"I'm not at all sure I'd take instantaneous over gradual, even if something ended up more powerful at the end of the instant.  There's not much point if the thing that becomes the god gets changed so fast that there's no continuity with the old you.  Are there non-Starstone gods?"

"Irori reportedly ascended by achieving mental and physical perfection, which is definitely gradual. I think his holy books probably have a fair bit of detail, but I don't remember it." Because they're illegal for her to read. "He's big in Vudra- across the continent from here - but my mother was always fond of him, she said he was a good god to have in mind for - having high standards for yourself. Presumably someone can get you a book if you ask."

"Huh.  Not sure if I'd go that route, but it's not an instant no.  What's different in other afterlives besides Hell?"

"Abaddon's the one that eats souls. The Abyss is infinite and the one the demons at the Worldwound come from, and reportedly you start out there as a sort of grubbish, larval demon, and if no one kills you first mature into a demon eventually. The Maelstrom is full of energy and magic but nothing reacts in a consistent way to external forces - I guess the laws of logic would still apply there but you couldn't really do any inference - and eventually it turns people into chaos beasts, which aren't possible to interact with and which can't interact with the world, not the physical world or magic or anything else anyone has tried. They are by all accounts happy and think this is cool, but it seems awful to me. Elysium - Chaotic Good - is an infinite wilderness. The kind of people who go there seem to like it? They just wander around exploring. Usually never run into anyone else. Nirvana turns you into an animal, as part of a journey towards Neutral Good, which is very - non-partial? Not caring more about you or people you know than about anything else? And somehow being turned into an animal helps with that. Heaven makes you an angel, like Hell makes you a devil. Devils are perfectly Lawful Evil and angels are perfectly Lawful Good. I guess there's nothing wrong with it but I don't want to be perfectly Lawful Good, you know?"

"That's missing - Lawful Neutral, Neutral Neutral?"

"Right, sorry. Neutral Neutral's the Boneyard, it's where Pharasma sorts everyone. It's, uh, overrun with babies, because like half of people die as babies, and most adults have alignments but babies generally don't. Abaddon used to sneak in and eat the babies but now Hell defends it, so they don't. I have never heard anything very good about the Boneyard. Once you start demonstrating any inclination towards an alignment you get kicked out of it to there instead. 

Lawful Neutral is Axis. It sounds ...fine? It's a big city, unimaginably big. The thing you turn into is called an....inevitable? And they're just pure Law. Axis has a lot of trade with Hell, their gods and ours get along."

"I'll take a closer look at all this someday when I've got time.  How hard is it to improve stuff up at that part of existence?  Not sure any of that sounds Keltham-optimal... and I have a god who should theoretically be about people doing their own stuff without stepping on each other.  Do gods carve out their own sections of the afterlife, or is it strictly nine to all customers?"

"Gods carve out their own sections which can vary some from the general scheme. There might be a spot for your god that's perfect for you that I just haven't heard of, if your god doesn't talk much. I ....think improving the afterlives without buyin from the relevant gods would be hard, and improving it in a way the relevant god likes is a highly encouraged way to spend your afterlife."

"I wish I could talk to my god, or even any of my god's other clerics if they exist.  I'll mark it down for now as something that is not known to me to be imminently on fire, though - the whole setup you're describing - in dath ilan you could take any large object or institution made by intelligent people, and ask exactly why it was the way it was, and get a sensible answer about the ways it was optimal.  To the point that I found it annoying.  Why is the city eight miles across but not nine miles?  Because the property prices in the core would increase like so and the benefit at the edges would decrease like so, market forecasts et cetera et cetera, therefore this way was optimal.  The thing with the afterlives seems - not that."

"I think it is not that. Maybe parts of Hell and Axis are like that but no one's told us about it if so."

"But the gods are smart, or at least are supposed to have very high measured intelligence compared to a human in whatever system you're using, and it sounded from other things you said like they had some coordination.  Is there a metagod with even more alien desires who built the afterlives?  It doesn't sound like that either, and it doesn't sound like the afterlives are as simple and non-functional as mountains, or rivers.  There's something the afterlives are doing, but I can't think of anything a smart entity could be trying to do, such that those afterlives are doing it optimally given their resources.  That kind of halfassedness can be a signature of hereditary-selection - the process I was talking about that built humans, systematic accretion of errors according to a fitness metric which in biology is reproduction - but it doesn't quite sound like that either..."

"You asked if my trying to situate my lectures inside of - everything - was a dath ilani thing or a me thing.  It's both.  We're used to knowing where we are inside a larger reality and where all of the order is coming from and why it's there.  There's pranks that get played on us as children which try to teach us to operate when we're wrong about things, when we don't know why things are happening, so we won't end up mentally fragile and unable to deal with confusion.  But the fact is that I'm used to knowing to within 0.1% exactly how old my universe is, and the names and qualities of every kind of tiny part of reality that we haven't reduced to tinier parts.  Not knowing that does feel quite disorienting, like I'm walking on air constantly trying to figure out what's holding up my feet."

"Whereas I am not used to having the slightest idea why anything is happening unless it's a magic item."

"You're stronger than an average dath ilani would realize from a first glance, aren't you.  It's not that you don't know those things because you're not curious, but because the answers simply aren't available to you, and you take for granted that you can operate in that hostile cognitive environment."

"Well, it's - how did you put it. The organisms that can't operate in their environment die, the ones that are around are the ones that happened to be better at handling it.

You're handling yourself pretty well, for having lived all your life in a place so - much safer than this one."

"Safer, yeah.  But also much less full of opportunity to be the person and take the role that I wanted.  I wouldn't step into a portal back if you opened one in front of me.  Neither a Good dath ilani or an Evil dath ilani would do that, in the end, only a weak one, and I don't aspire to be weak."

"You know, it's very rude, saying things like that when you still haven't worked out a payment agreement with our government so people can fuck you."

More direct than he's used to, but - not unpleasant.  "Embarrassingly, I think I'm blocked on figuring out how to calculate the actual benefit to your breeding program of tossing in a huge batch of new intelligence alleles, given that you do already have people as smart as me.  There's a theorem about how the speed of improvement goes as the covariance of reproductive variance with the variance of the quality selected on, and that means I need to figure out how adding a batch of different alleles increases the variance, it's not as simple as adding on some more intelligence.  I - also feel a need to know something about how my kids would grow up?  It's not the Good answer because my kids would be displacing other kids that would exist and I don't see how my kids would be expected to lead worse lives than the stupider people who'd otherwise exist, in terms of how that affects total utility, but I think I feel some Evil attachment to my own personal kids."

