"Right, then, what we are going to do now is invent a new reality-mirroring game.  That is one of the things that a dath ilani child would do as a matter of course, faced with a question they had no idea how to answer, whether that question came from an older child or a Watcher or from life itself; they would try to invent a game, corresponding to the question, that they might learn something from playing."

"There is math that I know which describes in a quite simple way the value of variance for heritage-optimization, as it happens, or the result of having the variations come from different bits of heritage.  But it can be hard to correctly derive the math that will give you the fully general answer right away.  Inventing games can be straightforward in a way that doing math is not."

"I did tell you how the twenty-three package pairs work.  So why not invent a game with, say, four package-pairs, and four places in each package where heritages can potentially vary?  How would you make a game like that, and play it, to learn something about how heritage-optimization might play out?  As an advisory panel to the Chelish government, it may be worth your time to spend a whole day playing games like that, if that's where you're generating your ideas and advice - in fact, you might even hire other people to play them for you, and report back about the results.  Though here, you can't do that yet, even if you brought in somebody else to hire in real life, because you're still learning how to invent and play relevant games at all."

They set at this. Somewhat abashedly. ...everyone has four package-pairs and four places where heritages can potentially vary, and each spot can either be a "smart" or a "nothing" or a "dumb", and your score is the smarts minus the dumbs. Everyone can trade with other people, and you can drop the current 'person' you're playing for any of your offspring, and other people tell you their total score but not any components, and you try to have the smartest 'person' after twenty rounds.

Would that be the right kind of game.

"Play it once and see what happens!"

They try it? It's not clear anyone is having any fun but they work very effortfully at it. Mostly everyone tries to do all of their trades with the highest-scoring person around, who has no real incentive to trade with dumb people. This is probably reflective of life but it's not very fun.

This game is not even slightly reflective of how anything would plausibly work in reality, and nobody has any idea of how fun game design or accurate simulation-game design works, and they are playing a game that would be cooperative in real life as if it is a competitive one, and it is occurring to Keltham for the first time that they may not even consciously know the difference between positive-sum and zero-sum games, which sure would explain why simple words for that don't seem to exist in Taldane, or why no Chelish book or Chelish person has ever happened to use the terms around him yet.

Right.  This is fine.  Everything is fine.

"All right, let's stop there," Keltham says, trying to maintain the same calm demeanor that a Watcher would have in this situation.  "I think this game isn't playing out the same way it would play out if Chelish governance was running a heritage-optimization program; do you have any ideas what went wrong and how you should modify the game?"

They noticed some problems!

 - high intelligence people can't get much out of trading, whereas in real life people are pretty motivated to have sex even if they don't get smart children out of it

- you can only be one person, so you have to ditch the person you were if you want to be a new person, but maybe you should just get to add them to your stable? that'd incentivize having more children, though also the paperwork would get really annoying

- no one has any particular insight into how some people got better, it seems like mostly just luck

"I am genuinely not sure how to introduce this topic if you have never encountered it before, but sometimes in real life, a group of people have to work towards a common goal, and at the end get some payout in common that they have to divide up - according to previously agreed-upon rules, if they were smart.  Games can work like that too, and should, if they're trying to mirror that kind of reality.  Chelish Governance is going to be trying to make the game work like that, that's sort of the whole point of having a government in the first place."

"The other thing that's missing is that you don't - seem to have a current notion of what you're trying to find out from the game - you know, I think I may be doing this wrong and not providing you with enough direction literally the first time you're doing this.  You play games with older kids leading, before you get handed some problem that requires you to invent a game for younger kids to play with you.  Well, I may just be motivated to think that because of my personal interest in having this particular topic taught quickly; still, the rationalization seems valid after having been invented."

