"Carissa and Lrilatha both warned me."

Keltham waits to see if anyone has anything urgent to add to that, and then goes off to think by himself.  A few seconds later he comes back and asks somebody to actually tell him when his stated time for lunch is over, because he doesn't have a wristwatch anymore.

He gets several volunteers to get him when it's time.

Keltham thinks.  He also takes small bits of additional food and arranges them in weird patterns on his plate without eating them, so he has something to distract his brain when it overheats.  Keltham does not think that food is supposed to be valuable, particularly not food on this level of elaboration.

Pros:  If this hypothesis is correct, there will be lots of things that Keltham can very, very easily say how to improve.
Cons:  Many dath ilani solutions will not work out of the box because they rely on other stuff already working.

Three girls come over to get him at once when it's the end of lunchtime.

Keltham has managed to rally himself by this point.  Fine, so instead of having the metaphorical opportunity to take over a company in a green field with no competition, he has the metaphorical opportunity to take over a company every single part of which is simultaneously wrong, in a green field with no competition.  So?  He just has to repair enough things, and then they'll work.  What's he going to do, give up on that without trying?  No.  Is he going to complain, when his immediate prospects include a date with Carissa tonight and he's been assigned a research harem?  More no.  All of his no.  What kind of reply would that be to Chelish Governance providing him with large opportunities?  He just has to rise to the challenge, make all the money, fuck all the women, and fix all of the universe's deficiencies.

All that's changed is that he now has some idea of the actual scope of the problem.  Off to the library again he goes!

(Keltham continues to have no idea of the actual scope of the problem.  The horrifying planetwide disaster of universally awful institutional design that Keltham is currently envisioning is somewhere around 1% as dysfunctional as, say, an alternate Prime Material with a roughly equivalent tech level to dath ilan's but the modal social outcome for that.  He continues to not be mentally on the same page as Golarion, nor, indeed, the same book, same language, same library, same city, same planet, or same laws of physics as Golarion.)

Carissa has a plan for the afternoon which is to pay attention to the actual lesson. She recalls from her days in school that this was usually a good idea. And she's pretty sure she should wait before she tries to completely reform the teachings of Asmodeanism on the Material Plane. 

To make sure everybody starts out on the same page, Keltham will quickly summarize earlier conversations for the benefit of any harem members who might not have been in hearing range for it.  He still isn't distinguishing them all that well and didn't actually count them, if somebody was in the washroom or something.  He definitely knows Carissa was absent for some of it.

Things Keltham summarizes:

