"No.  This is eight-year-old stuff and the rest of it's not going to make sense otherwise."

"Asmodia, I am worried that I have given you the wrong impression about exactly which forms of reasoning are dangerous, that stuff is not."

"...Keeper-only for at least the next several days?"

"For somebody who believed about herself that she didn't want to try to be a Keeper, you sure are trying to Keep things."

"But fine, I can probably find material a few days out that doesn't require people to distinguish meta-levels of self-modeling or access the subjective difference between endorsement and anticipation."

"What am I doing wrong if I think, that person over there has a Splendour of thirty, if I talk to her I'm definitely going to end up believing whatever she says, even knowing that if I talk to her I'll believe whatever she says -"

"I mean, in practice, what you're doing wrong is that you shouldn't talk to her - but - um.  I'm not sure how to put this.  Being a dath ilani - I mean an ilani - maybe I should just say, the closer you come to a Keeper, or an ideal-agent - the better you are at Law, the more that somebody with high Splendour can't convince you of which province the assassin came from, any more than they can convince you of, um, 1 + 2 = 5.  Or the more math you know, the harder it is to convince you of that."

"Back in Ostenso you'd have had an easier time convincing me that 1 + 2 = 5 in some other plane of existence, because I wouldn't know anything about the Law of Validity or what it really means that 1 + 2 = 3.  I'd have read that book arguing that the assassin of the Prefect of Tandak came on a ship from Whitemarch, and maybe been suspicious but not really have been able to say what was wrong.  So somebody with high Splendour could've convinced me of that, and now they couldn't.  Or at least it'd take a higher Splendour."

"Or to downgrade the proverb's profoundness a few steps, your strength in the Way is the degree to which it takes a higher Splendour to convince you of false things and a lower Splendour to convince you of true things."

Meritxell looks like she actually thinks that's maybe more profound than the original version.

"I should also note that to whatever extent an augmented Splendour of 30 does not actually act as irresistible direct mind control and you get any chance to think about things, the obvious reconciliation is to try to decide in advance, 'How incredibly persuasive of an argument should I expect to hear from somebody with Splendour 30, if they are trying to convince me of a true thing, compared to how likely I am to hear that level of persuasiveness if they're trying to convince me of a false thing?'  And then if you really expect that your predictions there are correct, and not just way underestimating how persuasive they'll sound for false things - and you think you'll actually get the chance to implement that rule, instead of them just effectively mind-controlling you - then you could try to update off that conversation."

"I mean, in practice, to first order, the answer is just not to talk to them if you think they're liable to deploy irresistible Splendour on convincing you of false things.  To second order, if you've got to talk to them anyways, go find a Lawful entity with Splendour 30 and pay them to spend a few days arguing true and false things to you until you're correctly calibrated on what it sounds like to hear a true versus false argument at Splendour 30, and if it turns out you can't learn that, go back to the first-order nope."

"I will keep that in mind if I ever need to talk to the demon lord Nocticula or something," says Meritxell very seriously.

"Okay I'm sorry but we all work on Project Lawful here and now that you've raised this topic I am going to need the one-paragraph explanation just in case it somehow comes up even if you might otherwise think that was improbable."

" - Nocticula is an extremely powerful not-quite-a-god entity in the Abyss and both has absurdly high Splendour and is the kind of person who'd use it to talk people into false things because she'd think it was funny. I really can't think how it'd come up. Maybe she'll object when we close the Worldwound?"

One of the candidate hires that Cheliax is supposed to send him, being Nocticula in disguise, is not very much more improbable than other things that have happened to him recently.

But, okay, there's been a reassuringly low hit rate when he tries to guess that sort of thing specifically and in advance.

"Fair enough.  Probably nothing will happen there, so long as there are not in fact and in reality any 'tropes' lurking about."

Message:  Meritxell, going forwards, and subject to policy approval by Sevar, I think that in the name of prudence we start not mentioning certain things even if we would've been talking about them in an alterCheliax that doesn't believe in tropes.

Acknowledged. 

Can I also not ask Keltham if he thinks me mentioning it makes it more likely and if so if that's only mentioning to him or mentioning to anyone.

