"Prior probability in this season for a couple of rainy days... ten percent?  But I think we can legitimately expect Keltham not to think that the Conspiracy world more narrowly predicts us hiding the sky from him...  Unless he's already noticed a time anomaly, in which case he thinks about trying to track the moon and then notices that it just happens to be rainy while the moon should be visible."

"I concur with the plan, though.  I think it's better than leaving our universe's moon out where Keltham can just see it."

She writes the order out. "Add to the yellow column that it's a little rainier in alter Ostenso, and I'll authorize the lie that rain's pretty common this time of year, maybe forty percent of days."

"I express dissent, that creates a consistent anomaly we have to maintain by using more Control Weathers, and has potential implications about - what weather our crops look heritage-selected to resist, when the planting and harvesting seasons are, which lands are fertile for farms -"

"We don't need to decide that part right away if Keltham doesn't ask right away.  Requisition me the weather records for Ostenso, to see if there's such a thing as just having a stretch of a couple of weeks with more rain and clouds than usual?  And how rare that is?  I think that's a thing in reality, my memories say it is, but I don't trust anything that doesn't have numbers attached for this."

"I'll ask for them. I don't want to commit on the rain unless Keltham asks but if he's suspicious he will ask, possibly ask a bunch of different people and be suspicious if our answers aren't distributed normally - you know, I'm going to ask everyone right now what percentage of days this time of year have rain, to get a sense of the distribution, and then we can decide if we want to fake it or not and if so we'll have a real distribution to adjust from."

"That'll also be a good chance to check their estimates against the reality, and see whether the probabilities we give Keltham without checking facts should usually be wronger."

" - yep. Maybe I'll also ask for some other checkable stuff - the population of Ostenso, the price of a pair of shoes, the number of ninth-circle wizards in the world..."

"Part of me now wonders if we're all just inside a bigger and more elaborate version of the illusion we're constructing for Keltham, and there's some poor god out there who has to frantically make all that stuff up as fast as we request it."

".....that's a really specific thing to wonder."

"And then that god is just inside another Conspiracy too.  Though, at that level, you'd have to be pretty silly not to suspect there was something outside you, after watching us down here building our own hastily constructed universe to contain Keltham, and knowing you were making a universe containing us."

"....I'm going to spend this evening trying to figure out if you can use the statistics from the distribution of traits like height or intelligence to characterize the spread of student guesses of the answers to true questions and come up with a process that generates alter Cheliax answers from that. You can help, if you'd like. I'll leave the worrying about bigger gods until I am a bigger god."

"Typical mortal attitude, leaving everything to the gods.  Keltham's probably never giving a thought to how much work he's making for us..."

"Well, except actually Keltham is thinking about us.  And whenever he does, he deliberately tries to make our lives as difficult as possible.  And Keltham knows more math than we do."

"I guess that's why I didn't get a comforting feeling that someone out there understood everything I was going through, which, you know, seems like it would have gone along with the rest.  Because I've legitimately got it worse."

"And sure, I'll come along and help."

PL-timestamp:  Day 10 (8) / Morning

Keltham arises.  It's another beautiful day in Cheliax... actually a cloudy and slightly rainy day, apparently, but, same essential principle!  Who says that slight rain can't be beautiful?  Keltham was probably not going to get to go outside much anyways!

He prays for spells, particularly those potentially apt for a date with Yaisa.

He meets everyone for breakfast.

Keltham proposes at breakfast that a very few people should be trying anything Keeperlike.  Like Pilar and Asmodia, say.  Keltham would honestly prefer not Carissa, if she's okay with waiting to see what happens to the other two first, but he's not making that an order because of the 'faith' thing and because there's just a whole lot of stuff here he doesn't understand.  He would rather not have to face Cheliax and explain why everybody in his first class of students is now catatonic, if it turns out that suddenly going into a coma is just a thing that happens if people try to undergo Keeper training without any actual Keeper supervision.

(Subirachs now routinely runs Spell Gauge on Keltham every morning after he prays for spells.  She is able to read up to his third-circle spells but not his fourth-circle ones; so Sevar gets notified about Detect Desires and Detect Anxieties, but not about Glimpse of Truth.)