- Keltham is not sure how important it actually is to understand where everything you know is situated within the order of larger reality, but dath ilan sure does situate all of it, and maybe that's important, he doesn't know.  Hopefully he doesn't have to burn more than a couple of hours here and there on situating things.
- Most adult dath ilani are running around thinking that they know the universe's age to within 0.1% and all the names and qualities of its tiny parts that haven't been reduced to even tinier parts.  The very smart people of dath ilan (actually the prediction markets but he'll explain that in more detail later) have predicted how this could otherwise make people weak and unable to handle mental adversity, which is why the adults play a lot of confusing pranks on children, in case they someday end up in Golarion or something.  Like, they weren't literally anticipating this exact event, or they'd have gone a lot harder on his pranks.  But it sure is why Keltham is hitting the ground running instead of curling up in a ball whining about structural uncertainty.
- And similarly:  Even ordinary life means sometimes facing questions you don't know how to answer.  Doing basic research means facing questions whose answers are very unlike all the questions and answers you've studied before.  Keltham regrets to inform Cheliax that only asking kids questions they already know how to answer, seems like it would obviously leave them weak and unprepared for real intellectual challenges.  He's pretty sure this is true of people at their own intelligence level, less sure about people with average or below-average intelligence for Golarion.
- Keltham does apologize for presenting his students with confusing questions, when they weren't used to that, had no idea why he was doing that, and also didn't have any meta-idea of why he'd be doing stuff they didn't understand.
- Keltham will try to remember to check in verbally about how people are doing, since Chelish pride permits verbal answers about that but seems to prohibit overt visual displays of confusion.  If Keltham seems to be forgetting to do this, he hopes somebody will remind him in words even if Cheliax considers that slightly undignified.  As an older kid teaching younger kids, he expected the younger kids to give much more overt signals of how well he was doing as a teacher.
- Dath ilan doesn't have magical healing and they sure don't have resurrections.  Hence, despite all their intellectual toughening procedures, they don't have any equivalent of, like, teaching kids how to walk on broken legs so that they can mentally divorce physical pain from long-term damage.  If Cheliax trains its kids to be strong in that particular way, Keltham has not gone through this training yet, and this is probably not the right time either.
- Correspondingly, if inflicting physical pain is considered an important element in Cheliax of training subconscious intuitions, Keltham has no idea how to do that professionally, and hopes they'll excuse him from it.  Keltham separately may end up making a case that rewards often work better than punishments, because you can scale rewards directly to performance instead of a problematic notion of 'are people doing their best', plus the brain learns from forgone rewards similarly in many ways to punishment; but he'd have to understand this entire system better, before he started feeling confident about critiquing that element specifically.
- It does seem specifically worrisome to Keltham that in a punishment-based system you'd have to worry about people taking safer, less challenging lessons and trying not to give outward signs that their potential was high enough to do better, if their subconscious was learning to avoid pain inflicted for doing less than their best.  Maybe he's totally off-base in worrying about that and Cheliax has already solved it somehow.  But the reason Keltham is bringing that up immediately, is to emphasize that he is going to continue throwing confusing questions at them and this is not meant to be a threatening overly difficult problem whose painful failures they need to avoid, it's meant to be an overly difficult problem they can safely hang out around and safely fail on without that hurting.
- It'd be particularly dumb if Keltham started throwing more difficult problems at them, they got hurt more for failing or just got scared of failing, and some deep part of their brain learned the lesson that facing actual confusing cognitive problems is scarier and more painful than facing easy fake cognitive problems.  That is why Keltham now emphasizes the point that, whatever problems they were trying to solve in their education before this, object-level failure will be punished less; because this is new to them, and their best is worse than it was on easier problems; also because Keltham doesn't know how to teach that way at all; and, above all, success on these new harder problems is more valuable and during equity negotiations he will ensure that it is accordingly better paid.

That all seems....reasonable. They think that probably Keltham's teaching style will be fine for them; it would also be silly if learning how to focus with broken legs meant you couldn't focus without broken legs.

(If there's a mistake, it has to be less obvious than - punishment not working as well as rewards for humans - no, she's going to not think about this and focus on the lesson.

Also she's never skipping lunch again.)

This afternoon Keltham is going to try conveying some of the absolute basics about population-heredity dynamics, which was on his mind during lunch today for reasons which need not be explained.  (Keltham actually says this part out loud.)  These basics are not all of the knowledge Keltham has out of dath ilan about heredity, there are advanced tricks he's deliberately not going to cover until they're bought from him, but he's wondering if even the basics will be self-evidently useful enough that it gets him enough credit with the Chelish government to cover things like Detect Magic goggles.

Also, after his experience with how Chelish education is configured, and having been told where the average Intelligence on this planet has ended up, he feels some degree of concern, and a need to check that current heritage-optimization programs are not being run, like... backwards.  (Keltham says this out loud too.)

Before he launches into his own lecture, what're Cheliax's current knowledge or hypotheses about heredity, and how have they set up whatever current heritage-optimization programs they're running for crops, domesticated animals, and people?

Cheliax knows that children inherit traits from their parents. The dominant theory is that girls mostly inherit psychological traits from their mothers and boys from their fathers, based on how it works in the species of marshbirds where a famous wizard did a bunch of seminal breeding experiments, but some people think humans are more like dogs in inheriting from both parents; certainly in skin and hair humans can take after either parent. Humans hybridize with elves, drow, orcs, sylphs, and hybridize inconsistently (offspring rare, often sterile) with angels, devils, and elementals polymorphed humanoid, and don't hybridize with halflings or gnomes or catfolk or gnolls or giants or goblins or merfolk. Human hybrids with elves are half-elves and with orcs are half-orcs, but human hybrids by dwarves if they live at all will fully resemble dwarves, and be sterile.