He can't come right out and say this next part, it just feels too weird not to put some level of indirection in it where he doesn't come straight out and become the petitioner for sex.

"Dath ilan has also figured out some alternatives to reproductive sex besides the standard methods of contraception, and even people with contraception have been known to use those alternatives.  For much the same reason that wizards here fling themselves off cliffs or have sportfights with - ostriches?  I know it wasn't ostriches but I forget which animal you said it was."  That gives Carissa an out if she doesn't want to reply directly to the line of conversation about non-reproductive sex.

"Bulls. And I bet we've invented more of those than you have, what with being under the much stronger constraint of not having contraception."

"I don't know if I personally know enough to take on your civilization's collective knowledge by myself.  I don't have much actual experience of variants, and it's considered mildly unwise to let your reading get too far ahead of your experiences there.  But I bet at strong odds that dath ilan generally has invented more sexual variations than Golarion.  Because we have more total people, with more free time that they see nothing better to spend on than sexual variations, who have access to better-aggregated repositories of information about what's already been tried.  Unless you've got gods specifically of variant sexuality, or magic opens up whole new spaces there that we can't access at all, in which case all bets are off and also I should like to know more."

"I hope you meant me to take that as a challenge."

She's pushing hard.  It's clear that she's decided on Keltham.

Has Keltham decided on Carissa, becomes the question.

Part of him is scared, but it's the kind of fear where it's a reflex thought that the correct action is probably to overcome it; Keltham has never aspired to be weak.  He has no intention of going around never actually having sex for the rest of his life.  Having just jumped worlds, there are all kinds of reasons why it'd be wiser to have sex with a relatively older woman first, before getting involved with the younger women in his research harem.  Carissa is attractive on a purely physical level, part of him is quite clear on wanting her physically.

He doesn't know Carissa all that well.  But he feels any respect for her, which is probably a good sign?  She was at the Worldwound, in the face of danger, and then dropped that to come here right away, in the face of uncertainty.  You could make the case for her as a strong, risk-taking woman with goals.  But he doesn't quite know what those goals are, or how her career was advanced by being at the Worldwound... they don't really know each other that well.  Quick flings can work, or so he's been advised, but only when both sides know that's exactly what it is, as he's also been advised.

"Oh, it's a challenge on at least some level.  What level exactly, that's the question.  I suppose, among other things, a potential challenger might wonder what his new world would make of a stronger challenge like that being issued by him and taken up - whether his new world saw any implicit promises as being issued, in either direction.  Even implicit promises like somebody having already decided that there's a real chance of something longer-term, because that decision would require more information than I have right now to make one way or another.  I don't default on debts, and that means I need to know when I'm taking them on."

He's - 

- asking whether he would be making a commitment? Because he wouldn't want her to think he wants more than he does?

That's adorable. 

It's also completely ridiculous but she's not going to laugh at him. 

"Where I'm from, promises are made explicitly, and sex isn't one. People do what they like, and if they like it a lot they might do it again, and if their wants are conditioned on the other person's attitudes then they'd better ask about those." And be good at telling if they're being lied to, but somehow, she expects Keltham would be distracted by the revelation that in Cheliax people lie to get laid. "I do not, in fact, want you particularly conditionally. But the flip side of that is that if you have conditions you're going to have to figure them out."

"Conventional wisdom for some totally other world that's not this world has it that people our age, having fun with each other, sometimes find that spiraling into further events.  Sometimes it means they have more fun than they expected, sometimes it means that they've got to deal with some stuff that didn't work out or got unexpectedly broken, and then move on.  It is said, there, that this is one of those cases where there's a big ol' residual chance even after you've reasonably estimated it to be unlikely.  I'm hardly going to be against young people being reckless investors and plunging into exciting new projects without total and complete information.  But another world's conventional wisdom seems to hold it important that people both be on the same page about being like, yeah, we both know we're being young here, we'd rather plunge ahead and deal with the residual chance of unpredictable consequences, than spend our youth being timid and passing up on chances."

Carissa is pretty sure that getting heartbroken is a thing that can only happen to you if you make the mistake of caring about other people or at least about what other people think of you, and that dath ilan didn't suggest the obvious solution of 'don't care about other people or expect them to care about you' because they're Good. She suspects, though, that this is an unsexy thing to say. 

"We're young," she says. "And we're playing games with very high stakes, such that this isn't, by comparison; I wonder if the warning seems more necessary, in a world where it's not true of everything you do that it might hurt much worse than you expected. But I'd rather live in this world than in yours, just like you would, and I'd rather have you than not, even though I might get hurt, on any given occasion, and almost definitely will get hurt, looking out ahead over all of them."

The words - hit harder than Keltham expected them to hit.  It's the kind of thing you might hear in a dath ilani science fiction romance, spoken on a spaceship in assorted plot jeopardies; but the words hit a lot harder when you are in an impossible scenario, and a woman is saying those things to you.

"Consider yourself challenged, Carissa Sevar."

See, overexcited batch of chattering wizard students, that's how you seduce people. I hope you're taking notes. 

(They're totally taking notes.)

She stands up. "I accept your challenge, Keltham. I have some logic homework, and if I'm not going to have time for it tonight I'd better do it now. Can't have anyone thinking I only get good scores because I'm sleeping with my teacher."

- Who would possibly design an institution where the same people responsible for teaching were responsible for scoring the learning metrics, that's like an electrical diagram with the world's most obvious short circuit
- Do people do that sort of thing here
- Possible priority within the Basic Stuff, explain how education works literally at all
- He is not going to ask any of that right now, he needs to come up with a witty romantic reply

"Oh, I'm far too Lawful for such a thing, by local standards.  Just don't expect me to be Lawful at all times."

"What's Chaotic in dath ilan, hair-pulling?"

"Surprises."  Shit now he's got to come up with something to back that up... well, he's got time.

This is going to be so much fun if it doesn't get her killed. 

She leaves the room to do her logic homework immediately go invisible and poke her head back in just for a minute.

