AlterPeranza: AlterPeranza stares, wide-eyed and breathless.
Peranza: RealPeranza is faking that. She's trying very hard not to feel anything, anything at all, if she feels those feelings she'll die.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 40
Keltham: How would Meritxell feel about getting, um, forcibly subdued and dragged off to a nearby simulated cuddleroom by Keltham? He's getting a surprise ready for Carissa. Meritxell shouldn't use magic, but should fight back against Keltham as hard as possible except for that part.
This is not a strong social request, to be clear. If Meritxell would rather not get hurt that way, or would feel weird about going all-out against a cuddling partner, Keltham will ask Pilar. He almost did that anyways, just, his social model suggested that Meritxell would strongly want to be asked even if she said no, leaving aside his not-to-be-mentioned-in-advance probability that Meritxell will say yes.
lintamande: Yes she's absolutely down for that, that sounds great. Does 'as hard as possible except for using magic' include, like, calling for help, Carissa's pretty unlikely to do that but it's, you know, an obvious thing to do if someone tries to forcibly subdue you and grab you off, if they're not preventing it.
Keltham: Nope. That's not realistic. He rather doubts Carissa will try that, but, if she does, Security won't do anything about it.
...oh, right, Meritxell is not to try telling him to stop. That is something Keltham doesn't want to try fighting his brain about, yet, and Carissa is under the same order.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 41
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 42
Keltham: Willa Shilira is the first tier-2 to learn Prestidigation to the point of being able to complete a full acid production cycle - following Keltham, Avaricia, Carissa, and Meritxell among the tier-1s.
Seems like a fine occasion to promote Willa Shilira to tier-1! To be clear, that doesn't mean everyone else gets to be tier-1 as soon as they master Prestidigitation to that same level; this reflects an expectation that Shilira will continue to learn at this speed.
Shilira's tier-1 pay is made retroactive to when she was hired; Keltham wasn't quite sure of her value at the time she was hired, but now he's sure, and be it far from him to dock her pay for his uncertainty.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 43
Keltham: Keltham has been taking some time to recover since his earlier fight against Meritxell, which was difficult for him to the point that he called it off before winning.
He'll give it another try, now, and this time manage to finish 'subduing' her.
...she's not actually much of an opponent with Keltham running Cat's Grace and Bull's Strength, and him able to heal himself in midstream but not her.
Carissa will probably be a tougher fight.
How does Meritxell feel about Alter/Disguising herself as Carissa Sevar, next time? Keltham's got a stolen hair from her.
lintamande: - yes actually she's been messing around with her Alter Self precision, for personal reasons, and that sounds like fun.
Also if Keltham wants any other women he's ever seen, she's pretty good these days, and she's picked up Eschew Materials so she can do it without the hair.
Keltham: Wait, so if he asked for Merrin -
lintamande: She'd need to see what she's aiming at but he's pretty good at illusions these days.
Keltham: They are so totally doing that!
...Next time Keltham has Silent Image queued, not today.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 44
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 45
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 46
Keltham: ...it's basically clear they're going to be able to get spellsilver, at this point, from the cheaper kind of ore.
The Project's acids are higher-purity, cheap to use in large quantities, they're getting the hang of smoothing out particular reaction pathways. They're starting to develop their own tricks around magical chemistry. Like Prestidigitating an impure chemical intermediate to react with acid, in a way where the spellsilver stays bonded after the Prestidigitation wears off, and the impurities' bonds break and precipitate them out of the solution.
Now that Keltham is thinking ahead - and he's a little ashamed about not thinking of it earlier - how does his ultra-high-Spellcraft girlfriend Carissa Sevar feel about trying something that will really stretch her magical-item-making abilities to the limit?
In particular, creating magic items that help make, not items in general like her Armillary Amulet, but particular magic items. Manufacturing +4 Intelligence headbands, to be exact. Unless Carissa thinks she can stretch further, to +6 Intelligence, or +4 Intelligence / +4 Wisdom.
Once they drop spellsilver cost by a factor of 10, the dominant manufacturing cost of headbands will be the time and required Spellcraft of the wizards making those headbands, of which Golarion is going to need a lot.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is aware that for some reason +6 intelligence headbands are considered really hard to make, and +4intelligence +4 wisdom even moreso.
"They don't actually look like they ought to be? I can see Asmodia's headband and obviously it's good workmanship but it doesn't seem like something that fewer than a dozen people in the country ought to be capable of, and I'd expect if I tried to make it I'd just succeed without too much time or trouble. It is possible I'm missing something but generally my experience of magic item making is that everyone insisting it's hard doesn't actually mean it's hard."
Keltham: "Yeah, uh, but... suppose we get an ordinary third-circle wizard who is not Carissa Sevar to try it. What steps are they going to fall down on? And can you make a magic item - potentially a very expensive one, that takes you a while to craft - that lets the third-circle wizard get past those?"
"Where making ten +4 headbands is probably a more important goal than making one +6 headband, I think, though it's a tough call... actually, I shouldn't even try to guess that, my actual motive here is that I suspect that building the Item of +4 Headband Creation is going to be noticeably easier than crafting the Item that boosts making anything other people consider difficult, and even you should try doing the easier difficult unprecedented thing first."
Carissa Sevar: "Armillary amulets are that, they get people past a bunch of the obvious blocks in magic item creation - I think you could probably invent one that was narrower, that just had the structure for Fox's Cunning in particular, and more useful for that - or maybe a series of them, for individual places-where-people-get-stuck - I would probably have to watch a mediocre enchanter work, to see at what points they don't understand what they're supposed to do or don't do it with enough precision -"
Keltham: "Heh. I was going to raise the clever-sounding idea of making lots of little items that helped on particular difficult steps of the manufacturing process, instead of one big item, but I see you're already there."
