"And if it's not stable then it moves until it arrives somewhere stable, only how is it moving, here? With national politics the way it moves is that other countries deliberately counterbalance ones that are growing. With wars, the way it moves is that the side that's more powerful wins. But with babies, it's not that some people throw all girls and some people throw all boys, where one would increase its numbers until it didn't have an advantage. Instead everybody throws a mix. ...that's just a confusion without even a theory."

How they manage to know one thing around here, but not another... probably the concept of an equilibrium appeared in wizardry, even though, apparently, wizards don't already know calculus??  At least at their level?

"Right.  Any time you've got pressures on something, moving it, it'll keep moving for so long as the pressures aren't balanced.  Half male and half female represents a balance of something, which is why it's like that - but what is it that's balancing?  We have thoughts like 'well, if it was ten times as many women as men, or ten times as many men as women, then a women who had all male children or all female children would have more grandchildren'.  But that doesn't explain how it's a pressure - how it would be able to move the system's mix of men and women, if that mix wasn't already one-to-one.  How can we get from 'in a country with ten times as many women as men, one woman with all male children would have ten times as many grandchildren', to, 'there is a pressure that will move the average ratio of men and women if it isn't already 1:1'?"

This takes them a while! They're more willing to show confusion on their faces, at least. 

Eventually: "well, say you throw only daughters, and those daughters also throw only daughters, and some other people throw only sons, who also throw only sons - no, that doesn't work, because they'd have to have children with each other -"

"No, I think you're onto something," Meritxell says. "I mean, not in the case where some people only throw sons and some only throw daughters, but in the case where some people mostly throw sons and some mostly throw daughters, and pass that along, then if you start out with mostly women, the people who mostly throw sons will have more grandchildren until there's not more women anymore, and they haven't got an advantage. Uh, I'm confused about, how you'd pass along a tendency to throw sons. I'm not sure you can do that."

"You're on the right track.  Remember some things I told you earlier, about tiny spirals inside people; remember that those hidden orders are real and not just stories, or at least they were definitely real in dath ilan, and probably also here given that the food hasn't already killed me.  Inside every human body, there are tiny spirals that code how a body works, themselves divided into twenty-three pairs of packages.  One of those package-pairs is the sex package-pair, or chromosome pair in Baseline..."

Keltham sketches out the sex chromosomes, XY for male, XX for female.  A child gets one chromosome in each chromosome-pair from each parent, allocated by the parent at random.

"But if you imagine a new genetic-alternative, mutation, which influenced the ratio of sperm containing Y chromosomes or X chromosomes - or a mutation in the mother, which influenced whether male or female pre-infants were kept and gestated - that mutation wouldn't have to be a mutation in the sex chromosomes in particular.  A man could have sons that were more likely, though not certain, to have more other sons, and even the daughters of those men might still have male children of their own that had more sons.  The force of possible heritable mutations that would throw a different mix is the pressure that only ever reaches a balancing point at one-to-one males to females."

"Or rather, to be precise, the balance is one-to-one parental investment in males and females.  If females were half the size of men and required half as much parental attention and grew two to a birth, so that you could raise two females at the same cost as one male, the balancing point would be two women per men; you wouldn't be able to do better by birthing more men because men would be more expensive.  If you see an animal species that isn't half male and half female, the first thing to ask is whether the males or females are bigger or smaller or fewer survive to adulthood or there's otherwise some big difference in how expensive they are to birth and raise to maturity."

"But there's a larger point and a more important one.  The balancing point isn't the point that's good for the species, the country, as a whole.  It's not the point you would pick if you were a supergod making the species from scratch.  If you were doing that as a supergod, you'd probably have ten times as many women as men, and then just make it incredibly biologically difficult to ever birth all men - try to design the people so that no mutation could possibly affect the balance of ten women per men.  More members of the species would be able to birth children.  Or to look at it from another angle, you might also wonder whether a group or small faction birthing mostly women, would have an advantage over a group with half men and half women - if the mostly-female group could grow faster, because more of its members could bear children, or because it didn't have to pay the extra cost in food of supporting men too.  But then a group like that would also be vulnerable to an invading mutation that birthed more men; that mutation would rapidly spread within the group.  You can look at the sex ratio in humans, half men and half women, and say things like, 'Oh, I see that the balancing points between competing genes do not settle at the place that is good for groups having more children, it settles in the places that are advantageous for individuals having more children.'"

"And then everything else you see inside a human should settle in a similar kind of place, or it won't be stable against the pressure from mutated alternatives.  That's why you want to prosper for yourself, instead of being full of unselfish desire to see your whole country prosper.  It's why I need to offer you money to work for me, instead of you just working for the benefit of Golarion or Cheliax.  A faction full of individuals all working for the common good would grow faster, obtain more resources and have more kids, and you might think a mutation which built people like that would soon take over the world.  But as soon as that faction was invaded by a mutation in an individual that worked for their own benefit, that mutation would soon become more common; it wouldn't be a stable balancing point in the sort of species that ends up with half males and half females.  Insect species, like ants if you have those here, which you probably do if there's a word for ants, have lots of worker ants all laboring for the benefit of an ant hive; they don't have equal investment in males and females.  Ants can be balanced in different places because ants reproduce differently and workers share more genes with their queens."

"I wouldn't be surprised if the event that you remember historically as humans gaining free will, was the gods trying to modify people to work unselfishly for gods or maybe the gods' factions, like ants; but over time mutations accumulated in the human population that made them resistant to that magical template, and restored the old balancing points, where people cared about themselves instead.  Or maybe the gods stopped doing it for some other reason, I don't know, I'm new around here.  Oh, and I should say, the balancing points aren't purely selfish.  You share half your genes with your parents, half your genes with your children, and an average of around half your genes with your brothers and sisters; you have some instinct to help them, though not quite as strongly as you wish to help yourself.  My point is that, if you know how all the pieces of reality are woven together, if you know the hidden orders and secret stories behind them, you can take one glance at the statistics of women giving birth, see that it's half male children and half female children, and guess, 'I bet the people in this species mostly want pay for their work, and don't mostly work unselfishly for the good of the group like ants; I bet they care a lot about their brothers and sisters, but not nearly so much about their second cousins.  The pressures-on-heredity in this species must balance at the point where individuals and small families can't easily get more grandchildren with a different strategy, not at the point where larger groups can't get more grandchildren with a different strategy.'  And I could similarly guess very quickly that you hadn't been put together from scratch by gods or supergods, just from the way you acted so similar to dath ilani at a basic level, because gods wouldn't be bound by those balancing points the same way."

