How much room does Keltham have here to godbuild/worldbuild? Is he searching for one key feature of himself, or a collection of them? Gods can do more than one thing, if they're related things. Asmodeus has related thingies for contracts, authority, pride, is called Executive of Law. Keltham may not need to squeeze the god-address down to one characteristic of himself... no, that's the wrong way to think about it. Even if he can call beyond the locally known universe, there is no guarantee that gods are dense in characteristics. It's probably better to find one idea or aesthetic that defines the god that Keltham would want to partner with. In any case, the correct search ordering is to begin with the most important requirement; after that, he can see if there's room or need for anything else.
...Keltham notices that he has spent an awful lot of time on meta. His mind is probably flinching away from this. Why?
...the same reason he never did the Environmentalized Intrinsic exercise in the first place. The incredibly obvious thought is 'what if - instead of there being a few more people like you in the next generation, if you succeed - rather, dath ilan had been composed of people like you to begin with'. And that is painful, it is should-ing, if you are actually stuck in dath ilan. There was no reason to think about things that way, to contrast reality to its alternative and make himself sad. Now he actually needs to solve this question for other reasons in real life, and needs to just go ahead with it.
What is the Kelthamverse like?
Does the Kelthamverse have higher GDP? He's going to think that just to get it over with. First order, 'no'. Okay, fine, in the details, if you literally do the version 'what is the world-in-mostly-equilibrium from which somebody like you is a median random draw', then the Kelthamverse has +0.8SD g over dath ilan and therefore a higher GDP. But by convention you are to ignore that, because re-extrapolating a world with higher intelligence or rationality is impossible for known reasons; you'd have to predict the effects of the actions of more extreme geniuses than any geniuses than exist in your current world. Or maybe Kelthamians care more about higher GDP compared to other considerations, relative to the average dath ilani, and the policy prediction markets' results are weighted accordingly. But mostly, there is no obvious reason the Kelthamverse has higher GDP in virtue of the people inside it... caring less selflessly.
Is a Keltham even happier, in the Kelthamverse? Would he actually feel more like he belonged, if he'd grown up there and never seen dath ilan for comparison? Maybe a Keltham is a person who needs to feel unbelonging over something, and his neurotype would find some other oddity of himself to obsess over instead. Maybe everybody in the Kelthamverse feels like an outsider there, based on their own personal least socially acceptable random variable.
Keltham recognizes a thought of undue self-uncharity, whispering in its way under the guise of counteracting some bias you might have, and sets it aside. His self-model does not actually say this is how a Keltham works, and that is that. He has been taught to distrust himself a little, not infinitely. No more distrust than he has earned from himself, under his own accounts of his history; the alternative is a kind of inescapable madness and helplessness, and he's not into that.
Does the Kelthamverse have fewer public goods, because, in fact, the Kelthamians do not care quite as much? Because those who become rich find better paths to romantic success than producing public goods, since that is the pathway that dath ilan laid out for rich people to be romantically more successful, and the Kelthamverse would not have laid out the same path? Keltham's brain immediately wants to shout back that the Kelthamians would find their own way to produce the public goods that were actually needed, just as well as dath ilan. But this seems not necessarily true, especially if the Kelthamians never saw dath ilan and never felt competitive about doing at least that well.
The fact that Keltham can no longer actually call a Confessor is no excuse for his not doing the same mental operation of betting on what a Confessor would tell him, just never again rolling an electronic d144 and actually phoning a Confessor if the die comes up 0 to keep himself honest. Would a Confessor, told this scenario, formally predict to Keltham that a Keltham would be unhappier in the Kelthamverse? Because he has been, in some sense, free-riding on the nice environment that was created by those dath ilani whose outrage at Abaddon would be enough to make them clerics of Iomedae?
There's a common wisdom, in dath ilan, that even after spending 3% of GDP on generalized coordination enforcement, most of what makes a high-tech society like dath ilan actually work, is that the people inside it have truly altruistic components of their utility function. That most people are not just being cooperative for instrumental reasons. That most people won't commit crimes even when they're pretty sure they won't get caught. The number of tiny opportunities for defecting and getting away with it, every day, is just too large to make it work if people don't actually care about other people. Dath ilan is much closer to the multi-agent-optimal boundary than it would be, in the world with the same institutions, but genuinely actually selfish people. The crime-reporting mechanisms are built for a world in which most people will take a minute to call the police if they see a violent stabbing in progress; and you don't have to pay people $5 to do that; and then worry that they'll set up violent stabbings to earn $5. The system is built to be resilient against rogue psychopaths, not against everybody being a psychopath. The police architecture is set up on the assumption that it might need to catch an individual bad police officer, not on the assumption that police collectively would just take your stuff as soon as they thought they could get away with keeping it.
