Keltham v3: "There's a cultural gap we never did cross, and not all of that was the Conspiracy making sure that I never understood Cheliax correctly.  A dath ilani woman would tell me not to use Splendour 25 to make a conversation nicer for her, and, depending on how cautious versus forgiving she was by her nature, might decide that she would not date a man who'd deployed Splendour 25 against a woman even if he'd done so literally to save that multiverse.  She just would not feel personally safe around him."

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: "That's manipulating you and I don't want to do that, don't want to be the kind of person who does that, don't really believe it's ever okay to be the kind of person who does that even if you've already crossed other lines it's never okay to cross. I'm not reaching the condescending conclusion you don't really understand what manipulation is and are okay with it because you fundamentally are failing to model it, but I'm confused!"

Carissa Sevar: "Talking to someone who has a lot of Splendour on you is giving yourself into their hands at least a little bit. But - well, two things.

One is that many of the other decisions I've made in the last two days are also giving myself into your hands a lot more than that, and I don't see a difference between Splendour and putting on your earring and swearing not to work against your plans and giving you wishes - like, they all might be bad to the extent they let you achieve your goals at my expense, and good to the extent they make things better. I am guessing that to you, Splendour feels different because it's more like modifying your priorities than constraining you, but I think that to me, at least, maybe to most people who haven't had dath ilani training - both of those end up modifying you, everything modifies you, to be in someone's life is to change which parts of you grow and which get squished, and all you can do is choose people who bring out parts of you that you like.

I suspect now that I say that that there's a Keeper art of not being altered by having done something you were selected to do randomly, being the same person as the version of you who wasn't selected to do it but would have, but it's not one of those I think I should be trying to pick up right now. I don't have enough of a self to defend. And the one true real conviction that I do have - that people who want to live should not be annihilated - I genuinely don't think you could talk me out of that with 50 Splendour. 

Two is that just like you can trade with Asmodeus if you're Abadar, you can just price in that He'll be trading adversarially, and so you can talk to someone who has Splendour and just correct for the Splendour. I like Abrogail and that's probably mostly the Splendour and I can in fact set it aside and kill her if that's strategic. I like Dispater and that's definitely the Splendour and I can set that aside if we think of some other way to reach a confidentiality agreement with Erecura where the fact of talking to her won't itself be suspicious. I believe myself broadly competent to correct for liking you and for you trying to be persuasive to me, and where I'm not perfect, I'm also not perfect at - correcting for being mad at you or for hating you or for being scared of you, and hating you and being scared of you makes it harder to think and so is worse."

Keltham v3: He sits down and hugs his knees to himself.  Keeps his face where she can see it, though.  "Okay.  That at least doesn't sound like you're - doing the thing that everyone else in Golarion does - where you have your Golarion frame and you can't imagine anything outside the Golarion frame and everything I actually am is just an outrageous deliberate insult for being not what the Golarion frame calls for -"

"Dath ilani try so hard to reach across the gap that exists between mind and mind.  It's, not literally all of our fiction, our science fiction, but so much of it is that.  When two dath ilani with - let's say a longstanding friendship, old alliance, not romantic couple - when they have a serious disagreement worth putting effort into - they put the effort into reaching across to one another, that novels showed exemplary protagonists doing with literal aliens.  Because that's what it takes for people to actually communicate with each other and not, the thing that Cheliax had, where both sides just pretend.  Which, though the rest of Golarion doesn't know it, they have only very slightly less than Cheliax."

"I thought, afterwards, that the reason why I was able to relate to anybody in the Conspiracy, is that, in trying so hard not to clue me in on what the world was like, in having to keep me contained - you had to meet me halfway.  You had to actually stretch your hand back, across the huge effort I was making to reach out my own hand, which I did because I was dath ilani, and you did because you were making a desperate extraordinary effort to keep the alien contained and needed to understand the alien and meet it on its own terms in order to deceive it.  And which, nobody else in Golarion, has in fact made very much effort to do for me since.  To them, their frame is just, the way things are, should be, must be, and if I try to be halfway less insane that's not very much of an effort worth reciprocating because I should just not be insane at all, obviously."

"I'm glad that you are trying to do - any of that, now - even if it's to try to stop the multiverse from being annihilated, as your own utilityfunction considers to be a bad thing.  Accurately or not, before, you came across as - not doing that, anymore - and I thought - it was because there was no more Conspiracy, and you wouldn't try to meet the alien halfway it it was just under threat of the multiverse being destroyed, and not under threat of being tortured for failure."

"I mean, I get why, according to your held principles, according to your model of yourself, you care about the multiverse more, but I didn't - trust that the real you -"

"It doesn't matter.  Even if it's only under threat of the multiverse being destroyed, I'm glad to be with, the Carissa who also reaches back."

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: Doesn't need translating.

Carissa Sevar: "I think - it wasn't just the Conspiracy - I think I got put in charge of the Conspiracy because I wanted to understand you so badly that I was better at it than anyone else."

Keltham v3: "Out of - a maybe stupid effort to understand a past that's already past - was anyone else - trying for your job, incentivized to try to beat you at it, was there anybody else trying to be an expert on Keltham - would that have gotten them tortured by you, if you'd noticed them threatening you - did you crush down any potential competitors -"

Carissa Sevar: " - it was Maillol's job at first. I - know you didn't really know him - but he was a decent man. He was good at his job at the Worldwound. I don't know if the official statistics are true but I think we had substantially lower losses than average. But Project Lawful was too weird, too confusing, and - required higher Intelligence, probably - the first night we slept together, when I told you I wanted to see a priest, I went to him with a question about whether -

- my recall may not be perfect but I think I was trying to ask whether, if I slept with you, as I wanted to, and then later you learned that you weren't unaware of subtle Chelish signals of people not wanting to sleep with you, you were just, the way things go in Golarion, not supposed to care, then you'd be furious with me for sleeping with you, even though I did want to - because we couldn't lie about the fundamental fact that most people in Golarion have sex they don't want sometimes, it was obviously entangled with too many other things, and if we weren't going to lie to you about that then it might be that we needed to tell you before anyone had sex with you -

- and he said to me that if I understood what I'd just asked I'd have to be the one to figure out an answer, because he did not understand what I'd just asked, and then after some further discussion had me ask Abarco and then told me I was in charge of trying to maximize the amount of time before you got fed up and left us. And that's how it ended up my job.

And then later, in Egorian, he got tortured very badly for a mistake that he made that I still don't completely understand and was - having a hard time exercising ambitious initiative about the project, visibly so, so I told him I wanted Project Lawful to not have torture beyond what was in Taldor, as an experiment to see if that let people think, and he didn't agree to do it but he told me I could ask the Most High to put me in charge. So I did. 

No one especially tried to undermine me about that. They'd have been enormously rewarded if they could legitimately do better, of course, but it was obviously a very hard job, and it's not like the rewards weren't also very high for being my second-in-command. I wouldn't've crushed someone who looked like they could grow up to be genuinely better than me, that could've made us lose. I really didn't want us to lose, and I also don't like - people who are under my command - being weaker than they could be - that was why the low-punishments rule, I thought maybe they'd grow like we needed them to...

In hindsight the rumor mill was probably doing a lot for me, and additionally I think it was visible that Abrogail Thrune had taken lots of personal interest in the Project and no sane person wants to come to her attention in the context of a Project they might fuck up, not if they can avoid it.

When I was being punished for your departure there was a lot of angling to take over the project but it was mostly Abarco and Avaricia gambling I wouldn't come back .... I did torture them. Not so much for trying to compete with me as for driving Asmodia to suicide. And I - hurt Maillol very badly, about that - it was horrible and stupid of me, he was always decent to me and I don't actually know if the damage I did can be undone. But not - not during the Project, not while you were there."

Keltham v3: "I am probably imagining this as being much much worse for you than it actually was, but I have no idea how I could ask about that, what would be the interpersonal comparison metric of worseness."

"It makes you look better than what Ione Sala knew of the background story, before she left Cheliax, which was all she was allowed to tell me about.  You doing those things, for those reasons."

Carissa Sevar: "It's possible I am wrong about my reasons. People get muddled enough to backfill their own history wrong, it's kind of terrifying. But I'm sure about the question I brought to Maillol that got me put in charge of the Project, and about what I got promoted past him over. I don't - think it was very awful for me. Almost everything I hate, looking back, is what I did, not what happened to me. With a couple exceptions but they're the kind of thing that would've happened more if I hadn't been in charge of the Project if anything."

Keltham v3: "I have enough additional questions that I need to start writing them down to make sure I can believe they will not just eventually get lost.  I am going to ask things that I would not have previously asked, and hope that my mind does not require a lot of emotion-severance about knowing the answers as soon as I turn off Splendour 25."

He takes a diary-like notebook from a Bag of Holding, and a fancy magical quill which is still not as good as a ballpoint pen, and writes:

- What drove Asmodia to suicide?- Are the others okay who haven't been mentioned, like Gregoria or Shilira or Korva?- What did Abarco and Avaricia and Maillol do to get tortured?- How was Abarco able to force you into sex if you were his boss?  (Ione didn't know this but said there were many possibilities, dominant one Abrogail punishing you for fucking up.)

Carissa Sevar: "When I left the project I didn't do a good enough job giving it continuity of orders, and also everyone was very uncertain how things were going to shake out without me, and Avaricia decided to make a play for being in charge if I didn't get back, or second-in-command if I did, and started needling Asmodia.

They'd pulled practically all the high-quality Security we'd enjoyed when we had you and sent them to Nidal and replaced them mostly with people who they were maximally confident wouldn't defect on exposure to ilanism, which mostly meant people who just enjoyed being awful people. And who started going after Asmodia and the other girls thought of as loyal to me, in variously plausibly-deniable or not-even-very-plausibly-deniable ways. And Asmodia was - a heretic, and naive - she thought that they'd do what was in Cheliax's interests if she just kept pointing out how stupid it was for them not to - she tried to get Abarco and Maillol to make them stop - and then when it didn't work she killed herself. 

No one thought she'd do that because Hell is worse. But she'd died and gone to Hell already, right, back when Nidal attacked us, and - she came back happier and healthier - she must've gone to the gardens, because Erecura foresaw that I'd bargain for that - so she didn't have anything to fear. So she killed herself. 

At which point Abrogail pulled me out of my punishment for failing with you and I went back and I - knew that Maillol and Subirachs had allowed this deliberately because they thought it'd be good for me to terrorize some people into submission for once - 

- the other students are all okay, I think. Pilar eventually stepped in and started protecting them with her Cayden powers. Meritxell's helping her with training the new candidate-ilani. I own all their souls and they'll get statued if they die.

Iiiii notice myself being nervous about discussing Abarco because many possible ways that conversation could go will make me annoyed at you for things that are completely not at all your fault and are entirely my own."

Keltham v3: "My current understanding is that you got forced into breaking that promise and did not - deliberately court being forced to break it.  If that understanding is unambiguously correct, we can pass on."

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: "You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to, I'm trying to give you the-thing-most-important-to-me-to-know at a higher level of abstraction to make it easier for you to not talk about it, I cannot actually do more than that to protect you while you haven't told me anything at all."

Carissa Sevar: "That's correct, yeah.