"I should probably pause here and check whether you have any questions, whether you followed all that, and whether I'm currently committing any visible horrible teaching errors that make a Chelish student's life less pleasant."

The students are captivated.

"It fits with what we've learned in theology class," Meritxell says. "About there being deep reasons Evil is - a natural equilibrium, though not usually phrased like that -"

"A balancing point of pressures.  Very large amounts of reality in general are at balancing points of pressures, which is why that aspect of reality sticks around in that form; it's a very common, maybe the most common form that a hidden order takes.  Water is a balancing point of pressures, in a way I'll either explain for free or sell later; if water wasn't balanced in its own dimensions of reality, you wouldn't see so much of it around.  Rocks too, they're at balancing points among the possible ways that the stuff making up rocks could be instead of rocks.  Likewise, just about everything in the human body or mind is at a local balancing point of how individuals and families can have the most grandchildren, because if it wasn't, even a small mutation could move you to a better point along that local dimension, and then that mutation would propagate.  Like people wanting to have sex, say, where if they wanted less sex, they'd have fewer kids, and if they wanted even more sex right away, they'd do things that aren't productive in the long term and end up with fewer kids.  If your body made a bunch more blood or a bunch less blood, that would, on average, lead to you having fewer kids too.  The degree to which people are Evil on average, however gods define that exactly, will also be at a balancing point relative to how many grandchildren families have when they're around that Evil - or if the world has recently been thrown into disequilibrium, the average degree of Evil will be moving away from its previous point where people in the previous world had the most grandchildren if they were around that Evil.  This would be even easier to see if you'd studied calculus, by the way, so when you do, remember to go back and rethink this in terms of derivatives equaling zero at the point where things stick around in existence."

They take notes vigorously. 

"Spells you can cast happen at balancing points in ways that magic can be," someone volunteers. "If you try to design a spell that does a random thing you thought of that'd be nice to have a spell for, it'll blow up in your face, and the reason is that you didn't happen to stumble on a way for magic to be where the magic will be happy to be, with no nearby state it'll flow into instead. So the way to actually invent spells is to understand where magic flows, and then find places it's flowed into, and then figure out what spell that must be."

"I'm frankly a bit puzzled as to why wizards don't already know calculus and not just topology.  But maybe if spell design is hard enough to require specialized ultra-expensive intelligence headbands and calculus is only useful once you get to that part... well, that's a topic for another time."  Keltham is going to be so amused if the actual key to spell design is on the order of 'invert the matrix to solve for the balancing point' and they just don't know how to invert matrices, but he is mostly not expecting this to be the case, though the incredibly bad design of Chelish schools sure has bumped up its plausibility.

"Anyways, uh, now that I've said all that, and just to check, has anyone had a sudden horrible realization about how mutations for lower Intelligence would be propagating, or why only what this world calls 'average intelligence' is the way for a family to have the most grandchildren, or why the Chelish heritage-optimization program is doing something horribly wrong around there?  I don't have anything specific in mind, here, I just, uh, it seems wise to check."

"Well, probably we should be encouraging wizards more aggressively?"

"Maybe it'd make sense to not let stupid people have children?"

"Wizards are also more likely to die, I think - and we're in school for longer, and deployed when we graduate - I don't see how you'd change that though, you need all that school to get good and you need the deployment to pay Cheliax back and keep the Worldwound sealed -"

"You could encourage wizards to have kids before they deploy, and their grandparents and the daycares raise them while they're deployed. I think it's hard to be pregnant in school right now but if it was good for Cheliax they could change the things that make it hard."

"There's - well, there's specific details I should probably be selling, not just giving away.  But, in general, I'll observe that one corollary of this whole theory is that if you've got a really excellent female wizard, and she's got a brother, you can potentially subsidize the brother to have an extra six kids.  It's not as good as her having an extra six kids herself, but it beats doing nothing.  Anything more clever and optimal and calculated than that is probably a sale issue rather than a free giveaway, though I'm still working out which is which on that score."

"I don't know enough details about Cheliax's situation to know myself what an optimal policy should look like.  I've given you some of the knowledge you'd need to think about it, but if Chelish governance is considering a policy shift based on that knowledge, it is probably wise to run it past me too.  I don't know how to balance the intelligence of future generations against any need for immediate wizards being deployed at the Worldwound, and yeah, asking people to be pregnant in school is a large ask.  But if you are currently losing even more intelligence to that sort of leak in the gene pool, I would really seriously consider that an emergency, I would not personally have expected a stable society to be possible at this level of average intelligence and I'm not sure how much further it stays possible."

His audience is so captivated and concerned. 

You'd think raising kids in Cheliax would be sufficient to make them not stunningly naive but apparently it isn't, Elias Abarco mutters through the telepathic bond with his colleagues. The girls are hanging off Keltham's every word with a degree of conviction that they ought to realize is borderline dangerous - at best trying to figure out how everything else they've been told is compatible with what they're hearing now, instead of keeping in mind that maybe Keltham's just not Asmodean and won't teach them to be either. Or they're very good liars. Probably for at least some of them, it's the latter - though it's a very good presentation, optimized for Elias rather than for Keltham, who is definitely missing nearly all of its nuances. 

Keltham won't teach them to be Asmodean. That's obvious. Presumably part of what they're here for is to figure out whether there's a variant of Keltham's teachings that will teach kids to be Asmodean, the obvious intelligence and societal competence distilled differently, presented in a way that preserves the awe-inducing sense of 'that's what it's like, for the world to be designed around principles that you'd have to be much smarter to even begin to understand' while also preserving the stuff that'd ideally go with it - a sense of smallness and irrelevance which dath ilan clearly does not bother inculcating...

Maybe some of the girls can be set to coming up with the synthesis, once they've been nailed down. The plan is to get them tomorrow before dawn, possibly excluding Sevar who might spend the night with Keltham and, if so, can be got at breakfast. This isn't Asmodeanism but it does seem like there's a better-crafted, more compelling version of Asmodeanism buried in it, once you strip out the stuff that's plainly aimed at advancing the art rather than awing children into submission with it.