Cheliax is divided on whether to try to reduce the percentage of children who die of disease, for reasons related to heredity: toughness is heritable, and if you start saving the half of kids that currently die possibly you'll be raising a generation of adults with fundamental weaknesses in their blood which they'll pass along such that future generations get weaker and weaker. That seems like one way you could run a heritage-optimization program backwards and they're not doing that.

Cheliax pays students who graduated with good grades from wizard school to have children, though talented wizards usually have lots of ways to make money and it's more about communicating that they're doing a thing valuable to Cheliax than about shifting their financial incentives much. Wizards actually have fewer children than other people because they can choose whether they become pregnant and other people can't, but Keltham's reportedly going to introduce technology to let everyone do that, which should help on that front?

Okay, yes.  Yes, if smart people have fewer children because they have better access to contraception, and nobody is, like, doing anything about that, that could be a problem, yes.  This is frankly something Keltham has never even imagined as a catastrophic failure mode of a civilization, but that could have been, over past generations, a very large cumulative problem, yes.  How good that anyone on Golarion has finally potentially noticed this is an issue.  The good contraceptive technology that dath ilan uses is unfortunately not trivial on the tech ladder, but Keltham can explain how to research things ever and they can hopefully find some better makeshifts than whatever people are doing now.  Cheap makeshifts.  Which a sensible government will subsidize.

That interbreeding stuff is fascinating, from a seeking-hidden-order perspective, but Keltham will explain why in more length later.

Does Cheliax have any kind of thinking that's about, like... why are there equal numbers of men and women, at least among humans?  Assuming there are.  If there aren't, Keltham is going to have to check a few things and then potentially back out a number of his assumptions.

There are equal numbers of men and women except in countries that kill baby girls, which is definitely some of them, but not Cheliax, because Cheliax doesn't suck. They are...not aware of thinking that's about that specifically. It's also true of most animals, it's not just a human thing.

Why would it be true of humans and most animals?  There's a reason for it, a hidden order behind it.

Guess wrongly; this is the dath ilani way of education and you are not always expected to know, when the teacher asks a question, because you will not always know the answer when real life asks you a question; and in both cases you must gather your scattered and inadequate thoughts, and manage to say out loud your first guess, so you at least know what you don't know and where your current thoughts point.  If all your thoughts are wrong and you know it, say both your best-seeming current thought, and the reason it must be wrong.  Much discovery of hidden order begins like this; do not refuse to venture forth.

There are some nervous giggles, at this.

Then they start speculating.

There might be some agreement of the gods about it, though that'd be less likely to cover animals.

Children are made from a boy and a girl, so maybe their making involves getting boy and girl inputs, and then drawing at random which turns into a child, which would get you half and half.

Maybe souls come out half and half, and then bodies that don't get a soul die, so you see half and half among live births.

Suppose you were designing humans from scratch.  Would you make them to have equal numbers of men and women?  Don't consider as constraints things like the balance of male and female desire for sex or mates; you could, if you like, say that there would be twice as many men as women, and women who on average desired twice as much sex as men, if you were designing the human species from scratch.  What would be the consequences, if you were designing the species from scratch, and you said there should be twice as many men as women, or twice as many women as men?

Well, a lot of people'd have a hard time getting laid, is the main thing? But you wouldn't actually go for equal numbers if you were optimizing for that, because men generally want sex more than women, you'd go for maybe two to one or three to one.

...actually, observes Meritxell, mostly women seems better? You can increase your population faster, because more people can bear children, and the men can get around and it's easier to attract foreign men than foreign women anyway. And she thinks women are better citizens, on average, Lawfuller.

"Less likely to be adventurers, and a country without adventurers is dead by a thousand cuts no matter how many babies they're having."

Ah, well, those are interesting puzzles in their own right, aren't they?  Why are women Lawfuller?  Why are men more likely than women to become adventurers?  Keltham knows the answers already, even though he's a stranger to the planet, because it was the same way in dath ilan.  He's not going to tell them the answer, just yet; they're welcome to try to see it on their own, if they can; and maybe they even will, before he gets around to giving away the answers.  If so, he will be duly impressed.

But return back to the original question.  Suppose, again, you are designing humans from scratch.  Why not twice as many women as men, and also have the women be as likely as current men to become adventurers?  Wouldn't a group like that be able to increase faster, because more people could bear children?