- we were running a test of whether it was possible to escape from the facilities and evade Security. Because we wanted escaping-with-Keltham to be a possibility and weren't sure what it'd take for an escape to be credible. The seed of the plan that became 'Nefreti' rescuing you. Security had orders to answer to Subirachs for the day. It didn't even - occur to me as a possible failure mode."

Keltham v3: "Accepted.  I model you as explicitly not wanting to hear reassuring things I could say about dath ilani attitudes versus Golarion attitudes, you can pokeback if that model is mistaken.  I pause briefly so you can potentially pokeback."

(Pause.)

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: "Since you predicted you'll get annoyed if I say anything, I'm guessing all the things I have to say won't actually help. That being the obvious inference from what you said. But I'm checking because I want to say things, if they might help to hear."

Carissa Sevar: "...maybe you could say them but just say them about Keltham attitudes instead of about dath ilan attitudes because I kind of have a grudge against your home planet's way of doing ethics right this minute but I do care what you think."

Keltham v3: "No.  I realize I was the one who had responsibility for being able to say what dath ilan was about, but I am sad and bitter about what - people here must think of dath ilan, now, and a whole bright world they never saw, and imagine horrible things about because they've been tortured by Golarion to the point where they cannot imagine an alternative to it -"

"It will not be good for me to accept that instruction."

"Are we still on crying-in-each-other's presence terms?  I'm keeping tears out of my eyes right now."

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: "I'm mad at Elias Abarco and I wish it hadn't happened to you and I hope you're okay and I'm not mad at you about that and the stuff Carmin said was right."

Carissa Sevar: - okay I think at some point I'm abusing the imaginary Keltham thing. 

Carissa Sevar: "I don't mind if you cry in front of me."

Keltham v3: "Okay.  I'm not holding against you - you being forced into that particular thing - though it's part of a much huger pattern of things you got forced into that I can't split off from you because then there's nothing left.  But that particular promise-breaking, I'm not holding against you.  If someday you want to know in more detail why, and what a beautiful sunlit world looks like and thinks like about issues like that, you can ask.  Someday."

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: I don't want bad things to happen to you. I wish I could have protected you. Elias Abarco sucks.

Carissa Sevar: You could have brought anything out of dath ilan you wanted, to Golarion. You could have ended slavery, if that was what dath ilan's ethics said to do, or made everyone rich, or ended all plagues and famines and wars, you could have made resurrection so cheap that every family could afford it for every child, you could have built whatever bright sunlit world you wanted. 

The thing you decided to bring out of dath ilan to my world is death for everyone. It doesn't matter what else dath ilan has; that is what you chose to give us. 

She doesn't say it. It's not true or fair; it just feels true, and Keltham's - right, about how hard it is to stretch across the gulf, how much trying it takes, and she believes him, that he's trying too -

Carissa Sevar: She nods.

Keltham v3: "I would not - actually be okay - with resurrecting Elias Abarco for, reasons directed at inflicting suffering on him, but if that's something you'd otherwise do, if not for me, I can try to pay you to make up the difference."

Carissa Sevar:  " - huh? No, I've tried not to be - personally vindictive about it, what would that help - I own an option on his soul too, and I was planning to make him into the best devil I could, it wouldn't be fair to do anything less -"

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: I think he might've been trying to say that that'd be an understandable way to feel, thing to want, that if you do want that he wants you to at least have something equivalent in value, so that while he can't give you that he can give you something you wanted as much as that -

Carissa Sevar: " - I appreciate the offer, though."

Keltham v3: "Okay.  I keep thinking - that I don't know what kind of person you actually are, when half of you isn't being pointwise shaped by the threat of immediate torture, and half of you isn't an elaborate lie.  And I keep thinking that, it's not like I could actually ask, or you could tell me, because even fully half a day being out from under all of that is not enough time that you could reasonably figure out who you are."

Carissa Sevar: "There are bits I've figured out. Not - the whole thing, definitely. I think - there are instincts I had all along, and was ignoring, but they didn't go away, and I can just stop ignoring them. And there's - it's not like how I got here isn't part of the answer to who I am. 

I figured out I needed to overthrow Asmodeus if I wanted to fix Hell, so I wrote a letter convincing Aspexia Rugatonn to let me sell my soul, rescue all the Project girls, and make things okay enough I could work with you to build Civilization, because I was pessimistic about doing it without you and I, uh, thought we probably couldn't work together if Asmodia and Peranza were being eternally tortured and it was my fault.

I think that's - a decent starting description of who I am."

Keltham v3: "I was - pretty explicitly not trying to be anyone, after I got out of Cheliax.  I'd lost all my girlfriends except Ione who would have been third on my list for emotional support and not on my list for physical intimacy, found out that all my hard work up until that point had made Golarion worse, figured out that Cheliax was holding my prospective child or children hostage, found out about the Boneyard, found out about Hell, didn't decide immediately to destroy Pharasma's Creation but I knew that if I couldn't think of a solution I would have to do that, didn't want -"

Keltham v3: "- didn't want, didn't want, never wanted, to hurt anyone -"

Keltham v3: "And at Splendour 25 I can, apparently, just bull-rush through letting myself feel some of that, if not all of it, so I have spent a few hours curled up sort of blacking out and not doing anything, and then another few hours letting myself starting to feel some of the more bearable things.  But it is still not clear to me yet that - I want to be a person, here, or would benefit from being one, while I have to do the things I have to do."

Carissa Sevar: "I think I'm made pretty differently from you, but, uh, trying not to feel things and just to do what I'd calculated was correct without letting myself catch up emotionally and while scared to even think....worked really badly, in my case. It'd be a very unusual mind that worked better when half of it was out of commission."

Keltham v3: "I am not scared to think.  I at no point during any of this decided to model the world incorrectly.  It's what's wise to let myself feel that's the question."

Carissa Sevar: 'scared to think' is about the Cayden Cailean stuff but his reason for being scared to think about it makes perfect sense and aren't emotional in nature and probably it'd be unhelpful to push further on it. "Sorry. 

I really want you to recover yourself and feel things but I think I am motivated in part by hoping if you do that then you won't destroy the universe.... I would still want it if it were magically stipulated not to affect the odds of destroying the universe, though."

Keltham v3: "When were you trying not to feel things and calculate and that worked out poorly?  Like... all of your life in Cheliax, or...?"

Carissa Sevar: " - mostly no, actually? Mostly just when you left and we were trying to figure out Project direction and, uh, Aspexia Rugatonn said if it took me killing twenty thousand people to figure out how to make ilani that'd be worth it, and I felt - uh, probably what I felt was basically some part of me noticing that Asmodeanism is incompatible with even a tiny shard of human values - but I ignored it, obviously, and when I was hurting Maillol I didn't want to but I had all these good arguments for why I should, and actually even by my priorities at the time I shouldn't have -

- it's not that my feelings are a perfect guide, I also tortured some people and didn't feel bad about it, but - the feelings were information about my values and ...your values are a dangerous thing to be wrong about while you're trying to do something big and important."

Keltham v3: "I suppose.  My values seem not ambiguous or complicated, here, and my assessments didn't shift between before and after I augmented my intelligence."

"As I noticed after I asked the question, I asked it in part to deflect from - you saying you wanted me to recover myself."

"I do not, actually, even now, feel that there is very much point to that.  It became - clear, after I left Cheliax - that the sum of my issues would not let me be happy unless I walked away from all of them and probably resorted to magical mind control to make myself not think about them.  There comes a point beyond which you can't be happy and there's no point in trying.  So I took my augmented intelligence and started trying to roll my own pseudo-Keeper skills, which, obviously, I am not getting right.  Also I suspect that headband Wisdom is another thing that interfaces poorly with dath ilani, or at least, the people here did not seem to know what I was talking about when I asked them if there were methods for handling the thing where staring at your own emotions with +6 Wisdom makes the emotions go away."

"I would have put more relative effort into solving that sort of issue if I had not been trying to - just speed ahead to where this is all over, and hope that, somehow, I'd be able to get back together with Carissa at the end of it."

"Which wish, it seems, will also not be granted."

Carissa Sevar: "....I notice the impulse to say that if you don't destroy the world I will absolutely and happily be yours forever. That sounds like the most doomed romantic relationship conceivable on every level but it is not in fact false."

Keltham v3: "I assume you meant to say that about if I don't try to destroy the world, at all, prohibiting also my trying to the point of Cayden showing up and presenting an alternative to destroying the world."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm not sure? One basically reasonable thing a person could say is 'I really like you but I can't get over you trying to kill everyone; we can only be together if you don't try to kill everyone'. But ....I think the thing I'm feeling is more - I want something Keltham really wants to live in the world where he doesn't kill everyone, regardless of how we ended up there. Which is plausibly even more doomed! But it's closer to how I actually feel."

Keltham v3: "I didn't understand 'want something Keltham really wants'?"

Carissa Sevar: "Right now, it seems like you are very miserable, and even if the world doesn't end, there isn't anything that you care deeply about that you expect to get to enjoy, in the world that continues existing and doesn't subject you to any personality death.

And - while I suppose this is a rude sort of assumption to make about someone - it feels possible that you wouldn't want to end the world, if you expected to be really and deeply happy if the world kept on existing. Or that you'd have a little more motivation somewhere deep inside you to come up with an alternative, or that you'd be a little more willing to compromise if you were getting most of what you wanted but not all of it. 

That possibility makes me want to offer you anything I possibly can, if the world survives. Not conditional on you not trying to end it - just to say to you, if the world exists, we'll live in Civilization and be happy and I'll be yours forever, there's something worth living for here.

I can imagine Carmin making such a face about this but that's where I'm at."

Keltham v3: "Needs to involve people not being in Hell as that basically exists now, better childcare in the Boneyard, some protected landing areas in the Abyss and Maelstrom, and neither of us needing to be a god..."

"Ironically enough, if we get an ending like that, it will imply further things about - what happens to people like me, after we die in plane crashes - such that, in fact, destroying everybody in the multiverse would have probably sent them to pretty safe destinations on average."

Carissa Sevar: "Two of the items to argue on my items to argue list are 'will technological development fix the Boneyard situation anyway inside a century' and 'are the Abyss and Maelstrom actually bad enough to defensibly risk the multiverse over if Hell is fixed.' But I don't know if we're moving on to that conversation yet, or if there's - more personal stuff to argue first -"

Keltham v3: "I'm finding myself wanting to back up from - what potentially sounds like a promise, or an offer, that we could be happy together under sufficiently optimistic circumstances - because I don't know whether you think you'd just, actually be happy, or if you're offering to sign yourself back over to me and let me use mind-control on you if I want you to be happy, or if it's the second thing but actually that's just how your sexuality rolls... how much of that was reality?"

Carissa Sevar: "I'd be really surprised if mind control was needed but am not intending to say 'by any means short of mind control' or something, if we have to use mind control to make it work we can do that." She can see Carmin's face in front of her going "wow! no! let's back up!" but she's not in fact going to retract that, not at all, not if this in fact helps Keltham think about the world as something he might want to live in. 

"I - told you the truth about how my sexuality works, except I think actually there's something about what you were doing which a Chelish person in your place would not have been doing which was in fact an important ingredient of it being good for me rather than just not hard for me to endure. And I do think that probably my not really having a sense of who I am as a person would play badly with belonging to someone else but that solves itself inside a year, I'm not expecting to need that long to figure out who I am as a person. - I want to travel the world. Read the histories in lots of different countries. Talk to people. Visit the Outer Planes too, talk to people there. Figure out which of them are - ways a Carissa might turn out - and what I want to do about that."

