requires a far more complicated form of coordinated action, something that 'bounded-agents'  lack the computational power to consider as a giant macroaction of their 'collective-agent'.  The optimal macrostrategy must be lossily projected down into simplified mental rules for individuals, a notion of imaginary-ownership-tagging: if one person sows food-plants within a field, and waters them and protects them, everybody around them will behave as if the resulting food-crop is tagged with an imaginary pointer to that person, saying that the food may be consumed by them alone.  Or only consumed by those others the food's 'owner' designates, at their own decision... that seems like it should obviously be an option built into the system too...

And once you create an imaginary structure of coordinated action that elegantly-complicated, the consequences and further-required-features inevitably explode; the explosion that results is Civilization's basic form nearly in toto.

dath ilan: People could often benefit from other people doing various things for them, but they must of course do something for the other in exchange.  If things have socially-constructed tags pointing to people, who alone may use or consume those things, why not let people announce that the pointer now points to someone else?  That's one way of doing something in return, for somebody who did some task for you, that was easier for them than for you.

If fields can be owned and an owned field produces owned produce in the future, why not let people announce that some of the future produce can point to some other owner?

Often the announcements of changed imaginary ownership are meant to be traded, executed one in exchange for another.  Then a new version and feature-expansion of the system can eliminate the uncertainty about whether the other will announce their bargained ownership change, after you announce yours: imaginary contracts, that molecularize the atomic actions into a transaction that executes simultaneously on both sides, only after both sides announce the same contract.

Do people want to work on some larger endeavor - specialize in different aspects of farming, and collectively challenge a larger farm?  Let the tags, in the eyes of society, point to persistent imaginary constructs, specified in some contract specification language; a corporation is one such persistent contract.

dath ilan: Let this system expand, let people use it enough, and there will predictably come a point where there aren't lots of untagged resources nearby for somebody to tag in society's eyes.

Once there are not plenty of new plots of land to tag and farm, people may indeed begin to ask, 'Why should this land be owned by them and not me?'

Because they did some work on that land?  If that's the rule, then won't people who foresee the predictable scarcity later, run around trying to plow small shallow furrows through every potential field within the reach of running, trying to tag as much land as pointing to themselves as possible?

And when all that land has been used up, wouldn't the people who were slower runners and didn't end up with any land - wouldn't new children born into this world, for that matter - ask themselves and perhaps ask out loud:

"If this elaborate imaginary social construct doesn't offer me any benefits for going along with the pretense - if the system says that little or nothing has an imaginary tag pointing to me - then in what sense is this even coordination, from my perspective?  Why would I cooperate in the coordinated rule of not eating things tagged as pointing to others, if the result is that there's nothing for me to eat?  Where's my fair share of the rewards for playing along with this pretend game, for cooperating with what this imaginary tagging system says is my part and my action in it?"

Keltham: This concept, incidentally, took some arguments to persuade into tiny Keltham, when he was first hearing about all this.  Tiny Keltham had a very strong instinctive sense that objects just were owned by people, and that what made a system fair and right was entirely that only the people who owned objects could do anything with them or transfer them to other people.

It was hard for tiny Keltham, at first, to see past his instinctive suspicion that people asking 'What's my reward for cooperating with this system?' were about to use that as an excuse to storm onto his hypothetical farm and eat his food that he'd worked to produce, and call that their share, without doing any work themselves.

Older children's attempted arguments about 'put yourself into that other person's shoes' repeatedly failed on Keltham, who kept replying that he wouldn't take anybody else's stuff period.

But tiny Keltham was eventually persuaded - by a Watcher, then, not by an older child - by the argument that it is an internally-consistent imaginary tagging system to say that some single person Elzbeth owns all the land in the world.  Everybody else has to work those lands and give Elzbeth a share of anything that grows there, since by default it would just end up tagged as hers, unless they agree to pay half their gains to her.

The question then becomes, why should anybody else except Elzbeth play along with this imaginary system, once it gets to that point?  Why shouldn't everyone who isn't Elzbeth, all just wake up out of this bad dream, and do something else which is not that?

Keltham asked if maybe the system had started out with everybody owning an equal amount of land, but Elzbeth had been a really clever asset-trader and ended up owning everything in the world after a series of voluntary transactions; in which case it seemed to him that fair was fair.

The Watcher told Keltham that, even if the last generation had gotten the world into that state through a series of voluntary transactions, the children born into it might look around and see that no land was tagged to them, that everything was tagged to Elzbeth.  They would ask what they were receiving in exchange for playing along with that particular delusion, and why they should not imagine some other tagging system instead, in which their coordinated action in playing along would actually receive any reciprocal benefit or reward.

And tiny Keltham growled and stomped around for a while, but finally conceded that, fine, the pointers were imaginary and yes it took more than just a consistent tagging system running on strictly voluntary transactions to make the whole thing be fair or right.  The elegant core structure was necessary-but-not-sufficient.

dath ilan: The unimproved land, the raw resources, these things must be tagged with ownership for the owners to have an incentive to improve them.  It doesn't mean that this tagging need be considered as free to the new owner.

