"We were selected for this because we're top students, we can handle weird or limited incentives."

"And if we want someone to whip us to help a lesson sink in, we can arrange that outside of class," Pilar says, with a glance at Paxti.

Something inside him has an unusual feeling about that, but Keltham does not know what it is, and it's not his priority right now.

"I should ask this explicitly - are you using mind-affecting spells to put yourself in an optimal state for learning?  It looked to me like, during the whole lesson, you only varied between the states of Attentiveness, Enthusiasm, and Great Enthusiasm, even when I said things that I would've expected to put somebody into an angrier state if they hadn't been explicitly trained in dignity.  Not saying you're doing anything wrong there, it just seems like the sorta thing a teacher should know about."

" - I think Cheliax also conducts training in dignity," says Asmodia. "We weren't using magic - at least, I wasn't."

A chorus of other 'I wasn't's.

"Well, that's good - the dignity training part, I mean.  Though, I should check, how does the word 'dignity' translate to you?  What's some concrete examples of dignity?"

Keltham has just tried a mental experiment of his own, and found that there are at least three different Baseline terms that all mentally translate to him as the Taldane word 'dignity'.

WHY is EVEN LUNCHTIME full of IMPOSSIBLE HIGH STAKES TESTS. 

"...dignity is remaining composed when situations are frustrating or frightening, and staying focused on the situation and not on your emotions."

"Dignity is conducting yourself like a person other people can rely on to be serious - not reacting childishly to things, not needing people to accommodate your human weaknesses."

"Dignity is carrying yourself like you're important."

"All right, I think I might have managed to put my finger on a quiet nagging doubt I had before," Keltham says, totally oblivious to any signs of INNER PANIC this might be producing unless somebody actually shows it to him.

"There's at least three different Baseline words that translate as 'dignity' in this language.  But the one I had in mind is - not getting angry at people for behaving the way they're supposed to, or in ways they have a right to do.  Not showing outward anger, not letting yourself react inwardly in a way that could lead you to subconsciously - lower their grades later, or the equivalent of that.  It's the quality that you display to others so that they'll know it's safe to turn you down for sex, even though you're acting as a manager, and if you weren't confident you'd shown that much dignity you'd be afraid to invite them for sex.  Dignity, in the case of my relation to students as a teacher, means that if I make my own mistake on the whiteboard, and you point it out, I don't even internally blame you for my mistake and give you a bad performance review later.  Nobody who lacked that kind of dignity would be tapped to give performance reviews.  Very few higher managers would be stupid enough to promote a manager who was visibly bad enough at 'dignity' that employees would be afraid to tell them what they were doing wrong.  We go through training to avoid that being true of us even subconsciously where our conscious minds wouldn't notice."

"If you're not in a state of fixed enthusiasm produced by mind-affecting spells, then it's very odd if I just started up teaching again after not doing that for years, in another dimension, across an unknown huge cultural gap, in a non-native language that's translated in my mind by spell, and didn't make any mistakes.  I was wordlessly expecting somebody in the class to go 'wrong, that's not how you teach Chelish students,' and that never happened.  It might locally pain me some tiny bit to be told that, but it's the kind of hurt that's intrinsic to learning not to do something again, not what I'd classify as - the dath ilani word that translates as 'punishment' in the Lawful sense of that - the kind of hurt where you're deliberately making it worse because you're trying to influence my behavior by imposing costs on me."

"So, if my concept of dignity is all about thinking and acting in a way that makes there be negligible real social disincentives for you to inform me about my mistakes, even if I didn't ask, and your version of dignity is about always looking cheerful and enthusiastic and not giving me any visible sign that I'm making mistakes, unless I ask, there might've been an inter-cultural problem."

The students still do not visibly display any distress. Although - maybe they're supposed to? This is such an unfair test!!!

"I wouldn't mind telling you if I think if something you're doing wrong," Meritxell says after a moment, somewhat truthfully. "But no one in Cheliax is going to tell you by - being visibly distressed or confused - that's not how people in Cheliax communicate things - so you won't want to read anything into that. We are competent to tell you with words, that's not - undignified."

"Yeah.  So, asking in words now - were there any memorable points in class where, if I'd remembered to ask, you would have told me I was teaching suboptimally even though nobody was showing visible signs of confusion or distress?"

Meritxell will...keep going with this even though it might be a disaster. "Well, you were teaching really differently from how it's done in Cheliax, and if a Chelish teacher were teaching that way I would think they weren't very good, since it involved so much - being confused - but you said you were doing that on purpose, and that it's part of all the techniques we're supposed to be learning."

"I sure was trying to bewilder you on purpose for reasons.  I was probably also trying harder and harder to bewilder you because you never showed any overt emotional signs of being bewildered."

"I'm - actually running into a small stumbling block about trying to explain mentally why it's better to give wrong answers than no answers?  It feels too obvious to explain?  I mean, I vaguely remember being told about experiments where, if you don't do that, people sort of revise history inside their own heads, and aren't aware of the processes inside themselves that would have produced the previous wrong or suboptimal answer.  If you don't make people notice they're confused, they'll go back and revise history and think that the way they already thought would've handled the questions perfectly fine."

"...well you definitely succeeded at being confusing."