"So!  Things you could be testing in this game include alternate rules that Chelish governance could give the players about subsidies and rewards, which would lead players each trying to maximize their own score, to do useful things for heritage-optimization.  And now it's occurring to me that maybe you don't already have this concept, maybe people here just make up laws that sound like good ideas and don't play games to figure out what the laws will do in their effects on selfish people.  In which case I also have to, at some point, convey basic competence for figuring out what effects different legal systems would have and optimizing better laws, which, the complete wreckage of what my own people consider Lawfulness in Golarion, should maybe have suggested to me earlier was also going to end up a Project issue, but never mind one thing at a time."

"The other thing you were going to investigate was the effect of adding one person with different bits of heritage to the system.  So for now, just make up some fixed rules about points that players score by having smarter characters in their hand, let's say there's at most three characters you can keep in your hand at one time, and your objective is not to score higher than other players, it's just to score as many points as possible for yourself.  Characters can be male or female at random; men can have any number of children in a lifetime, women can have only three children per lifetime.  When any two players mate their characters, they have to agree in advance on which player will retain the resulting offspring.  Any time a mating occurs between two characters one of whom has over ten smarts, the Chelish government pays an extra point to whichever player doesn't end up owning the resulting offspring.  Any time a mating occurs between two characters both with over ten smarts, the Chelish government pays an extra three points to whichever player doesn't end up owning the resulting offspring.  At the end of the game, everybody gets a bonus equal to total smarts divided by ten, which mirrors the real-life fact that smart people don't capture all of the value they create for themselves and that smarter societies end up generally richer even for the nonsmart people in them; and remember, your in-game goal is to maximize your total points for yourself, not worry at all about how many points other players are scoring..."  Keltham goes on sketching some additional rules intended to make the game mirror real-life genetics, and real-life incentives under conditions of government subsidy.

Each player gets one free mating at the start of the game with the 'Thamkel' character, which is the only one that has any 'smart' or 'dumb' values at the fourth locus of each chromosome - all other characters have 'neutral' at the fourth locus.  'Thamkel' also has only neutral values at the first locus, where other characters can have 'smart' or 'dumb' there.  This reflects the way that Thamkel has some different varying bits.  You can't legally mate two Thamkel offspring during the first two generations afterwards.  There are a few other characters as smart as Thamkel, but only Thamkel has any variation in the fourth locus for each chromosome.

And then Keltham observes what happens under the new game conditions.  Do they - sort of get the point of the simulation, now, or the incentives?  At all?

Yes, once he spells it out they can follow how that's like the situation they're trying to produce, and they can try to fumble through it with all the new scoring rules in mind. They're...still not clear on how you learn from this how much Thamkel helps, aside from playing the game without Thamkel in it.

Well, yes, after they've played this game for a few generations, they're going to score themselves, and then play a new game without Thamkel in it.

Right. 

They're still evidently not having any fun but they do this very diligently, and get better at it over a couple of trials, and take down their scores. (They seem to find it hard not to track who has the highest score). 

He's seriously not trying to score them on their game scores!  First of all, people were given randomized characters with uneven qualities at the start of the game, just like life itself isn't fair in that way, and second, he's watching to see if people play according to their incentives, not whether they get higher scores than other players.

...he's not sure what's going wrong with the way that nobody's having fun.  Maybe just the sheer cognitive load associated with not really instinctively feeling what's going on and not having pre-learned brain patterns for this complicated game?  He should maybe back off of this soon, then, and only re-approach after playing simple games with shorter-term intrinsic real rewards associated with good play, like if they're doing it on a playground, or the adult equivalent of that.  He doesn't want to train his students that simulation games aren't fun.

"So this game wasn't a very realistic one - for example, you knew all of your characters' genetic information locus by locus, where, for a more realistic game, we should've had some Game Masters who only told you a character's total Intelligence score, didn't tell you anything about the specific loci, and generated new characters for everyone after each mating.  Nonetheless, for this unrealistic version, around how valuable was Thamkel?"

(Two games without Thamkel managed to take Intelligence from 10 to 12.2 and 12.8, over the prescribed number of generations.  Two games with Thamkel took Intelligence to 13.6 and 12.8.  It's frustrating how slowly the game seems to progress!)