Ione Sala, if somebody were to look inside her head - which nobody of Chelish affiliation, at least, is doing exactly at this moment - would not be smiling as much on the inside as she is on the outside.  She is thinking about how it really is beautiful that you could look at a species of half men and half women, and deduce so many other things from that, because you know why they're half men and half women, which is a huge thought she only understands a fraction of, but it implies so many other things, apparently.  And with that, you can just get tossed into another plane, even though nobody from your home plane knew for sure there were other planes, and by the time you've been there two minutes, you know which parts of the theology lessons are more there because they're mandatory for Asmodeans to believe and which parts are, the other kind of theology, it doesn't do to be too precise about thoughts like that.  But you can end up in another plane you had no idea existed, and within two minutes you know the people there weren't originally created by the gods.

Ione Sala isn't smiling as much on the inside because she's regretting, a little, that her life is like it is.  She does well on tests, it's why she's here, that and being passably pretty.  She carefully doesn't compete too hard in social contests, she aims to end up safely in the middle.  She behaves just as it is safest to behave, towards the students above her and below her, including sexual favors as they are given away to those below her who are useful, or extracted from her by those above her.  She passes her loyalty scans by being a cautiously obedient game-player even in her own mind, a sort of person that Cheliax considers adequately standard and predictable, a sort of soul that Asmodeus considers to be an acceptably tyrannized slave.  It is the way that things have always been and will always be.  If any parts of her feel otherwise, they are not allowed to voice their heretical thoughts in words; though she also knows, wordlessly in the back of her mind, that if she's a good-enough wizard someday Cheliax will ask her to sell her soul and after that it will be okay to think more freely.

Still some tiny remaining fraction of Ione Sala, even today, wishes without words or inner acknowledgment that her life could be more like the greater reality she's dimly glimpsed inside a repurposed library in an Archduke's villa: learning things, knowing how one fact connects to so many other facts, seeing how worlds differ across planes.

But now, onward to the next part of this topic, which may be personally important to some of those present.  Suppose hypothetically that Cheliax discovers an alien visitor, who we'll guess for now to be capable of interbreeding with Golarion humans, who is about as smart as the smartest Chelish people without intelligence headbands... actually, can somebody remind Keltham of what the mean intelligence is around here, in the local measurements?  He thinks he was told this number but he's forgotten it since.  Also does this language have any more standard way to talk about the square root of the average squared deviation from the mean?

Ten, and no, that's how you'd talk about that, though with intelligence in particular people usually talk about a two-step, which is the same thing - an intelligence of 12.

"So around sixty-eight percent of the population should have an Intelligence between 8 and 12?  Is that about correct?"

Yep! 

All right then, the Chelish government has just come across an alien visitor with an Intelligence of... Keltham thinks he was told 18, though at levels like these, the difference between 17.5 and 18.5 is significant, but let's say his Intelligence is exactly 18 for now.  Though it feels funny to call himself "Intelligence 18", since in dath ilan's system, the average g is 0 and Keltham is at +0.8.  Somebody with a dath ilani g of 18 would have a dath ilani Intelligence of "46".  But let's ignore for now how the dath ilani system is obviously better and closer to the underlying math.

So anyways:  Is this alien visitor likely to be of any special benefit to heredity-optimization in Cheliax and Golarion, compared with just matching the same potential volunteers with a local man of Intelligence 18?  Is he worth anything special from the Chelish government's standpoint?

Pretend you were just collectively tapped to advise the Chelish government on this, and can't ask Keltham directly!  Also try to pretend that you're a dath ilani whose life experience trains them to continue thinking in the face of questions your teachers didn't tell you how to answer, including the part where you know and list the reasons you might be wrong.

....well, probably it's easier to get girls to sleep with Keltham, since he's cooler than their average male classmate. If that's wrong, it's wrong because, well, you could just order them - you could just pay them more.

"So," says Tonia, "if someone reads 18 and their relatives also read 18, they're more valuable than someone who reads 18 and their relatives are more like 14, because the score doesn't map perfectly to the thing we actually care about - though it's pretty good - and someone who is an outlier is also likelier to be, sort of, a measurement error - a case where they're not actually quite as bright as their number suggests - but if their family's that smart too then they probably just are -"

"And similarly if someone's from a society where the average is 18," Asmodia says. "It's a realer 18, in a manner of speaking. ...uh, if that's wrong, it'd be because...maybe the measurement system is actually meant to evaluate locals and fails on evaluating foreigners -"

"dath ilan is richer than us. Everyone eats better. We know that kids who don't eat enough are stupider. Maybe none of us eat enough, and we're all stupider than our children would be if they were raised in dath ilan, and so Keltham has less good heritable-traits than us, but a much better upbringing."

"Sure, but wizard kids are mostly born to wizards, and don't go hungry."

"We don't go hungry compared to normal people, we might still be missing something - or replace 'hunger' with 'malaria' - does dath ilan have malaria -"

"Doesn't translate, so if it's there it's not common enough to have a name I learned, either that or this translation magic is picky about what it translates in ways I don't understand.  I... know the theory of several things that will knock half a... will knock a point off of Intelligence if you're deficient on them, that's specific knowledge rather than basic general principles but the Chelish government should maybe purchase that knowledge from me sometime soon.  I'm happy to sell it on a contingency contract where it's only worth any payment if you run experiments and find later that kids were actually deficient."  Element-53 is in seaweed.  They need to see what happens if kids here grow up eating seaweed.

"Also, credit for thinking of that at all, I should have remembered earlier that intelligence here may not be as heritable as it is where I come from because we've eliminated the variation from non-heritable factors like that.  There are also potential contaminants that can knock off a point of Intelligence or do other kinds of metabolic damage."  Element-82.  Element-3.  "You should contingency-buy my knowledge about that, too.  Or would healing spells fix that already?"

"That's not the kind of thing that healing fixes. Restoration might but your average person who isn't an adventurer has never gotten a Restoration, it costs, uh, three or four years of unskilled labor."

"There's a very obvious thing a dath ilani thinks immediately after hearing that.  Can you guess what it is?"

"...that it's worth it?"

"What's worth it depends on what you can afford.  Do you even have that many clerics who can cast spells from a high enough circle, to get your whole population that way?  It's not the first thing a dath ilani thinks, either.  Try again?"

"...that we should at least check?"

"Check what?  How?"

"Try a Restoration on a number of random farmers that we can afford and check if their intelligence goes up afterwards? If you tried it on five of them and it didn't do anything for any of them then it's probably not a big deal, at least."