Keltham v3: "Sounds nice.  I ended up in an entirely different universe and never got to explore very much of it at all.  Not a lot of different scenery programmed in the game, apparently."

"There's an angry thing I need to get out of the way - not about exploring, about the whole, destroying the multiverse thing.  Even if it's unwise, I think I should say it before we talk multiversal destruction, so it's not just running through my brain over and over."

Carissa Sevar: - nod.

Keltham v3: "You were emotionally loud at me about how much you think it's not okay to destroy the multiverse.  As I understand Golarion rules for political debate, I'm supposed to be loud back at you about people in Hell who are too broken now, in too much pain, for them to pray to me, or anyone, for rescue.  About infants who wake up in the Boneyard and cry for their parents and nobody comes for them until some feral older toddler bites off their hand and then they heal because that's how the Boneyard works, and they grow up like that too and go to the Abyss and then cease to exist locally and, I hope, end up somewhere with good psychiatric rehabilitation."

"If I don't come with a good, persuasive, loud emotional response like that, then, as I understand the rules for Golarion discourse, I've lost the argument.  Possibly the person who made an angry argument and didn't get an angry counterargument feels that they've definitely won the debate, there, even if the other person is unreasonably not changing course despite having lost so badly."

"I want you to imagine that you are the villain in control of everything, and that I am the protagonist who has to steer reality only by persuading you.  Imagine that I, the protagonist, come in here being very emotionally loud at you about how dare you not destroy the multiverse when there's somebody on fire in Avernus right now and it's maybe not too late to send them on to their next reality while there's still something left, if we work fast enough."

"Imagine that you don't say back anything at high voice volume and emotionally loud, about the importance of people getting to live, back at me.  You just state that the importance of people getting to continue existing is the deciding factor according to your own utilityfunction."

"What are you feeling when you decline to respond to my emotional loudness with more emotional loudness of your own?"

Carissa Sevar: "If I imagine that person, I mostly feel...sorry for them that they're missing so much, that there's so much human value it seems like they can't understand? But presumably I'd have a script for responding to this, if it comes up regularly, and that'd - shape my feelings about it - like, I'd know what response actually helped get through to people like that, or at least have - guesses I was curious about? I guess I might be annoyed, if they'd interrupted something important?"

Keltham v3: "Right, well, what I feel is something like, I am having to be the adult here, I am doing the emotional work here.  While it might under other circumstances be searingly annoying that the other person might think they'd won the argument, having the deciding power would make up for that, so what I would actually be wondering about was why they were trying something so ineffective as being indignant at me, when I could not plausibly be persuaded by that, about this issue they seemed to feel was important.  I would think they were probably just, acting out their own emotions, by reflex.  Saying that I would feel dismissive about it, would not be wrong."

"I am not saying that you cannot have and express feelings about how much you don't want the multiverse destroyed.  Expressing them indignantly, at me, as if I shared your background assumptions and just needed to be shown the self-evident truth, acting out those emotions at me -"

"It's not particularly likely to work on me.  I make only that argument and no others, because I think it is the part that you, by your own principles, ought to care about.  It won't work.  It will hinder you in what you say is your purpose."

"The part I feel 'shouldness' about, I suppose, is that two dath ilani, no matter how extreme the situation they were in, would never do that to each other.  That's why they'd be able to continue, trading, working together, maybe even not hating each other, even if they had an unresolvable difference of utility.  Clearly everybody in this planet ought to behave that way, the way I think they should behave.  When the universe doesn't behave like that, it's doing so to personally hurt me and I should yell at it, and you, in this case, are being the universe, so I am yelling."

Carissa Sevar: "- I think I wouldn't find an argument at all less persuasive because it was emotional? Like, it it were an argument we should destroy the world it still wouldn't move me because that is really really overdetermined as a horrible idea, but I wouldn't feel any differently about the person who came in to yell about it and the person who came in to calmly ask about it, and therefore wouldn't really be more confused about the emotional person than the calm one, except insofar as in Chelish terms being unable to conceal your emotions means you're weak and contemptible."

Keltham v3: "I have to say that if this was otherwise a nice planet that should absolutely not be destroyed, and some ill-advised people were doobling along doing something that would destroy it, like an ill-advised Wish spell; and this wasn't even a values difference, such that they did share all my emotions and could theoretically be persuaded by those; I would still not just start screaming at them, about all the people explicitly asking not to be killed, and all the children who didn't want to be killed, and all the waiting souls in cryonic suspension who'd trusted themselves to the Future, and how so many people had happy lives that ought not be destroyed and the Future would be even more full of happy lives that shouldn't be destroyed.  I would still, even in that case, expect that getting emotional at them would not actually work."

"...maybe this isn't the important thing and we should move on.  I got to say the angry thing, you heard it, and if that's not enough then too bad for me."

Carissa Sevar: " - perhaps that's a good idea but I feel like some confusion remains, and I wish I understood it. If the person came in to yell angrily at me about the people in Avernus, and I thought they were a kind of strategic person in general, I'd assume they thought I was...missing some deeply felt sense of what it was like to truly and acutely appreciate the harm of Avernus, and trying to convey it to me, in case I actually hadn't encountered anything that'd given me a deeply felt sense of that. Or trying to help me notice that some intuition of mine applied to the situation which I hadn't been applying. 

This isn't what I was doing when I asked if you denominated internal spending in billions of murders enabled, that was just me hating you and wanting you to know it because I was scared and miserable and would've been delighted if you'd lit me on fire for it, but it's what I'd expect the person was doing, and it'd...sometimes work if they were right, and not otherwise, just like other ways of trying to communicate?"

Keltham v3: "So as much as you may not like to hear about it, I come from another planet which has a thousand tons of extremely advanced cognitive technology for causing people with outlook differences to be able to work productively in the presence of those differences.  This includes people with values differences, negotiating; and people with epistemic differences, making bets or figuring out experiments; and people in multiagent-cooperation-defection-dilemmas, knowing the conditions for mutual cooperation; and dividing the gains, when two parties have to work together.  It's all this technology that is designed incredibly carefully to work great when both people use it."

"Golarion doesn't, in fact, have its own, different, version of this technology, that works great so long as both people come from Golarion.  It has people acting out their feelings at each other and yelling and this does not, in fact, work.  Hence Golarion."

"The reason why I don't yell angrily at the hypothetical people with a poorly phrased Wish about to destroy dath ilan, is that I don't think the locus of my disagreement with them lies within their failure to activate a latent emotion which I can activate by yelling my emotions at them.  I think, in this hypothetical example, that they don't think their Wish will destroy dath ilan, so yelling my emotions at them wouldn't help even if yelling my emotions at them caused them to activate the corresponding emotions.  That's more like - you think you're trying to persuade an audience - but then, first of all, the hypothetical audience, if this is dath ilan, also knows the key issue is just whether their Wish destroys dath ilan or not.  Second of all, in our case, there is no audience, or at least, none that has power over our world so far as we know and is persuadable by arguments we understand."

"I have all these rules inside my head for what you are supposed to, to do about cases like this.  And the thing is, in fact, my rules would work great if there were a world-destroying dath ilani and a world-preserving dath ilani who needed to negotiate about that and navigate related factual disagreements.  Your rules, I am betting, would not work great between a world-destroying Carissa and a world-preserving Carissa.  And while this doesn't make me right, because I don't have rules that work for myself plus a Carissa and that's the rules I would need, it does make me frustrated."

Carissa Sevar: "...do dath ilani not think that yelling emotions ever activates latent emotions, or just think that no one ever makes mistakes that can be fixed by causing emotional realizations, or - I'm not sure this matters. I had, actually, noticed that it was not achieving my goals to express any of how I feel about your plan, and talked with Carmin about how to not do it, and I think I can have this conversation by dath ilan rules. And in fact, the Chelish way of doing this is for everyone to conceal all their feelings at all times, so it's entirely possible I'm too optimistic about approaches that don't require that and they really don't actually work."

Keltham v3: "Dath ilan doesn't require everyone to conceal their feelings at all times.  It has ways of quoting feelings to make them information, instead of being emotional at people like, like it's a threat, or a demand.  You could say, 'I think the locus of our disagreement is that you're not feeling the right emotions about the people in Axis who'd end up isekaied to a hundred different places with who-knows-what average properties and I want to talk about how terrified I am when I imagine them dying and being separated from each other and maybe ending up in alternate universes run by Powers worse than Pharasma who like them even less' and I could say 'I think we disagree about what the distribution of metaversal Powers would probably end up looking like, but this uses a bunch of knowledge you don't have and can learn much faster and debate more productively at INT 29'.  You could say 'I think the locus of our disagreement is that you're just not visualizing the sheer blank horror of somebody suddenly existing less, even if that feels to them internally like they just pop into existence at the Worldwound, and I want to prompt you with some visualization exercises for activating that emotion' and I could reply 'Actually I don't think I have that emotion, I'm sort of skeptical most Golarion natives have that emotion, so prompting me with visualization exercises may not help but you are welcome to try'."

Carissa Sevar: "I will try to say things those ways when it seems to me that that's the reason for distance between us."

Keltham v3: "I have, obviously, a model of our disagreement.  Among the protocols we could be ad-libbing for this whole thing, if we wanted to try running it through relatively more informally before going full Very Serious People at each other, is that I try to write down your argument the way you'd put it, and write down where I think I disagree with it, and you write down my argument the way you think I'd put it, and write down where you think your loci of disagreement are, and then we compare notes."

"Then we fairly judge, because we are ilani who can judge things fairly, how well the other person's argument sounded like what we'd say; and if one of us did much better, beyond the variance of noise, in predicting and imitating the other, they win argument-prestige that they can cash in for things like 'Well then my theory of our disagreement is also more likely to be correct and I'd like you to pause and listen carefully to it.'"

"We could also just quickly talk it out in case we already know where we disagree, or can easily determine that by talking, and don't want to bother wagering and winning argument-prestige."

Carissa Sevar: "Trying to describe the other person's position sounds sensible to me."

Keltham v3: "And then describe what we think our own disagreements with that are."

"All right, let's do this thing.  Uh, I am going to use some primitive but surprisingly helpful magitech to do mine, a Fake 'Computer' that basically just pipes a 'keyboard' to a 'printer', so my version is probably going to be longer and more detailed given equivalent time.  You want longer to work to make up for that, or we just notice that'll be different and consciously compensate for the unfair advantage it induces?"

Carissa Sevar: "I guess I'll take a bit longer, if that works for you."

Keltham v3: He'll go to his bedroll to grab his keyboard-printer Fake Computer.  It looks like a dath ilani chording keyboard, connected by silver wire to a number of animated printing-press types that dart out and impress themselves on the paper as he chords.

He types up a draft, slowly.

And then at the end, reads and retypes it, much faster:

Why I think Keltham should not destroy Pharasma's Creation, by 'Carissa Sevar':

People live here.

This argument is uncomplicated and correct and should be decisive if understood, but I will continue writing anyways.

