"It'll take another hour or so, so calibrate your presentation accordingly."

"I'm not sure I have an hour of things to say. I....think that rules and punishments should be applied consistently rather than randomly, and I think criminals should be caught and punished, and I think that people will not randomly do the things that make for a good society and so you have to oblige them, and I think if you fail at those things you'll mostly create societies that are - even more coercive, from more different directions - it's easier to appease one government than a dozen street gangs -"

"Huh. That's an interesting - angle on it - I guess my preliminary remarks are that I understand punishment's value as a deterrent and as a side effect of preventative measures but I think all by itself without those factors it's just bad, but I don't know if that's a chaotic opinion or a good one in the local sense. Also we have experimental data to the effect that being caught right away with near-certainty is drastically more important than punishment severity, which you can get down to nearly nothing if you're doing well on the other fronts, so there's that. I think a lot of the society-arranging stuff you can do on the level of soft incentives and environmental management even if there needs to be hard law under there - like, people are way less likely to litter if you just have trash cans every thirty feet, you mentioned lead poisoning and there's stuff like that."

"That all seems fine, I am not particularly attached to torturing people as punishment if something else works just as well - though it seems kind of unlikely that really minor punishments would, say, deter someone from murdering someone, if they really wanted to."

"Well, I'm calibrating 'really minor' to what I'm guessing about your likely standards based on what I saw of your educational system, I don't mean you put them in a hat that says 'don't leave me around mortals, I have no self-control'. You can put them in three years of rehabilitative detainment and then parole and if they don't show up to parole then you lock them up over the weekend."

"That seems like it'd depend an awful lot on how good your rehabilitative detainment was but obviously getting the correcting over with faster is desirable?"

"Also the rehabilitative detainment cannot be staffed by people who think criminals deserve to be harmed, it really fucks with their professionalism something awful."

"Well, you can mindread them every week and fire everyone who has the wrong attitudes for the job."

"As someone with a lead-lined skull, I feel this would constitute an overreach of employer discretion."

"...why? If it's important to the thing working?"

"I'm presuming that mindreading people isn't considered a hallmark of Evil but if I were Pharasma it would be, it's a horrifying invasion of privacy! You can screen your staff other ways. Background checks, good anonymous complaint system for the inmates, probing intake interviews, thoughtful design of workplace culture."

"Huh. Why are you against....invasions of privacy?"

"All the hypothetical Cams out there need theirs."

She does not understand at all. "You mean, they want to deceive everyone around them and you think society ought to be set up so they can?"

"No, they need - space to think without worrying about anything but how their own thoughts fit together, before they process it for public consumption. I actually don't like lying and avoid it unless it's particularly necessary for some reason."

"Gods can read peoples' minds any time, is that different because they're gods?"

"No, not at all, I object to this enormously and am retaining my mental stability mostly by hoping real hard that they are not in fact doing that."

She's so baffled. "If people have a bunch of magic items for reading - twitches in your face - and can guess your thoughts from that, is that any different?"

"Yeah, I do actually feel different about that - I mean, depends how magic, but if they don't in principle outperform people who have studied microexpressions, I can at least in moments of particular alarm stick a bag on my head."

"So do you just need to have the option of making people stop or is it bad for them to be doing ever? What if it's lower-resolution, like, there's a spell that detects someone's deepest desire..."

"Lower-resolution might be fine! I'm real curious about what my deepest desire would look like to that spell, I'm not freaked out by alignment detection magic, etcetera. I just find it very important to be able to think without an audience. I don't object in principle to consensual mind-reading, though I cannot imagine it being to my taste under any reasonable circumstances."

"Is it like...if there's an audience then you'll end up sculpting your thoughts for them and you're very interested in what shape they grow in if you refuse to do any trimming them?"

"I think that's probably what it cashes out to ultimately, but in fact I expect if I were aware of being mindread for more than a few seconds I'd pretty quickly run out of cope for that and mostly just be thinking 'AAAAAAAH' rather than anything more tailored."

" - huh! Do you feel like - it is a skill you could have learned, if you'd grown up in Cheliax, or just all your thoughts wilt on inspection and couldn't figure out how to do otherwise? Do you think it's a Good thing or a Chaotic thing?"

"There isn't mindreading in my home universe! Or alignments! So I don't know on either count."