Discard the obvious-first-solution-that-is-wrong of charging somebody an amount of food or other worked goods, to tag previously untagged land, and redistributing those payments equally among everyone in the world.  Even leaving aside the question of how that system initially starts farming anything at all, it inevitably arrives at a point where there's no untagged land left or it's impossibly expensive.  Whereupon the next generation of children, being born with no land tagged to them and no payments for newly bought land coming in, will again begin to ask, "Why should I play along with this imaginary arrangement at all; where's my payoff for coordinating my action with yours?"

More sensible then to regard people as renting land and other raw-resource sources, at their unimproved price of course, but still an unimproved price set by competitive bidding - albeit perhaps for long-term leases, etcetera.

When you are born, you conceptually acquire a share in this whole system -

Keltham: Of course tiny Keltham immediately demanded his accumulated profits from his share of all the land-rents in the world, and demanded also to know why he had never been told about this before.

The Watcher again had to be brought in to explain to Keltham that, conceptually speaking, his share was mostly going into maintaining a lot of non-rival non-excludable goods, or services that Civilization thought should be provided to literally everyone even if in principle they weren't public goods.  The value of unimproved land wasn't as high as Keltham was imagining in the first place; dath ilan still had whole forests just lying around not being used for anything -

Tiny Keltham said that he had absolutely not consented for his share of the land rents to be used for non-rival non-excludable anything, and from now on he wanted it delivered to him in the form of actual money he could spend on what he wanted.

...could he please wait and listen to the whole story before getting angry? said the Watcher.

Tiny Keltham was incredibly suspicious, but he did already have a great deal of experience with adult craziness turning out to be more reasonable than he had at first thought.  Tiny Keltham agreed to go on listening for a while longer, then, before he started trying to persuade all the other children that they ought to band together and overthrow Civilization to get their fair share of the land rents, in the form of actual money, delivered to them right now.

dath ilan: Because, you see - it was said to tiny Keltham - returning to the Hypothetical Newly-Created Educated People, at some point their system is going to grow large enough that even with everybody receiving benefits for their participation in the system, there will still be defectors.  There will be people who just don't want to go along with the system, and try to eat food with a tag on it that points to somebody else.

Now the nascent Civilization needs police that can outfight any individual thief; and, since Newly-Created Educated People aren't stupid, they know they obviously need to ensure that the collective of all of them can always outfight the police.  Neither of these 'features' are cheap, and neither easily lend themselves to private ownership -

Keltham: Tiny Keltham said that he'd be happy to pay for the police to protect him, out of his share of the land-rent, once it was being paid to him in actual money, and he didn't see why Governance had to take his money and use it without his permission supposedly to protect him with police.

Why couldn't people just pay for police who sold their services on the market like everybody else?  Or if it was much more efficient to police larger regions at once, why couldn't his sub-city in Default provide police, and then Keltham would help his parents pay their share of the house-rent out of his share of the land-rent being paid to him directly -

dath ilan: Because the police have weapons, tiny Keltham!  What if the police for a sub-city decide one day that, in this sub-city, it's fine to raise kids of Keltham's age, and force them to work in exchange for only enough food to keep them alive?  What if the police decide that nobody in the city block is allowed to hire different police, and take all their stuff to make sure they can't afford them?  What if somebody dies and their head doesn't get cooled and preserved fast enough?  That's the kind of thing that Civilization as a whole has to prevent, as a universal regulation with no opt-outs, so it doesn't happen anywhere in Civilization.  Even if you thought people should be able to opt-out of any and every protection as adults, you'd still have to check to make sure they weren't having kids.

In fact, tiny Keltham, your subcity does contract with a police agency to do a lot of ordinary policing, and it does appear in your parents' rent on the 'foundation' for their 'house-module'; but Governance has to provide oversight of that policing, and that costs money.  Cryosuspension emergency response on constant standby service costs money.  Protecting the Waiting Ones in their frozen sleep costs money.  Maintaining the election system to pick people to run the Government that regulates armed police costs money.  Quiet Cities to host the 5% of people who can't be happy working in Civilization, and who are thus held injured by what Civilization has chosen to become, cost actually quite a lot of money.  No, most people won't need the Quiet option; but everyone, when they're born, can be considered as needing an insurance policy against that happening to them, and that insurance policy costs money.

Subsidized policy-prediction_markets to make all those institutions work boundedly-optimally cost money.

When you add up everything like that, which Governance has to do for everyone or can't just sell to individuals separately, it actually does eat all the rent of unimproved land plus all of Governance's other revenue streams.  Lots of individual philanthropists fund Governance on top of that, so that Civilization can have a bigger Government than basic rents alone will support - so that there can be Annual Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festivals, say, or so that Quiet Cities can have nicer things.

(Most philanthropies in Civilization with room for more funding accomplish roughly the same amount of marginal good per marginal labor-hour, according to most people's utility functions.  If you've got a fairly conventional philanthropic utility function, you get to pick whichever random charity or impact-certificate market best matches your personal taste there, including just throwing your money at Governance.  It's like buying individual-stock equity investments; there's more volatility, but all the expected returns are the same.)  (In Civilization, that is.)