"So... somebody picks out the most attractive women, tells them they're sex workers whether they like it or not, and underpays them, because otherwise their country can't fill out those jobs because no woman wants them because of the marriage thing."

"...you know, I can tell that's still too sensible for Golarion but even having said that, I don't know how to make the answer be crazier."

"If a girl has had sex while unmarried, in a country where women are supposed to marry as virgins, then no one will marry her, but it's illegal for her to have been educated or gotten a normal job, so she can be a sex worker - that does not translate quite directly to our word - or she can starve, and she will almost definitely get diseases from having sex with lots of strangers, and also eventually one of them will be bad news and strangle her, but I imagined dath ilan having enough Law to solve the latter problem and enough medicine to solve the former and it's still considered a lousy job with those aside, because propensity for it is barely getting selected for at all."

More equilibria that seem weirdly more awful than anything Keltham knows about to explain why.

"Why would - you get diseases particularly from having sex with people you didn't know?  Is this a magic thing?"

"...no? It's just - well, you get diseases from any kind of close contact with other people, right, and there are a bunch of diseases that you specifically get from sex, and people who haven't had sex won't have those diseases to pass along, and people who have sex with hundreds and hundreds of people will inevitably get the diseases eventually."

"And here that's much more serious than - the kind of contagious illnesses that we still have in dath ilan, because we eliminated anything we didn't know how to easily treat, probably long enough ago that it happened before the screen.  Though - I'm a bit confused about the concept of a disease that's specifically transmitted by sex - you wouldn't think a disease would find its optimal strategy in only, like, infecting genitals or sexual fluids, and making sure it never got transmitted by sneezing - I wonder if there's something I'm missing about how the equilibrium point is different here.  Is it anything you still have to worry about in the face of fourth-circle cleric spells?"

"No, Remove Disease is third and will totally handle it, but normal people can't afford that. I don't know enough about why diseases work different ways to guess the answer to your question but doctors do track, like, if you're doctoring someone with smallpox and haven't had it yourself you'll catch it, if you're doctoring someone with syphilis and haven't had it yourself you'll be completely fine, but their wife and mistress will come down with it eventually."

"I'd guess that - a long, long time ago, in dath ilan - we figured out how to identify everyone with a disease like that, all at once, in one giant sweep through the population, and we isolated all of them until they got better or died, plus a while longer to be sure, and then the disease didn't exist anymore."

(The concept that you can have a contagious disease forever, without it either getting better enough not to be contagious, or getting worse until it kills you, has not particularly occurred to Keltham; why would the replication rate in the face of immune counterattack be exactly 1, rather than exploding or vanishing?)

Nod. "I think Cheliax could do that but it'd just get reintroduced from other countries that aren't coordinated enough."

"Yeah, we wouldn't even have tried until we thought we could pull it off across the whole planet at once, so it can't have been any earlier than that, in our history... I wish I knew whether dath ilan went through a phase like this, or if it's something that happens here entirely because of the gods or a leak in your heritage of intelligence or I don't know what.  If dath ilan used to look basically like this, minus the gods and magic, it sure would be nice to know exactly how we climbed out of it."

For the first time it occurs to Keltham to wonder if dath ilan used to have gods, and that's what the Great Screen is meant to protect, because if you know the info for gods, you might pray to them... it would take a huge effort to keep not just the phenomenon but the physics behind it out of all the textbooks, but that's the magnitude of effort dath ilan put in to the Great Screen.  And if that's not what's going on, then there remains the unexplained question of why Keltham does not know any standard speculations about hypothetical superagents, that lots and lots of people could have hypothesized, hypotheses which pose a lot of interesting then-whats once you start looking in that direction.

"Anyway. It's interesting to know you can have plenty of sex workers if they're also allowed to do other stuff."

"I'm not sure there's literally anybody on my planet who's 'not allowed to do other stuff'.  Maybe some Keepers, if they're holding infohazards so bad that they all have to stay in the same isolated village somewhere?"

(And the people who know the true history, in their own causally isolated bunker.  But Keltham is now suddenly very unsure he should talk any more about the Screening of History where gods might hear him.  If dath ilan's Keepers defeated the gods and eradicated their memory, sometime in the Forgotten, this may not be a good thing to talk about in modern Golarion.)

"Where does the equilibrium balance in Cheliax?" Keltham adds on.  "You didn't think that people who enjoy sex lots would be the natural sellers for sex, so what prevents that here?"

"Well, there's still the diseases and there's still the risk of a dangerous guy, so it's still a job you probably only do if you don't have better options, though in Cheliax that wouldn't be because they're illegal so it'd probably be because you're really bad at working in some way or another. And if you are particularly attractive and desirable you probably try to angle that into being a powerful person's mistress rather than working at a brothel, even a high-end one."

And the gaps are filled by slavery, which she's not going to say. 

"Oh, in dath ilan it's that sufficiently attractive people who are sufficiently good at sex, have formed - um.  A... temporal process with two sides... where each side is composed of people... who each have their own incentives... such that each side is in equilibrium with respect to the incentives given to them by the other side... and on the other side from the very desirable people, are people who are sufficiently cool and have done sufficiently awesome things.  You can't buy some very hot people with money, you've got to have done something that they think is worthy.  And the people who are obviously worthy, if they're willing to acknowledge you publicly as a fuckbuddy, they're validating to the world that you are that hot and that good at sex, and then you're somebody who gets to decide whether some lesser incredibly rich person is cool enough to meet your standards."

