So.

Their world has people who are more smart or less smart, just like his world.

Lots of smarter people, however, are out to exploit less smarted people using adversarially selected arguments.

So the less smarted people have to freeze in place and only believe what they were told by - their parents, Keltham guesses, because even if somebody wandering into the village looks as dumb as you, they could be a smart person faking that.

Nobody has any Law-inspired concept of validity, or which arguments are admissible or inadmissible, or how to go about constructing a narrower class of arguments that could still contain important stuff while being harder for smarter adversaries to exploit.  Their books are endless strings of non-sequiturs and impossible leaps and emotion-invocations, and when your contest of ideas is on that level, there is nothing you can do to stop a clever adversary from doing a search that Goodharts through any flaws or loopholes in the resistance of a dumber argument-considerer.

...or maybe dath ilan would also be like this, Law or no Law, if not for the Keepers and the fact that the Keepers are, so far as Keltham knows, Good.  Just given what's publicly known about talk-control, most dath ilani can little more resist a high-ranked Keeper going all-out on exploiting their own flaws, than a villager of this world could resist the arguments of a wizard, if the villager was foolish enough to hear out a stranger.

But - what is he supposed to do about that, if that's the case?  Even if he can mass-manufacture intelligence headbands they won't change the relative intelligence... well, no, because currently the smartest people get intelligence headbands and the less smart people don't so at the very minimum fixing that would have to shift the equilibrium relative to what it is now...

"Thanks for my evening update on how awful Golarion is," Keltham says out loud, and not without a certain irony.

"More of an update than the Kuthites were?"

"The Kuthites are a problem, and if they've penetrated your security they're much more of a problem, but they are a relatively shallow and understandable problem compared to average-intelligence people not being able to trust that all the arguments they hear aren't out to get them."

" ...fair enough. Yeah, I don't know how you solve that without the resources of the Church. You do have the resources of the Church, though, and with that it's solvable though slowly - you open schools, and you feed the kids at school, and so parents send the kids to school even if they worry it'll teach things they can't trust, and then other people notice things that can't be faked, like that the kids are more prosperous, and over generations people come around..."

"Orrrrr I could figure out how to mine spellsilver in the sort of volume that Civilization gets when Civilization wants lots of a rare metal, and make intelligence headbands for wizards who would then craft more headbands, and give all of the villagers intelligence headbands and do it not over generations.  There's a place in life for doing things the slow way with diligent hard work, and that place is when there is in fact no shortcut whatsoever for doing things a faster way."

"Yes, all right, certainly the 'give them all Intelligence headbands' plan is better though I'll note that the fanciest most expensive headband will enhance a slightly-duller-than-average peasant up to 14 which is still, you know, not smart enough Cheliax puts you on projects that require the ability to make decisions independently."

"It's a start on half of a solution.  -2 in dath ilan isn't too dumb to learn the sort of Law you've been learning in my lessons, you'd just learn it a couple of years later."

"It would be the most important thing that'd ever happened, we'll see what problems remain after that.

- I want some. If you invent a way to mine arbitrary spellsilver."

"'How much do you want', he said, bearing in mind that he didn't have any grasp of units and would need those translated into least-expensive-headband and unskilled-labor-year units."

"More than I know what to do with. More than I could use even if I spent every waking moment on fancy complicated enchanted projects. That would be twenty or so least-expensive-headbands a day and there is no sense giving you a value in unskilled labor years because I do not expect to get this wish of mine if spellsilver mining continues to cost unskilled labor years. ..but the current state is that a headband is 55 unskilled labor years."

So, assuming unskilled laborers work four hours per day averaged over rest days -

Wait.  Keltham suspects he may have made an important unit conversion error, throwing off several other calculations.

"And the number of unskilled labor hours in one unskilled labor year?"

"4500ish, I suppose?"

Blink blink.

"That's... around thirteen hours a day including rest days if those even exist, unless your year doesn't have 365.2422 days per year."

"We have three hundred sixty exactly. There are two festivals."

...what that makes no sense at all.  "In dath ilan, the time between spring equinox of one year and the spring equinox of the next year is 365.2422 days, the amount of time it takes dath ilan to complete exactly one orbit around the sun is 365.2596 days, and I have absolutely no idea how having two festivals could interact with either of those quantities."

" - the number of days it takes for the sun to complete its orbit is 360, rather than 365, and as an answer to your separate question about rest days, there are two of them."

"Welp, I'm going to chalk up those insane work hours and lack of rest as hopefully a problem merely of quantitative productivity rather than a Horrifying Golarion Structural Equilibrium that will persist even in the presence of infinite machinery, and then I'm going to only think about it insofar as that serves the purpose of doing something about it, sound like a plan."

"Sounds great. I wanted to daydream about mountains of spellsilver, here, not be sad about global problems."

"Among the many ways of viewing your global problems is that they are caused by some missing mountains of spellsilver, and if we're going to go looking for those anyways we might as well keep one mountain for ourselves.  That's what being Evil is all about."

"You're going to say things like that to me and then have some kind of societal norm of not having sex on days when bad things happened? Can I at least kiss you?"

This is the most bizarrely fascinating bedroom talk that Abrogail has ever spied upon in possibly her entire life and she genuinely does not see how Sevar is going to pull this off.  If Sevar manages to tempt and corrupt Keltham from this starting point she will get her County.

"You miiiight have to explain first how 'kissing' works, the word sounds like the lip-touching thing and all I knew about that was to mirror what you did.  Not that we couldn't just improvise so long as it's the sort of thing that goes well when improvised."

Abrogail has things to do, and now she has to choose between doing those things and continuing to spy on this, which is unfortunate; having that never happen to her is something she should have thought to write into her compact with Asmodeus somehow.

"You haven't invented kissing? Well I suppose, then, as Golarion's duly appointed representative to Keltham, it is my duty to try to explain it to you, though it's popular because it does in fact go well when improvised. See, you can do a little kiss like this," she repeats last night, "which just says, I like you and I want you, or you can do a little more than that."

And he's kissing back in a very uninspired way.  Well, this was a good time for things to get boring, she supposes.  It is, apparently, time to end her brief break and actually attend her war council; Gorthoklek is almost finished breaking down her door.