Keltham will be eating more of his food and wearing the fixed look of concentration of somebody trying to figure out which very standard dath ilani sex techniques in his very standard repertoire, that he did not expand much because he had other life priorities, would be able to cash in that "Surprises" promissory note.  An obvious place to start would be to figure out which bits of standard technique would have no corollary inside a mess like Golarion, while still being executable by him... actually, that does narrow down the search a whole lot?  A vibrator would probably surprise Carissa, but, of course, he doesn't have access to a vibrator.  Okay, if he narrows it down from that angle, there's an obvious possible-surprise to try.

Keltham is also trying to figure out what Carissa could have possibly meant by 'hair-pulling'.  If he just straightforwardly visualizes somebody pulling on his hair, it could be a moment of spontaneously passionate embrace, but mostly it would just yank his head back, and if it was hard enough to hurt, it would hurt?  Though oddly enough, when Keltham tries to visualize the case where Carissa could have meant him pulling her hair - if she hadn't mentioned that in a sexual context, his unrevised first guess would be that it should just make her say ouch.  But when he visualizes that producing a sexual response from her instead, that - seems to be booping on some internal sexual part of him that hasn't been booped before?

Yeah, he's probably going to lose this contest.  That's what happens when you challenge somebody older and more experienced.  It doesn't mean he's going to lose without dignity.

Keltham eats some more of his food, with the absorbed look of a horny teenaged male who knows he is in over his head and who is going to swim that fucking pool anyways.

- okay she is not going to let this distract her from her main priority here which is becoming a perfect devil before she's even dead. This is actually, if you think about it, not a distraction from that goal because the closer she is with Keltham the more incredibly annoying and difficult it would be to execute her for heresy. 

She turns and leaves the room again and this time actually tries studying her logic homework.

Keltham will eventually turn his thoughts back to further lesson plans, if nobody has interrupted him yet; he does not conceptualize himself as a man too thirsty to get important work done.

He makes a mental note about sending a respectfully brief letter to Lrilatha mentioning his concern about lowering child mortality in a way that might run ahead of agriculture and if that's safe to discuss with Chelish humans y/n, along with a numerical-scale brief question asking whether Keltham should be sending fewer or more letters like that in the future -2/-1/0/1/2.  And a mental note to ask about getting one of Irori's books, on the remote chance that it contains a ton of useful exercises for making people less imperfect.  He doesn't think a handy guidebook like that should be a thing that already existed here, given that Golarion is still Golarion; but it sounds worth checking, maybe they only got halfway and Keltham can provide the other half.  Oh, he should've asked whether Irori counted as Neutral Evil, or what exactly - Keltham still isn't sure he has this alignment thing down at all.

No one interrupts him for the rest of lunch, though several girls look like they're agonizing over whether to.

Then Keltham shall eventually make his way over to the harem tables, once they look to be past their hypothetical initial food rush; and once he himself has eaten enough food to no longer feel imminently hungry, plus 20% in case the unfamiliar flavors are causing him to underestimate energy demands, or he's overestimating later food availability.  (His set point is stable, and if he accidentally takes in excess food it's not going to change anything long-term, obviously.)

"Hey.  Wanna tell me about anything I'm doing wrong as a teacher?  It's been a while since I was an older-kid teaching younger-kids, and this time I don't have a Watcher backing me up, plus I'm in another plane, so I'm not going to be surprised if you've got complaints."

Having a date with Carissa makes it easier to go talk to the research harem about other stuff; they're not going to be trying to grab him for this night.

...probably.

They look baffled by this question!

"I'm not very clear on how we are evaluated," Meritxell offers after a moment of silence. 

"That's... very legitimate, but not one I can solve in 5 minutes, sorry.  I don't have all the measuring instruments we'd have at home, I can't just go to the store and buy standard tests for how you're doing at learning predicate logic or calculus, and if I'm going to have to improvise that, I'd better not do it right here on the spot.  Success metrics are hugely important on any operation, I don't dare half-ass them.  I can't even promise that I'll manage to find somebody other than myself to evaluate all aspects of your short-term performance, separately from my being the one who teaches you, even though in dath ilan we'd think it was hugely stupid to have the teacher be the student evaluator.  Like, general issues of Lawfulness aside, we'd usually consider it to be a blatantly obvious matter of optimal institutional design, that there be a separate student evaluator that students would theoretically have to sleep with in order to obtain better grades, who's not the same person responsible for teaching the students in the first place.  And we'd also be looking for forms of evaluation that were easy for a higher Watcher to spot-check and catch out any lower Watchers who'd done it incorrectly, for sexual reasons or otherwise.  I can't promise you any of that, it may not even end up being the practical priority, and I ask for your understanding and forbearance about that given the incredibly weird circumstances."

"Though, I mean, in the long term there's an obvious team metric where we look at the gross domestic product of Cheliax and Golarion and see if we pushed it above trend, or measure how much money we made by selling better metals and agricultural implements."

Excited giggles. 

"That's fine," Meritxell says. "Anyway, if you're sleeping with everybody then there's no question of it affecting anyone's grades unfairly."

"Oh, come on, you're not going to all have the same skills at sex," Keltham reflexively points out the obvious invalidity in this argument before his central monitoring loop has had even the slightest chance to think about it at all.

Meritxell seems to think this a completely reasonable response. "I don't think the mechanism by which grades get altered by sleeping with the teacher is bias, I think it's inducement, so as long as you think everyone's doing their best there's no incentive to toy with their grades, even if some people have a better best." She nibbles her lower lip. "Even though some people have a better best."

"To be clear, I think we'd want to rigorously separate sexual performance from research performance and not get those confused into one metric over a person - I'd frankly expect both you, and the Chelish government, to be pissed about the performance hit to the world economy if I got confused that way.  That said, it'd be conventional practice in dath ilan to pay people proportionally to their apparent output, not - whether people are doing their best?  It's a lot easier to measure how well somebody is doing, than to know whether they're really doing their best.  And there's an implied incentive that seems really awful to me, for people to be - weaker, for their best to be worse - if you pay them to do their best.  Even very Good people in dath ilan wouldn't do that, it's not Lawful."

"That's how Cheliax does punishments," says Asmodia. "I have never heard it applied to sexual favors except informally because you can only get anywhere if you have something to offer, but probably that is because we are insufficiently Lawful and haven't thought it through properly."