"Why yes, that is indeed something that this advisory panel might tell the Chelish government to do, in order to help estimate the probable value of the alien visitor to their heritage-optimization program, and also, you know, check on general principles if there is anything that might be lowering your entire population's intelligence.  Since you figured that out on your own from being told the basics, I will not charge for that advice in that form; though there are some further refinements for sale if you would like your results to be more precise and more meaningful.  The other thing to keep in mind is that intelligence develops over time; even if Restoration immediately fixes nutrient deficiencies or subtle contaminants, it may not fix the way that intelligence already developed as a result of those nutrient deficiencies or subtle contaminants.  So the other thing a dath ilani thinks of immediately is to try giving some children a Restoration once every three months, and seeing if on average those children grow up with higher measured Intelligence than would be predicted from the measured Intelligence of their parents.  There are precise subtleties we think of, in the design of the investigation procedure," like having any control group at all, and any grasp of quantitative statistics, and the required number of experimental subjects to produce enough expected evidence between possible effect sizes, "though I haven't yet decided if those are for sale or free.  There are also ways we think of to start getting preliminary results faster, earlier, saving on time," like experiments on rats, followed by experiments on monkeys, who have shorter development times, and aren't protected by sapient rights the same way as chimpanzees or humans.  "But, again, I haven't decided if specifics like that are free, and they probably aren't."

"And then, if tests like that show an effect of routine Restoration on intelligence development, you know that the general population has any kind of significant problem that Restoration cures, and you can start trying to narrow down what the problem is and how to cure it without needing to spend precious cleric spells on Restorationing every member of the population."

"The larger attitude I want to teach you is that everything around you is an investigative tool.  There's a famous dath ilani fictional character who spent too much time fighting and now thinks in terms of how every object in a room could be used as a weapon.  This is that, but for figuring things out.  Your first thought was that, since Restoration cured people, maybe you could use it to solve your problem and cure everybody in the Chelish population.  Before solving problems comes figuring out problems, and the first step there is to open your eyes and look.  Everything around you is a tool for investigation, it is a potential way to poke other things and reveal facts about them.  Restoration isn't just a way of curing people of a set of problems, it's an investigation tool for seeing whether observable qualities of people are being affected by things that Restoration cures.  First, open your eyes and look; and ask how every resource you have and everything in the world around you can be an eye."

Ione Sala has never deliberately tried to learn anything more about Nethys, or any other gods who aren't Asmodeus - why run even a slightly increased chance of seeming heretical? - but even she knows that this is the most Nethys thing that has been said inside the borders of Cheliax since the change of administration.  She wonders if this was enough to catch Nethys's attention, and if Nethys is now looking at this very library and will try to - well, no, Nethys can't make Keltham a cleric, Keltham's already some other god's cleric.

But, let us return to this advisory board and its report to the Chelish government on the potential value of the alien visitor.  The board has recommended some experiments that might shed light on the general state of the entire Chelish gene pool which perhaps should have been done already - assuming they haven't been, Chelish Governance does seem to contain some smart people and Lawful beings - but if not, the alien visitor can sell some further refinements in those regards.  Anyways, leave that part aside.  How is the advisory board thinking about the basic question of whether it's especially useful to set up matches with an alien with 18 Intelligence?  Is it more useful than a match with an 18-Intelligence local?  Why or why not?  What are the different theories there, what is there to say for and against those theories?

It depends on which produces smarter children and grandchildren. Presumably the government already has some sense of how valuable it is to them to have people of a given intelligence, so if you know which match produces smarter children and grandchildren, and by how much, you know how valuable it is.

You could maybe, Tonia ventures, compare marriages between Chelish INT-18 people to a marriage to, say, a Tian INT-18 person, and if marrying out produces smarter (or stupider) offspring, it ought to show up in that.

An interesting thought!  Especially since, if marriages like that already exist, you could go look at those marriages already, without needing to wait years to produce your advisory report.  But before you look at a result like that, you should try to come up with some prior idea of which ways reality could be that could produce which results.  What are the different things that might be true?  What different results would they produce for Chelish-Tian marriages?

Well, people hybridize with some other humanoid species by getting traits from both, and hybridize with some species by getting traits from just one, and hybridize with some by not turning out at all. So it might be true that hybridization across ethnicities is like that, where you get a mix, or you might get something that's not quite in between, like you get if you fuck a polymorphed air elemental, the kid isn't half air, they're just something else entirely. You'd be checking to see how people hybridize, more or less.

"I can tell you the result of that one, if a Chelish-Tian mating is a human one and the human matings work anything like they do in dath ilan.  Twenty-three package-pairs of heritable information, remember, with each child getting their two packages one from each parent package-pair, selected at random?  So most things in a human mating will be a mix, unless a trait is being determined all at once in a single package-pair location, the way that sex is determined by the sex package-pair.  Intelligence is not determined all in one spot, if it's determined here anything at all like it is in dath ilan.  There'll be bits of heritage all over the twenty-three package-pairs that affect it, positively, negatively, and subtly."

"Well, and now that I've told you that, is there still anything you could find out from observing Chelish-Tian matings?  What could you observe differently, where you're not already sure of what you might observe?  What could those possible observations say about the package-pairs and the heritable-information coding for Intelligence?  What could it be saying about what's going on inside of those package-pairs, in Cheliax, in Tian, and in your guesses extrapolated from distant Tian to the far more distant dath ilan?"

"...variance," says Meritxell. "If you mix two eighteens you probably get an eighteen, on average, but - but it's much more valuable to get a sixteen and a twenty than two eighteens, because the twenty can end up running the country - if Chelish people and Tian people have the same bits making them smarter, then they'll have the same variance mixed, but if they have different bits then they'll have higher variance."

"You have slightly impressed me.  Be justly proud of this."

She beams at him fiercely.

Oh, good.  After he said that, Keltham started to worry that some dath ilani flirting tropes wouldn't make it across the vast cultural gap, but at least that one seems to have landed.

"Now here's a harder question.  How valuable is higher variance in the intelligence of offspring, if the alien visitor has mostly different bits in his package-pairs that increase and decrease intelligence?  How much can the Chelish government gain from using that variance, how much should they be willing to pay?"

"Well, depends how valuable smart people are. But I think - I mean, one person with native-born INT 20 is itself something they'd pay a lot for, and the variance thing probably applies for a couple generations until it's all diluted..."