If there's a trillion identical copies of you, and 999,999,999,999 die and 1 survive, that's not like all of you ending up as the 1 surviving version.  It's like 999,999,999,999 people dying and is exactly 99.9999999999% as bad as 1,000,000,000,000 people dying.  This Keltham may have been that one lucky survivor, when he died inside the 0.0000000001% of dath ilans that were visible to or connected to a place like Pharasma's Creation and where somebody bothered to copy that Keltham into the Worldwound, and to him it feels like nothing happened, but that's not what happens every time to everyone.  99.9999999999% of the Kelthams died and didn't think any more thoughts and didn't exist at all.

And that's horrifying.  Existing is the greatest gift we have.  It's the premise of all other gifts, obviously, but that's not what makes it great.  Though I respect that a tortured soul in Hell may want to stop existing, I think they're making a mistake, maybe the hugest mistake there is, if that actually got them destroyed.  So long as they're alive at all, and thinking, and feeling even if what they feel is pain, they have something that's better than the absence of all that.

Happiness is better than suffering, but not to the same degree that both are better than null, nothingness, nonexistence.  People can say words like that but not really feel what it would mean, because how can you imagine that?  Anything you imagine it feeling like, is not what it is, which is nothing.  Trying to feel that head-on is like trying to look into the sun, a horror blinding enough that your mind wrenches away without actually thinking about it.  The fact that nobody ever thinks about this, or can ever think about it, causes everybody to systematically underestimate how bad it actually is, and not be able to correctly estimate that being a paving stone is Hell is still better than that.

Pain is something you can accept, suffering is something you can accept, so long as there's still an awareness there to accept it; nonexistence can't be accepted because there's nobody there to come to terms with how awful it is.

Pharasma gave that gift to everyone in this world, and even the people in Hell were not wronged by it.

The people in this world do not want to be destroyed.  While some people got worse deals at birth, like those in Cheliax who mostly went to Hell, a lot of people got prospective local chances at afterlives that look a lot like the overall statistics for Golarion.  Those people overwhelmingly did not, and do not, express horror and regret at having been born into a place like Golarion where that was their lot, they don't try to save up for a Malediction to Abaddon, or even, really, complain all that much.

It would be a straw version of my argument to say that this shows, directly, that Pharasma's Creation is a good deal for the people born into it on average, or that you shouldn't destroy the entire thing.  People could, for example, be mistaken about their personal probability of going to Hell, or be mistaken about how bad Hell was if they went there (as I do admit I was now mistaken to some degree).  But the fact that people don't seem to think it's a near thing or that you should seriously debate in depth whether to destroy Pharasma's Creation, that Rovagug cultists are universally and unhesitatingly regarded as the villains by everybody who isn't one of the tiny fraction of Rovagug cultists, illustrates that this is not the sort of near thing where people being off by a factor of three about their personal probability of going to Hell is going to change that.

Yes, some people here got the shitty end of the deal and now said, in your Vision of Hell, 'please kill me', as probably did mean, in context, that they wanted to stop existing.  Even those people didn't ask you to destroy Axis too, or scream that you ought to destroy Axis as the price of destroying Hell.  They were distracted and probably didn't know you were listening, but they did not, in fact, scream that.  They didn't scream 'Please destroy everything.'  Maybe they would have, if you'd asked.  Realistically they wouldn't have been screaming anything that complicated, with nobody apparently listening at all.  But you can't, actually, say that even the people in Hell asked you to do this.

Maybe the people in Hell would tell you to destroy everything.  But the people not in Hell would not tell you that.  The people alive in this world right now, who might go to Hell with around the same probability as anybody from Golarion ends up in Hell, would overwhelmingly tell you not to annihilate their existences on the spot lest they wind up in Hell later.  The people like that who do go to Hell, might end up being tortured into changing their minds about that, because pain can have the power to change people's minds by force, or just because, they're the ones who got unlucky.  That doesn't mean their original self, who accepted that probability in exchange for their chance of ending up happy ever after in Axis or Elysium, was making the wrong decision, based on a bad model of Hell, and learned something in Hell that changed their mind.  It's just like somebody who took a great gamble with a high expected value, happened to lose that gamble, and is now unhappy.

You are wrong, Keltham, to think that most of the people in Hell made no choices worth mentioning, in going there, that change how much it matters that they're in pain.  You think that because you believe deep in your heart that everybody in Golarion is a child who can't make meaningful choices.  In this you are wrong.  They're just a different kind of adult who is not shaped the peculiar way that dath ilani are trained to recognize as adults, which is only one particular kind of adulthood that obtains in dath ilan.

If you'd been allowed to leave, or been safe to leave, your tiny enclosures in Cheliax, in Osirion, in this new lair, and take in the wide range of cultures across Golarion that has so much more variation than dath ilan, you might realize: you are surrounded by a hundred different kinds of adults, not a world full of nothing but children.  A great many of them have handled more adversity and more serious situations in their lives than dath ilani 'adults' ever do.

This also affects how much you should listen to them, when they ask you to please not kill them, their families and ancestors in their afterlives, and destroy all of their children and all of the children they'll ever have. 

Even if you're right about people just ending up somewhere else, they will end up someplace worse than Golarion, if they're scattered into a wider multiverse.  It's known, about Pharasma's Creation, that the things outside of it are no friends to anything inside, and that's just about all we know about them.  Pharasma did everybody here a service in creating them someplace as friendly as this place is.  Scattering them outside of it is, maybe, a worse disservice to children than Maledicting them to Hell.

You don't know what lies beyond Golarion.  Maybe it's better.

You don't know what lies in this universe's Future.  Maybe it's better.  You'd be destroying that too.

Any time you make up a plan which has a step that includes 'release Rovagug', anybody native to Golarion would immediately and correctly recognize that you have made a reasoning error somewhere along the way, just like everybody else who concludes that.  It is a heuristic that is simple, valid, and correct about your particular case.

There has to be a better way.  Iomedae hasn't given up on this universe.  Why should you?  Iomedae lives here and knows the place better and has worked on it for longer and is much, much smarter and better-informed than you are.  She doesn't seem to think it's hopeless.

You're not going to beat Pharasma.  She's larger than you are.  Even Iomedae isn't trying that.

You haven't looked for a better way, or have not looked nearly hard enough, because this world hurt you a lot, and you want it gone, or maybe you just find it painful to look at it in enough detail to decide whether or not it should be gone.

Somebody in as much pain as you, as broken as you, is the wrong person to say, "I know better than everybody here asking me not to do this; this world should end."

Keltham v3: And then types and retypes, more briefly, because wow is this taking some time:

My beliefs about the probable loci of my disagreements with Carissa Sevar, more located and pointed at than argued:

- A possibly theoretically unresolvable epistemic disagreement (though we'll know better at INT 29) where I've updated off my isekai experience about what 'typically happens', and ended up in a world full of people to whom this observation is theoretically inaccessible.

- Very different model of the theoretical origins and hence likely psychology of beings and Powers who could devise continuation causal-weaves for otherwise halted entities; in particular, greater expectation of coordination among them, and expecting most utility functions of non-mortal-caring such entities to settle on maxima which don't have mortals inside them at all.

- Unresolvable values difference about disutility of nonexistence:  eternal suffering << null < eternal happiness.  Would consider Hell at least 100 times as bad as Axis is good.

- Do not in fact respect reasoning of local mortals about their afterlife prospects, suspect they're mostly not thinking about it, nonexistence isn't exactly an easy option for them anyways, don't think their expressed opinions are really bound to the relative weight of an eternity in Axis or Hell.  No people who can remember millennia of existence as paving stone / lemure and also millennia in Axis, and do an interpersonal comparison there - if even that would be meaningful and not just default to whichever came last.  Given all that, situation with 9x Axis inhabitants saying 'this life was a good deal' and 1x Hell inhabitants saying 'bad deal' doesn't seem so much like a 90% majority vote, as people dividing a cake where 9 get nice deals and 1 gets crumbs; the person who got the crumbs has a kind of priority in saying whether the overall deal was fair or not.

- Pharasma thought the things She trapped in Her creation couldn't endanger Her and so She did not need to treat with them as agents and divide gains fairly with them, or even ask what they wanted.  I see myself as agent, this world as a deal, and reject the deal.

- Expect Golarion typical, Pharasma roughly balanced entire multiverse to sort around 1/3 of petitioners to each category on each axis.  No obvious reason why Pharasma would have built a setup where later on almost nobody got sorted to Hell in Her own expectation.

- Suspect Iomedae's "goddess of victory over Evil" deal, maybe not so much distorts Her probabilities, as constrains the way She can behave about them.  Iomedae has notably not distributed a timetable with probabilities to Her followers.  Iomedae is opposed by gods much more powerful than Her and maybe smarter who do not want Her to win.  If everybody got hope by trying hard, every god would own that hope to the same degree, none more hopeful than the others.

- Have estimate of Pharasma's apparent power given observations about Her, does not seem to rule out rigging Her Creation to destruct.

- I'm sorta broken, yeah.  Everyone else in Golarion is completely bugshit wacko, though.

- Tropian probability distortions: clearly a thing, even allowing for some of our history to have been produced by divine interventions imitating tropes.  If we don't do this now, Pharasma's Creation might be waiting a long long time on the next story-empowered people who would have a probabilistically anomalous chance at fixing or even changing things.

Carissa Sevar: In Pharasma's Creation there are many people who don't want to exist and do not have a good way to achieve this. The overwhelming majority of those are in Hell, but probably there are also some in Abaddon and the Abyss and maybe the Maelstrom and the dungeons of various people on Golarion and planets like Golarion, plus some who are suffering and uncertain enough about their afterlife not to kill themselves despite having access to the option. They often suffer slowly in a way that changes who they are as people and means that even if at some point they stop being conscious, a version of them that landed on another planet at that point would not be very much like the person they were before they suffered so much.

This is bad under approximately every conceivable value system. Under the value system most common in dath ilan, where everyone has thought about ethics a lot more and some people are smarter, this is so bad that killing approximately 9 people whose lives are eternal and good in order to prevent one person from suffering in this way is clearly justified. Dath ilani would practically all agree on this. It is true that people in Golarion mostly don't see it that way when they are not in Hell, but they mostly try to avoid thinking about it, and might believe false things about it. Hell lies relentlessly about what sends you there and what it's like. People in Cheliax mostly fear Hell and try not to think about it; people in other places do move mountains to avoid it. Lots of Lawful Evil people, in private, will admit that they are scared. The fact they don't atone or don't try to be Chaotic is about their suppressing thoughts of how they'll go to Hell in abject terror, not about their actual preference. Even if someone prefers Hell to nonexistence, once they've been in Hell for a little while they'll almost definitely change their mind. Even if someone does things that condemn them to Hell for the sake of protecting their children, so that their children will get to eternity in Axis instead of being eaten in Abaddon, they'll regret that choice and wish they'd chosen differently approximately as soon as Hell actually starts on them. Even if they don't for a hundred years, they will in a thousand years; even if they don't for a thousand years, they will in a hundred thousand years. People on Golarion don't know how to think about those scales. Hell deliberately discourages thinking on those scales. And it's hard to understand how bad Hell is until you are actually being tortured there; it is not a fact you can know any other way. 

Any viable plan to fix Hell, where nearly all but not all of this suffering is located, probably incurs some risk of killing everyone in the multiverse. The plan that incurs the least risk of that is probably destroying Avernus so that further people cannot go to Hell, which would not necessarily be permanent. The plans that are most definitely permanent, like killing Asmodeus and taking His job or trying to force Pharasma to change the rules of Her Creation, incur a quite high risk of this. Plans to kill Asmodeus and take His job are probably more than 50% likely to result in His releasing Rovagug, which is probably at least 20% likely to destroy the universe and 80% likely to destroy Golarion, which may or may not be important for building Civilization within Pharasma's Creation.