"Do Chelish teachers just... not ask questions unless you already know how to answer?"

"...not usually? If a question is asked, that suggests you are supposed to be competent to answer it."

"Unless I am severely misunderstanding something, that sounds like a truly basic mistake that could be crippling your entire process of education, especially of the people who are supposed to be producing intense-thought-based products like research.  The most important hidden orders begin as questions you don't know, the real answers are things you haven't seen, that may resemble nothing you've seen before, they may require new instruments and new kinds of thinking to figure out.  Dath ilani are trained from childhood to answer questions they have no idea how to answer and, on a really fundamental level, that is why that civilization now knows any stuff."

The students blink at him. 

"That seems important," Asmodia ventures after a minute. "It might only work for smart people, though."

"No kidding.  Dath ilan has enough scale, a billion people slightly less, that it can adapt different educational processes for different levels of intelligence.  If somebody took an educational system that was implicitly designed for average intelligence in this world, and then just tried to throw a bunch of smarter kids through the same system - I'm wondering if I should maybe be giving an Early Basics talk on, like, how to teach and learn, at all.  Or if I should be leading by example there for a while, before presuming to write up how anything should work in Cheliax."

"My understanding," says Meritxell, "is that if we turn out well they'll adopt it more widely and if we turn out terribly then they won't."

"I think if we start to get good results early they should figure out twenty variations on education and test those early.  Human capital accumulation is one of the classic examples of an input to the total production cycle that takes a long linear time, and can't be shortened by throwing more money at it.  But, sure, I can wait to argue that part with Governance for another week."

"...I'm sorry, it's just occurred to me that it's lunchtime, we're talking about work things, and I need to ask out loud in words if you'd rather be talking about - it's not ostriches but for some weird reason my brain is repeatedly having this hiccup where it thinks that the sportfights are with ostriches instead of whatever it actually is."

" - probably we could get people to fight ostriches, if you want. Bullfights are traditional. We usually work during lunch at school, recreation is for holy days."

"I'm sorry again, I couldn't actually focus on this without more effort than I think wise.  My brain is repeatedly calling attention to the point that this has been your first formal learning experience with structural uncertainty.  Was it - fun, awful, funawful?  I can go away if you don't want to think about work until we resume, but it doesn't sound like that's your usual rule."

"It was really interesting."

"I think I learned a lot."

"I'm worried it will have bad side effects but the direct effects didn't seem bad."

Some of the warnings Lrilatha gave him make more sense now, unfortunately, which he maybe should have expected from talking to a Very Serious Person.  Her warnings suddenly sound much more like things that could actually happen instead of far-flung failure modes.

"A lot of the warnings I got back as a kid - suddenly seem a lot more like they might be necessary and important, if somebody didn't have a lot of actual experience with - what it's like to usefully think weird and unusual thoughts pointing in odd directions.  Look, there's a very basic warning, which first gets told in the form of a joke, about a patient who goes to the doctor complaining that his arm starts to hurt if he folds it all the way behind his back, and the doctor says, 'Well, first of all, if it hurts, stop doing it.'  If you start feeling like it is a perfectly logical and inevitable conclusion from the Law I've taught that you need to destroy this universe - talk to me, talk to somebody who works fairly directly for Asmodeus, and first of all, stop twisting up like that, just literally pause until you've talked to somebody, because that is not supposed to be an inevitable conclusion from dath ilani premises.  Reasoning under structural uncertainty is legit harder and easier to screw up than reasoning when you already know exactly how you're supposed to think, which is boringly easy by comparison.  You're going to suck at it for a while.  If you arrive at the necessary truth that you must fling yourself into the sea, don't."

The girls nod fervently. 

"I - need to think.  I may not need to think more than you need to have urgent questions answered, so interrupt me if it's important, but I need to think.  It's - I wondered how Golarion managed to be screwed up when it had Very Serious Lawful Devils and frigging gods, but now I'm visualizing - dath ilan has put this massive effort by a lot of people with very high measured intelligence into optimizing everything important, which I don't think I really appreciated before, and, in this world, somebody put the children's lessons together in a way where the person teaching them is also responsible for measuring the results.  And nobody else is checking on their measurements.  And all of the questions are supposed to be things the children have already been taught how to answer.  And the regional numbers of children are too small and travel is too expensive, to sort each lesson by current knowledge and velocity of learning, so the people I consider to be of average intelligence are just being thrown into a scaled-up version of whatever has to teach people much dumber than them how to do ultra-basic algebra and I'm realizing that every single aspect of Golarion must be that screwed up simultaneously."

Keltham is visualizing what Lrilatha's day must be like.  She probably walked straight out of this villa and teleported directly to somewhere else where she had to stop somebody from being a massive idiot and plugging all the outputs of the iron factories back into their inputs and then teleported again and then again and does her species even get to sleep and how many of her are there in all of Cheliax, three, she can't fix things on a deep level because the human problems aren't her problems, she doesn't know how to tell people to do it systematically better because the current educational system wouldn't hurt her the same way, and Keltham's god isn't talking to him and there's some massive communication barrier that made it easier for Asmodeus to point vaguely in Keltham's direction than to give detailed instructions to anyone and this whole situation is so much more messed-up than he previously realized.

"You're really going to hate all the other countries in the world," says Asmodia.