If you'd say it in Alter, do it.

"Do you think that me mentioning things makes them more likely? Mentioning them to you or mentioning them at all?"

"That's a legitimately fascinating question in trope mechanics.  Suppose that the basic mechanism of the tropes is that something else looks over universes that would exist anyways, and drops Keltham in a world where, given the way Keltham predictably acts, things that resemble trope-patterns will happen around him.  It seems incredibly likely that this happened at least with my being dropped on the Worldwound someplace I'd predictably run out of the cold into a building where Carissa would be the first person I found who could talk to me.  It happened at least with my dropping into a universe with masochists in it, and one where my knowledge would be incredibly valuable, falling in the right margin between being obsolete and being too advanced for anyone there to understand.  The question is whether universe selection happened with anything else than very basic and initial things like that."

"It could be, for example, that the forces that selected my landing universe were also looking around for a world where Pilar delivers snacks - that they looked over a world with a Carissa with no Pilar and were like, not good enough, needs more Pilar, next universe please.  Or it could be that those forces dropped me wherever with a Carissa, but it very naturally happens, without that needing to be further specified, that if you get a weird thing like me, some nearby gods look around and one of those gods is Cayden Cailean and Cayden's like 'well this project needs snacks' and then that happens."

"If there's a lot of tropes, a lot of selection, running rampant about - or if the tropes are things that can continue to steer actively - though active steering is very much not what the answer would be in a dath ilani story - then we get into the realm of questions about, if Meritxell talks about Nocticula, does that imply Nocticula is more likely to show up?  Can Meritxell make Nocticula show up?  Does it only apply from Keltham's perspective, or also Carissa's, or even Gregoria's?"

"It could be that the tropes operate primarily on whether Nocticula shows up at all, and then have a secondary effect of Meritxell happening to mention her.  Meritxell happening to mention Nocticula, you might think, is then not something that makes Nocticula show up; rather, because Nocticula is going to show up, Meritxell happens to mention her."

"But even in this case, it doesn't mean Meritxell can't affect what happens.  Maybe if Meritxell and every other researcher on the project and all the Security are like, nope, we're not mentioning anybody like that to Keltham, in case the tropes are real, the tropes are like, 'Can we drop Nocticula on this story in a foreshadowed way?  No, because nobody's going to mention Nocticula', and the tropes give up and we don't have to deal with an incredibly persuasive demon lord."

"Except now we have a new question - is there just one Keltham that gets dropped on a single Golarion, or a fixed quantity of Kelthams, or does every Golarion that matches Keltham to the satisfaction of the tropes get one?  Because in the latter case, by being the sort of person who looks at this situation and has everybody get together to refuse to mention Nocticula, what you're doing is reducing the number of Golarions that get a Keltham at all, and if you think I'm net positive for Golarions, you super don't want to do that."

"In calculating this, obviously, you're not supposed to say anything like, 'But we obviously already have a Keltham, he's right here, and if we refuse to mention future entities like Nocticula, he'll still be here, it's too late for the tropes to take him back', because your decision exists in two places at once and has two synchronized effects.  The first place is here and now.  The second place is in a prediction about this world that the tropes made before dropping me here.  A prediction where the tropes asked, 'Well, what will people like Meritxell decide, when they think they've already got a Keltham who the tropes can't take back anymore?' and if the tropes predict you won't mention any future demon lords and will make it impossible for required events to happen in a duly foreshadowed fashion, you don't get a Keltham.  If you're the sort of person who thinks that the tropes can't take back a Keltham you already have, you don't get one."

"All this is the shard of Law after Utility and before Coordination, what we'd call the theory of logical decisions, meaning, decisions that are about logical facts and identified with logical facts and which we evaluate in terms of their logical consequences."

"But pending knowing a lot of other stuff, I'd say that, even if tropes are everywhere, you shouldn't avoid mentioning things like Nocticula... uh, unless demon lords actually directly notice when you talk about them, which, in retrospect, I should have checked before going into this whole long lecture here."