Plans to force Pharasma to change the rules of Her Creation will, if they fail, fail either by Pharasma laughing at Keltham and crushing him in which case no improvements to the universe at all will be achieved, or in the entire universe being destroyed, possibly by Yog-Sothoth or something in an existentially horrifying Hell-like slow-personality-death way. Failure modes like that are very unlikely. If they succeed they might change not just Hell but also significant features of other planes that have a high rate of petitioners there being very unhappy or being eaten. 

Pharasma does not particularly share human values, and a universe run on rules set by Keltham would be much nicer for humans and similar kinds of mortals to live in, or not exist at all if making a universe that's substantially nicer to live in is not possible within these constraints. 

When Keltham experienced dying, he experienced showing up in Golarion. All people, when their soul is permanently deleted from existence, should anticipate having the experience of waking up somewhere else like he did. In the typical case this will not be worse than the lives that those people are currently living in Golarion. In particular the percentage of people who will turn out to have moment-of-death copies that are slaves who cannot suicide, or in Hell dimensions, or in incomprehensible conditions that alter their cognition as they kill them, is very low. The fact this is true means that being killed is much less bad than it would be if there were not copies of you in other places some of whom will remember the moment of your death. The fact this is true also means it is better to kill someone instantaneously than for them to die in a slow way that alters their personality and values, because if they die instantaneously then they'll experience continuity with a copy of them elsewhere which hasn't already changed in a way that changes their identity as a person. 

It is undesirable that people will never see their families again, be separated from their children and husbands and wives, lose everything they have and were working towards, etc., but the undesirability of this is much much much smaller than the undesirability of Hell. It is probably not the case that most people would readily risk Hell to be present for their childrens' infancy and childhood, and if they say they would it is probably because they are underestimating the badness of Hell. Also under the present system many people are separated from their loved ones permanently anyway, and an ideal fix to Pharasma's Creation would improve the world along this metric. 

It is not bad that people will exist about a billion times less, because it doesn't subjectively feel like anything to exist, and is not part of most human value systems in dath ilan. Those people who think it is part of their value systems would almost always reconsider if they could discuss the matter with a Keeper.

The gods as they are currently situated seem likely to stop any planet in Pharasma's Creation from building Civilization, or at least likely to stop it from spreading its discoveries to the rest of Pharasma's Creation. It seems reasonably likely that they're only presently allowing the scientific revolution because they don't see where it's headed. In the absence of intervention to change the rules and ensure Civilization is allowed to come about, it seems possible the inhabited planets within Creation will either persist for a very long time not being much better as a place to live, or else get destroyed the first time they get far enough out of equilibrium some gods want them gone, or else get destroyed by dath ilan or some force like it that is trying to maximize average happiness of instantiated minds across the multiverse. If that is a common value, which it probably is because everyone in dath ilan is very smart and it was approximately universal there, and if Pharasma's Creation is as vulnerable to destruction as it looks, then Pharasma's Creation is going to get destroyed sooner or later unless someone brings average quality of life there above a reasonable estimate of how bad the greater multiverse is.

Pharasma is fundamentally the kind of entity who has no business running a multiverse, and so it is good, other things equal, to make her stop that, and it is worth at least some small probability of the multiverse being destroyed to wrest control of it from an alien entity that does not share human values unless Greater Reality is even worse. 

If the policy 'destroy bits of Greater Reality that you are not glad you landed in' is followed by all people waking up in unfamiliar universes, then maybe in the long run everyone who wakes up in an unfamiliar universe will wake up in a pretty good one, so the repeat application of this process makes it more and more of a good idea over time. The fact dath ilani were taught to think about the world this way, including game theory about cleaning up bits of Greater Reality you find yourself in where Zon-Kuthon asks for 10gp, suggests that dath ilan may already have calculated this is a good idea. 

Carissa Sevar: Guesses about where Keltham and I most disagree: 

I expect that it's easier to destroy yourself in Pharasma's Creation than in most places. Everyone has a physical body and if you destroy it you go somewhere else! If you destroy it as an outsider that's it! Most possible ways to have a mind exist don't involve that mind having fairly-straightforward things it can do to cease its function and ensure its function doesn't have to start again. It is widely known even among peasants in random places that if you're Neutral Evil you go to Abaddon and get eaten, and most people actively avoid this, but if a person had an unusually strong nonexistence preference they can not-exist. I don't believe this is true of most possible souls/minds.

I think that it is possible for good lives to be as good as bad lives in Hell are bad even for normal people who don't care about existing as much as me. I don't know exactly what extremely good lives are, and I don't know what share of people in Good afterlives I'd say have them, but it feels to me like things can be as good as they are bad. Certainly my most good experiences are as strongly preferable-above-baseline as my most bad experiences are negative and I have had some experiences that are fairly Hell-like. I'm willing to get tortured harder if a failure of imagination about what Hell is like might be relevant. 

We disagree about how much the revealed preferences of Golarionites are relevant. I don't think that people not trying to avoid Hell means they don't mind Hell. It's often that they're very muddled. I do think that when people decide that they are willing to do Evil things and go to Hell in order to, say, make a lot of money to Raise their dead baby and give that baby a good life in Axis, they frequently understand exactly the trade they are making and are within their rights to make it, and it is a terrible wrong to them to destroy the children they worked to save, in order to save them from suffering in Hell. I do think it's suggestive that everyone was appalled about the daemons eating souls out of the river of souls and eating babies in the Boneyard. I also think it's suggestive that many people if you ask them would take on considerable risk of Hell to protect their loved ones from Abaddon. 

I think that the fact that people mostly go to Hell for doing awful things to other people matters in our evaluation of whether they got an unfair division of gains or not. It makes it feel, to me, more like they played a lottery and want the winners killed so they don't have the consequences of losing than like they were randomly assigned an unfair share. You have to be a bad person to go to Hell; you have to knowingly treat people very badly on purpose. 

I think that Civilization can find better ways to fix Creation and fix Hell, in the next hundred years, once there are headbands everywhere and not much scarcity. 

Not everyone in Creation is human or even humanoid. The overwhelming share of them are not. I think that Keltham has not thought enough about whether he is doing right by very very inhuman minds, some of which might have very different preferences from humans like being much more okay with Hell or for that matter being much more harmed by Axis or Nirvana or by waking up in another universe (say, because they're a telepathic hivemind that die slowly in horrible suffering if separated from their kin). Keltham is weird enough that it seems plausible to me that for most creatures in Pharasma's Creation moving it towards Keltham's values will leave them worse off.  Relatedly I think it's hard to evaluate how reasonably Pharasma is running Creation with a view of just one planet but her running of it seems basically reasonable to me except for how the wrong person is in charge of Hell. 

I think it's reasonably likely that Pharasma will just crush Keltham and then everything will be much worse with a huge opportunity for making them better totally lost and gone. I think that if we start by letting out Rovagug then the net effect of Keltham will be empowering Asmodeus, getting the one planet without prophecy eaten, and foregoing a chance to fix almost everything. I also think it's pretty likely that we'll all just get slowly and horrifyingly eaten by Yog-Sothoth or something if Pharasma stops protecting the universe.

An implication of the above is that I think if you try this, we should mostly expect to 'wake up' in worlds where you tried this and it failed in some way; that is where most minds that have continuity from our current existence is. 

I don't think that killing someone across billions of worlds is made meaningfully less bad by there existing a copy of them somewhere at some point.

I think that Keltham is deeply unusual in many respects which could be relevant to whether you wake up somewhere else when you die and we should not necessarily conclude that everyone who dies will experience waking up somewhere else.

I don't think I care very much about the specific path by which a mind dies, even if I grant that they'll wake up somewhere else; a copy of me that is me-from-a-year-ago is about as good as a copy from right this minute (when I haven't just been through a very transformative year), so to whatever extent a copy makes it less bad that I was murdered, an out of date copy is almost as good as a new one. I think Keltham cares a lot about this. 

I think that Hell is not worse than nonexistence at least for me and plausibly for most people but I don't even know that it's worth arguing this one. 

Keltham v3: "All right, you've read mine, I've had a chance to read yours.  Meta-level comments, things I failed to make clear about how the process supposedly worked that are more obvious now that you've seen literally one example of it?  In retrospect we should've run a pilot where we first tried this on... some other disagreement we had in the past where your position was mostly real, you'd know better what the choices were than I."

Carissa Sevar: "- I think from my perspective this was about the result I expected. I am sure I didn't do it in the proper dath ilani way but it looks like my attempt was in fact probably close enough to work from."

Keltham v3: "Yeah, I'm trying to remind myself that it would not be remotely fair to judge this the way that a dath ilani audience would be judging it right now.  Like, I did not, for example, actually say out loud that your description of my views was to be written from Keltham's perspective, as if by Keltham..."

"I don't think your presentation of my views really - emphasized the parts I'd emphasize, and there's strange little hiccups in your model of my model of dath ilan..."

"We could now take each other's writeups and underline parts we noticeably disagreed with in the other's presentation of what was supposed to be our own view.  First I'm curious how you'd rate my attempt to write from your perspective overall."

Carissa Sevar: "It seemed like you were thinking of 'existence is much better than nonexistence' as a big part of my argument against destroying the universe, and it's a big part of my personal priorities and I did, in fact, prefer when it came up with Abrogail to be tortured for arbitrary lengths of time if I was going to cease existing at the end of it, because suffering was so much better than not existing. 

But I think that actually fairly little of my argument rests on that. That'd be relevant if we were debating destroying a universe where everyone went to Hell. 

Uh, 'Scattering them outside of it is, maybe, a worse disservice to children than Maledicting them to Hell.' is wrong about my views, it seems pretty unlikely to me that most of the Greater Reality is worse for humans than Hell. Just that even if 1% of it is as bad as Hell, that's probably trillions of children you're sending to Hell, and that most of it is worse than the balance of the Outer Planes. 

I don't think you should learn from the fact everyone thinks releasing Rovagug is a bad plan, I feel like the reasons it's a bad plan are pretty self-evident and there's not additional information in public opinion.

I think you're condescending to Golarion people but that's mostly just relevant to the degree of consultation you'll get on your plan, I don't really think it's actually the driver of your plan or worth talking you out of. I figured I'd just consult everyone myself and then translate for you.

Your writeup does not emphasize much how with the resources we'll have one week from now we can probably at least fix Avernus in a much safer way, and the Civilization we can build will contain people much much smarter than us who might think of a much much smarter solution to Hell and who will have the option of this solution, so long as we don't blow up the only planet where prophecy is broken.

You don't really mention downside risks of, say, getting the one planet without prophecy eaten so no one can ever rise up against the gods again, or getting us all taken by whatever got Zon-Kuthon. I think those feature pretty significantly in my thinking about this.

Iomedae might be wrong about whether the universe before you arrived was going to end well for Good, but there's a truly transformative number and kind of resources now available! Hell has been betting on the products of this interworld contact as if they're a really, really big deal, as if they are a loophole in the godagreements about information-sharing. I think that we can take Avernus and build Civilization and leave the rest to our intellectual heirs, a generation down the line, who'll be equipped for this problem in a way we aren't, and I think that's really the core of my reasoning here, that we don't have to choose this plan or nothing, that there is so much potential to do something else which is not this."