"People mostly don't actually sleep with their instructors for better grades," Gregoria clarifies. "Probably if it were widespread people would've noticed how to do it Lawfully, even here."

"With punishments, though, there's some sense in scaling - like, you want to evaluate second years against second years, not second years against fifth years, in deciding who is underperforming, because it's just not informative if your process concludes that all the second years are underperforming."

"Okay, yeah, that's been puzzling me for a while, the books referred to it too, like there was this one book supposedly by a magic instructor who spends the first chapter telling you about what a great magic instructor he is, where he mentions punishing students at the end of the day so it won't interrupt their learning.  If that was literally true and not a weird collection of lies, I'm so confused about this for multiple reasons that I don't even know where to start asking.  If I'm like, hey, give me your shoes for twenty silver pieces, and you value your shoes less than that, it makes sense to give me your shoes.  If instead I'm like, hey, give me your shoes or I'll put you in an armlock and break your arm, and you actually do that because the value of the shoes is less to you than the value of the unbroken arm, then the fact that you reacted that way is the reason why I made the threat in the first place, right?  I mean, assuming I'm the sort of ideal entity who doesn't have any altruism or any inherent desire to behave in a coordinated way with others, if I can go around collecting everyone's shoes by threatening to break their arms, why wouldn't I just go collect all their shoes?  So in the," they don't have the word 'counterfactual', lovely, "unreal branch of reality where I threaten to break your arm, you fight and punch me in the face and don't give me your shoes, even though it costs you a broken arm; and since I know that's how it will go, I don't actually threaten to break your arm, and the branch of reality stays unreal."

"I mean, I can guess that you aren't trained in ways of thinking about real and unreal branches of reality and playing complex strategies over them.  But I would have thought it would be more like human instinct, to punch somebody in the face if they threaten to break your arm if you don't give them your shoes.  I mean, we get training that's about how we have instincts like that and we need to carefully refine them so they actually lead to optimal real-world outcomes.  And then here it sounds like - there is a whole lot more of people punching each other in reality - and then you've got students supposedly paying somebody to punch them in the face and that I just do not get at all."

The students are confused.

"The soul learns through incentives," Asmodia says after a while. "Incentives like 'if I do this thing, it works out nicely for me and I get a glow of satisfaction', but also incentives like 'if I fuck this up, it'll hurt'. The way to teach children not to touch a hot stove is to let them once, and then they'll know. Because the soul is wired to understand feedback from pain faster than it understands feedback from anything else. ...I am aware you may not have souls in dath ilan and I don't know if this still applies without them."

"No magical healing, we try to avoid children touching hot stoves once.  I think if dath ilan could get faster learning by - no, that's not valid reasoning on my part, they could attach enough disutility to the students' experience of pain that they still wouldn't do it, so it's not much evidence that they don't do it already.  I guess I'm still skeptical that you're describing a system that's actually locally optimal and that people aren't messing up?  Because if you get an electrical shock for a wrong math answer - that's a kind of pain we could inflict without lasting injury, if we wanted to go that route - then you don't just learn not to answer math problems wrongly, I'd expect you to also learn not to answer math problems and not to go to classes, in some deep part of you that you can't consciously override.  And it sounded like - from something Carissa mentioned earlier - people end up afraid to point out what looks like an error by the teacher, because if they're wrong about that, they might get pain inflicted on them.  That sounds like - exactly the kind of incredibly obvious failure mode I'd expect to develop, if somebody had the bright idea of trying to use pain to teach things, but you were also so bad at institutional design that students could get better grades by sleeping with the teacher?  I would have been a lot less cooperative with the older kids teaching me if I'd been getting punched by them for errors instead of paid by my parents for successes."

"You definitely have to have the punishments arranged competently by people who know how to do it," Asmodia says. "It sounds like the teacher in the book you read was arguing that the end of the day is a better timing, in order to get the benefits without creating side-incentives you don't want? Though in practice I don't think it's a very big problem, certainly there are not students who are uncooperative so we can't be doing whatever would've caused you to be uncooperative."

"I do not understand how the system you describe is in equilibrium but that can probably wait for another day.  Are you going to be okay if my teaching style is built entirely out of rewards for success instead of punishments for failure?  Because I do not know how to do punishments competently."

"We were selected for this because we're top students, we can handle weird or limited incentives."

"And if we want someone to whip us to help a lesson sink in, we can arrange that outside of class," Pilar says, with a glance at Paxti.

Something inside him has an unusual feeling about that, but Keltham does not know what it is, and it's not his priority right now.

"I should ask this explicitly - are you using mind-affecting spells to put yourself in an optimal state for learning?  It looked to me like, during the whole lesson, you only varied between the states of Attentiveness, Enthusiasm, and Great Enthusiasm, even when I said things that I would've expected to put somebody into an angrier state if they hadn't been explicitly trained in dignity.  Not saying you're doing anything wrong there, it just seems like the sorta thing a teacher should know about."

" - I think Cheliax also conducts training in dignity," says Asmodia. "We weren't using magic - at least, I wasn't."

A chorus of other 'I wasn't's.

"Well, that's good - the dignity training part, I mean.  Though, I should check, how does the word 'dignity' translate to you?  What's some concrete examples of dignity?"

Keltham has just tried a mental experiment of his own, and found that there are at least three different Baseline terms that all mentally translate to him as the Taldane word 'dignity'.

WHY is EVEN LUNCHTIME full of IMPOSSIBLE HIGH STAKES TESTS. 

"...dignity is remaining composed when situations are frustrating or frightening, and staying focused on the situation and not on your emotions."

"Dignity is conducting yourself like a person other people can rely on to be serious - not reacting childishly to things, not needing people to accommodate your human weaknesses."

"Dignity is carrying yourself like you're important."

"All right, I think I might have managed to put my finger on a quiet nagging doubt I had before," Keltham says, totally oblivious to any signs of INNER PANIC this might be producing unless somebody actually shows it to him.