"Hm, yes, how much you're willing to pay for one Intelligence 20 offspring does depend on what use you can make of them, which in turn depends on how clever you are in thinking up potential uses.  This advisory panel of the greatest native experts in Cheliax on heritage optimization has been convened to make expert recommendations about heritage-optimization to the Chelish government, since that is what this advisory panel knows more about than anybody else in Cheliax, or Golarion for that matter.  This may now actually be true about you in real life, by the way.  Anyhow, the rest of Governance will decide for itself how valuable an Intelligence 20 person will be for purposes of fighting at the Worldwound and such.  What can this advisory panel say to Governance - or wildly guess with appropriate qualifiers - about the clever use of any Intelligence 20 children from the alien, for the purposes of heritage-optimization in particular?"

"- you probably shouldn't pair them off with their half-siblings, you get weird genetic defects that way, and there aren't any native twenties...that I've ever heard of -"

"And now I know you actually do have the package-pair system around here!  The pairs of packages carry duplicates of a lot of the same genetic information for constructing a person - that is, if a package is carrying some of the instructions for building, like, fingers, you've got the same information on both packages in the pair, usually.  If one of the package-pairs gets damaged, in that particular, the other element of the pair can often take over and make sure your fingers still get built.  If a brother and a sister mate, their offspring has a one-fourth probability of ending up with the same package twice, for each of the twenty-three pairs.  You are a lot more likely to end up with no information for building fingers that way.  In dath ilan, the corresponding equilibrium is that people usually aren't sexually attracted to other people they grew up with.  If people here weren't also built from package-pairs, they wouldn't get the same deleterious effects from mating with half-siblings."

"Anyways, yes, you shouldn't pair off my kids with each other in the first or second generations, unless you've already developed other magic or technology for telling who got which packages from me.  Still, what are they worth to the Chelish government?  Ignore the part for the moment about whether any of my kids are smarter than any other kids in this world - they may not be, for reasons I'll get into - that's a fighting-at-the-Worldwound issue anyways.  How would you guess the value of intelligence variance for the heritage-optimization program, or the value of having different bits of heritage that are increasing and lowering intelligence?"

They are pretty stumped by this. You could have smarter kids, but that's been said already. You can't directly try to use the best bits because they have no magic that refers to things on the level of bits.

It's not occurring to them that they could just... "Ah, what kind of - intelligence-training games, you don't have a word for them, that's not a good sign - what kind of complicated games do Chelish children play, if any, at all?"

People play Knights, which is a two player board game with pieces that move in different ways, and Spy, which is a group game where some children are spies and some are soldiers and they have to figure out who's sabotaging their operations, and it takes them a suggestive while to come up with a third, though someone eventually offers that there are spelling bees.

HOW DOES EVERYTHING MANAGE TO BE THIS BROKEN SIMULTANEOUSLY WOULDN'T THE KIDS THEMSELVES SPONTANEOUSLY INVENT BETTER GAMES THAN -

"Right, then, what we are going to do now is invent a new reality-mirroring game.  That is one of the things that a dath ilani child would do as a matter of course, faced with a question they had no idea how to answer, whether that question came from an older child or a Watcher or from life itself; they would try to invent a game, corresponding to the question, that they might learn something from playing."

"There is math that I know which describes in a quite simple way the value of variance for heritage-optimization, as it happens, or the result of having the variations come from different bits of heritage.  But it can be hard to correctly derive the math that will give you the fully general answer right away.  Inventing games can be straightforward in a way that doing math is not."

"I did tell you how the twenty-three package pairs work.  So why not invent a game with, say, four package-pairs, and four places in each package where heritages can potentially vary?  How would you make a game like that, and play it, to learn something about how heritage-optimization might play out?  As an advisory panel to the Chelish government, it may be worth your time to spend a whole day playing games like that, if that's where you're generating your ideas and advice - in fact, you might even hire other people to play them for you, and report back about the results.  Though here, you can't do that yet, even if you brought in somebody else to hire in real life, because you're still learning how to invent and play relevant games at all."

They set at this. Somewhat abashedly. ...everyone has four package-pairs and four places where heritages can potentially vary, and each spot can either be a "smart" or a "nothing" or a "dumb", and your score is the smarts minus the dumbs. Everyone can trade with other people, and you can drop the current 'person' you're playing for any of your offspring, and other people tell you their total score but not any components, and you try to have the smartest 'person' after twenty rounds.

Would that be the right kind of game.

"Play it once and see what happens!"

They try it? It's not clear anyone is having any fun but they work very effortfully at it. Mostly everyone tries to do all of their trades with the highest-scoring person around, who has no real incentive to trade with dumb people. This is probably reflective of life but it's not very fun.

This game is not even slightly reflective of how anything would plausibly work in reality, and nobody has any idea of how fun game design or accurate simulation-game design works, and they are playing a game that would be cooperative in real life as if it is a competitive one, and it is occurring to Keltham for the first time that they may not even consciously know the difference between positive-sum and zero-sum games, which sure would explain why simple words for that don't seem to exist in Taldane, or why no Chelish book or Chelish person has ever happened to use the terms around him yet.

Right.  This is fine.  Everything is fine.

"All right, let's stop there," Keltham says, trying to maintain the same calm demeanor that a Watcher would have in this situation.  "I think this game isn't playing out the same way it would play out if Chelish governance was running a heritage-optimization program; do you have any ideas what went wrong and how you should modify the game?"

They noticed some problems!

 - high intelligence people can't get much out of trading, whereas in real life people are pretty motivated to have sex even if they don't get smart children out of it

- you can only be one person, so you have to ditch the person you were if you want to be a new person, but maybe you should just get to add them to your stable? that'd incentivize having more children, though also the paperwork would get really annoying

- no one has any particular insight into how some people got better, it seems like mostly just luck

"I am genuinely not sure how to introduce this topic if you have never encountered it before, but sometimes in real life, a group of people have to work towards a common goal, and at the end get some payout in common that they have to divide up - according to previously agreed-upon rules, if they were smart.  Games can work like that too, and should, if they're trying to mirror that kind of reality.  Chelish Governance is going to be trying to make the game work like that, that's sort of the whole point of having a government in the first place."

"The other thing that's missing is that you don't - seem to have a current notion of what you're trying to find out from the game - you know, I think I may be doing this wrong and not providing you with enough direction literally the first time you're doing this.  You play games with older kids leading, before you get handed some problem that requires you to invent a game for younger kids to play with you.  Well, I may just be motivated to think that because of my personal interest in having this particular topic taught quickly; still, the rationalization seems valid after having been invented."