Keltham v3: "Sounds like mostly gaps of omission, then, or mistakes of emphasis if you want to put it that way."

"Give me a second and I'll pass back the underlined version of yours, with some notes.  Shouldn't take much time and seems easier than saying."

In Pharasma's Creation there are many people who don't want to exist and do not have a good way to achieve this. The overwhelming majority of those are in Hell, but probably there are also some in Abaddon and the Abyss and maybe the Maelstrom and the dungeons of various people on Golarion and planets like Golarion, plus some who are suffering and uncertain enough about their afterlife not to kill themselves despite having access to the option. They often suffer slowly in a way that changes who they are as people and means that even if at some point they stop being conscious, a version of them that landed on another planet at that point would not be very much like the person they were before they suffered so much.  [Yep.  This is the core problem.  Pharasma's unfair deal would not be a destroy-the-multiverse issue if not for this.]

This is bad under approximately every conceivable value system. Under the value system most common in dath ilan, where everyone has thought about ethics a lot more and some people are smarter, this is so bad that killing approximately 9 people whose lives are eternal and good in order to prevent one person from suffering in this way is clearly justified. Dath ilani would practically all agree on this.  [This is a values-difference, not something where it matters what another place thinks.]

It is true that people in Golarion mostly don't see it that way when they are not in Hell, but they mostly try to avoid thinking about it, and might believe false things about it. Hell lies relentlessly about what sends you there and what it's like. People in Cheliax mostly fear Hell and try not to think about it; people in other places do move mountains to avoid it. Lots of Lawful Evil people, in private, will admit that they are scared. The fact they don't atone or don't try to be Chaotic is about their suppressing thoughts of how they'll go to Hell in abject terror, not about their actual preference. Even if someone prefers Hell to nonexistence, once they've been in Hell for a little while they'll almost definitely change their mind. Even if someone does things that condemn them to Hell for the sake of protecting their children, so that their children will get to eternity in Axis instead of being eaten in Abaddon, they'll regret that choice and wish they'd chosen differently approximately as soon as Hell actually starts on them. Even if they don't for a hundred years, they will in a thousand years; even if they don't for a thousand years, they will in a hundred thousand years. People on Golarion don't know how to think about those scales. Hell deliberately discourages thinking on those scales. And it's hard to understand how bad Hell is until you are actually being tortured there; it is not a fact you can know any other way.  [Being tortured in Hell still doesn't let you do the interpersonal utility comparison we actually need.]  [Being tortured into regret of saving your children doesn't make it the wrong decision, still an awful one tho.]

Any viable plan to fix Hell, where nearly all but not all of this suffering is located, probably incurs some risk of killing everyone in the multiverse. The plan that incurs the least risk of that is probably destroying Avernus so that further people cannot go to Hell, which would not necessarily be permanent. The plans that are most definitely permanent, like killing Asmodeus and taking His job or trying to force Pharasma to change the rules of Her Creation, incur a quite high risk of this. Plans to kill Asmodeus and take His job are probably more than 50% likely to result in His releasing Rovagug, which is probably at least 20% likely to destroy the universe and 80% likely to destroy Golarion, which may or may not be important for building Civilization within Pharasma's Creation.  [I'd maybe say more like 30% of destroying Golarion?]  [Currently put low estimate on Golarion's importance if we can't otherwise beat Pharasma/gods.]

Plans to force Pharasma to change the rules of Her Creation will, if they fail, fail either by Pharasma laughing at Keltham and crushing him in which case no improvements to the universe at all will be achieved, or in the entire universe being destroyed, possibly by Yog-Sothoth or something in an existentially horrifying Hell-like slow-personality-death way. Failure modes like that are very unlikely. If they succeed they might change not just Hell but also significant features of other planes that have a high rate of petitioners there being very unhappy or being eaten.  [Pharasma crush wouldn't seem that unlikely, if not for tropes.]  [Obvious ways to rig multiverse for destruction don't seem to me to run much Yog-Sothoth risk.]

Pharasma does not particularly share human values, and a universe run on rules set by Keltham would be much nicer for humans and similar kinds of mortals to live in, or not exist at all if making a universe that's substantially nicer to live in is not possible within these constraints.  [Didn't think I could set rules, but get them modified, sure.]

When Keltham experienced dying, he experienced showing up in Golarion. All people, when their soul is permanently deleted from existence, should anticipate having the experience of waking up somewhere else like he did. In the typical case this will not be worse than the lives that those people are currently living in Golarion. In particular the percentage of people who will turn out to have moment-of-death copies that are slaves who cannot suicide, or in Hell dimensions, or in incomprehensible conditions that alter their cognition as they kill them, is very low. The fact this is true means that being killed is much less bad than it would be if there were not copies of you in other places some of whom will remember the moment of your death. The fact this is true also means it is better to kill someone instantaneously than for them to die in a slow way that alters their personality and values, because if they die instantaneously then they'll experience continuity with a copy of them elsewhere which hasn't already changed in a way that changes their identity as a person.  [My case doesn't need to be typical, just in some sense normal or not in a distinguished region of low probability.]

It is undesirable that people will never see their families again, be separated from their children and husbands and wives, lose everything they have and were working towards, etc., but the undesirability of this is much much much smaller than the undesirability of Hell. It is probably not the case that most people would readily risk Hell to be present for their childrens' infancy and childhood, and if they say they would it is probably because they are underestimating the badness of Hell. Also under the present system many people are separated from their loved ones permanently anyway, and an ideal fix to Pharasma's Creation would improve the world along this metric.  [Not how system necessarily works.  Nice destinations can synchronize arrival of related people.]

It is not bad that people will exist about a billion times less, because it doesn't subjectively feel like anything to exist, and is not part of most human value systems in dath ilan. Those people who think it is part of their value systems would almost always reconsider if they could discuss the matter with a Keeper.  [Depends on if the less-existing were above or below Greater Reality average.  Obviously I currently guess Pharasma's Creation is below average.]  ['Keepers would disagree' kinda not how people in Civilization think, they'll add 'because it's invalid' and then eliminate the Keeper part.]

The gods as they are currently situated seem likely to stop any planet in Pharasma's Creation from building Civilization, or at least likely to stop it from spreading its discoveries to the rest of Pharasma's Creation. It seems reasonably likely that they're only presently allowing the scientific revolution because they don't see where it's headed. In the absence of intervention to change the rules and ensure Civilization is allowed to come about, it seems possible the inhabited planets within Creation will either persist for a very long time not being much better as a place to live, or else get destroyed the first time they get far enough out of equilibrium some gods want them gone, or else get destroyed by dath ilan or some force like it that is trying to maximize average happiness of instantiated minds across the multiverse. If that is a common value, which it probably is because everyone in dath ilan is very smart and it was approximately universal there, and if Pharasma's Creation is as vulnerable to destruction as it looks, then Pharasma's Creation is going to get destroyed sooner or later unless someone brings average quality of life there above a reasonable estimate of how bad the greater multiverse is.  [I'm not expecting dath ilan's utilityfunction to be common among things more powerful than Pharasma that connect to Pharasma's Creation.]

Pharasma is fundamentally the kind of entity who has no business running a multiverse, and so it is good, other things equal, to make her stop that, and it is worth at least some small probability of the multiverse being destroyed to wrest control of it from an alien entity that does not share human values unless Greater Reality is even worse.  [Yep.]

If the policy 'destroy bits of Greater Reality that you are not glad you landed is' is followed by all people waking up in unfamiliar universes, then maybe in the long run everyone who wakes up in an unfamiliar universe will wake up in a pretty good one, so the repeat application of this process makes it more and more of a good idea over time. The fact dath ilani were taught to think about the world this way, including game theory about cleaning up bits of Greater Reality you find yourself in where Zon-Kuthon asks for $10, suggests that dath ilan may already have calculated this is a good idea.  [Pretty sure they weren't teaching me things I'd need to know for Golarion.]  [This is mostly just a special case of rejecting bad deals, incl. Pharasma's non-deal.]

Carissa Sevar: She reads through it, nods, sighs. "Well, one of the things that I was thinking might convince me to work with you was if you thought an unfixed Creation was vulnerable to other universe-destroyers. But I appreciate you telling me you don't think that and think Creation would probably be otherwise safe."

Keltham v3: "It would be a common courtesy in Civilization while prosecuting a disagreement, and one I hope I can expect symmetrically from you."

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: Yeah. We're doing trusting-negotiations here. ...I hope?

Carissa Sevar: "Yes.

I.... think I have some kind of additional disagreement with you now about - if every human in dath ilan ends up with the same views on something as apparently-subjective as 'average utilitarianism', then I don't think it feels right to just assert that's all their unchangeable utility-functions - people don't have utility-functions, people are muddled and dath ilani society reliably resolves that muddle in that way, but I am not sure that's different than how Cheliax reliably resolves various muddles in various ways. I'd feel more confident it was a utility-function thing if it was, say, 85% of people in dath ilan.

I realize some utility-function things should in fact be overwhelmingly common among humans but this really, really doesn't seem like one of them especially given all the absurd-seeming claims it makes - you're going to say we should discuss this at INT-29 - but it seems like it would imply you should destroy perfectly good universes under a wide variety of circumstances, including if that subjectively sends everyone in them to Hell, so long as most of Greater Reality is much nicer than those perfectly good universes... and maybe some people believe that but I am suspicious of claims that it ends up in nearly all human utility-functions unless you deliberately engineer your whole society to make them think that."

Keltham v3: "I wasn't saying that 'average utilitarianism' was just a matter of utilityfunctions.  The averaging part is something that's - pinned down by some pseudo-Law-fragment-ish arguments relative to the human pre-utilityfunction muddle that shakes out into a utilityfunction?  One way of looking at it is that it doesn't make any more sense to ask what if there was twice as much sentience in reality any more than it makes sense to ask what if everything in reality was twice as large or what if time everywhere was running half as fast."

"Not sure we should dive on that right now, I don't think 'average utilitarianism' per se is liable to be a crux of disagreement.  Though if we both converted to 'total utilitarianism' we'd then be faced with a question of whether Pharasma's Creation is above or below 'zero' which seems entirely utilityfunctional, rather than the question of whether Creation is above or below average."

Carissa Sevar: "That does sound like it might be more productive if we wait."

Keltham v3: "I unfortunately get a sense from having taken the disagreement this far that the real crux is liable to be the sense to which - I've lived in a universe which wasn't tropey in the slightest, where everything just bubbled up from directly visible math in a directly visible way, and by comparison Golarion looks really blatantly tropey to me, even if it's ultimately a real thing that got selected really sharply for tropiness.  So I'm also expecting to a much higher degree that the universe has been set on track for a Bad End unless the protagonists do something.  Your worldview has a much higher prior that we might not need to do something that looks like the climax of a story, for things to end up pretty much all right, a hundred years later, because we're not that special and our efforts don't need to be that desperate.  My prior is more that I've been put into a situation where, if I try to - the trope would be 'Refuse the Call' - the multiverse is otherwise set to have the ancient gods crush out Civilization, our enemies get their own diamond synthesis not that far behind us, Asmodeus is not dumber than Iomedae and has His own symmetrical plans about how to eliminate Heaven as opposition.  There was an apparent plotline about just building Civilization, that plotline got trashed with the reveal of the Conspiracy."