"Make it so, Carissa. I'll approve the budget requisition for one mediocre enchanter. About as good as you think we can afford to put on mass-producing +4 headbands, if we want to produce lots and lots of those at a tenth of the current cost and sell at one-fifth the current price."
"We're doing the thing."
Carissa Sevar: " - yeah. Yeah, we are. We're going to - be the most important thing that's ever happened. And be very, very rich."
Keltham: "For the revolution of the world!" Keltham says.
Nobody in Golarion is gonna get that reference, but he says it anyways.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 47
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 48
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 49
Keltham: Well, going on their increasing mastery of the Periodic Table, it seems increasingly clear that what Golarion calls by the name 'lead' is in fact Element-82.
Keltham: WHICH GOLARION IS USING IN PIPES THAT CARRY DRINKING WATER.
AND IN MAKEUP.
AND IN PAINT.
INSIDE HOUSES THAT CONTAIN CHILDREN.
AND SOME PEOPLE APPARENTLY USE IT IN COOKING POTS.
Keltham: That could be half an Intelligence point off the entire planetary average, right there.
Carissa, you know what else Golarion is going to need besides a lot of Intelligence headbands? A lot of items that cast Neutralize Poison, multiple times per day so that they can sweep all the affected populations. If that even works against Element-82 poisoning - he guesses they'll have to test that first -
...how is this going to get announced. They have to tell literally everyone in the world immediately but Keltham's presence is still mostly a secret, how will people - know it's true - how does that sort of thing work in Golarion, there's no prediction markets, how does this civilization end up collectively knowing anything -
Carissa Sevar: Mostly this civilization doesn't. However if Cheliax starts a sudden initiative to replace all their lead things and explains that a clever Chelish wizard figured this out and convincingly demonstrated it, then probably the places that think Cheliax's government is basically competent will consider it themselves and do it if it's cheap enough.
Maybe they can pitch some paladin orders on paying for all the Neutralize Poison items to be distributed in the countries where the government can't afford to.
Keltham: No.
No, chickenshit, this is too important, this is Worldwound-grade catastrophic. Even in Golarion, there has to be a better way to communicate that warning than by example.
Start by informing all the Worldwound-signatory countries at the top level. Cheliax doesn't need to explain how it knows, it just needs to make it visible that it's immediately banned Element-82 coming into contact with human biology mortal biology, they don't know how it generalizes to races that don't interbreed with humans but there's no point in taking chances until they do -
Carissa Sevar: There's something horribly wrong here and Carissa doesn't have words for it.
It's not just that Cheliax's interests are probably not served by the people in other countries being smarter, though that's true; alter-Carissa is still feeling some of this sense that there's something horribly wrong here, she thinks.
"Keltham -
- how expensive would it have to be, to make human biology not come into contact with Element-82, before it'd seem reasonable to you for Cheliax to not make that law?"
Keltham: Element-82 makes people violent, not just stupid. Keltham would say "Chaotic" except that he suspects Golarion's "Chaotic" at least as practiced by Chaotic gods is just a different fragment of math, and Element-82 is not that. Just dropping intelligence headbands on people wouldn't be enough to make up for what it does - maybe boosted Wisdom would do it, Keltham doesn't know -
Element-82 does damage that Civilization thinks it can't cure. Maybe Golarion can cure it.
...Keltham doesn't know. He doesn't know what's too expensive for a country where people earn 10 or 20 gold pieces per year.
They've got to at least stop making more lead pipes, stop making more lead paint.
Get those cooking pots away from children.
Carissa Sevar: "Yeah. Yeah, I'm not - arguing with that - I feel sick, actually, to think that we're all just - worse - than we have to be - that I'm worse than I have to be - and it might be that even once they know, most places don't replace their pipes, because they're too poor -"
Carissa Sevar: "Maybe Hell will pay to do it everywhere," she says, and the difference between alter-Carissa and normal-Carissa feels more acute than it has in a long time, and she has no idea why.
Keltham: Keltham sends a priority message to Lrilatha.
Keltham is going to be more vigilant about checking this Interaction Outside Cheliax than he's been vigilant about a lot of other things happening outside the Project's bounds.
What kind of summit will be held. What kind of announcement will be made, given that Keltham is being kept secret. He wants to know how other countries react, when they react, what they're doing inside and outside Cheliax.
Asmodia: ...Asmodia is going to put her own voice down as pleading very strongly that they just actually do this and don't try to elaborately fake it. No, they're not going to be able to tell Keltham about countries' actual reactions to Cheliax, the Infernal Empire, making an announcement like that, but they can tell Keltham honestly how much progress is being made in which countries. Contessa Lrilatha can swear things to Keltham about it.
None of this is going to matter on the sort of military timescales that they're heading for with spellsilver production. It may matter to keeping Keltham contained another week. They don't want him looking outward from the Fortress like this. Everything else should be secondary to Contessa Lrilatha being able to swear things to Keltham, and the progress reports they give him making sense, and there not being any delays while people try to figure out what to fake. They cannot afford a repeat of the Pilar candy curse incident, the Asmodia headband incident, not when Keltham is looking outward like this, it all has to be real.
lintamande: - the Chelish government is in fact against its citizenry being violent and stupid. Not uncomplicatedly so - there are certainly advantages to violent stupid people -- but on the whole, less violence and less stupidity is an improvement, and one they'd probably make all concerns of Project secrecy aside.