Carissa tries to follow that and when that fails tries to nail down her confusion and when that fails says reluctantly, "maybe that's the same thing as taking a mistress but I suspect, instead, it's another vast confusing cultural divide."

"Okay, suppose I asked you who was the hottest woman on the planet.  The first obvious answer would be whoever gets paid the highest prices for sex.  But suppose there's somebody even hotter than her, who doesn't accept direct payment for sex at all.  How could you tell she was even hotter?  How could she prove that to the world?  Well, let's say she thinks the big important thing is... research on rats, and suppose somebody incredibly rich goes and builds an entire small city devoted to rat research, and then she screws him.  Depending on how much money gets spent, especially if she's influencing multiple rich people to fund rat research, you could make the case that she's getting implicitly paid more than the most expensive direct sex worker on the planet, even if she's only a small fraction of the reason why anyone funded the rat research city."

" - this is missing the point but in Golarion you'd check with a spell who had the most Splendour. Uh, I'm not sure that's how I think about sexual desirability working? I don't - think how hot someone is relates very directly to how much I expect to gain from having sex with them and therefore how motivated I am to do it. And I'm also not sure that's the main place where the confusion is."

"Do people here not have... I don't know, the kind of pride in their own desirability and sexual skill where they want to prove that they're way better at it than most other people?  Because you can't just go around saying that, you've got to prove it somehow."

Carissa is pretty sure that the more powerful you are, the less you need skill at sex. She's suddenly worried that she shouldn't say that either, though. "...yes but that correlates with not being very powerful or in-demand, and therefore with needing to establish that you're fun to have sex with if you want to get anyone to have sex with you at all?" she says tentatively after a bit of thought.

Keltham is not sure what the communications obstacle could be here, exactly.  "I mean, it's a two-sided equilibrium containing the hottest people and the worthiest people who mutually judge each other as that, anchored by how hotness and worthiness are also somewhat visible to people outside their ingroups - I have a sense like I'm also missing the point.  If you're hot enough that powerful people are competing to sleep with you, you don't need to establish how hot you are anymore, the outside world has now seen it established."

"I'm going to talk about some place other than Cheliax, first, because I keep getting distracted by trying to apply this conversation to our date" and by worrying about saying something that you'll be incredibly concerned and offended by. "So, Osirion. Osirion has a god-king, a pharaoh, they've had them since ancient times. The pharaoh of Osirion has hundreds of concubines. If he sees a hot girl in the street, I think he can just order her to become one of them. It's not particularly validating to be chosen by the pharaoh of Osirion, because it just means that you're either in the top couple hundred or that he was tired of the top couple hundred and wanted something new. I am absolutely not in the top percentile of hotness for women but if I went to Osirion I'd be a little worried about getting noticed, because I'm exotic, which is sometimes appealing in its own right.

Does all of that make sense, are we starting to make different predictions at some place after that -"

"I mean you've convinced me that no woman would want to go to Osirion, and if she did, she wouldn't expect to gain positive sexual reputation from being selected by the pharaoh because the pharaoh isn't discriminating enough, but I'm now distracted by the question of why there is such a thing as a pharaoh of Osirion in the first place."

"...as a question about history the answer is that his grandfather staged a nearly bloodless coup against the satrap of the Kelish Empire, with the churches of Abadar and Sarenrae both backing him, right after Aroden fell when the empire was very distracted, and won Osirion independence and kicked out all the Kelish nobles and ended serfdom and is wildly popular. I am not sure that's the question you were asking, though?" 

"Suppose everybody in a dath ilani city woke up one day with the knowledge mysteriously inserted into their heads, that their city had a pharaoh who was entitled to order random women off the street into his - cuddling chambers? - whether they liked that or not.  Suppose that they had the false sense that things had always been like this for decades.  It wouldn't even take until whenever the pharaoh first ordered a woman, for her to go "Wait why am I obeying this order when I'd rather not obey it?"  Somebody would be thinking about city politics first thing when they woke up in the morning and they'd go "Wait why we do we have a pharaoh in the first place" and within an hour, not only would they not have a pharaoh, they'd have deduced the existence of the memory modification because their previous history would have made no sense, and then the problem would escalate to Exception Handling and half the Keepers on the planet would arrive to figure out what kind of alien invasion was going on.  Is the source of my confusion - at all clear here?"

"You think everyone in dath ilan would just - decide not to follow orders, even though this would get them executed if anyone else in the system continued following orders, on the confident assumption that no person with a correctly configured mind would possibly decide to follow orders under those circumstances?"

"Oh, so we're imagining that people also wake up with the memory that everybody's supposed to kill anyone who talks about removing the pharaoh, and the memory that they're supposed to kill anyone who doesn't kill anyone who talks about removing the pharaoh, and so on through recursion, and they wake up with the memory of everybody else having behaved like that previously.  Yeah, that's one of the famous theoretical bad equilibria that we get training in how to -"