But still, that suggests Thamkel is maybe worth a point over the next couple of centuries, which is a lot, if it were true on a population scale.

"Unfortunately, I can't promise this scenario is at all realistic.  The results you got were ones that I knew you'd get; the game simplified things to where, more or less, the main thing driving the results was how much variance, squared-deviation, you had to select on.  The games with Thamkel gave you four-thirds as much variation to work with as the games without him, and that's basically the answer you got.  That said, though the game was simplified, that part should be more or less true about real genetics according to the real math; the real math says that the rate of selection on a characteristic goes as the covariance between the variance of that characteristic and variance in fitness."

"I could have just proved that, but I thought it was more important to show you a methodology that works for getting a quick perspective on modeling something in an hour, when you don't know how to prove a general mathematical result inside that hour.  Even the abstract math wouldn't take into account things like the division of the genes into twenty-three package-pairs, and until we played this game with four package-pairs, it would be hard to tell from looking at the more abstract path whether that was a critical thing to model."

"Is it realistic that the game with Thamkel has four-thirds as much variation to select on?  That's the critical question, and unfortunately, that part I don't know.  I wish I could remember what percentage of population variance an average dath ilani is carrying, or figure out how many alternative alleles besides that would have been fixed in your population, versus my population, over the unknown time since dath ilan diverged from whatever human biology got here.  With my own world's technology, we could spot-check the tiny spirals directly, see how different they were, figure out how much they'd diverged, and get a good guess how long ago it had happened chronologically.  But I can't do that, and I don't remember even some of the relevant figures that I've actually seen."

"The end result could be anywhere between 'Keltham is worth a five percent boost to how much heritage optimization we can get over a millennium' to 'Keltham has most of a whole other plane's worth of intelligence-promoting alleles that differ from our own pool and that gives us twice as many beneficial mutations to work with' or even, though this would be extreme, 'Keltham quadruples the amount of variance we have to work with, because the cumulative differences between his plane and our plane are four times larger than the pool of important mutations we were selecting on locally, and selection starts going four times as fast for a while a hundred years later.'"

"But, let's be real here, unless I'm somehow worth much less than I look on the surface of the game, the Chelish government cannot realistically pay me as much as my genes are worth to Golarion a thousand years later.  And also, let's be real, I didn't exactly do all the work of dath ilan that selected people like me into existence, even if my genes would usually be considered to be owned by myself; the percentage of generated value that I capture should maybe be legitimately less than if I was selling a book I wrote.  So this is mostly a situation of eh, make me an offer for some unknown-size but probably civilization-level long-term boost.  Plus maybe some unusually smart kids in the first generation, if a lucky draw from the higher-variance heritage-bits that go into a Chelish woman with high Intelligence play well with half of a dath ilani baseline."

"Though I suspect the first generation's results may possibly see a drop instead, unfortunately, if it breaks up some package-combinations of established dath ilani genes that rely on each other.  Or if my kids don't get the right nutrition, or if other kids start getting the right nutrition and catch up.  You're not paying for a higher mean in the first generation than you could've gotten with an 18-Intelligence person from Tian, you're mainly paying for higher variance between smart kids over the next decades, centuries, and millennia.  Which is a lot more valuable than you might realize without doing the math or playing the game.  If the end result is that you get all of another world's good ideas from its tiny spirals, it really is quite valuable - but most of the value won't show up in the very first generation of remixing the package-pairs."

"What's a fair value on that between friendly trade partners, in a world otherwise dancing on the edge of imminent destruction by the Worldwound?  Good question, really.  Unless your government tries to lowball the offer by an amount I consider insulting or silly, I doubt that's going to end up the real sticking point.  I suspect a larger cause for hesitation is that I find myself selfishly concerned with what sort of life my kids will lead, including the ones who only end up with Intelligence sixteen - or even fourteen if that's how much variance is in play, and the first generation ends up breaking important combinations inside the dath ilani baseline genome.  I mean, the kids who'd otherwise exist instead of my kids wouldn't be hugely better off, unless you'd otherwise have found mates much smarter than me, so all fine from a Good perspective.  But I'm not Good and I know very little about this place and it is kind of a gigantic flaming mess and they'd be my kids - well, that's the sticking point from my own perspective."