The Chelish government is probably in favor of people in other places being more violent and more stupid; it wouldn't necessarily be expected to send them to Hell, but it weakens them. But it weakens them much, much less than a Chelish advantage on the Project does.
That makes the most important consideration here what it conveys to Osirion, in particular, which is suspected to have guessed much of what's going on, and who it's probably going to be necessary to go to war with at some point.
Well, Osirion will either try to devote resources to fighting lead, and devote less to its military, which serves Cheliax; or it'll not do that, which they can swear to to Keltham.
Lrilatha's recommendation to the Crown is to make the announcement, and start replacing all the pipes and pots, and let her sit down with Keltham and talk him through what they're trying so far.
Also they should try lead poisoning some villages much more aggressively than is presently being done, to see if against expectations more violent and stupider humans are good to have. It's the ilani thing to do.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 50
Merenre: "We have looked into this before, though I don't doubt that another world might have finer measuring instruments and more information."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Findings when we looked into it?"
Merenre: "Pots seem bad, pipes seem fine. - and it's really hard to make pipes without lead, it's by far the best cheap metal for it. We're not doing anything about pots because I don't really have a principled account of what we should do. We could warn people in classes in the temple. We haven't really any grounds to take their pots away just because they're poisoning themselves. We could give out free not-lead pots, or swap them for leaded ones -"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "How sure would we have to be that Keltham has more information than us, for it to be worth spending the money to swap everyone's pots - say we fund it by delaying the expansion of schools -"
Merenre: "- I'd want to estimate how good the expansion of schools is in equivalents-to-innate-intelligence-increase, and then a range of plausible effects Keltham might know of of lead on intelligence."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Figure that out. And then the pipes are - five times as expensive as that? Ten times as expensive? Is the proposal to stop having pipes and set up more water distribution sites?"
lintamande: "That seems like a grave wrong to You, your majesty," the sanitation manager for Sothis is moved to object. "Your people would be worse-occupied and your city impoverished."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Well, that's what we're trying to figure out. What if we make the pipes out of wood."
lintamande: "They won't hold water, your majesty."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Gold."
lintamande: "....we can't afford that, your majesty."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "What are your top three options if you have to replace all the pipes."
lintamande: " - clay, Stone Shape, or - asking Nefreti Clepati to do something. Your majesty."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "All right, figure out how expensive clay and Stone Shape are, and how bad leaded pipes would have to be for that to be worth it, and then ask Merenre to figure out how sure we ought to be that leaded pipes are that bad, given that Cheliax implied Keltham said to switch them out at once."
Merenre: "It's - fairly promising, as a first thing for Cheliax to be doing presumably at Keltham's request. And they also offered to bet that we'll end up thinking they were right."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Huh. - too bad one can hardly bet with Cheliax, because they are nearly ideologically committed to only making agreements they think they're able to cheat at."
Merenre: "I know. I want international governance to involve more commitments of that form but agreeing to one with Cheliax just looks - and probably is - foolish. - we could offer such a bet, on our own terms, to nations intrigued by what Cheliax is doing but too sensible to bet with Cheliax."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Betting against you is hardly less ill-advised than betting against Cheliax."
Merenre: "Sure, but if they don't know that it seems good for them to learn it, and if they do know that they can trust the number we quote them, though I don't know what that number is yet, I've called in the alchemists who conducted the tests on lead pipes and concluded they seemed fine to ask why they think that."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "We could also just tell Iomedae to have her countries do it, on the grounds that she prefers their populace not suffer Chaotic Evil damage; She'll pay us, if we're right."
Merenre: "That will probably work better than offering Mendev terms on a bet about whether it's worth it but I find it objectionable, that that'll work better."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Well, you can offer the bet first, and then when Mendev and Lastwall turn you down because they don't know what to do with offers to bet, then We can give our current estimates to Iomedae under an agreement where she'll pay what they end up being worth to her, and then you can point out to Mendev and Lastwall they could've saved their goddess an intervention."
Hemaka: "Forgive me, your majesty, but I wonder if we'd serve you better by contemplating what this proposal says about Cheliax and about the progress of Keltham's work there."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Right, there's also that. Why this? Why now? It doesn't seem like the sort of plan they've had in the works for nearly two months."
Merenre: "Keltham may have just learned about it, or connected the metal in front of him to some discovery in his world of origin. Or he may have demanded some sort of external cooperation from Cheliax, which he could verify happened, as a sign he's not being systematically misled about the international community and the potential for his work to be disseminated -"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "But they can just lie to him about the result!"
Hemaka: "It could be this doesn't come from Keltham and is an effort to distract us and spend down our resources while Cheliax in reality plans for conquest."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Or does come from Keltham, at least in the sense he mentioned it, and is nonetheless being entertained by Cheliax for that reason. It'd be - more of a departure from their usual diplomatic strategy than I'd expect from them without some kind of unusual impetus."
Merenre: "Unless they're refraining from prediction markets for all the questions they consider genuinely high-stakes or sensitive, I don't benchmark them as being very near prepared to wage a war on all fronts. Their chemistry prediction markets indicate a lot of recent progress on acidmaking and spellsilver refining. That's - a major advantage, once they have it as an industry, but it's a major advantage on the timescale of a few years, not one right now."
Hemaka: "What's the plan if it looks like in a few years they'll have a massive, spellsilver driven military advantage -"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Pray."
Merenre: "Less than a ten percent chance, in my view, that they're going to hold on to him for that long. Though - they've surprised me so far."
