"And it was also said to me from the very beginning:  For all the beauty of the Law as Law, and all the reasoning you might ever do about it as mathematics, the only reason to ever take that Law upon yourself, is if it is the correct Law of obtaining what you desire.  Not, necessarily, desire in a selfish sense, for this is Civilization's teaching of which we speak.  Good people desire Good ends, and this Law is their Law too."

"The meaning of the caution is rather that if you think, at some point, that this Law is telling you to do a thing, which will not lead best of all your available choices to whatever destination you seek, then most likely, vastly likely, you have made a mistake somewhere.  You may be mistaken about the Law, you might be correct in calculating what the Law must say and wrong in thinking that some other way is better, you may be correct about some derivations in mathematics but be wrong about which mathematics you should be using.  It is not likely the case that the Law is telling you a worse way and some other pattern is telling you a better one."

"But if - we are always also told - if some very clever person at some point demonstrated that the Law as taught in Civilization's lessons, did fail to be the best way of choosing in one part of reality so as to make another part of reality conform to our desire - then we should at once discard that old Law and seek another.  That, after all, was presumably how that whole branch of mathematics was invented in the first place.  In its final form, dealing with choices that are themselves mathematics, the Law of decision is a touch complicated; there must have been a time when people did not know it, and used simpler math instead.  If at that time they had thought to themselves that the Law they held was the final and ultimate principle and the definition in itself, of what should be done - and not instead thought of there being an ultimate goal to find that mathematics which best describes how choices in one place operate to constrain reality in another - they would have been unable to move on."

"But as far as dath ilan knows, this is the Law the gods use too? It's - right no matter how smart you are, or how vast your goals?" If she wants to be an archdevil she'd better go right for learning the Law gods use.

"I'd guess!  But if Civilization got a portal to Golarion and the gods said they had a different decision theory, everyone would be listening very attentively, much more so than they listened to me when I was twelve and had a better decision theory."

"What was your better decision theory when you were twelve." Meritxell says. 

"...sort of embarrassing, and complicated, and really blatantly wrong once you understand what Law is even supposed to look like normally, and it had a lot of terms in it you haven't learned yet."

"So I'm going to delay explaining it at least until everybody knows what the correct theory was supposed to be, to avoid misleading you.  That is the only reason I am delaying explaining it.  It's not at all because some part of my brain is worried that nobody in this room will want to have sex with me if you know about my early attempts at decision theory."

"dath ilan gives people weird sexual hangups," Meritxell says. 

"Still working out how much is dath ilan and how much is Law and how much is Keltham."

"Surely any sensible feminine 'gendertrope' would take for granted that if you had a choice of men to have sex with, the first element determining your choice should be how good he is at decision theory.  I'm just saying this because it's obviously true, of course, and not because I'm the best decision theorist on this planet."

"Shall we all to dinner?"

PL-timestamp:  Day 10 (8) / Evening

Keltham will, at dinnertime, inform Yaisa that she's been quite successful in her goal of causing him to be occasionally distracted at various times during the day, and he does not want to spend all of dinner like that, and he is therefore going to go sit by Gregoria and Tonia and Peranza instead.  Keltham will be seeing to Yaisa shortly.

He had better, Yaisa tells him cheerfully.

Meritxell and Carissa are sitting right near Gregoria having a not-not-for-Keltham's-ears discussion of how you would define Cheliax's gendertropes if you were doing that, but Gregoria is pointedly not participating in that in favor of talking with Tonia about experiment design for checking whether Security/the washout girls make the Law error to do with inconsistent ordering of three preferences.

Of all the darned times not to be able to run two streams of verbal interpretation simultaneously!  Keltham will try to listen to both conversations anyways while also eating.  Tonia and Gregoria are hopefully going to end up on basically the right track and only require a few hints from him?

Tonia and Gregoria seem to basically have the concept figured out, minus knowing enough statistics to interpret their results, which is a problem for future Tonia and Gregoria. 

"I'm not sure that 'mad scientist' is a gendertrope! To be a gendertrope I think the way women do it has to be different from the way men do it."

"I think that there are some differences between women mad scientists and man mad scientists, though! Like, the archetypal mad scientist woman is Areelu Vorlesh, or Nefreti Clepati, or Felandrial Morgethai, and they're going for a different vibe than, say, Manohar, or the Archmage Nex, or Tar-Baphon -"

"'lich' is definitely its own gendertrope and not just a subset of 'mad scientist'."

Keltham will listen attentively, somewhat more so to the female side since these could be eventual future dating prospects.

      "Are there any female lichs?" says Meritxell. 

"I mean, not that I've heard of, but they might just not advertise it."

     "Then I don't see how it can be a gendertrope at all."

"Honestly I'm not sure exactly what a gendertrope is."

"Standard, recognizable patterns that men and women fall into.  Or women and women, or men and men, or asexual women and people who looked male at birth but want to become as female as they can, but those are rarer and get long words instead of short ones."

"We definitely have some of those, I just don't think 'lich' is one of them. Dangerous bad boy who will definitely hurt you and walk out after sex and never see you again, that's a gendertrope. 'lich' isn't."

"I could better pass judgment on that if I knew what a 'lich' was, aside from a supervillain-related personality type that commands undead armies."

"With very powerful magic you can separate your soul and your body - this kills you, but that's not prohibitive - and contain your soul in an object, which presumably you hide in an extremely secret and inaccessible place, making you impossible to permanently destroy; this is becoming a lich. The powerful magic is of the kind that allows for the raising of undead armies, so lichs usually have undead armies, because if you're really good at that kind of magic anyway and can hardly piss off Pharasma more than you already have, why not. The ability to raise undead armies is - the kind of power where the more you have the more you can accumulate - so people usually coordinate to put down lichs that seem to be raising particularly notable armies."

"And not everyone wants to be a lich because..."

"How exactly to do it is secret but I think requires sacrificing large numbers of people? And is also incredibly difficult, like, decades of work. And many of the gods disapprove, so people who care what those gods think wouldn't do it."