"So!  Things you could be testing in this game include alternate rules that Chelish governance could give the players about subsidies and rewards, which would lead players each trying to maximize their own score, to do useful things for heritage-optimization.  And now it's occurring to me that maybe you don't already have this concept, maybe people here just make up laws that sound like good ideas and don't play games to figure out what the laws will do in their effects on selfish people.  In which case I also have to, at some point, convey basic competence for figuring out what effects different legal systems would have and optimizing better laws, which, the complete wreckage of what my own people consider Lawfulness in Golarion, should maybe have suggested to me earlier was also going to end up a Project issue, but never mind one thing at a time."

"The other thing you were going to investigate was the effect of adding one person with different bits of heritage to the system.  So for now, just make up some fixed rules about points that players score by having smarter characters in their hand, let's say there's at most three characters you can keep in your hand at one time, and your objective is not to score higher than other players, it's just to score as many points as possible for yourself.  Characters can be male or female at random; men can have any number of children in a lifetime, women can have only three children per lifetime.  When any two players mate their characters, they have to agree in advance on which player will retain the resulting offspring.  Any time a mating occurs between two characters one of whom has over ten smarts, the Chelish government pays an extra point to whichever player doesn't end up owning the resulting offspring.  Any time a mating occurs between two characters both with over ten smarts, the Chelish government pays an extra three points to whichever player doesn't end up owning the resulting offspring.  At the end of the game, everybody gets a bonus equal to total smarts divided by ten, which mirrors the real-life fact that smart people don't capture all of the value they create for themselves and that smarter societies end up generally richer even for the nonsmart people in them; and remember, your in-game goal is to maximize your total points for yourself, not worry at all about how many points other players are scoring..."  Keltham goes on sketching some additional rules intended to make the game mirror real-life genetics, and real-life incentives under conditions of government subsidy.

Each player gets one free mating at the start of the game with the 'Thamkel' character, which is the only one that has any 'smart' or 'dumb' values at the fourth locus of each chromosome - all other characters have 'neutral' at the fourth locus.  'Thamkel' also has only neutral values at the first locus, where other characters can have 'smart' or 'dumb' there.  This reflects the way that Thamkel has some different varying bits.  You can't legally mate two Thamkel offspring during the first two generations afterwards.  There are a few other characters as smart as Thamkel, but only Thamkel has any variation in the fourth locus for each chromosome.

And then Keltham observes what happens under the new game conditions.  Do they - sort of get the point of the simulation, now, or the incentives?  At all?

Yes, once he spells it out they can follow how that's like the situation they're trying to produce, and they can try to fumble through it with all the new scoring rules in mind. They're...still not clear on how you learn from this how much Thamkel helps, aside from playing the game without Thamkel in it.

Well, yes, after they've played this game for a few generations, they're going to score themselves, and then play a new game without Thamkel in it.

Right. 

They're still evidently not having any fun but they do this very diligently, and get better at it over a couple of trials, and take down their scores. (They seem to find it hard not to track who has the highest score). 

He's seriously not trying to score them on their game scores!  First of all, people were given randomized characters with uneven qualities at the start of the game, just like life itself isn't fair in that way, and second, he's watching to see if people play according to their incentives, not whether they get higher scores than other players.

...he's not sure what's going wrong with the way that nobody's having fun.  Maybe just the sheer cognitive load associated with not really instinctively feeling what's going on and not having pre-learned brain patterns for this complicated game?  He should maybe back off of this soon, then, and only re-approach after playing simple games with shorter-term intrinsic real rewards associated with good play, like if they're doing it on a playground, or the adult equivalent of that.  He doesn't want to train his students that simulation games aren't fun.

"So this game wasn't a very realistic one - for example, you knew all of your characters' genetic information locus by locus, where, for a more realistic game, we should've had some Game Masters who only told you a character's total Intelligence score, didn't tell you anything about the specific loci, and generated new characters for everyone after each mating.  Nonetheless, for this unrealistic version, around how valuable was Thamkel?"

(Two games without Thamkel managed to take Intelligence from 10 to 12.2 and 12.8, over the prescribed number of generations.  Two games with Thamkel took Intelligence to 13.6 and 12.8.  It's frustrating how slowly the game seems to progress!)

But still, that suggests Thamkel is maybe worth a point over the next couple of centuries, which is a lot, if it were true on a population scale.

"Unfortunately, I can't promise this scenario is at all realistic.  The results you got were ones that I knew you'd get; the game simplified things to where, more or less, the main thing driving the results was how much variance, squared-deviation, you had to select on.  The games with Thamkel gave you four-thirds as much variation to work with as the games without him, and that's basically the answer you got.  That said, though the game was simplified, that part should be more or less true about real genetics according to the real math; the real math says that the rate of selection on a characteristic goes as the covariance between the variance of that characteristic and variance in fitness."

"I could have just proved that, but I thought it was more important to show you a methodology that works for getting a quick perspective on modeling something in an hour, when you don't know how to prove a general mathematical result inside that hour.  Even the abstract math wouldn't take into account things like the division of the genes into twenty-three package-pairs, and until we played this game with four package-pairs, it would be hard to tell from looking at the more abstract path whether that was a critical thing to model."

"Is it realistic that the game with Thamkel has four-thirds as much variation to select on?  That's the critical question, and unfortunately, that part I don't know.  I wish I could remember what percentage of population variance an average dath ilani is carrying, or figure out how many alternative alleles besides that would have been fixed in your population, versus my population, over the unknown time since dath ilan diverged from whatever human biology got here.  With my own world's technology, we could spot-check the tiny spirals directly, see how different they were, figure out how much they'd diverged, and get a good guess how long ago it had happened chronologically.  But I can't do that, and I don't remember even some of the relevant figures that I've actually seen."

"The end result could be anywhere between 'Keltham is worth a five percent boost to how much heritage optimization we can get over a millennium' to 'Keltham has most of a whole other plane's worth of intelligence-promoting alleles that differ from our own pool and that gives us twice as many beneficial mutations to work with' or even, though this would be extreme, 'Keltham quadruples the amount of variance we have to work with, because the cumulative differences between his plane and our plane are four times larger than the pool of important mutations we were selecting on locally, and selection starts going four times as fast for a while a hundred years later.'"

"But, let's be real here, unless I'm somehow worth much less than I look on the surface of the game, the Chelish government cannot realistically pay me as much as my genes are worth to Golarion a thousand years later.  And also, let's be real, I didn't exactly do all the work of dath ilan that selected people like me into existence, even if my genes would usually be considered to be owned by myself; the percentage of generated value that I capture should maybe be legitimately less than if I was selling a book I wrote.  So this is mostly a situation of eh, make me an offer for some unknown-size but probably civilization-level long-term boost.  Plus maybe some unusually smart kids in the first generation, if a lucky draw from the higher-variance heritage-bits that go into a Chelish woman with high Intelligence play well with half of a dath ilani baseline."