Keltham: Years? Keltham totally intends to be producing massive amounts of spellsilver in months. He's graphed out the supply networks, Cheliax has located a potential mine for the key ore, stockpiling preliminary quantities of the ore is not that expensive, he's got a process that doubles the amount of sulfuric acid on every cycle, his tier-1s are picking up Prestidigitation at the requisite level, and people currently think that ten pounds of spellsilver is a lot.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 51
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 52
lintamande: Contessa Lrilatha reports to Keltham on the presentation to the Worldwound-treaty countries, including the offer to bet. Mostly the complaint of the other countries was that this would be incredibly expensive and they aren't as rich as Cheliax so the fact it's worth it to very-rich Cheliax doesn't mean it's worth it to anyone else. Also no one wanted to bet, on the grounds that betting is a bizarre thing to do. She thinks they'd be more receptive if there were good industrial processes for metals such that alternatives to lead for pipes were affordable.
Cheliax has also tried Neutralize Poison on lots of people. An effect on Intelligence is not observable immediately, but even if the Neutralize Poisoning is working it might take time to have effects; Neutralize Poison doesn't restore you instantly to an unpoisoned state, just gets the poison out. They went over everyone with Detect Intelligence beforehand and will do so again in two weeks.
Keltham: Lead is famous for having bad developmental effects. People will have grown up with damaged neurons not making the right connections. Maybe Restoration works against that; it's worth trying - but Keltham wouldn't bet on it.
The obvious thing to try here to get faster info would be raising mice, rats, or some other mammal with shorter developmental times. Keltham will sketch out some basic experimental techniques for measuring the thinkoomph of mice so that developmental damage can be quickly observed within an experimental versus control group. That can verify the problems with lead and prove them to other countries; and they can also see whether Neutralize Poison or Restoration helps at all there, once a mouse has already grown up damaged.
It's - so bizarre that an element as high on the periodic table as 82 would be the most affordable metal for pipes. Civilization uses complicated synthetic liners for pipes that carry drinking water, but Keltham knows that underneath the liners are Element-29 - what they currently think is 'copper' - and Civilization would use something failover safe underneath the linings, so copper pipes would probably be safe.
Keltham will look into copper mining, see if anything there stands out as obviously improvable. Keltham was thinking about electrorefining / electroplating anyways. Maybe they can line the lead pipes with a thin sheen of copper via electroplating, it wouldn't - wouldn't be a great idea - but it's probably better than exposing the lead outright - though Keltham will need to figure out, some way to check, that the metal-to-metal contacts aren't generating voltages and putting even more lead ions into the water -
Keltham: It's - probably not what he should actually be prioritizing.
He should be prioritizing scaling up spellsilver. It's famously bad for startup projects to split their attention.
He gave them warning. He doesn't - understand, Golarion, but - he tried -
Having lots and lots of +4 intelligence headbands to sell is step one on a lot of things, not the least of which is earning enough money and credibility to scale up the Project further, get more people besides Keltham who could work out how to line pipes that carry drinking water...
Are they at least not - using lead cooking pots, to make food for children.
lintamande: Well, Cheliax is requiring everyone to turn in their lead cooking pots and get replacements. Other places - might be doing that. A bit slowly, but they'll probably get around to doing it.
Keltham: But - what are the Lawful countries, who aren't Cheliax - is there a stated reason they're not moving faster on this? It's been three days!
lintamande: - right, and things don't really happen in three days, most places.
Keltham: He doesn't understand. Three days might not be a lot of time for him, but governments - have rapid-response teams, people working in shifts, precalculated plans for contingencies -
...none of that is true here, is it.
Okay.
The Project can solve all of those problems itself, if it has to, it'll just take months and Keltham should make sure spellsilver production is scaling first.
Keltham: He'll ask a lot of questions. Just to make sure he's not missing something.
Asmodia: The answers can all be almost entirely true, and swiftly supplied, since Cheliax actually did do the thing.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 53
Keltham: Keltham holds forth today on the answer to a question Pilar asked him a while ago, about dath ilan's view on what people should want, and how they should want it.
It's not really the way dath ilan sees things, that 'should'. It's not advertised as a decision society gets to make for you - how would that even work, why would any agent agree to coordinate their own part, in that. But if you want to know how an average dath ilani sees things -
So Keltham holds forth then upon the Light, and its origins.
Keltham: Natural selection singlemindedly optimized humans for only one single simple thing, in the 'outer optimization target': Inclusive genetic fitness.
But its optimization method was via accidental mutation producing many random tweaks, and selection keeping only the few tweaks that improved inclusive genetic fitness.
And when that kind of optimization produces entities that do their own optimizing, like humans, using that kind of hill-climbing method that moves slowly and in many directions through the search space - rather than analytically designing a solution - it doesn't reproduce the single simple constant 'outer optimization target' inside the 'inner optimizer' of mortals.
Like, at all.
Some humans explicitly want kids, and not just sex, is about as close as natural selection got. Pretty few humans explicitly want to maximize the number of copies of their DNA in the next generation. Keltham himself was a lot closer to having a goal like that than most dath ilani, and it really wasn't about the DNA, for him, it was about making a point. Keltham definitely doesn't want relative inclusive genetic fitness; if he had two brothers, he wouldn't have been just as happy with each of those brothers having 144 kids, even though that's the same amount of total genetic-relatedness passed down.
So what do the 'inner optimizers' end up wanting, in a hill-climbing 'outer optimization loop' like that?
They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation) that correlated with having more kids - or with your relatives having more kids - across the range of varying situations and environments where the 'outer optimization loop' was optimizing.
Keltham doesn't have them all memorized.
But, for example, people generally want to eat food, especially if they haven't eaten food in a while. Potential ancestors who didn't want to eat any food starved to death and failed to become actual ancestors.