"There's at least three different Baseline words that translate as 'dignity' in this language.  But the one I had in mind is - not getting angry at people for behaving the way they're supposed to, or in ways they have a right to do.  Not showing outward anger, not letting yourself react inwardly in a way that could lead you to subconsciously - lower their grades later, or the equivalent of that.  It's the quality that you display to others so that they'll know it's safe to turn you down for sex, even though you're acting as a manager, and if you weren't confident you'd shown that much dignity you'd be afraid to invite them for sex.  Dignity, in the case of my relation to students as a teacher, means that if I make my own mistake on the whiteboard, and you point it out, I don't even internally blame you for my mistake and give you a bad performance review later.  Nobody who lacked that kind of dignity would be tapped to give performance reviews.  Very few higher managers would be stupid enough to promote a manager who was visibly bad enough at 'dignity' that employees would be afraid to tell them what they were doing wrong.  We go through training to avoid that being true of us even subconsciously where our conscious minds wouldn't notice."

"If you're not in a state of fixed enthusiasm produced by mind-affecting spells, then it's very odd if I just started up teaching again after not doing that for years, in another dimension, across an unknown huge cultural gap, in a non-native language that's translated in my mind by spell, and didn't make any mistakes.  I was wordlessly expecting somebody in the class to go 'wrong, that's not how you teach Chelish students,' and that never happened.  It might locally pain me some tiny bit to be told that, but it's the kind of hurt that's intrinsic to learning not to do something again, not what I'd classify as - the dath ilani word that translates as 'punishment' in the Lawful sense of that - the kind of hurt where you're deliberately making it worse because you're trying to influence my behavior by imposing costs on me."

"So, if my concept of dignity is all about thinking and acting in a way that makes there be negligible real social disincentives for you to inform me about my mistakes, even if I didn't ask, and your version of dignity is about always looking cheerful and enthusiastic and not giving me any visible sign that I'm making mistakes, unless I ask, there might've been an inter-cultural problem."

The students still do not visibly display any distress. Although - maybe they're supposed to? This is such an unfair test!!!

"I wouldn't mind telling you if I think if something you're doing wrong," Meritxell says after a moment, somewhat truthfully. "But no one in Cheliax is going to tell you by - being visibly distressed or confused - that's not how people in Cheliax communicate things - so you won't want to read anything into that. We are competent to tell you with words, that's not - undignified."

"Yeah.  So, asking in words now - were there any memorable points in class where, if I'd remembered to ask, you would have told me I was teaching suboptimally even though nobody was showing visible signs of confusion or distress?"

Meritxell will...keep going with this even though it might be a disaster. "Well, you were teaching really differently from how it's done in Cheliax, and if a Chelish teacher were teaching that way I would think they weren't very good, since it involved so much - being confused - but you said you were doing that on purpose, and that it's part of all the techniques we're supposed to be learning."

"I sure was trying to bewilder you on purpose for reasons.  I was probably also trying harder and harder to bewilder you because you never showed any overt emotional signs of being bewildered."

"I'm - actually running into a small stumbling block about trying to explain mentally why it's better to give wrong answers than no answers?  It feels too obvious to explain?  I mean, I vaguely remember being told about experiments where, if you don't do that, people sort of revise history inside their own heads, and aren't aware of the processes inside themselves that would have produced the previous wrong or suboptimal answer.  If you don't make people notice they're confused, they'll go back and revise history and think that the way they already thought would've handled the questions perfectly fine."

"...well you definitely succeeded at being confusing."

"Do Chelish teachers just... not ask questions unless you already know how to answer?"

"...not usually? If a question is asked, that suggests you are supposed to be competent to answer it."

"Unless I am severely misunderstanding something, that sounds like a truly basic mistake that could be crippling your entire process of education, especially of the people who are supposed to be producing intense-thought-based products like research.  The most important hidden orders begin as questions you don't know, the real answers are things you haven't seen, that may resemble nothing you've seen before, they may require new instruments and new kinds of thinking to figure out.  Dath ilani are trained from childhood to answer questions they have no idea how to answer and, on a really fundamental level, that is why that civilization now knows any stuff."

The students blink at him. 

"That seems important," Asmodia ventures after a minute. "It might only work for smart people, though."

"No kidding.  Dath ilan has enough scale, a billion people slightly less, that it can adapt different educational processes for different levels of intelligence.  If somebody took an educational system that was implicitly designed for average intelligence in this world, and then just tried to throw a bunch of smarter kids through the same system - I'm wondering if I should maybe be giving an Early Basics talk on, like, how to teach and learn, at all.  Or if I should be leading by example there for a while, before presuming to write up how anything should work in Cheliax."

"My understanding," says Meritxell, "is that if we turn out well they'll adopt it more widely and if we turn out terribly then they won't."

"I think if we start to get good results early they should figure out twenty variations on education and test those early.  Human capital accumulation is one of the classic examples of an input to the total production cycle that takes a long linear time, and can't be shortened by throwing more money at it.  But, sure, I can wait to argue that part with Governance for another week."

"...I'm sorry, it's just occurred to me that it's lunchtime, we're talking about work things, and I need to ask out loud in words if you'd rather be talking about - it's not ostriches but for some weird reason my brain is repeatedly having this hiccup where it thinks that the sportfights are with ostriches instead of whatever it actually is."

" - probably we could get people to fight ostriches, if you want. Bullfights are traditional. We usually work during lunch at school, recreation is for holy days."

"I'm sorry again, I couldn't actually focus on this without more effort than I think wise.  My brain is repeatedly calling attention to the point that this has been your first formal learning experience with structural uncertainty.  Was it - fun, awful, funawful?  I can go away if you don't want to think about work until we resume, but it doesn't sound like that's your usual rule."

"It was really interesting."

"I think I learned a lot."

"I'm worried it will have bad side effects but the direct effects didn't seem bad."

Some of the warnings Lrilatha gave him make more sense now, unfortunately, which he maybe should have expected from talking to a Very Serious Person.  Her warnings suddenly sound much more like things that could actually happen instead of far-flung failure modes.

"A lot of the warnings I got back as a kid - suddenly seem a lot more like they might be necessary and important, if somebody didn't have a lot of actual experience with - what it's like to usefully think weird and unusual thoughts pointing in odd directions.  Look, there's a very basic warning, which first gets told in the form of a joke, about a patient who goes to the doctor complaining that his arm starts to hurt if he folds it all the way behind his back, and the doctor says, 'Well, first of all, if it hurts, stop doing it.'  If you start feeling like it is a perfectly logical and inevitable conclusion from the Law I've taught that you need to destroy this universe - talk to me, talk to somebody who works fairly directly for Asmodeus, and first of all, stop twisting up like that, just literally pause until you've talked to somebody, because that is not supposed to be an inevitable conclusion from dath ilani premises.  Reasoning under structural uncertainty is legit harder and easier to screw up than reasoning when you already know exactly how you're supposed to think, which is boringly easy by comparison.  You're going to suck at it for a while.  If you arrive at the necessary truth that you must fling yourself into the sea, don't."