"And I'm mostly at tropes not being that ubiquitous and not running foreshadowing in that particular way, after there was no conflict with the queen, Carissa made her afterlife arrangements just fine, and wasn't a hidden cleric, etcetera.  And in that case you again shouldn't refrain from telling me about demon lords, unless, again, they directly hear when we talk about them.  Do they?"

Meritxell attempts to recalculate that logic that Keltham just regurgitated with the additional information that there was....some kind of conflict with the Queen, though the details are very secret, and that Carissa has not sold her soul.  The tropes do operate, but it might serve Asmodeus to accommodate them and make lots of tropey things happen, as that prediction is what caused Keltham to show up, which Asmodeus wanted...

Then she remembers alter-Meritxell would just be answering the question. "No - or not here, they might in the Abyss. If there are entities it's not safe to mention I haven't heard of them, which is what you'd expect, really."

"That's what I trusted, but wanted to verify."

...orders not to mention entities like that are rescinded for now, pending policy ruling by Sevar.

"Keltham, was that all Keeper-only, or does it get copied at least to Sevar?  I imagine Sevar wanting to know about all that, if she's involved."

"Good question.  I'd say at least copy it to Carissa for sure.  Aside from that put it under Keeper classification until I've had time to think about potential dangerous-information."

Asmodia was gambling on that; if Keltham had explicitly said 'no' then copying it to Sevar would have required her to compartmentalize and hide that knowledge which she wouldn't know in alterCheliax, but explicitly saying 'yes', which is what Asmodia expected, reduces the number of facts like that to keep track of.  And it does rather seem like something Sevar needed to know, with or without Keltham's permission.

Next up is Asmodia's lecture to the general researchers, including Carissa.

It goes mostly the same?  Minus some of the more interesting or immediately-Asmodean-destructive portions.

During discussion of #7, Keltham will at least mention the general concept of trying to assess how much of an incredibly persuasive argument you expect to hear for true things versus false things from somebody with high Splendour; it's analogous to asking how many Queen coin-spins you expect somebody to be able to tell you about, if the coin is actually biased Queen or Text and was flipped twelve times.  If you don't think you're calibrated on expected persuasiveness of Splendour that high, or if you expect it to work out to direct mind control, don't talk to people with that much Splendour, obviously.

Keltham's actually kind of curious about the whole super-high Splendour thing?  It seems analogous to something Keltham knows about from dath ilan, and which he, like almost everybody else in dath ilan, is incredibly curious about.

One of the qualification tests for a fifth-rank Keeper is getting put into a prison, with a single guard in the person of some average dath ilani who's otherwise expecting to go into cryonic suspension shortly after.  The Guard gets told not to let the Keeper out, and offered a pretty substantial financial incentive not to do that, payable to friends or relatives or favorite charities.  The Guard has to solemnly affirm that they intend to resist any attempts to be persuaded to let the Keeper out, that they're not planning to throw the test.  The Keeper is obviously forbidden to offer any considerations outside the test; they can't promise to pay even more money to the person's relatives or favorite charity than the incentive, if they're let out.  The Guard does have to go on listening to the Keeper, talking back to them, and so on.

To be a fifth-rank Keeper you have to persuade the person to let you out before they next sleep; you can go into overtime but only by persuading the other person to go on talking to you.

To be a sixth-rank Keeper you have to do it in 2.4 hours flat with somebody who isn't average, somebody smarter than Keltham, and they have to be between 30 and 40 years old.

To become an eighth-rank Keeper, of which there are maybe three dozen in dath ilan, you have to persuade your way through a second-rank Keeper.

Obviously nobody except higher-ranked Keepers ever get to find out what goes into those conversations.

They don't lack for volunteers on the rare occasions where an opening comes up.  Everybody else is so incredibly curious about what the Keepers could possibly, possibly be saying.  If you're going into cryosuspension anyways, why wouldn't you find out?

Keltham is curious about whether he could do that to, say, an INT 16 person from Golarion who'd never heard of Law.  But, not something he's really got the spare time to test right now.

It might take less time, though, for somebody to try incredibly high Splendour on him, to see if that works, like, at all?  If that's safe and Asmodeus-approved.