...possibly you need some scarcity of women to motivate the men to be adventurers, and if they had girls either way then they'd all just lounge around doing nothing? ....no offense to present company who is admittedly a counterexample. But the average person might be motivated by it being the case that they can have sex if they work hard and not otherwise, best achieved by balance. 

It seems like you'd make people as Lawful as you could if you were making them and it's not clear why that'd be Lawfuler for women than for men. And same with propensity to be an adventurer - no, well, you don't want everyone being an adventurer, some of them have to stay home making the institutions function - 

- maybe there's a tradeoff in human psychology between Lawfulness and adventurer-tendency?

In countries where people kill their daughters, they do it because men are more valuable (under the local cultural regime where women are hardly allowed to do anything). And presumably if enough people did that then eventually daughters would become valuable again, as the men wanted wives. So you'd end up with as many living women as made daughters as valuable as sons. Or with across the board infanticide if no children were valuable to have.

(Keltham reminds himself again that the whole afterlife thing is obviously going to lead to different local mores about death, just as the existence of healing magic has led to different local mores about pain; killing babies here does not mean the same thing that killing or cryo-suspending babies would in dath ilan.  It wouldn't be surprising if the whole pre-afterlife world operates as a tiny adjunct to a much larger afterlife, only of note to gods and a higher economy because it's the part of reality that provides the afterlife with its intake feed.  Some of the attitudes ascribed to countries outside Cheliax definitely give that impression.)

(Keltham also notes that Carissa seems to be able to follow the thread of an argument better than others here.  He's not used to thinking of that as an adult capability per se, but maybe it takes a lot more life experience to follow threads of argument if you have, like, very little formal training in it.)

"Ah, well, if you value having more of your own children, then, if the human species had been designed to birth ten times as many female children as male, you might wish yourself to have more male children.  It would not necessarily be any better in terms of producing a functioning species; the species could get along fine with each male having to do ten times as much work of fertilizing women.  It doesn't take that long, well, if you're doing it right, it takes longer, but not so long that a male couldn't fertilize another female the next day.  Still, if the rest of your species gave birth to ten times as many women as men, and yet you could manage to birth only men yourself, you would have a lot more grandchildren than the average women."

"And yet what difference does any of that make?  What difference does it make, as to what some woman wants to herself, when it comes to how the human species works as a whole?  At least in dath ilan, women cannot choose the sex of their child by just an act of will.  Then how can their wants control the balance of female and male births across the whole species?  I'll tell you right now, the answer isn't that there is some mysterious channel by which the emotions of women collectively control the balance of births; you might have to look at things a little sideways to get it.  But even if you can't get it, guess anyways -"

"Oh, and don't forget, if you can guess why your guess might be wrong, say that part too!  You're not trying to convince me of your guess - this isn't like wacky Chelish books - you're not trying to tell me just one side of a story, like you're selling me your guess as a product and trying to get a higher price on it by concealing information while hoping I don't realize you're concealing information.  I mean, if you want to sell me anything in real life, sell me on how good you are at reasoning.  That means when you tell me your best guess, you should try to figure out how your best guess might be wrong; if you can see why it's probably wrong, if you can already see something that doesn't fit with your guess, tell me that part too.  Remember, when real life hands you a problem, it won't tell you when you guess wrong, the way a teacher in a classroom tells you when you're wrong.  In actual real life it's your job to figure out why your best guess might still be wrong.  Dath ilani teachers let kids stay wrong about some things for years, and older kids are forbidden to tell younger kids about them."

"Well, people can't decide what overall population ratio makes the most sense but the gods probably can. The problem with that theory being that as far as you know dath ilan doesn't have those," Asmodia says.

"If you had a family that only threw daughters and one that only threw sons," Tonia said, "they'd do about as well for themselves, I'd think. It's not like throwing only sons is an advantage. Men don't have more children than women on average, since they're having them with women. The, uh, problem with my theory is, I don't know, maybe you could imagine it being two thirds to one third, and still somehow working out so that no one had an advantage, I don't know how you would prove you wouldn't."

"Why does it matter whether some family has an advantage?  What do the forces that created humans care about that?"

Tonia bites her lip. "I...feel like it should, but I don't have a good explanation - when someone's got an advantage, then the situation's not stable. And if no one has an advantage, then the situation's stable."