"I'm fine with not being in the first batch of people who finds out what happens if you try to be a Keeper without any of the societal guardrails dath ilan has. If you all become Keepers and it's great and Keltham still doesn't want me to I am going to expect some serious compensation but I don't expect I'll decide to do it, in the next couple years at least."

"If there are only two Keeper spots open, I shall gracefully step aside to make room for another; I find myself feeling a little ambiguous about this and I believe that a certain someone else here does not."

" - I want to be a Keeper," says Meritxell immediately. 

"...All right then."

"Asmodia, you're up first today, you'll give the unfiltered version of the talk I interrupted yesterday to Pilar and Meritxell."

"After that, I want to see how you do at giving a non-Keeper version to everyone else."

Asmodia would be hesitant about giving this talk when the actual insights happened 3 days ago instead of 1 day ago, except that she has wisely foreseen this coming and refreshed the thoughts in her mind already.

Asmodia speaks then, to Pilar and Meritxell with Keltham observing, upon Keltham's seven problems; the remaining five, since she already spoke of #1 and #2.

#3, no empirical theory can prove itself except by risking its disproof.  The surface mathematical truth of this is that to shift probabilities from theory1 to theory2 you must encounter evidence with P(evidence ◁ theory2) > P(evidence ◁ theory1); but then if the evidence is not seen, one necessarily has P(~evidence ◁ theory2) < P(~evidence ◁ theory1); and the test by which theory2 hoped to advance itself at the expense of theory1, if it's right, instead becomes its downfall at theory1's hands, if it's wrong.

And the deeper meaning of this is how human minds are constantly constantly trying to pretend at imbalanced games, where they can win too much with too little risk.  Perhaps P(evidence ◁ theory1) is higher than theory2's advocates would like to think.  Keltham exhibited to them, certainly deliberately, some of those possible fallacies, when he claimed that only the Conspiracy could possibly predict that Ione and Carissa and Pilar would all go off together; there was an Ordinary explanation as well, and if anything a stronger one, because there was an Ordinary fact about those three having been absent from the general group (along with Asmodia, who was however known to have a reason to be busy), whereas explanations based in Conspiracy don't single out those three to quite the same degree - though it is of course true that in some Conspiracy worlds, those three also need to go off and copy Invisibility, so maybe you can't really say the Conspiracy assigns much less probability - though to Asmodia it does seem like copying spells is more of an ordinary thing and in the Conspiracy world everybody already has all the spells they need assigned to them?  Unless the Conspiracy is faking that.  You could always have the Conspiracy trying to do on purpose what they think the Ordinary world would do -

(Keltham interrupts to say that you can go down that thing-a-conversation-goes-down forever, and Asmodia should return to topic, exactly as realAsmodia predicted he would do after alterAsmodia started saying all that.  She keeps her smile strictly inside.)

Or more simply, people can be broken in the way where they try to just update off the positive evidence that would prove theory2, if it appears, and mysteriously forget to check their mental books, if instead the negated ~evidence is seen or unseen.  If those three had failed to disappear at lunch, which Keltham had at one point claimed the Conspiracy assigned 100% probability to expecting, would a non-dath-ilani remember to update against the Conspiracy?

Or people just make up the probabilities afterwards, or in hindsight - not so much to have both evidence and ~evidence prove theory2, as to have evidence prove theory2 more than it should, and ~evidence disprove theory2 less.

And if you don't make up any numbers at all, if you don't even know the Law of it, then how would you ever notice or realize you were doing anything wrong?

Such is all Golarion, seen with the eyes of a dath ilani.  They are not only insane, but cheating.  But in this they can at best deceive themselves, and others, if none are dath ilani; for if you put numbers on it all, it would be plain as day to the Probability-Sight -

"Not actually true, or a lot of this would be a lot simpler; there's versions of the mistake that look coherent.  When I 'trolled' you yesterday, I made up probabilities such that, if you predicted my trolling, which I mostly expected, that would appear to provide a big update in favor of you being a time-traveler, and then if you didn't predict my prediction, which I slightly expected you not to do, that would appear to provide a big update in favor of Conspiracy.  Those numbers weren't honest but they were coherent, and you couldn't spot the error just from looking at the numbers themselves."