People like green fields, blossoming flowers, the sound of running water in the distance, because people who gravitated to fertile places like that had more kids, in the ancestral environment. Keltham isn't one of the people who have a strong need for that sort of thing - he's fine in this Fortress for a while yet - but if it starts to bother him at some point, he will have to employ Interior Decorating Principles that try to create interior environments that satisfy the same instincts.
Mothers love their children - as do fathers, if they get the kinds of cues that the ancestral environment would have delivered, about the kid being theirs, which dath ilan is correspondingly very careful to deliver. You'd expect that to correlate with having more surviving kids who made grandkids, in the ancestral environment. Mothers who casually tossed their babies aside did not become ancestors.
People who have brothers and sisters usually care about those; they share half your genes on average. There's a joke about how you shouldn't sacrifice your life to save your brother or sister's life, but you should sacrifice your life to save 2 siblings or 8 cousins. It's funny because, of course, human beings don't care at all about their inclusive genetic fitness once they learn that such a thing exists. They're not aligned to that which created them. Like, you can imagine some creator smarter than natural selection devising an analytic solution for things that actually pursued a particular goal, but if you look around at yourself and you're not that, you're not. As humans evaluate shouldness, there's no reason a human should be aligned to their creator, natural selection. There isn't any principle of Law saying that things created will end up aligned to their creators.
Keltham's lessons sure did emphasize that point a lot! He's guessing it's because there's some silly thing kids might otherwise do, where they imagine that inclusive genetic fitness is the 'correct' or 'intended' goal behind all of the things that they actually want. Like, they start incorrectly thinking that they're supposed to calculate how much reproductive fitness they'll get out of food, instead of correctly understanding that they want the food because it's tasty and that's all there is to their own utilityfunction. If a mistake like that carried over to adulthood, people might start thinking that the objective point of loving their own children, was to spread their DNA, rather than to love their children, which is in fact the point if you're a human. So it's important to understand that there's just no reason to think like that!
Asmodia: Thaaaaat does sound like somebody might've been warding dath ilani specifically against modes of thought that are common in Golarion, as Asmodia will highlight for Korva later.
Keltham: It's fine to want lots and lots of things. The ideal of being coherent isn't the same idea as being simple, not at all. Lawfulness just says, don't make weird patterns of decisions where you could rearrange your resources, and get more of everything you wanted simultaneously. If you're going to dance a complicated dance, that's fine, just don't step on your own feet.
The 356 known fragments of desire, the shattered correlated pieces of inclusive genetic fitness in the ancestral environment, are not like components of a utility function; they are not born into human beings as consistently valued long-term goals. They are things people want, dislike, under particular circumstances, patterns of thought that they flinch towards, flinch away from.
Human beings are born, bluntly, as giant messes.
And when they weave themselves into anything more sensible than that - they should take care not to become less complicated, and leave anything out that they really wanted.
Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; the myriad pleasures and satisfactions that may be natural to a person, from good food to good sex; happiness, contentment; beauty, harmony, aesthetic experience; love, friendship, working together; justice and the receiving of earned deserts; power and achievement; self-actualization of what has been designated as virtue; self-expression, freedom; adventure and novelty; ultimate safety from the worst harms; the esteem of others; familial bonds; children and intellectual legacy; honor in one's conduct and trading...
All these are some things close to base human desires in the moment, that seem reasonably reifiable into components of the utility function - things to be pursued as ends in themselves, and not for the sake of anything else. These are some of the things that dath ilan tries to measure when it measures its Planetary Utility Function Achievement Index, as is bet upon in important conditional prediction markets.
There's a lot of things to value! And dath ilan endeavors not to leave any of it around free for the taking, if prediction markets say that it would be just as easy to do things a little differently, and get more of things designated as nice.
Ordinary life and politics in dath ilan, then, takes place close to the tradeoff-optimal frontier - where you can't get more of one thing you want, without sacrificing something else - which is the sort of situation you'd mostly expect to find yourself inside, if you'd otherwise planned and acted like a sane person during your previous life.
Keltham: The ordinary politics of dath ilan are all about the tradeoffs. Is it more important to have more and smarter geniuses in the next generation, or to avoid assortative mating between the Very Smart People as might lead them to begin to diverge from the rest? There are benefits and costs on both sides...
Yet there is a word in Baseline that means the harmony and song between the many varieties of what dath ilan considers (on average) to be betterness in thought and action: kindness and altruism and honor and beauty. It is a word for those rare occasions where, instead of tradeoffs, there is a nontrivial policy question on which utilitarianism and deontology and virtue ethics and aesthetics all agree.
A high-functioning society should present its individuals with only rare true moments like that, because usually things should not be going wrong in that many ways at once; there is a dath ilani proverb that, like acts of individual heroism, such moments should be found mainly in fiction.
Keltham didn't like that fiction, in fact. He found it annoying.
Keltham didn't really understand, on a deep level, why anybody in real life needed the concept of what, in Baseline, would be called 'the Light'.
Until he got to Golarion and found that it - was apparently not that easy - to get the lead out of cooking pots being used to feed children.
That's it. That's all Keltham had to say for today's lecture.
lintamande: Does he just not realize how many problems are bigger than that one even if you're Good.
Carissa Sevar: Well, lots of problems cause children to die horribly, which is worse if you're one of the dead children. You'd rather be an alive child than a slightly smarter dead one.
But this one makes them more worthless. It doesn't seem strange, to Carissa, that Keltham is fixated on it. If there were a reverse-lead, that made you more Lawful and smarter, she'd drink it all the way until she was a god.