The girls nod fervently. 

"I - need to think.  I may not need to think more than you need to have urgent questions answered, so interrupt me if it's important, but I need to think.  It's - I wondered how Golarion managed to be screwed up when it had Very Serious Lawful Devils and frigging gods, but now I'm visualizing - dath ilan has put this massive effort by a lot of people with very high measured intelligence into optimizing everything important, which I don't think I really appreciated before, and, in this world, somebody put the children's lessons together in a way where the person teaching them is also responsible for measuring the results.  And nobody else is checking on their measurements.  And all of the questions are supposed to be things the children have already been taught how to answer.  And the regional numbers of children are too small and travel is too expensive, to sort each lesson by current knowledge and velocity of learning, so the people I consider to be of average intelligence are just being thrown into a scaled-up version of whatever has to teach people much dumber than them how to do ultra-basic algebra and I'm realizing that every single aspect of Golarion must be that screwed up simultaneously."

Keltham is visualizing what Lrilatha's day must be like.  She probably walked straight out of this villa and teleported directly to somewhere else where she had to stop somebody from being a massive idiot and plugging all the outputs of the iron factories back into their inputs and then teleported again and then again and does her species even get to sleep and how many of her are there in all of Cheliax, three, she can't fix things on a deep level because the human problems aren't her problems, she doesn't know how to tell people to do it systematically better because the current educational system wouldn't hurt her the same way, and Keltham's god isn't talking to him and there's some massive communication barrier that made it easier for Asmodeus to point vaguely in Keltham's direction than to give detailed instructions to anyone and this whole situation is so much more messed-up than he previously realized.

"You're really going to hate all the other countries in the world," says Asmodia. 

"Carissa and Lrilatha both warned me."

Keltham waits to see if anyone has anything urgent to add to that, and then goes off to think by himself.  A few seconds later he comes back and asks somebody to actually tell him when his stated time for lunch is over, because he doesn't have a wristwatch anymore.

He gets several volunteers to get him when it's time.

Keltham thinks.  He also takes small bits of additional food and arranges them in weird patterns on his plate without eating them, so he has something to distract his brain when it overheats.  Keltham does not think that food is supposed to be valuable, particularly not food on this level of elaboration.

Pros:  If this hypothesis is correct, there will be lots of things that Keltham can very, very easily say how to improve.
Cons:  Many dath ilani solutions will not work out of the box because they rely on other stuff already working.

Three girls come over to get him at once when it's the end of lunchtime.

Keltham has managed to rally himself by this point.  Fine, so instead of having the metaphorical opportunity to take over a company in a green field with no competition, he has the metaphorical opportunity to take over a company every single part of which is simultaneously wrong, in a green field with no competition.  So?  He just has to repair enough things, and then they'll work.  What's he going to do, give up on that without trying?  No.  Is he going to complain, when his immediate prospects include a date with Carissa tonight and he's been assigned a research harem?  More no.  All of his no.  What kind of reply would that be to Chelish Governance providing him with large opportunities?  He just has to rise to the challenge, make all the money, fuck all the women, and fix all of the universe's deficiencies.

All that's changed is that he now has some idea of the actual scope of the problem.  Off to the library again he goes!

(Keltham continues to have no idea of the actual scope of the problem.  The horrifying planetwide disaster of universally awful institutional design that Keltham is currently envisioning is somewhere around 1% as dysfunctional as, say, an alternate Prime Material with a roughly equivalent tech level to dath ilan's but the modal social outcome for that.  He continues to not be mentally on the same page as Golarion, nor, indeed, the same book, same language, same library, same city, same planet, or same laws of physics as Golarion.)

Carissa has a plan for the afternoon which is to pay attention to the actual lesson. She recalls from her days in school that this was usually a good idea. And she's pretty sure she should wait before she tries to completely reform the teachings of Asmodeanism on the Material Plane. 

To make sure everybody starts out on the same page, Keltham will quickly summarize earlier conversations for the benefit of any harem members who might not have been in hearing range for it.  He still isn't distinguishing them all that well and didn't actually count them, if somebody was in the washroom or something.  He definitely knows Carissa was absent for some of it.

Things Keltham summarizes:

- Keltham is not sure how important it actually is to understand where everything you know is situated within the order of larger reality, but dath ilan sure does situate all of it, and maybe that's important, he doesn't know.  Hopefully he doesn't have to burn more than a couple of hours here and there on situating things.
- Most adult dath ilani are running around thinking that they know the universe's age to within 0.1% and all the names and qualities of its tiny parts that haven't been reduced to even tinier parts.  The very smart people of dath ilan (actually the prediction markets but he'll explain that in more detail later) have predicted how this could otherwise make people weak and unable to handle mental adversity, which is why the adults play a lot of confusing pranks on children, in case they someday end up in Golarion or something.  Like, they weren't literally anticipating this exact event, or they'd have gone a lot harder on his pranks.  But it sure is why Keltham is hitting the ground running instead of curling up in a ball whining about structural uncertainty.
- And similarly:  Even ordinary life means sometimes facing questions you don't know how to answer.  Doing basic research means facing questions whose answers are very unlike all the questions and answers you've studied before.  Keltham regrets to inform Cheliax that only asking kids questions they already know how to answer, seems like it would obviously leave them weak and unprepared for real intellectual challenges.  He's pretty sure this is true of people at their own intelligence level, less sure about people with average or below-average intelligence for Golarion.
- Keltham does apologize for presenting his students with confusing questions, when they weren't used to that, had no idea why he was doing that, and also didn't have any meta-idea of why he'd be doing stuff they didn't understand.
- Keltham will try to remember to check in verbally about how people are doing, since Chelish pride permits verbal answers about that but seems to prohibit overt visual displays of confusion.  If Keltham seems to be forgetting to do this, he hopes somebody will remind him in words even if Cheliax considers that slightly undignified.  As an older kid teaching younger kids, he expected the younger kids to give much more overt signals of how well he was doing as a teacher.
- Dath ilan doesn't have magical healing and they sure don't have resurrections.  Hence, despite all their intellectual toughening procedures, they don't have any equivalent of, like, teaching kids how to walk on broken legs so that they can mentally divorce physical pain from long-term damage.  If Cheliax trains its kids to be strong in that particular way, Keltham has not gone through this training yet, and this is probably not the right time either.
- Correspondingly, if inflicting physical pain is considered an important element in Cheliax of training subconscious intuitions, Keltham has no idea how to do that professionally, and hopes they'll excuse him from it.  Keltham separately may end up making a case that rewards often work better than punishments, because you can scale rewards directly to performance instead of a problematic notion of 'are people doing their best', plus the brain learns from forgone rewards similarly in many ways to punishment; but he'd have to understand this entire system better, before he started feeling confident about critiquing that element specifically.
- It does seem specifically worrisome to Keltham that in a punishment-based system you'd have to worry about people taking safer, less challenging lessons and trying not to give outward signs that their potential was high enough to do better, if their subconscious was learning to avoid pain inflicted for doing less than their best.  Maybe he's totally off-base in worrying about that and Cheliax has already solved it somehow.  But the reason Keltham is bringing that up immediately, is to emphasize that he is going to continue throwing confusing questions at them and this is not meant to be a threatening overly difficult problem whose painful failures they need to avoid, it's meant to be an overly difficult problem they can safely hang out around and safely fail on without that hurting.
- It'd be particularly dumb if Keltham started throwing more difficult problems at them, they got hurt more for failing or just got scared of failing, and some deep part of their brain learned the lesson that facing actual confusing cognitive problems is scarier and more painful than facing easy fake cognitive problems.  That is why Keltham now emphasizes the point that, whatever problems they were trying to solve in their education before this, object-level failure will be punished less; because this is new to them, and their best is worse than it was on easier problems; also because Keltham doesn't know how to teach that way at all; and, above all, success on these new harder problems is more valuable and during equity negotiations he will ensure that it is accordingly better paid.

That all seems....reasonable. They think that probably Keltham's teaching style will be fine for them; it would also be silly if learning how to focus with broken legs meant you couldn't focus without broken legs.

(If there's a mistake, it has to be less obvious than - punishment not working as well as rewards for humans - no, she's going to not think about this and focus on the lesson.

Also she's never skipping lunch again.)

This afternoon Keltham is going to try conveying some of the absolute basics about population-heredity dynamics, which was on his mind during lunch today for reasons which need not be explained.  (Keltham actually says this part out loud.)  These basics are not all of the knowledge Keltham has out of dath ilan about heredity, there are advanced tricks he's deliberately not going to cover until they're bought from him, but he's wondering if even the basics will be self-evidently useful enough that it gets him enough credit with the Chelish government to cover things like Detect Magic goggles.

Also, after his experience with how Chelish education is configured, and having been told where the average Intelligence on this planet has ended up, he feels some degree of concern, and a need to check that current heritage-optimization programs are not being run, like... backwards.  (Keltham says this out loud too.)

Before he launches into his own lecture, what're Cheliax's current knowledge or hypotheses about heredity, and how have they set up whatever current heritage-optimization programs they're running for crops, domesticated animals, and people?

Cheliax knows that children inherit traits from their parents. The dominant theory is that girls mostly inherit psychological traits from their mothers and boys from their fathers, based on how it works in the species of marshbirds where a famous wizard did a bunch of seminal breeding experiments, but some people think humans are more like dogs in inheriting from both parents; certainly in skin and hair humans can take after either parent. Humans hybridize with elves, drow, orcs, sylphs, and hybridize inconsistently (offspring rare, often sterile) with angels, devils, and elementals polymorphed humanoid, and don't hybridize with halflings or gnomes or catfolk or gnolls or giants or goblins or merfolk. Human hybrids with elves are half-elves and with orcs are half-orcs, but human hybrids by dwarves if they live at all will fully resemble dwarves, and be sterile.

Cheliax is divided on whether to try to reduce the percentage of children who die of disease, for reasons related to heredity: toughness is heritable, and if you start saving the half of kids that currently die possibly you'll be raising a generation of adults with fundamental weaknesses in their blood which they'll pass along such that future generations get weaker and weaker. That seems like one way you could run a heritage-optimization program backwards and they're not doing that.

Cheliax pays students who graduated with good grades from wizard school to have children, though talented wizards usually have lots of ways to make money and it's more about communicating that they're doing a thing valuable to Cheliax than about shifting their financial incentives much. Wizards actually have fewer children than other people because they can choose whether they become pregnant and other people can't, but Keltham's reportedly going to introduce technology to let everyone do that, which should help on that front?

Okay, yes.  Yes, if smart people have fewer children because they have better access to contraception, and nobody is, like, doing anything about that, that could be a problem, yes.  This is frankly something Keltham has never even imagined as a catastrophic failure mode of a civilization, but that could have been, over past generations, a very large cumulative problem, yes.  How good that anyone on Golarion has finally potentially noticed this is an issue.  The good contraceptive technology that dath ilan uses is unfortunately not trivial on the tech ladder, but Keltham can explain how to research things ever and they can hopefully find some better makeshifts than whatever people are doing now.  Cheap makeshifts.  Which a sensible government will subsidize.

That interbreeding stuff is fascinating, from a seeking-hidden-order perspective, but Keltham will explain why in more length later.

Does Cheliax have any kind of thinking that's about, like... why are there equal numbers of men and women, at least among humans?  Assuming there are.  If there aren't, Keltham is going to have to check a few things and then potentially back out a number of his assumptions.

There are equal numbers of men and women except in countries that kill baby girls, which is definitely some of them, but not Cheliax, because Cheliax doesn't suck. They are...not aware of thinking that's about that specifically. It's also true of most animals, it's not just a human thing.

Why would it be true of humans and most animals?  There's a reason for it, a hidden order behind it.

Guess wrongly; this is the dath ilani way of education and you are not always expected to know, when the teacher asks a question, because you will not always know the answer when real life asks you a question; and in both cases you must gather your scattered and inadequate thoughts, and manage to say out loud your first guess, so you at least know what you don't know and where your current thoughts point.  If all your thoughts are wrong and you know it, say both your best-seeming current thought, and the reason it must be wrong.  Much discovery of hidden order begins like this; do not refuse to venture forth.