"It's also possible to overemphasize the degree to which all of this is, like, regulations that people make up to prevent each other from cheating.  Math is simpler than people.  This math is not about people.  Sometimes, people are about this math.  Sometimes, people try to cheat in a way that violates this math.  But this math is not about preventing cheating.  People who never felt any impulse to cheat would use the same math."

"I also notice that people are starting to use 'dath ilani' to mean 'person using Law' or 'person using Law correctly', which is probably not a good loanword to add to Taldane?  The term actually just means the people from the particular planet of dath ilan, while the whole point of the Law is that it's much more universal than that?  Not to mention that a lot of us, and I don't just mean those of us who are five years old either, have been known to wield the Law incorrectly.  Keepers aren't perfect at it either.  We say 'ideal-agent' - maybe a Taldane translation would be perfect-simplified-person? - when we want to talk about a hypothetical mind that is stipulated to be using Law correctly.  Kids in Civilization don't grow up hearing that dath ilani do this, dath ilani do that; they're told what ideal-agents do, or how well Nemamel did, or how high you've got to score to be in the upper nineteen-twentieths of adults."

"I'd like to have a word that means 'person who knows the Law at all and tries to practice it the way dath ilani do'.  Maybe you don't need that word in dath ilan, just like, in a world where everyone was a Keeper, you wouldn't need a word that meant 'Keeper', just the name for people in that world.  Here we need a word for a person who can do what a dath ilani does."

"There's definitely words for people who are old enough to pass competence tests, but I don't think you want to import that into Taldane as something you'd use to contrast Project Lawful candidates to the general population, it has Questionable Implications..."

"Yeah, we have words for being good at Law and words for being bad at Law, words for being a Keeper and words for hypothetical perfect entities, but nothing's really coming to mind as a word that means 'as good as a dath ilani adult rather than a Golarion adult at Law'.  I'll consider it and see if there's an obvious cognate for you to import."

"How about just ilani?  And the dath ilani are the kind of ilani from dath ilan."  Pilar remembers the Queen using that word that way, which is reason enough to favor it as a suggestion.

"Doesn't actually make any sense in terms of the underlying Baseline, that's pretty close to if you ended up in another world and the people there started saying they wanted to be Larions, but I can't really stop anyone if they want to use the word that way.  I suppose I could consider myself challenged to say what's better."

"Just keep in mind, nobody from dath ilan ever gets told that they ought to be an ilani.  If you want to be an ilani, go try to be the things that dath ilani try to be, instead of trying to become an ilani.  Imagine you got to another world where they were just finding out about magic, and everybody was like, instead of, I want to get better at wizardry, I want to be as good as Whatshername with INT 26, they were all like, 'I will study hard and someday know as much about magic as the average Golarion person who didn't specialize in that!'  If you see what I'm gesturing at here."

"But, back to topic.  Asmodia?"

She carries on through #4 and #5.

And then sets forth the Law in #6, that it is impossible to coherently expect to convince yourself of anything:

P(h1 ◁ e) * P(e) + P(h1 ◁ ~e) * P(~e) = P(h1 & e) + P(h1 & ~e) = P(h1).

For every expectation of evidence, there is an equal and opposite expectation of counterevidence.  This is the more precise principle above the injunction of #3, against cheating.  It tells you a very exact balance that must hold within yourself, and if it is not there, you are cheating.  You cannot expect to be persuaded, on net, in a direction.

If you suspect that in the Conspiracy world Pilar didn't really copy Invisibility off Sevar... not a great example, the Conspiracy probably thought of that?  But you could check her spellbook and think, if there's no Invisibility, that's a huge update towards Conspiracy.  But then, if there is an Invisibility spell, that must be a huge update towards Ordinary.  Or alternatively, if you try to say that it's only a small update towards Ordinary, you must think there's only a small chance of seeing no Invisibility and making the large update, to counterbalance the large chance of seeing Invisibility and making the small update.

Any time you go eagerly looking for something you can observe, expecting it to convince you of something, you must necessarily be doing something incoherent and wrong.  Which, of course, people from Golarion have been running around expecting all the time.  Asmodia's pretty sure she's supposed to leave this part out of the non-Keeper lecture -