"Though I suspect the first generation's results may possibly see a drop instead, unfortunately, if it breaks up some package-combinations of established dath ilani genes that rely on each other.  Or if my kids don't get the right nutrition, or if other kids start getting the right nutrition and catch up.  You're not paying for a higher mean in the first generation than you could've gotten with an 18-Intelligence person from Tian, you're mainly paying for higher variance between smart kids over the next decades, centuries, and millennia.  Which is a lot more valuable than you might realize without doing the math or playing the game.  If the end result is that you get all of another world's good ideas from its tiny spirals, it really is quite valuable - but most of the value won't show up in the very first generation of remixing the package-pairs."

"What's a fair value on that between friendly trade partners, in a world otherwise dancing on the edge of imminent destruction by the Worldwound?  Good question, really.  Unless your government tries to lowball the offer by an amount I consider insulting or silly, I doubt that's going to end up the real sticking point.  I suspect a larger cause for hesitation is that I find myself selfishly concerned with what sort of life my kids will lead, including the ones who only end up with Intelligence sixteen - or even fourteen if that's how much variance is in play, and the first generation ends up breaking important combinations inside the dath ilani baseline genome.  I mean, the kids who'd otherwise exist instead of my kids wouldn't be hugely better off, unless you'd otherwise have found mates much smarter than me, so all fine from a Good perspective.  But I'm not Good and I know very little about this place and it is kind of a gigantic flaming mess and they'd be my kids - well, that's the sticking point from my own perspective."

"But anyways, I have now conveyed to you, and so hopefully to Chelish Governance soon after, that basic knowledge of reality's underlying workings which is required to guess a valuation over the genes from an alien traveler with 18 Intelligence, including the elements of great uncertainty in models thereof.  I await your government's offer, and perhaps more importantly, testable predictions over my offspring's future circumstances."

- nervous giggles. 

" - what about their circumstances do you want predictions about exactly? That they'll get a good education? That they'll, uh, consider themselves to have been done a favor, by your creating them?"

"...I frankly have not thought about this enough!  I thought I had several more years at least to think about it, and when I contemplated it before, did not expect this quantity of potential variation from baseline circumstances I would need to consider!  My kids considering me to have done them a favor by becoming their dad would be, would be a start.  But also, am I going to scream in horror every time I try to check in on one of my 144 kids and they're being taught how to do arithmetic incorrectly in 'school', and should I even let that stop me or is it just the kind of thing that somebody has to grit their teeth and accept if Golarion is ever going to be less of a giant flaming mess?  The prospect of having 144 kids here would be less of a funawful question if this place was less of a giant flaming mess!  Should I maybe at least wait until two successive waking hours have gone by without my realizing once again that in fact things in Golarion are much worse than I previously realized?  This at minimum would seem to indicate some basic level of achieved epistemic stability that seems valuable for making irrevocable long-term decisions!"

"My feelings about this are a bit disordered and I'm not going to try to sort them out in two minutes, I can tell I won't end up with a great answer if I do that."

There's a silence long enough it could be considered awkward.

"Golarion's probably going to be a whole lot better in ten years, anyway, you can stall on this one for as long as you can bear to."

"Yeah, here's another bit of knowledge, I'll throw it in for free:  The little tiny spirals aren't perfectly stable, they degrade little by little over time, that's part of the story behind how getting old kills you.  The tiny spirals in female and male reproductive elements are some of the most protected and best repaired in the whole body, but parents getting old before reproducing is still not good for kids.  If a man does something really impressive at 50, people try to have his kids' kids, not that guy's kids directly -"

"Unless magical healing or Restoration repairs that.  That's something we can also check by measuring the children's intelligence from existing marriages between people who have or haven't had Restorations.  Though it also implies that - adventurers? - should age more slowly, so if that's not already known to be true, maybe don't bother."

"But even if that is true, I'm not going to take ten shitting years to decide a thing.  A ten-year delay is not a trivial cost to heritage optimization in Cheliax and Golarion.  I'm not slow like a tiny cognitive snail.  I'm going to have any idea how Golarion works before ten years pass, I'll see how fast it's improving.  When I try to predict my own future decision, my first-order intuition is 70% that I say yes and that means my real probability is more like 95% given the known direction of systemic error there.  Delaying ten years on something you're 95% likely to do eventually is downright stupid.  But spotting myself ten days, that I may perhaps do."

"Adventurers age mostly normally, wizards worth their salt cast daily aging-delaying spells and make one thirty, one fifty. I have no idea if their later-in-life children tend stupider."

"Wizarding school is disproportionately firstborns, though, everyone knows that. Moreso in other countries where it might just be parental investment, but even here," Jacme says.

"Does that mean people should mostly have children in school, for that reason," Meritxell says, "or is the difference between your teens and twenties not as large -"

"Twenties is - considered socially fine, default childbearing years, you'd only push it into your teens or thirties if you were planning to have lots of kids and your twenties weren't enough?  That's what our customs were, but I don't remember what the numbers are on that... you know, as much as we train to operate under ignorance, it's really quite alarming not to be able to look certain things up on - on the repository of all human knowledge that every dath ilani can instantly access from their house.  Uh, that's high on the tech ladder and you're not going to be able to do that for a while."

"...how do you set that up?"

"Same tech that I'd use to talk to somebody on the other side of the planet.  Or get the statistics from a million runs of a game like the one we just played, without anybody playing it.  Tools to make tools to make tools, hidden orders beneath hidden orders beneath hidden orders, if it was simple you'd have figured out more of it by now on your own.  The tech ladder goes up.  You go look for bits and pieces of reality that can interact with each other from far away, you look for bits and pieces that you can arrange and rearrange into incredibly complicated dynamic patterns using advanced tools, and you take your books and turn them into patterns like that and let them interact with other people from far away.  If it wasn't for magic maybe being able to boost things in ways we couldn't do in dath ilan, I'd say that there was little chance we'd live to see it ourselves - not as mortals, maybe from the afterlife.  With magic, anything is possible so far as I know; you, of course, may know better."

"We'll need headbands," says Merixtell, very dryly.

Keltham is not really the intended audience of that statement. 

Also Meritxell must be really convinced it's worth getting in trouble for it, because there aren't a lot of continuations of the conversation that don't involve nailing down how much they're supposedly all being paid.

