"We sort by ability as far as we possibly can, we know it's important, but it might be a lot less than you need to sort in order to not have this problem - I've heard of kids who have to walk eight miles to school but not more than that, I think past that point there are diminishing returns because they're tired and can't learn as well. Do you send people farther than that?"

"Walk eight - miles - crap on a stick!  Yeah, kids in an especially low-density area might travel eight miles to school.  Which would take them roughly a dozen half - roughly six minutes by self-driving ultraspeed carriage!  If you live in a real city, like my parents did, 'eight miles' would - I'm losing track of the conversions in my head and need scratch paper.  Eight miles or six minutes would take you from the outer edge, to the center, of a city with around ten to the seventh... around ten million people in it."

"There's around twenty million people in all of Cheliax, and we're eight hundred miles from the western to the eastern edge. And we're more densely populated than most places."

"Let's optimistically call that plenty of room to expand.  All we need is to hold back the Worldwound for one more generation while y'all learn how to farm more efficiently, and then couples can have six kids on average and throw three times as much resources at the Worldwound in twenty years.  We'll call that Plan 2 and see if there's any faster methods for Plan 1."

" - people do have six kids, just, they usually lose half of 'em, but I think the argument still holds, just, you'll have to teach us what your society does for illness as well as famine."

"Yeah."  Keltham feels an unfamiliar twinge suggesting to him that information here should be given away for free, even though it's not part of fundamental universals.  He tells that twinge to go away; Cheliax should be happy enough to pay for valuable info like that.

...non-Chelish factions are a thing.

Maybe this information should be given away after all.

...Chaotic factions are a thing.  What if the info about curing childhood illness is easier for Chaotic countries to master than improved agriculture?

Sometimes Keltham wishes he was someplace that was Not Golarion.  He looks down at his food.  "Am I guessing implausibly when I imagine that a local Very Serious Person like Lrilatha would tell me to make certain that any information which spreads about curing childhood diseases must be harder to use than information about growing more food, because if the reverse is true, Chaotic countries will grow twice as many kids as they can feed and then try to storm the Lawful countries and take all their food to feed them?"

" - I wouldn't actually expect them to do that because it - still requires coordinating, if you're spreading the information about how to prevent pregnancies - you'd need to get all the parents to have far too many children for the national good, and that's exactly what Chaotic countries are no good at - there are a bunch of places that don't do agriculture at all, just piracy and raids on civilized people, but I don't know how to think about how they'd be affected by there being less illness. Illness is contagious, probably whatever you've got for that it'll just be better to tell everyone in the world. But I haven't studied international relations."

"The Chaotic countries wouldn't have to plan it.  They'd just need to have six kids the way people here usually do, and then half of the kids don't die because that part was easier than growing twice as much food."

"And then they're more populous than us - yeah, I guess that could happen - I would expect Asmodeus to intervene in a dynamic where Chaos is triumphing over Law by virtue of being more willing to have kids they can't feed but it's better not to count on that, when thinking about policy. Why is the crops part harder than the illness part."

"Because you need many ordinary people with incredibly low intelligence to do correct complicated things to their own farms for half a year, instead of a few above-average people who are slightly less stupid to be doctors and do correct complicated things to kids.  I guess I wouldn't be shocked if Chaotic countries just can't do either."  He still needs to check with somebody like Lrilatha before he starts spilling specific info about this topic to someone like Carissa, or so Keltham suspects a more Serious person than him would tell him to do.

"I think probably what you'd get is good doctors in cities and not out in the countryside where most people live. Cheliax can get good doctors out to the farmers but we're richer than most places and - trying harder - most rulers don't actually care how many baby peasants die, I don't think."

"Is the whole thing with rulers something that can be quickly explained to... you know, never mind, I think this general topic trend is tiring out my brain again and I should be letting it recover faster.  What do people in Cheliax do for fun, if that's not too broad a question?"