There are some nervous giggles, at this.

Then they start speculating.

There might be some agreement of the gods about it, though that'd be less likely to cover animals.

Children are made from a boy and a girl, so maybe their making involves getting boy and girl inputs, and then drawing at random which turns into a child, which would get you half and half.

Maybe souls come out half and half, and then bodies that don't get a soul die, so you see half and half among live births.

Suppose you were designing humans from scratch.  Would you make them to have equal numbers of men and women?  Don't consider as constraints things like the balance of male and female desire for sex or mates; you could, if you like, say that there would be twice as many men as women, and women who on average desired twice as much sex as men, if you were designing the human species from scratch.  What would be the consequences, if you were designing the species from scratch, and you said there should be twice as many men as women, or twice as many women as men?

Well, a lot of people'd have a hard time getting laid, is the main thing? But you wouldn't actually go for equal numbers if you were optimizing for that, because men generally want sex more than women, you'd go for maybe two to one or three to one.

...actually, observes Meritxell, mostly women seems better? You can increase your population faster, because more people can bear children, and the men can get around and it's easier to attract foreign men than foreign women anyway. And she thinks women are better citizens, on average, Lawfuller.

"Less likely to be adventurers, and a country without adventurers is dead by a thousand cuts no matter how many babies they're having."

Ah, well, those are interesting puzzles in their own right, aren't they?  Why are women Lawfuller?  Why are men more likely than women to become adventurers?  Keltham knows the answers already, even though he's a stranger to the planet, because it was the same way in dath ilan.  He's not going to tell them the answer, just yet; they're welcome to try to see it on their own, if they can; and maybe they even will, before he gets around to giving away the answers.  If so, he will be duly impressed.

But return back to the original question.  Suppose, again, you are designing humans from scratch.  Why not twice as many women as men, and also have the women be as likely as current men to become adventurers?  Wouldn't a group like that be able to increase faster, because more people could bear children?

...possibly you need some scarcity of women to motivate the men to be adventurers, and if they had girls either way then they'd all just lounge around doing nothing? ....no offense to present company who is admittedly a counterexample. But the average person might be motivated by it being the case that they can have sex if they work hard and not otherwise, best achieved by balance. 

It seems like you'd make people as Lawful as you could if you were making them and it's not clear why that'd be Lawfuler for women than for men. And same with propensity to be an adventurer - no, well, you don't want everyone being an adventurer, some of them have to stay home making the institutions function - 

- maybe there's a tradeoff in human psychology between Lawfulness and adventurer-tendency?

In countries where people kill their daughters, they do it because men are more valuable (under the local cultural regime where women are hardly allowed to do anything). And presumably if enough people did that then eventually daughters would become valuable again, as the men wanted wives. So you'd end up with as many living women as made daughters as valuable as sons. Or with across the board infanticide if no children were valuable to have.

(Keltham reminds himself again that the whole afterlife thing is obviously going to lead to different local mores about death, just as the existence of healing magic has led to different local mores about pain; killing babies here does not mean the same thing that killing or cryo-suspending babies would in dath ilan.  It wouldn't be surprising if the whole pre-afterlife world operates as a tiny adjunct to a much larger afterlife, only of note to gods and a higher economy because it's the part of reality that provides the afterlife with its intake feed.  Some of the attitudes ascribed to countries outside Cheliax definitely give that impression.)

(Keltham also notes that Carissa seems to be able to follow the thread of an argument better than others here.  He's not used to thinking of that as an adult capability per se, but maybe it takes a lot more life experience to follow threads of argument if you have, like, very little formal training in it.)

"Ah, well, if you value having more of your own children, then, if the human species had been designed to birth ten times as many female children as male, you might wish yourself to have more male children.  It would not necessarily be any better in terms of producing a functioning species; the species could get along fine with each male having to do ten times as much work of fertilizing women.  It doesn't take that long, well, if you're doing it right, it takes longer, but not so long that a male couldn't fertilize another female the next day.  Still, if the rest of your species gave birth to ten times as many women as men, and yet you could manage to birth only men yourself, you would have a lot more grandchildren than the average women."

"And yet what difference does any of that make?  What difference does it make, as to what some woman wants to herself, when it comes to how the human species works as a whole?  At least in dath ilan, women cannot choose the sex of their child by just an act of will.  Then how can their wants control the balance of female and male births across the whole species?  I'll tell you right now, the answer isn't that there is some mysterious channel by which the emotions of women collectively control the balance of births; you might have to look at things a little sideways to get it.  But even if you can't get it, guess anyways -"

"Oh, and don't forget, if you can guess why your guess might be wrong, say that part too!  You're not trying to convince me of your guess - this isn't like wacky Chelish books - you're not trying to tell me just one side of a story, like you're selling me your guess as a product and trying to get a higher price on it by concealing information while hoping I don't realize you're concealing information.  I mean, if you want to sell me anything in real life, sell me on how good you are at reasoning.  That means when you tell me your best guess, you should try to figure out how your best guess might be wrong; if you can see why it's probably wrong, if you can already see something that doesn't fit with your guess, tell me that part too.  Remember, when real life hands you a problem, it won't tell you when you guess wrong, the way a teacher in a classroom tells you when you're wrong.  In actual real life it's your job to figure out why your best guess might still be wrong.  Dath ilani teachers let kids stay wrong about some things for years, and older kids are forbidden to tell younger kids about them."

"Well, people can't decide what overall population ratio makes the most sense but the gods probably can. The problem with that theory being that as far as you know dath ilan doesn't have those," Asmodia says.

"If you had a family that only threw daughters and one that only threw sons," Tonia said, "they'd do about as well for themselves, I'd think. It's not like throwing only sons is an advantage. Men don't have more children than women on average, since they're having them with women. The, uh, problem with my theory is, I don't know, maybe you could imagine it being two thirds to one third, and still somehow working out so that no one had an advantage, I don't know how you would prove you wouldn't."

"Why does it matter whether some family has an advantage?  What do the forces that created humans care about that?"

Tonia bites her lip. "I...feel like it should, but I don't have a good explanation - when someone's got an advantage, then the situation's not stable. And if no one has an advantage, then the situation's stable."