Pilar : It's not particularly the answer Pilar was hoping to hear, though, in retrospect, it's obvious enough that dath ilan wasn't going to have an Asmodean-helpful answer there. They would think that Pilar ought to be crystallizing all of her human wants into her utilityfunction, instead of simplifying it down like Sevar spoke of, to 'wanting to be a good slave to Asmodeus' and then to simply serving Asmodeus as the Most High does.
She also needs to warn Sevar, later, against exposing Keltham to facts that activate his Good impulses. She can see, now, some of what the Chosen was talking about when she spoke of mortals being quivering slimes that flinch about in disorganized directions in response to their own fleeting thoughts. If they want to corrupt Keltham to Evil, they need to have him not thinking at all about children, or anything else for which he feels sympathy, for a long-enough period that his Evil impulses have a chance to crystallize unopposed into a full-fledged Evil utilityfunction.
"Are there any impulses on that list of 356 desires that dath ilan says to just cast out of yourself?" Pilar says.
She realizes only after speaking that she forgot to ask if alterPilar would have the same question. AlterPilar could, obviously, but Asmodia is always sternly admonishing them all to ask what their alterselves would do, not could do. You can rationalize anything as a possibility to yourself, it doesn't mean it'll fool Keltham about probabilities.
Keltham: "Dath ilani tend to be pretty conservative about passing that judgment. They wouldn't even have told you that I had too much self-interest, just that I had too little altruism - said that I wanted too little, not too much. And they wouldn't have said that about me, either, wouldn't have told me I was wrong to be what I was. Just, I wasn't what they hoped their own kids would turn out like."
"Human beings, I was told as a kid, have a 'vengeful' impulse," he uses the Baseline word instead of Taldane, to name a feeling rather than an act, "to hit somebody else back as hard as you think they've hit you, or harder, if you hold yourself injured by them. That way, they won't dare injure you in the first place, right? The obvious atomic problem with that baseline emotion, from the standpoint of the Law of Decision, is that it's a 'punishment', something you'd do only because you expected the other agent to respond to threats. The obvious problem with it molecularly is that if people disagree about who owes the net debt of revenge, they get locked into an infinite resonating retaliation. The obvious problem with it globally is that if you've got lots of agents running around trying to invert each other's utility functions, for acts of vengeance or any other reason, it's pretty easy to imagine Reality as a whole getting into a state where everyone's utility functions are being inverted all the time and you'd all collectively prefer unleashing Rovagug on the whole thing."
"So to first order, Civilization tells children, yeah, don't just flow along with your first instinct about revenge. Channel it into something more organized, with better effects on the larger gameboard."
"When somebody stops coordinating with you, stop coordinating with them. It's not 'punishment' to Defect against somebody who's Defecting against you, in a cooperation-defection dilemma; you're just withdrawing the Cooperation you were trying to coordinate with them. It's not 'punishment' to catch a thief or send them to the Last Resort; it's simply not in your own interest to have them wandering around taking your stuff in the future."
"But you can still draw on something like a remaining trace of the emotion of revenge, for that. And that reflects a meta-level policy of rescuing as many emotions as possible, rather than throwing them away and trying to run on pure Law."
Keltham: "If somebody stole my jacket - and ate it, so I couldn't get it back - and was very unlikely to steal again from me personally, you might think at first that the Law would say that it's not in my own interest to spend effort hunting them down, if I didn't feel an impulse to vengeance."
"But imagine that there's ten people from whom a thief is going to steal 5 gold pieces each, in a random order. The thief never hits the same target twice, ever. It costs 10gp to catch the thief."
"By ill-luck, I'm the first person randomly selected as a target. As it happens, I don't particularly care about the other people on the list. Why, I don't even have any idea who they are! So how is it worth my while to spend 10gp on catching somebody who only cost me 5gp originally and isn't going to touch me again in the future?"
"But if you think about it from the perspective of the ten people on the list, not knowing yet which one of them will be the first target hit by the thief, they'd rather a policy that whichever one of them gets hit first, spends 10 gold to track the thief down. If they don't have that policy, they each lose 5gp with certainty. If they do have that policy, they each lose 15gp with 10% probability, 0gp with 90% probability."
"Now, I could carefully reason all that out Lawfully, from scratch, after the thief targets me, and motivate myself only by the thought of how I would've wanted the collective policy to be that whoever had the bad luck to end up in my position, would spend 10gp to hunt down the thief that already cost them 5gp."
"Or I could draw on my emotion about revenge, and hunt down the criminal who stole my jacket, even if that cost me a lot more additional money on top of what was stolen from me. After checking very carefully to make sure that was also what the Law said to do, and not a case of me trying to get away with inverting somebody else's utility function in an attempt to motivate people like that through the threat of 'punishment' - because that, they'd just ignore, or maybe have an incentive to kill me in my sleep before I could go around inverting their utility function. Kids with stronger Good tendencies than mine are cautioned 'do not optimize society in anger', meaning that it's generally considered dangerous to tell yourself that you're hurting somebody else for the public benefit - which I'm safer about, because, like, selfish, so I didn't get cautioned as much there."
"But the point is that Civilization doesn't tell you to flush the emotion of revenge out of yourself and never use it again because it's anti-Lawful. It says to check the Law first, once you've been trained to be able to actually compute that validly, and use the feeling of vengeance to fuel moving through the structures of Law when those structures are close enough to the emotion. After you've checked that it's not going to wreck society if everyone starts acting like that, and that you're not turning into a rogue utility-function inverter that other people have an incentive to exile or cryosuspend before you hurt them next, etcetera."