"But anyways, I have now conveyed to you, and so hopefully to Chelish Governance soon after, that basic knowledge of reality's underlying workings which is required to guess a valuation over the genes from an alien traveler with 18 Intelligence, including the elements of great uncertainty in models thereof.  I await your government's offer, and perhaps more importantly, testable predictions over my offspring's future circumstances."

- nervous giggles. 

" - what about their circumstances do you want predictions about exactly? That they'll get a good education? That they'll, uh, consider themselves to have been done a favor, by your creating them?"

"...I frankly have not thought about this enough!  I thought I had several more years at least to think about it, and when I contemplated it before, did not expect this quantity of potential variation from baseline circumstances I would need to consider!  My kids considering me to have done them a favor by becoming their dad would be, would be a start.  But also, am I going to scream in horror every time I try to check in on one of my 144 kids and they're being taught how to do arithmetic incorrectly in 'school', and should I even let that stop me or is it just the kind of thing that somebody has to grit their teeth and accept if Golarion is ever going to be less of a giant flaming mess?  The prospect of having 144 kids here would be less of a funawful question if this place was less of a giant flaming mess!  Should I maybe at least wait until two successive waking hours have gone by without my realizing once again that in fact things in Golarion are much worse than I previously realized?  This at minimum would seem to indicate some basic level of achieved epistemic stability that seems valuable for making irrevocable long-term decisions!"

"My feelings about this are a bit disordered and I'm not going to try to sort them out in two minutes, I can tell I won't end up with a great answer if I do that."

There's a silence long enough it could be considered awkward.

"Golarion's probably going to be a whole lot better in ten years, anyway, you can stall on this one for as long as you can bear to."

"Yeah, here's another bit of knowledge, I'll throw it in for free:  The little tiny spirals aren't perfectly stable, they degrade little by little over time, that's part of the story behind how getting old kills you.  The tiny spirals in female and male reproductive elements are some of the most protected and best repaired in the whole body, but parents getting old before reproducing is still not good for kids.  If a man does something really impressive at 50, people try to have his kids' kids, not that guy's kids directly -"

"Unless magical healing or Restoration repairs that.  That's something we can also check by measuring the children's intelligence from existing marriages between people who have or haven't had Restorations.  Though it also implies that - adventurers? - should age more slowly, so if that's not already known to be true, maybe don't bother."

"But even if that is true, I'm not going to take ten shitting years to decide a thing.  A ten-year delay is not a trivial cost to heritage optimization in Cheliax and Golarion.  I'm not slow like a tiny cognitive snail.  I'm going to have any idea how Golarion works before ten years pass, I'll see how fast it's improving.  When I try to predict my own future decision, my first-order intuition is 70% that I say yes and that means my real probability is more like 95% given the known direction of systemic error there.  Delaying ten years on something you're 95% likely to do eventually is downright stupid.  But spotting myself ten days, that I may perhaps do."

"Adventurers age mostly normally, wizards worth their salt cast daily aging-delaying spells and make one thirty, one fifty. I have no idea if their later-in-life children tend stupider."

"Wizarding school is disproportionately firstborns, though, everyone knows that. Moreso in other countries where it might just be parental investment, but even here," Jacme says.

"Does that mean people should mostly have children in school, for that reason," Meritxell says, "or is the difference between your teens and twenties not as large -"

"Twenties is - considered socially fine, default childbearing years, you'd only push it into your teens or thirties if you were planning to have lots of kids and your twenties weren't enough?  That's what our customs were, but I don't remember what the numbers are on that... you know, as much as we train to operate under ignorance, it's really quite alarming not to be able to look certain things up on - on the repository of all human knowledge that every dath ilani can instantly access from their house.  Uh, that's high on the tech ladder and you're not going to be able to do that for a while."

"...how do you set that up?"