"If we want to pursue that question on the object level instead of direct meta level, we could talk plans to take over just Avernus."

Carissa Sevar: "I - thought you thought on tropes-logic I was the protagonist? In which case it's true that the universe is set for a Bad End unless I do something, my ex is going to destroy it. 

I haven't had much time to think about plans to take over Avernus, if you've thought about it a ton and have nothing and Carmin doesn't think there's anything the church of Iomedae could do even with a million Wishes I'll be more pessimistic there."

Keltham v3: "Heh.  Fair enough, you didn't show up being the protagonist until a day ago, and I'll have to rethink what possible storylines remain consistent given that."

"I have not thought very much about plans to take over Avernus in particular.  I suppose if this universe is to last long enough that the number of people already in Hell would end up being dominated by new people..."

"I am not sure I actually have it in me, to abandon the souls currently in Hell.  Fair warning, anything that - comes to that conclusion - might end up being something where I look over the logic and do the calculation and then throw the calculation away and instead not abandon the souls currently in Hell.  I suppose, if I were the Big Problem that this universe faces, that would make me not too easily solvable from your standpoint."

"Carmin is not, I think, somebody with the spark herself to envision plans on that scale.  Most people in Golarion don't have that, Carissa, it's not just Cheliax that burns it out of people."

Carissa Sevar: "It seems good that most people aren't like that, they'd be destroying the world left and right. 

The other part - that's one of the things on my list to persuade you of. That even if the world is bad enough to risk destroying it to fix it, the set of changes that'd make that no longer true are pretty small.  There are trillions of people leading good lives, there's lots of potential to fix things through non-world-destroying mechanisms. If we succeeded at taking Avernus, no one would ever go to Hell in its present form again. You'd have saved the people who were begging to die. You'd have saved every person who'll ever be born. At that point, to kill everyone, to send many of them to something as bad as Hell, to risk feeding everything to Yog-Sothoth, to risk getting crushed and achieving nothing at all including the Avernus fix, because the first pass at fixing things didn't solve literally every instance of suffering in the multiverse - I can't actually make any sense of that. 

Relatedly, we don't need to ask Pharasma for a contraceptive cleric spell, we can just make and distribute ilani contraception, or build it in to Rings of Sustenance which we give the whole population for free. We don't need to ask Pharasma for landing-spaces in the Maelstrom or the Abyss, a Civilization with the resources we should be able to command in a few decades can just build those.

The only things that you actually need to ask Pharasma, in the sense they can only be done with Her leave, are removing Asmodeus and getting rid of Malediction and preserving somewhere where Civilization can grow without being crushed, and I don't think it's defensible to ask for anything else. Anything else you ask for is trading off us getting it slightly sooner for in expectation killing tens of billions of people, and virtually none of the people in Creation would take that trade.

It's - one thing - to imagine telling them all that the reason they are now to be annihilated is to stop Hell. I think it's wrong, but I - see in, in a way. It is another thing entirely, to imagine telling them the reason they are now to be annihilated is that we wanted birth control to be a cleric spell instead of a nonmagical invention to be widely distributed starting in a decade or so."

Keltham v3: "I think - a major problem I have with this scenario is how many things need to go sort of right, sort of the way you hoped, over an extended period, while facing a lot of adversaries who are aware of you and making their own plans and who don't want your hopes to go that way."

"Without the methods of diamond manufacture leaking to Cheliax or being rediscovered by them.  Without Golarion being destroyed by opposed Wishes.  Without all of the diamonds we make, suddenly vanishing.  Without it suddenly becoming impossible to manufacture diamonds.  Without the laws of magic shifting, so that diamonds are no longer useful in Resurrections and Wishes.  Without all of the Neutral and Evil gods banding together, to prevent the Good gods from growing too powerful."

"There's also things that have to go right for me to successfully destroy the multiverse in a surprise attack, but they're fewer and less adversarially opposed.  They just consist of particular things that need to already be true, rather than our adversaries staying in place not making plans while only we get to make plans.  I am hoping to take Pharasma by surprise, once.  Afterwards, either this multiverse is gone, which is acceptable to me; or I've negotiated with Her, once, to put this multiverse into a state where it's possible for the forces of Good to clean it up with a lot of hard work."

"This universe contains a lot of powerful things besides Iomedae.  I believe in a plan where we take them by surprise, using temporary unknown advantages like diamond synthesis and my grasp of how to destroy multiverses.  I don't believe in a plan where the Good gods beat all other gods, over an extended period, because of a discovery that didn't remain unknown once it was used.  I don't believe that we get to make plans and they don't get to make plans, once the advantage of surprise is lost.  I don't believe we get to shove this world out of its current equilibrium to a new place in spite of all the restoring forces that kept it in this state to begin with, unless we can beat those forces, and those forces are Pharasma and the ancient gods.  I don't believe we get to make plans and have those plans be real once other agents are making plans too."

Carissa Sevar: "All right, so one important area of disagreement is what the set of minimal concessions from Pharasma that makes it likely Civilization can fix things from there is. And related to that, I should probably be trying to figure out if Abadar is willing to commit to defending Civilization and making sure it gets to exist, if Sarenrae is, if - I don't know who else might be relevant."

Keltham v3: "Abadar will appreciate Civilization if it exists, I think.  Having Him defend it from other gods is a whole different story, especially when it doesn't already exist and Abadar is very confused about a lot of the things that make up a stable Civilization from a mortal stand point.  Sarenrae... I have concerns about the thing where She smote a city, and I am not very reassured by the part where She's supposed to have realized afterwards that this was a bad idea, it sounds more like mortals trying to paper over divine unpleasantness than how I imagine ancient gods working.  It's not clear to me that dath ilan Civilization wouldn't... I mean, not actually arrest Sarenrae, She's done some good work for mortals, but tell Her that She needed to clean up Her act a bit."

"My model isn't that there's nobody out there for Civilization to cut a deal with.  I think They're not powerful enough, and that the ancient gods opposed to Them will squash Civilization before Civilization gets powerful enough to participate in ancient-god-deals."

Carissa Sevar: "If Abadar would want Civilization, but is confused about what it will look like and how to bring it about, and we would benefit from Him defending it from other gods, then that seems like among the most solvable problems we've run across yet. Abadar also might know more than us about how powerful anti-Civilization forces are, and whether Pharasma's one of them or whether She'd be willing to defend Civilization given certain assurances..."

Keltham v3: "I could be wrong, but my current strong guess is that when it comes to tech and magitech on the level of spellsilver refining, Axis already knows how to do it, Azlant knew how to do it, Abadar's First Vault still has all of Azlant's books."

"My being here did not make advanced spellsilver refining be possible for the first time, because the knowledge existed for the first time.  It made it be a default outcome rather than an outcome that required any gods to intervene.  If the gods wanted things to be like that, collectively, they could have done it much earlier."

"That's part of why I strongly expect the Scientific Revolution to otherwise get shut down before it proceeds too far, and why I expect that the ancient gods favoring it would not have a supermajority as more and more other ancient gods' interests are threatened.  Urgathoa.  Gorum.  It maybe goes differently if Project Lawful remains on par with the Scientific Revolution and Cheliax conquers half of Golarion and remains in a constant state of battle with the Scientific Revolution, such that Gorum and Asmodeus favor the new state of affairs, but now we are once again getting into the space of possible outcomes where I am no longer very happy about it and want to fall back on the Nope Plan."

"It is possible that nobody around except Pharasma and Otolmens are allowed to know how to rig up planes for destruction.  You plausibly need to run particular high-energy experiments to figure out some of those even at INT 40, and if Pharasma can prohibit those experiments She can prohibit anybody from figuring out how to make a plane erase itself."

Carissa Sevar: "That all sounds right, but the closer Civilization is to something the ancient gods are all right with, the smaller the concession needed, which means we can ask for less from Pharasma and have better odds of getting it, or find another way to get it. And I think it's worth my seeing your concrete projections about - if the problem is specifically Gorum and the Evil gods, that's a different state of affairs than if the problem is all of the ancient gods, or all of them but Abadar..."

Keltham v3: "If it comes down to details like that, we're just going to have to refigure it all anyways when we're at mutual INT 29 in a couple of subjective weeks."

"Figure out what your plan would be.  Figure out what you'd need to set your plan in motion, that takes time to gather, that we need to start now and isn't doable far more efficiently at mutual INT 29.  Then we plausibly just do that, set in motion time-sensitive subplans or resource-gathering.  I can decide later whether to actually do it, unless it's incredibly clear right now that the plan is one that Smarter Carissa can't repair into something Smarter Me will go along with."

"I - register a strong preference that this plan have me not destroy Egorian, before Cheliax attacks Osirion once they believe they've got a hostage.  I'm not especially likely to be happy about Cheliax conquering Osirion and putting its inhabitants, who helped me, to slavery and misery.  I would do it to clean up the multiverse, I suppose, if there was no other way, but I'd lose a lot of myself that I haven't already lost in that process."

Carissa Sevar: "If we don't want Cheliax invading Osirion, I think I can pretty straightforwardly assassinate Abrogail and find out whether there are others. If there are, you just send Cheliax an ultimatum before the children are ensouled: swear not to invade Osirion for the next year or I'll destroy you now before the children are ensouled. 

I do kind of want Cheliax invading Osirion as part of my interest in Asmodeus thinking that things are going really well for him, but I - acknowledge that probably if I cared more about Osirion I wouldn't really be all right with that, and that the calculations about Asmodeus are tenuous right now."

Keltham v3: "I'm - not clear I would otherwise destroy Cheliax, if I was still planning on my current default plan.  There's an obstacle there, that I'm seeing more clearly after recent discussions and now that my emotions are in better repair."

"How would you find out if there are other children?"

Carissa Sevar: "I have spectacular Bluff these days. I Teleport in, assassinate Abrogail, raise her, and say to her 'I just saved you from Keltham destroying Egorian. Next time, consider not letting it come to that. Are there others as well?'"

Keltham v3: "I am not following this plan at all.  She lies and says 'no' and then, alerted of my suspicion, orders the further children evacuated to outside of Cheliax until they are ensouled."

Carissa Sevar: "She is told that you're prepared to preemptively destroy Cheliax unless there are no further children. If she says no, I say 'great, we bring Keltham an oath to that effect and he won't destroy Cheliax'. If she can't provide that oath, we kill the other mothers until she can. ...wrongthought, you're upset about them going to Hell. If she evacuates them from the country, your incentive is still to destroy Cheliax to ensure it doesn't have the capacity to go after Osirion, unless Cheliax is prepared to commit that they won't."

Keltham v3: "So this is being done at a point where I otherwise would destroy Cheliax, namely, if I switched away from my main plan, and then was otherwise about to run out of time on ensoulments probably starting?  I can stop Cheliax going after Osirion just by attacking Egorian with something that draws in their military response and then destroying Egorian, I think.  Or are you proposing that Cheliax responds to threats so I should make one?  Or proposing that it benefits myself, rather than being a threat, if I speed up the time when I'd otherwise confront them?"

"- Carissa, the fact that all of this enormous mess happens to me at a certain time unless I delete or clean up the multiverse before then, really looks to me like the plot is telling me to get on with it.  Not that the plot is telling me to wade into this enormous mess."

