"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
-- P. C. Hodgell, Seeker's Mask.
"I mean, presumably the gods who think ickier than average worlds should be destroyed just fought alongside Rovagug, and lost, and that's why we're here at all. Either that or we're a less icky world than average, but in that case dath-ilan-which-pays-bribes being destroyed is sending nearly all its people to much worse places..."
"Why would those gods actually fight instead of, like, presenting an estimate of how much damage they'd do by fighting and how much expected utility they thought they could gain from that for themselves, and asking the other gods to make them an offer?"
"Rovagug was a prophecy-breaking entity, so it wasn't possible for the more Chaotic gods who didn't like the trend of existence to present credible estimates or make credible commitments to the other gods. All they could do was fight alongside Rovagug, who could not be negotiated with, whose strength was impossible to estimate, and hope that Rovagug was strong enough. They lost, and were destroyed. The new prophecy that was woven afterwards was far stronger, since all the remaining gods were either Lawful or pretty okay with the universe continuing to exist on something like the course it had."
"That prophecy got broken by Earthfall, which was not foreseen."
"After Earthfall, the gods scraped up all the fragments of shattered prophecy they could, and with it foresaw the possibility of a mortal finding the Starstone where it had fallen on the ocean floor and using it to ascend to godhood. The gods knew that if they fought over their different interests in what sort of mortal found the Starstone, they'd all cancel each other out and leave the Starstone to be found in an uncontrolled way. Their negotiated compromise was a new prophecy with all the remaining fragments of shattered destiny woven into it, that the person who found the Starstone would be somebody Lawful Neutral who'd use the Starstone to make Golarion their own divine realm, and contain Rovagug there forever so the rest of the Great Beyond would be safe from It."
"Aroden correctly deduced the gods would do that, changed his own will to match the prophecy's inferred requirements, and took the Starstone. And then Aroden's death shattered all remaining prophecy permanently around this planet."
"I'd like to register my own increasing discomfort with all this talk of destroying universes in a context where it is not being treated as an obvious and indeed mandatory conclusion that we should not, in fact, do that."
"You definitely can't reason like that or you're just going to find entities all over the place who'll destroy the universe unless you give them five gold pieces. If you blindly or shortsightedly refuse choices that lead to the universe being destroyed in 'counterfactuals', that can definitely make it more likely to end up destroyed in reality."
"Yeah, it's a bad place to make mistakes, and you should avoid making any on subjects like that... that probably sounds like a more realistic policy in dath ilan than in Golarion, doesn't it."
"Asmodeus is good at this and desires that we not be annihilated and you should do what Asmodeus says, and then the fact we'll predictably do what Asmodeus says helps him prevent the destruction of the universe. And dath ilani say the same thing about their Keepers, presumably," says Avaricia, who has cottoned on in the last week to the problem that when Sevar goes on being heretical no one's willing to speak up either to agree with her or disagree with her.
"But dath ilani think that their Keepers want them to not be annihilated, when actually their Keepers may not care very much because of the secret lots of universes thing!"
"Speculating wildly, here, but Asmodeus cares Evilly that we not be annihilated -- we're His, Hell's prosperity strengthens Him, devils are visible to Him in a way that enables Him to act and plan around them - and gets none of what He wants just by virtue of us existing at some point in some universe -"
If this solves that problem tag on the wall she's going to be very pleased with herself.
"I worry I may be misconveying an impression about how often Civilization decides to totally destroy something instead of, like, fixing it. Our Civilization is very not full of people deleting each other from local existence because they couldn't figure out how to negotiate things, especially as compared to, say, Golarion. Your gods fight each other more often than we do. Your surviving gods."
"I think we ran into this because Zon-Kuthon is the obvious referent for a utility-flipped entity, and the thing you said is even more confusing if I imagine it as just a policy that, if a corrupt officer of the law in one of the River Kingdoms offers to let you go if you bribe him, but says he'd really have a lot more fun if you didn't, you ought to fling yourself at him and die horribly of it."
"The question isn't whether Zon-Kuthon is utility-flipped Dou-Bral, it's whether he's a conditional other-agent-utility-pessimizer that just naturally wants to minimize your utility function unless you pay him five gold."
"And on that corrupt officer thing, I'm gonna need more context to figure out that one, because I'm not seeing at all how you get that as an implication of the position I thought I was expressing. For one thing, he's obviously lying, because if he had more fun the other way he just wouldn't accept the bribe?"