If a high-tech world could be put together out of entirely selfish people at all, it would probably require much more spending on explicit coordination to set up a system that could stably run factories, without them just being looted by every employee simultaneously plus any police who showed up. Who even puts in the work to build the whole coordination structure in the first place, if they're not motivated by the good of Civilization? Maybe perfectly selfish beings who were more coherent and crystalline in their thoughts would find their way to a multi-agent-optimal boundary, kept in place by institutional structures ruling out defection at every point. None of the crystalline minds would need to altruistically spend the time to negotiate institutions into existence, because all the crystalline minds would see the possibility simultaneously and choose it at the same time. Beings like humans, but who didn't care at all about others' welfare, wouldn't do that; they would not end up with factories, just roving individuals looting each other. So says the common wisdom of dath ilan.
Keltham was, in fact, honestly shaken when he heard that the Neutral Evil afterlife was eating souls. He'd always questioned that common wisdom in the back of his mind. But - but apparently not. Apparently, if you're not explicitly Lawful or explicitly Chaotic, if you don't care about social structures either way, then what's left is simply Selfishness the way it might be materialized in an alien or a construct.
The sense in which actually, all of society working depends on people being altruistic - because the incentives just aren't that perfect, and otherwise the whole structure of dath ilan would fall apart almost instantly - that's part of the justification that dath ilan could give, if Keltham tried to explicitly argue with it, for why heritage-optimization should try to preserve explicit altruism in the utility function. It's a reason dath ilan might give, for why Keltham shouldn't have subsidized childcare; unless occasional people like him are valuable enough to society that he can pay for the childcare himself.
So yeah. The Neutral Evil beings - just eating souls - yeah, that shook him. Because if that's where being a little more selfish leads, in the end, then dath ilan is right.
But maybe that's still - the voice of too little self-charity.
(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)
Keltham did not abandon that lightly injured person that he passed upon the sidewalk, even as a child with his own frontal cortex less than fully formed. He wanted to be repaid, since the other person was capable of repaying him, but he didn't abandon them. A bird once flew into a window right in front of Keltham, when he was a child, and fell to the ground and didn't move, and he ran off crying to find his father. He didn't think about whether the bird could pay him back, because it obviously couldn't. If Keltham came across an injured child now, with a lot less money than himself - well, he'd help, but he'd feel a lot better about a world in which that Civilization would repay him and not give him any second stupid glances about his having insisted on payment, because, why is this child his problem in particular. But Keltham wouldn't ask the child to repay. And he'd cheerfully pay a proportional amount into public-good funds to repay other people who helped children when it wasn't particularly their job.
He's not a bad person, not by his own standards. And if he was, he could choose to do things differently and meet his own standards. If he's not completely incoherent under reflection, he ought to be able to reach into himself and imagine the world that's nice according to his own notions of niceness.
The writing exercise for the Environmentalized Self is allowed to include ideals inside you, hopes inside you, not just realities inside you. The point of the writing exercise is that the feature is inside you, so some part of yourself knows how the feature should work, and it is not just an oddity added out of a vague wish to make your writing different. This isn't that writing exercise, but for purposes of calling the right god, nearby ideals may also be the way to go; if they are Keltham's own idealizations, that the real Keltham could at least come close to attaining on his own.
So the Kelthamians of the Kelthamverse are not selfish, not the way that whatever eats souls in Abaddon must be really actually selfish. Keltham doesn't think that he, himself, is flawed in that way. He does not think he is actually just plain selfish and picked up the rest through acculturation in dath ilan. And even if he's wrong and the real Keltham isn't that nice, fine, so what, he is envisioning a universe in which he is not exactly the median, sue him.