Carissa respects the initiative, honestly.

"Legit.  I - should maybe prioritize learning about those, more than I've been prioritizing that, previously, within my incredibly rapidly lengthening long list of priorities.  How much social credit do I need with Chelish Governance to start getting headbands for everyone, for that matter?  What does it take to impress them?  A direct price list for what it takes to rent stuff by the day would come in handy.  For that matter, I've got fourth-circle cleric spells I can potentially sell; resorting to that seems like it would reflect a process inefficiency, but it's sometimes okay to do inefficient things temporarily."

"I think it's plausible today was enough they'll loan you all the cheapest kind of headbands, which do two points; the expensive kind is four times that and does four points, and the most expensive time is four times that again and does six. I suspect the Chelish government does not have twenty, or even three, of the most expensive kind, they'd be requisitioning from adventurers, and that's much more expensive than the materials price."

"I suppose if that wasn't true, Golarion would look different from how it does... there's one metal, spellsilver, that's the limiting resource?  I would have memorized a lot more about the properties of every known kind of elemental metal and how to mine them all most efficiently, if I'd known this was how my life would go.  It's unfortunately exactly the sort of knowledge most people, such as me, are too lazy to memorize if you have access to the universal repository.  But with any luck, climbing the tech ladder on generating heat and turning heat into motion will suffice for moving and sifting greater quantities of any kind of ore."

"Spellsilver and enchanter time but the sale price is sixty percent just the price of the raw materials and if that were cheaper, in the long run more wizards would train into enchanting wondrous items."

"And with more headbands, even basic headbands, we get more wizards who can train to make more expensive headbands.  When things go well, that's why they go well, in economies."

"We should probably break soon for the day, after which I should take a brain cooldown rest, and then try studying basic wizard magic, I think?  Though before then I did have a couple of things left to say about the optimization of hereditary information, and some of those points are cautionary and shouldn't be left off."

What would you need to caution people about that's a fraction as bad as accidentally making your whole population stupider because only smart people can learn Alter Self.

They're starting to trust Keltham to know where he's going, though. They listen.

"I'll start with a probing sort of question, though if everyone's too tired, I can step back from probing questions.  On the other hand, if only some of you are too tired, that part can continue.  I'll see if I get sensible answers, I guess.  Anyhow!  Optimizing your whole population gene pool is obviously not something you'd want to make mistakes with.  How could you gain more knowledge about what you were doing, in advance of doing anything risky?"

"...do it with part of your population? One duchy, not the whole country?"

"Better than doing it with the whole country, possibly.  But heritage optimization takes time.  Every time you try something and see what happens, you have to wait one human generation to see what happens, and if you need two generations, well, that adds up very quickly.  Gonna keep the whole country waiting while you play around in that one duchy?  Doing nothing also has risks."

"Speed of discovery matters.  It's not enough to get there eventually.  How can you figure out what the ass you're doing with heritage optimization without spending twenty years every time you want to try something?  How can you learn about the sort of mistakes that only show up three generations later, in less than sixty years?"

"...do it with mice?"

"...do it in a time-dilated demiplane?"

"...ask Asmodeus?"

"Yeah, you got some resources we don't got in dath ilan.  I assume that time-dilated demiplanes are very expensive, but I nonetheless can't help but ask how much we have to prove ourselves before we get to tuck ourselves into one of those and do the rest of this faster?"

"The nearest known permanent one is in Nex, on another continent, and I don't think it's listed for rent, though maybe they have a price. It wouldn't be very surprising if we had a secret one for emergencies, but it's probably tiny, if so, they're cheaper if they're tiny, and the Queen has a necklace of adaptation so she wouldn't need it to have air, if there's one just for her and Lrilatha."

"Well, not step one then.  But you really might end up with some very nice things in a very short time, if you can scale the technology and magic to where you can get a decent-sized research team into a time-dilated demiplane."

"But I digress.  In dath ilan, sure, you could use mice.  But why limit your ambitions to just playing around with mice?  Humans aren't the only sort of biological organisms with useful heritages."

This puzzles them. "...orcs have a faster generation time than humans and are more like us than mice?" someone offers.

"Good case for starting with an orc duchy if there's one around here, but remember that I've been telling you the secrets of life itself, in general.  Do you use life for anything around here?"

"Corn?" says Tonia. "It grows every year and we do select it a lot, for not getting weevils and having big ears."

"Yep.  Corn's got two packages per package-tuple the same as humans, if I recall, though not twenty-three package tuples - I don't recall the exact number.  Wheat - if you've got that here, which I expect you do because the word translated - if it's the same wheat I know, at least - has six packages per package-tuple.  If you've been selecting plants at all, and the people who've been selecting them have already made any effort to try things systematically and observe results, there's a whole body of knowledge there that you might be able to apply to heritage optimization in general.  And if they haven't been trying things systematically and observing results, then that's the art you're here to learn; and whatever wonderful theories and strategies you come up with, why, maybe you could try them faster and cheaper on a field of corn than on a duchy."

"They're systematic," Tonia says. "Probably not the way people are in dath ilan but they know what kinds do well with what weather and how they all hybridize and they track yield per acre and they trade tips, and particularly good strains."

"Heh, that's an example of the good-news bad-news duality right there.  It's no doubt been good for Cheliax that they already know that much, but bad news that they'll have already tried a lot of obvious stuff, which makes it harder for us to stroll in and double corn yields on our first try.  Are there specialists who make particularly good strains, or do people just trade them as they randomly crop up?"

"I don't ...think there's a way to make them besides planting historically good strains and seeing how they do. Not that I heard of anyway."

"Well, if they're already doing the obvious, I think the steps beyond that are knowledge-for-sale not universal-basics.  Still, should probably get a book on that."

"But if we got that book, and after reading it, the notion of the tiny spirals and the package-tuples gave you some idea that you thought people probably hadn't tried yet - well.  What sort of precautions should you take, when trying to create new strains of corn using a clever new method nobody's tried before?  Because in real life, on really novel problems, there's no teacher telling you which precautions you need to take, or correcting you if you miss one."

"....pray for guidance? I know that's not what you're going for but it's actually - the front-line intervention for unexpected consequences, really -"

"Maybe Asmodeus is sick of saving us from mistakes we could catch ourselves."

"Starting small, like with one duchy except maybe even smaller, one cornfield."

"Checking the corn for poison, to make sure you didn't make it worse somehow."