Carissa Sevar: "If that's so, I think you should say 'fuck the plot'. Do this at the time when you are most prepared and estimate the highest odds of success, or don't do it at all.  In any story worth reading, it'd be a mistake to do something with these stakes at a time chosen by external forces for any reason that isn't your own."

Keltham v3: "Fighting Pharasma is one thing.  Fighting the plot is another.  The current incentives that have been applied to me are sufficient to force me to hurry up and get on with the main plotline, taken at face value, because I do not, in fact, want to destroy Egorian as well as Absalom, or destroy all of Cheliax and send its inhabitants to Hell because possibly this world is mostly not real and one of my putative children ends up in a sequel being mostly real.  When I consider defying those incentives, there is then the further question of whether the incentives just escalate as opposed to staying in place while I defy them.  Or if they'd have just been raised retroactively, before the story started, if I was somebody to whom the current incentives would not be sufficient."

"I'm not saying flatly no.  I'm saying why I'm hesitant to defy the current incentives that suggest getting this all cleared up in a couple of weeks objective."

Carissa Sevar: "Do you agree that our odds of success are much worse if we have to rush to be ready in a couple of weeks objective, compared to if we have all the time we need at high INT and with specialized magic items to think and design Wish-wordings and consult every Power it might be worth consulting?"

Keltham v3: "I agree that our odds of success would be much better with a ten-speed time-dilated demiplane than with a two-speed time-dilated demiplane, which is why the laws of magic in Golarion are such as to make a ten-fold sped-up demiplane not be possible with the resources I have available.  I agree that my problems would be much easier if I could consult Iomedae about all of them, and it is obvious that the story will be twisted up into any pretzel-like shape required to prevent that."

Carissa Sevar: " - you know what? That's a prediction. Let's test it. Plan on taking six months. If something mysteriously happens to make this completely impossible, I will concede that it is more likely that there's some kind of 'plot' that will make it impossible to approach this in a responsible fashion. If nothing mysteriously happens, we're not in the 'story' you think we're in and the 'story' isn't set up to destroy the universe if we only achieve moderate gains and it's reasonable for us to be doing moderate things and leaving the key problem here to the next generation. This is really important; we have a way to check if it's true."

Keltham v3: "Then I guess I have you to thank, Carissa, for Abrogail's substitution plot and the fact that I have an unknown number of children looming over me, to make it mysteriously impossible for me to take six months, as you might otherwise have been able to talk me into doing."

"- I don't actually mean that, I would have talked me into doing that, without the deadline."

Carissa Sevar: "....you can in fact take six months! You taking six months vastly improves the possible outcomes here!"

Keltham v3: "Nnnnooo, my being unable to take the blatant hint presented by the storyline about needing to resolve this before my children get ensouled, causes the story to be even harsher about giving me a time limit.  Retroactively, I'd expect, but that doesn't make a difference here."

Carissa Sevar: " - Keltham, give me a diamond and a wording and I'll fucking blow up Cheliax today. Okay? And then you can take six months."

Keltham v3: "Either I'm really missing something or the 'today' part there makes no sense.  One, I haven't currently bought any Wish diamonds since I was planning to harvest them in a week.  Two, if I found a diamond like that on the market, we then would not have any way to convert that Wish diamond to a Wish inside of Golarion, the bottleneck is forming a relationship with somebody who'll make me a Wish scroll.  Three, if I had an extra Wish scroll, it would then be premature to use an insufficiently refined Wish wording in case that blew up more than Cheliax, which risk we could reduce by thinking about it at INT 29 until the deadline had almost run out."

"...should we take a break?  Either you really missed something or I really missed something or both, and either way, there's standard heuristics about taking a break and having a snack at this point."

Carissa Sevar: " - you're right, sorry, I don't need a diamond, just your acknowledging this as a allowable use of the Wishes I already have, and ideally a wording but I'll recruit Fe-Anar and we'll figure something out ourselves if needed.  The reason I want to do it today is that it seems to me you have tied yourself up into an utterly absurd knot around how story logic says not just that you should do this instead of doing something more limited but also likelier to succeed, but also about how story logic says that you should do it much sooner than when is optimal for the odds of it going well, and I can't - I can't respect a story where you're supposed to rush ahead and do something you haven't thought through before you're ready. In any real story, that ends with Yog-Sothoth eating everybody. And I can't respect a person who thinks that way. 

And, in order to have as much time as possible working with a thinking Keltham who I respect before the deadline, I think I should not wait until the last minute to blow up Cheliax; if I wait that long, you're not progressing on six-month or one-year challenge-Pharasma plans in the interim. I think I should just get it over with and blow up Cheliax today. Even if there's a 90% chance of a failure mode where the Wish actually destroys much much more than that, that's clearly worth it to have you wait six months on your challenge-Pharasma plans. 

 I believe this is in your interests and I am planning to do it this afternoon, though I'll of course spend a couple hours thinking about it first."

Keltham v3: "I am concerned about the potential dynamic this is heading into, where you have bright ideas and want to do them, and I keep having to be the one saying 'no'.  I think you would notice as many as several issues with doing this two hours from now, given two hours to think about it.  I want to send you off to think about it, but I feel it would be dishonest to claim that I would, at the end of those two hours, assent to that use of those Wishes that I purchased from you and that you gave me in reparation, three of which I saved out against better-advised uses than this."

"Wish phrasings that destroy whole countries are weirdly difficult to come by, go figure.  Osirion thought they needed me for that.  I don't think Hell would be much inclined to interpret any ambiguities in your favor, either, if you tried using your Hell-Wish for that."

"That said, if you think you have a good-enough wording based on only the ilani knowledge you have, which I had thought was carefully selected not to be dangerous in that way... Osirion does have a Wish scroll.  I will think about whether the agreements we've made so far are ones that I interpret to mean you couldn't try to talk Osirion into it."

"I'm saying this, and making that much of a suggestion for how you could try to destroy Cheliax this afternoon anyways, despite blatant flaws in your proposal as first stated by you, only because I do not want our relationship to get into a mode where I am the obstacle to all of your bright ideas.  Rather than, as is actually the case, your haste and your terror and the resulting flaws in your ideas, being the obstacle to your ideas."

"I don't own you and can't give you orders.  I suggest that you go take a break, Carissa.  I suggest that you think that proposal over and talk to Carmin or Fe-Anar.  Please convey to them that I said that you shouldn't be told about the really basic obstacle to destroying Cheliax two hours from now with a hastily-assembled Wish, because I think it is important for you to think the problems through without knowing that."

Carissa Sevar: "I am concerned about a potential dynamic where - you want to have this all over with in three weeks, so even if I come up with a good idea, you will insist that the plot says you mustn't try to work around this self-imposed deadline of yours.

But I acknowledge that until I in fact have a good idea, I might be assuming this of you unfairly."

Keltham v3: "I will be huddled in my bed-tent if anybody needs me.  Do not actually destroy Cheliax without giving me a final chance to explain why you should not, even if you should find all your own resources for it; I do consider that something that will interfere with my plans, based on information I gave you, as is prohibited by agreements we've already made."

Carissa Sevar: "Understood. 

It's not - to be clear - that I want to, that I'd do it lightly. Everyone I love lives there, and I don't want to send them to Hell. But - but if I were a person anywhere else in the multiverse at all, I'd hope the person in my place would do whatever it took, to make you spend one extra week double-checking your assumptions and consulting other Powers about your plan."

Keltham v3: "I have not in fact killed, of my own will, a single person, yet."

"That probably doesn't mean anything to you right now.  It wouldn't seem important on a scale of trying to destroy Pharasma's Creation.  Ask the Iomedaen to explain.  I - don't know how to say it to somebody from Cheliax, but Carmin will know how to say it, maybe, or Fe-Anar."

He turns and goes about back to his tent, his breathing not very steady.

Carissa Sevar: She goes to Carmin. 

lintamande: "How did it go?"

Carissa Sevar: "....it worked for a little while, we talked about some things I thought we couldn't talk about and I did the pretend Keltham thing and managed to not feel like it's incredibly dangerous to give him any information about myself, so that was progress. 

But then he said that he - well, he said things that came across to me as if he was saying that he wouldn't entertain any plans to stop Cheliax invading Osirion or solve the children issue because he thinks the Plot is just telling him to attack Pharasma by then. And I -

- I don't have any idea what to do with that? What I was trying not to say to him is that I feel such intense contempt for anyone who would think about the world that way that I don't think I could possibly work with them.

There's clearly a bunch of forces at play here and some of them are gods and some of them might not even be gods. But I just don't believe, at all, that those forces want Keltham to go ahead with his plan in a couple of weeks, unless they in fact want the multiverse destroyed, or want a - pointless illustrative tragedy where Keltham tries and gets  unceremoniously squished.

Am I wrong.  Isn't that - if you were writing a story, with a character like Keltham, who went ahead and did this in a couple of weeks because he thought he was a character in a story and was supposed to do it then, how would that story end."

lintamande: "...is this didactic fiction aimed at children in Mendev? Is it a serial published in the Absalom papers?"

Carissa Sevar: " - I think Keltham thinks it's an ilani story? Probably I should just - calmly discuss this with him like I calmly discuss the merits of destroying the universe with him, it's not different, it's my job to calmly discuss with him every way he's being unfathomably monstrous - I hate him -"

lintamande: "The story disagreement feels to you like another values disagreement, not just a factual disagreement about kinds of story?"

Carissa Sevar: "I don't - I don't know how to put words to it -

- so one part of it is that I really do think a story where you rush ahead with your incredibly dangerous plan before you've properly checked if it even works and before you've explored all your alternatives, because you think you're in a story and you're supposed to rush ahead is a tragedy, it's a story where you lose. 

Another part of it is that - I proposed an experiment, the thing Keltham was saying didn't make any sense to me and I said, okay, let's try solving the current reason-to-rush and if that fails, I will change your mind in your direction about how the story works, and if it succeeds, then you can agree that you're not in the same story you thought you were in and your story assumptions didn't apply, and he said, he said, 

'Then I guess I have you to thank, Carissa, for Abrogail's substitution plot and the fact that I have an unknown number of children looming over me, to make it mysteriously impossible for me to take six months, as you might otherwise have been able to talk me into doing.

- I don't actually mean that, I would have talked me into doing that, without the deadline.'

And that's when - that's when I stopped being able to - I tried to translate that and pretend he'd said something that wasn't incredibly cruel and stupid but I couldn't think of any possible meaning that wasn't cruel and stupid - it felt like, like he was saying, that it was silly, that I was proposing a test, that he was so sure that no new information would possibly change his mind, that I was silly, for believing him when he taught us things about checking your beliefs against reality, because actually all you're supposed to do is fold the information in to your own explanation you already have for doing what you wanted to do, it was like I didn't know who I was talking to, I thought we'd been having an ilani conversation about how new evidence would change our minds and now he was mocking the entire idea -" 

lintamande: "Do you think he was actually doing that?"

Carissa Sevar: "I have been trying and trying and I can't think what else it could possibly have been! I proposed a test, and he said that!! If that wasn't 'oh, no, I'm just going to back-interpret previous events as a test of this hypothesis that already confirmed what I want to believe, and refuse to conduct any more tests', what was he saying?"

lintamande: "Did you ask him?"