" - I don't really know what it's like to be a corrupt River Kingdom guard who takes bribes and beats and rapes people who don't pay him but I'd expect part of the dynamic to be that the other corrupt guards will give you a pass if you're asking for a reasonable bribe and only hurting people who refuse, because that's what they do too, but they'll get mad at you if you just run around being a bandit in a uniform. Uh, I guess it just seems like, if we're not in the realm of gods and formal decision-commitments, there are lots of awful people who want to make your life worse because it's fun for them, and who demand minor things of you, in the world, and if you have the bad luck to be born in a normal country and decide you won't give awful people five gold to leave you alone then you will definitely die horribly."
"I'd have to think about what would be a Lawful response to that situation, but among the obvious thoughts that occur to me is to generate random numbers and spend the effort to find him and kill him afterwards, with a small probability that cancels out his expected gain of five gold from threatening me... though if five gold is like, half his annual income, I guess that might have to be a relatively large probability. Sucks to be him, he shouldn't have tried to threaten for bribes that large."
That's not a very Asmodean answer.
She should probably sit down with Asmodia and try to figure out what the Lawful response to that situation is if you're an Asmodean. "You still probably die young of that but it does seem more - I can see how it's not just a philosophy to immediately commit suicide if you don't live in one of the three or four nicest countries in the world."
"I am getting a nervous sense here that I may have jumped too far ahead of your background mastery of Law. Instinctive high-precision use of Law in particular. Possibly the exact occasions you pick to Lawfully track down somebody to kill them is, perhaps, a relatively advanced topic, especially in Golarion which is full of situations that dath ilan would usually keep inside the 'counterfactuals'. People are taking the things I said and deriving further conclusions from them that strike me as worryingly not what I was trying to say."
"Possibly people should stick with their sensible instincts or educated heuristics, rather than generating sentences which sound sort of like stuff I've said about Law, and doing that."
"If you seem to have carefully reasoned out that you ought to destroy the universe, but it also seems to you that there's a better thing you could do instead of the Lawful thing, which is not destroying the universe, maybe you should hold off on trying to be quote Lawful unquote for that exact minute. This stuff is supposed to make sense; if at any point it's advising you to do terrible things that don't feel like they make sense - I can't say it's certain that you're wrong, for reversed stupidity is not intelligence. But I am certain that you didn't achieve a reliable understanding and internalization of the Law. Any time the Law doesn't feel like it makes sense, you definitely don't have the kind of understanding of it that you can trust."
"Only destroy the universe if you have a carefully Lawful line of reasoning saying to do that, and you can take a step back from all the careful reasoning and grasp the whole thing intuitively and it totally makes sense why you'd do that, and that doesn't feel at all strained or like you're sweeping key issues under the rug. If you don't have the 'introspection' - if you don't have the Wisdom to confidently evaluate that level of strainedness, then you should back off the whole thing and leave destroy-the-universe decisions to somebody else..."
"You know, let's just simplify that line of reasoning," it's hard to remember that everyone here is effectively six years old, in some ways if not others. "Everyone here should just not destroy the universe, period. Don't complicate it any more than that until you're much much much better at Law, and can be very sure that you're correct to ignore my flat instruction not to do that. Like, maybe Asmodia in a few years could decide that if someone had to, but everyone else should just not do it."
The leaden-cooking-pot issue was still causing Keltham to feel - closer to dath ilan, to the average dath ilani - than he has in a while. And he's also worried people here are getting an inaccurate impression of what dath ilan is actually like, from their policies being discussed mainly in the context of weird thought experiments.
So Keltham has now managed to reconstruct at least one piece of dath ilani fiction. It's not a very famous one, but the problem is, the actually famous stories are full of way too much incredible prose and complication and made entirely out of foreshadowing. His previous attempts to ad-lib Miyalsvor and Verrez episodes at dinner are... feeling increasingly painful to him, let's put it that way.
So Keltham is actually just going with this one short story he happened to read a week before his planecrash. And this time he took the effort to write it down and polish it, with such writing skills as he possessed. That way people can get at least one actual glimpse of what a normal piece of dath ilani fiction is like.
Anyways, here.
"Keltham, I've got much stronger Good sympathies than most people here for obvious reasons and even for me that is just way, way, way too much Goodness."
"Yeah, I had to get pretty homesick for dath ilan before I could make myself write it down. If I did get a portal to dath ilan, I'd call them in temporarily to handle stuff like leaden cooking pots, but I sure wouldn't go back."
If nobody's going to order alterPeranza to have an opinion on this then Peranza is just going to not think anything and not say anything it's safer that way. She knows alterPeranza would have an opinion, but, but alterPeranza is just distracted or having a bad day, Peranza does not want to figure out exactly what alterPeranza would think. Peranza is probably just having a bad day herself so that's statistically realistic. She won't say anything unless Security or Asmodia orders her.