The Kelthamians of the Kelthamverse, Keltham decides, do not have to go to fantastic lengths to enforce and punish and pay for coordination; they are not in a world where nobody actually cares about anybody else or has any honor. Kelthamians keep their promises, always, whether or not anyone is watching. Kelthamians don't betray their business partners, whether or not anyone is watching. They don't qualify as 'Good' by Golarion's bizarre standards, because they are perfectly aware of how a positive reputation benefits them, and they are ready to exploit that and would be very snippy about not getting their due for it. But they would also keep their promises in the dark, even if nobody ever knew. Keltham thinks that is actually true of himself; and even if he is wrong, and flatters himself too much, the corresponding god would be one he could work with. It is one of his ideals, and one that would be very close to him even if in fact he doesn't have it already.
And - it's not the part Keltham needs to be thinking about, but he's going to think about it anyways, just to get it out of the way of the rest - it is actually true, it is not just him trying to stick it to dath ilan in his mind, it is actually true that a neurotypical dath ilani would feel less outside and alone in the Kelthamverse, than Keltham felt in dath ilan. Because nobody in the Kelthamverse thinks it's a problem if you're more altruistic than the rest of the Kelthamverse, so long as you still keep your business promises, and don't murder people even in the dark, in all the forms of honor that keep Kelthamverse society running and coordinated. They don't withdraw public support for your children's childcare if you're nicer than other people. The Kelthamverse doesn't want to be dath ilan when it grows up, but it's fine with there being dath ilani inside it in the Future.
The Kelthamverse has more of an expectation that people fund childcare individually or through individual philanthropy, in the first place; they have much less of a collective Future-optimization thing going on. The Kelthamverse doesn't have voter-aggregates deciding on heritage-optimization criteria for policy-prediction-markets resolving 20 and 50 and 100 years out. They're leaving it up to individuals and philanthropists, and just checking the prediction markets to make sure that the default course isn't predicted to end up with huge probabilities of anything awful; so long as the prediction markets don't predict catastrophe, they're fine letting the larger world go its own way.
Maybe a dath ilani will feel sad that the entire world isn't as altruistic as they are, that only 5% of the population feels the same strength of feeling about the true deaths of strangers as themselves. But if so, the Kelthamians won't feel too sad for them, because a Kelthamian doesn't think you have the right to expect all of Civilization to think the same way you do. Keltham didn't complain about Civilization being of a different mind than himself, because he had no right to demand that of strangers; he just set out to test himself, and prove Civilization wrong if he could.
So that's the first defining quality of the Kelthamverse. In one sense, yes, people care differently and less about each other; when they help, they do so much more in expectation that somebody will repay them, even if they're helping a child. But the Kelthamians still help children, and pay into the public funds to pay off other people who help children, they do have the sense that somebody ought to be doing that. And the Kelthamians still have all the emotions about intrinsically caring about coordination, the emotions that are shards of the higher structure for Coordination and shadows of the one irreplaceable logical copy of the Algorithm. Kelthamians keep their promises, even in the dark when nobody will ever find out. They aren't first to betray their business partners, their mates, their friends - and not because they are calculating the value of their reputation, but because that isn't who they are. They would pay their debts even absent any legal enforcement for debts, the vast majority of them, under the vast majority of circumstances; and so they don't have to pay more of their GDP for coordination enforcement than dath ilan.
If a Kelthamian sells you something, it does exactly what it says on the label, and disclosed all the facts you needed to know. In fact, if the Kelthamverse is literally all exact copies of himself, not a distribution from which he is the median draw, then advertisements are more trustworthy than in dath ilan; because when everybody is exactly Keltham, there is no variation in trustworthiness, so there is no adverse selection favoring producers who got ahead by being a little less trustworthy in ways they couldn't be caught. And the GDP is actually slightly higher. Though they'd also better get cracking on biotech really fast, because, reproduction.
If there's a god of doing really honest business in both business and friendship, with personal and commercial advertisements true in letter and spirit, all debts repaid whether monetary or informal, all promises kept without exception, never the first to defect - even in the dark, even if reality is ending the next day and there's no more iterations of the dilemmas - where it's also perfectly socially acceptable to be nice, because you're not hurting anyone by doing that - but you don't just demand people be nice to lightly injured strangers, then look oddly at them when they want personal or public reimbursement - a god whose thingy is a little more selfish than dath ilan's, in one sense, but unselfishly utility-function-desiring the shards of higher Coordination, in some more coherent but still ultimately bounded version of how humans have honor - and never defacing the Algorithm - then Keltham could see himself working with that god on the Golarion industrialization project. Maybe even being its cleric, depending on the benefits.
That, Keltham thinks, is the true meaning of Chaos, if there's a Chaotic Evil god like that.
(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)
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