Carissa Sevar: "What about sadism, actually enjoying hurting other people because it's fun. Or the desire to have power over others, to command their obedience. Or the desire to shape someone exactly how you want them."
Keltham: "I think the approved dath ilani response is to end up in another dimension where people enjoy that."
Carissa Sevar: "'Find the place for all of your desires' sounds like wise advice but - I guess I am declaring myself skeptical Good societies actually pull it off, instead of trying really hard not to notice a bunch of them."
Pilar : They're... kind of good at noticing, Pilar suspects.
Keltham: "Also, wrongthought, I wasn't being fair to dath ilan there. Sadism can be expressed as positive 'trolling', as an aggressive instinct in competitive games, or as a struggle for advantage inside of Complicated Relationships. The desire for power can express itself in wanting to start your own company. The desire to shape somebody else exactly how you want them... I don't think is on the list of primitives, at least that I saw of it, and seems too specific for it? Maybe that's like, desire for power, plus whatever it is you wanted from somebody else being that way. Not strict addition, the two feelings can blend together with each other and with sexuality to form a new complex-circuit that becomes part of you. But it's not on the list of 'universal genetically built-in primitives' either, I'm guessing, even if there's a real list somewhere and I only saw the censored version of it."
"Now I'm wondering if sexual sadism is on a real version of that list that gets censored, or if it's something nonprimitive that happens to people when their sexuality and their sadism blend a certain way. Probably the first case? If it was nonprimitive they'd have worked out how to stop it happening."
Pilar : "I'm definitely suspicious that there are at least some items on the actual list of all mortal desires that a Lawful Good Civilization like dath ilan would try to drive completely out of its people."
Keltham: "I really think all y'all don't give dath ilan enough credit on some dimensions, if not others. They didn't tell me about my sexual sadism because there would have been no good way for me to satisfy it, Pilar, not because they wanted to deny me my utilityfunction. Or did you have something else in mind?"
Pilar : "Everything that Lawful Good considers not nice and pretty! Like - the part of people where, if you've suffered yourself, it feels better if you can make others suffer the way you suffered -"
Keltham: "That one doesn't make sense. Paying costs to hit back at whatever made you suffer, sure, but - hitting somebody else - Pilar, what? That doesn't sound like something natural selection would do."
Pilar : Pilar opens her mouth to retort that it's obviously a reproductive advantage, and then stops short because she can't actually see how it is.
Asmodia: Asmodia is flashing back to Hell, to a silent chained boy whose ears she cut off with a shard of glass, and how that did not, in fact, make her feel any better. She has questions, but alterAsmodia doesn't, and so she remains silent.
Keltham: "Before we start getting into anything about possible divine interventions, though, are you sure that's a primitive built-in emotion, to want unrelated others to suffer as you've suffered? Or could it be something like - it feels bad to be at a relative disadvantage to other people, and if they get shoved down, you feel better? Assuming you were myopic and didn't have any Law to ask what the group effects would be of that decision being made across multiple places."
"Because that feeling is on the list, and we just get told to make sure we push ourselves up rather than pushing other people down."
Pilar : "I don't know that it's a 'builtin primitive'. I'm - not sure what that distinction really means, or how you could tell?"
Keltham: "Yeah, that gets complicated even as a matter of useful definition. But at the very least, if you've got an impulse like that, try an Owl's Wisdom, or maybe even try giving Asmodia an Owl's Wisdom and borrowing her headband, and then try to stare at it to see if it's made out of parts."
Pilar : ...it feels really obvious that there are entire realms of emotion they just didn't tell him about. But Pilar is having trouble figuring out how to find a really devastating argument here, and is suddenly concerned whether any of those emotions were put into Golarion by divine interventions they don't want Keltham thinking about. She needs to check in with Sevar and maybe at some length before trying to pursue this any further.
(What she was hoping for, this entire time, was that Civilization would've openly told Keltham to drive some emotions entirely out of himself, using a technique that he'd happen to talk about in front of Pilar.)
Keltham: Keltham will talk a bit more about what kind of emotions Civilization is dubious about, and how they often try nonetheless to 'rescue' them, give them a place somewhere in the utilityfunction.
It's clear that Civilization is very impressed with itself, about how much of a hand it graciously holds out to offer tiny scraps of indulgence to people's impulses to pride, glory, power and cruelty.
It's equally clear that Cheliax would not be impressed at all with how far Civilization gets on self-actualizing those parts of people.
Oh, and Keltham does happen to mention, in passing, that if you meet aliens who just really really want to do the opposite of your utility function unless you pay them 5gp, Civilization's strategic reply is to remove them from reality by any means necessary, even if they're only asking 5gp. Yes, even if the aliens have a plausible story about how they totally evolved with a desire like that and it's not a threat at all. Somebody probably thought they were being clever, at some point along the way. They probably at some point were imagining how you'd respond to a situation like that by sighing and paying them the 5gp, when they at some point made a decision about whether or not to go around really honestly wanting to invert others utilityfunctions.
The response is not to pessimize the aliens' utilityfunction, note, that would be contributing to the problem of making Reality an unpretty place. You just remove the aliens from Reality, even if you have to destroy yourself in the process; Reality will be better off if the sections of it containing utilityfunction inverters just don't exist for very long. And if the aliens thought, at some point, that you'd just pay them 5gp, more fools they. In broken possible worlds like that, where people thought the wrong thing about how you'd act, and where the main desideratum is to have those possibilities not exist in the first place, there is a place for modified-'spite' where you are willing to sacrifice your own existence to end theirs. Just not so much spite that you start thinking about how to anti-optimize the aliens' own utilityfunctions, to try to 'punish' them, because then you're just becoming part of the problem.