"In Corentyn where I'm from they go swimming at the beach, or anyone with a bit of wizardry climbs the cliffs and then jumps off using magic to safely land. Some people train and race horses, or hunting dogs, or falcons. People go out drinking." People go to public executions. She's going to elide that one. "People fight bulls, or watch other people fight bulls. There's theatre."

"How much wizardry does the cliff-jumping take, because that I have not tried before.  Also, go out drinking what?"

"It's a first-circle spell. Feather Fall. There's a special technique that lets you tie it off even closer to complete than most spells, so you can activate it just by clenching your fist. ...it's recommended to do it over the water, though, so if you manage to fuck up at clenching your fist you just get a very unpleasant splash landing."

"Yeah, noted.  Drinking?"

"Consuming alcohol, in order to get drunk, which is an altered state of consciousness where you are gigglier and more reckless and like people better, though the effects vary a lot by person. Often accompanied by hooking up with people. ...which is having sex with them."

"Huh.  We use mind-affecting drugs mainly to teach young adults how to go on thinking well when their brain gets mildly challenged - how to notice specific impairments and work around them, or back off and not try to do things their brain isn't working well enough to do.  I don't think I've heard of a drug that makes people like each other better and enjoy sex more, though it wouldn't surprise me if you could get it in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  Dare I inquire what procedure a Lawful, sensible country like Cheliax must have used to test the long-term effects of this drug on people, both physiological and psychological, before approving that drug for unwarned general purchase?"

"...I mean, mostly Asmodeus would tell us if we should be doing something else. I guess without that it'd be really hard to know."

"If I were Asmodeus, I'd tell you how to set up prediction markets for that sort of thing, instead of you having to bug him all the time... is Asmodeus just a sufficiently strange being that he can't easily calculate what bits of simple advice could make humans be more competent and less weird?"

"Lately I have been assuming that giving us that advice would be more expensive than, uh, summoning or copying you from your universe. But setting that aside, it seems rather likely that you might need smarter people than we have, or more production surplus, to be able to have them surpass just having experts study an issue and come up with a recommendation to the Queen. And that while we've only got a limited number of smart people you'd want them on something else. Also, the gods have - less information than mortals about most things happening on this plane, but they've specifically got really good information on all the souls that made it to their afterlife, so it's easy for Asmodeus to answer questions on anything that's been around long enough that lots of people in Hell experienced it while living. And alcohol has been around thousands of years. So I'd expect Asmodeus has at least checked whether drinking it more or less makes you more or less Lawful and smarter or stupider and more or less able to adapt in Hell."

"Yeah, I think I see.  Maybe prediction markets assume - lots of people who can make predictions, and you need to know what to think of all their different opinions collectively - not that you're struggling to get even a single person to predict anything.  Which is a problem that dath ilan also solves by starting a prediction market, to be clear, but maybe that's based on the assumption that if you subsidize the bets a hundred people will immediately show up and bet."

"What does happen in Hell, exactly?" 

Oh boy. 

"You turn into a devil gradually, one as cool as Lrilatha if you are very dedicated and smart and willing to work at it; people get sorted and the exact process and kind of devil depends a lot on what suits you and what's achievable with you as a starting point. I think it doesn't involve any logic lessons in the median case which is sort of confusing but my guess is that the median person isn't smart enough to learn that way. A lot of it...based on what you said I would say it's aimed at changing how human instincts and intuitive processes work to be more Lawful, instead of teaching it explicitly. My great-grandfather complains about it but my great-grandfather complains about everything. It is pretty common for people to say that it hurts, at various points - like seeing something very very bright when you've only ever seen dim things, or stretching your legs when you've been sitting on them for a thousand years. It is not at all common for people to say that they regret it or want to stop halfway through."

"I get the impression that becoming a god happens to rather fewer people, but do you know how that compares?"

"Four people've become gods with the Starstone, none of them described it usefully rather than poetically. I think it's instantaneous, instead of taking centuries, so that's a pretty big improvement all by itself. I'd - definitely go for godhood preferentially if I thought I could swing it. Lrilatha's really cool but probably Asmodeus is so much cooler."