Again, this isn't about trying to threaten the aliens into behaving more nicely; it's about being the sort of Civilization that, if it finds itself in a rare broken piece of Reality like that, will try to remove any utilityfunction-inverters from existence. Aliens thinking about whether or not to go on being utilityfunction-inverters are welcome to take that into account, or not, as they please; Civilization has made its own choice there.
...actually now that Keltham is saying all this, he's kind of seeing why Lawful Good civilizations in Golarion might just tell people never to feel spite, never to feel vengeful, never to express any fury or indignation, because the kind of carefully detailed guidelines he's been laying out are plausibly beyond the ability of Intelligence 10 people to understand or follow. Or even Intelligence 16, if you don't come from a Civilization full of people much smarter than that.
Carissa Sevar: " - that just kind of sounds like an absurd wrong awful policy to me even for smart people? I don't like that Zon-Kuthon exists, but Civilization absolutely should not have destroyed itself utterly in the effort to destroy him the second it found out he existed! Locking him up, as the gods in fact did, seems like a considerably better plan!"
Keltham: "They'd obviously imprison Zon-Kuthon and destroy him later at leisure rather than immediately unleashing Rovagug, if they had that option?"
Carissa Sevar: "And if they don't have that option they should leave him alone!"
Keltham: "Not seeing the Lawful reasoning for that. The point is that you don't pay Zon-Kuthon the five gold pieces. Once that part is settled, Civilization then decides how much it doesn't like Xovaikain continuing to exist, and how much it wants everything else it could buy using the opportunity-cost of the resources to destroy Zon-Kuthon, and takes its own maximal option. This would plausibly include Civilization deleting itself in order to delete Zon-Kuthon and Xovaikain, if that was even an option in the first place, but only if there wasn't some better alternative to rescue everybody in Xovaikain without destroying Civilization."
Carissa Sevar: " - am I understanding correctly that I owe my entire existence to the sheer fortune that none of our Lawful Good gods use that style of reasoning."
Keltham: "Or they had a plan, Carissa. Zon-Kuthon is sealed now, isn't he? Even with Aroden having died a hundred years ago and other plans being thrown off. Planning for the long-term is Lawful too."
"Civilization deletes itself to delete Zon-Kuthon and Xovaikain if it would otherwise last forever, not if it's going away in a few years anyhow. Centuries... I dunno, there'd be a big fight about it, I'd definitely come down on the 'dislike Xovaikain but accept for a few centuries' side."
Carissa Sevar: "If Law says to destroy Civilization rather than give Zon-Kuthon five gold I don't want to be Lawful. If Law says to take into account the ways that a Zon-Kuthon-paying policy creates Zon-Kuthons, fine, if it says that stupid humans who can't do all the complex calculations shouldn't give Zon-Kuthon five gold, fine, if it says you should spend at least ten gold pieces doing not what Zon-Kuthon wants, fine, but if it actually says that you should destroy everything if you have a straight choice between doing that and giving five gold pieces to Zon-Kuthon then - then I think I'm on Zon-Kuthon's side, because he's the side that isn't murdering everybody in any nearby hypotheticals!!!!"
Keltham: "The idea is taking into account the way that paying Zon-Kuthons creates Zon-Kuthons, in a way that's extremely suspicious about any clever story where some Zon-Kuthons just happened to be lying around one day, to the point where it starts to look like 'deontology'. You don't want the aliens wondering if the right clever story might fool the complicated reasoning you'll be doing about them. You want them correctly estimating that your reasoning looks pretty simple and can be summarized as 'die in a fire'."
(As is a much, much, much stronger curse in a world where the burned dead don't get suspended.)
Carissa Sevar: "Is dath ilan convinced that this policy actually - minimizes how often Civilization gets destroyed, somehow?"
Keltham: "More like, maximizing how much all of Greater Reality looks like a place where agents want things and get them, instead of, when agents want things or dislike things, there's a bunch of other entities running around trying to threaten them and firing those threats and transforming all of Reality into a place where most entities get what they don't want. That's literally about the most tragic way that Reality could look. Civilization doesn't want to do anything at all, even paying five gold pieces, even reasoning in a complicated way about whether to pay five gold pieces, that shifts Reality a little more in that direction."
Carissa Sevar: " - well then I think I just disagree with Civilization about whether it's more tragic for there to be bullies or for everyone to be obliterated forever."
Keltham: "It admittedly makes even more sense now that I realize that, as the Keepers would've known, everybody would just end up somewhere else inside that Greater Reality they were trying to help prettify."
Carissa Sevar: "- I don't think Asmodeus reasons that way and if He does reason that way I am in the market for a new god." Alter-Carissa only, obviously; real Carissa is aware which decisions result in Carissae being obliterated forever.
Keltham: "You'd rather your god believe false things than true things?"
Carissa Sevar: "I don't want to lend myself to a power that will destroy me to prettify Greater Reality!"
Keltham: "I think you're simultaneously asking the question of 'What if I actually get destroyed' and 'What if Asmodeus falsely believes I won't get destroyed', rather than forming the hypothetical 'What if I don't get destroyed and Asmodeus correctly believes I won't get destroyed' which is the one I was trying to point to there. Possibly on account of you having some trouble with lending temporary consideration to the hypothetical 'What if I don't get destroyed', since spending too much time thinking about it might cause you to come to an incorrect answer and then get actually destroyed, if you don't feel yourself to have earned trust in your own validity and are afraid of becoming mistaken. But I'd expect Keepers and Asmodeus not to make mistakes about that, so asking what if they strongly believe something should be the same as asking what if it's true."