"Sounds good to me. I'm excited to work with these people, they look really smart. And a noble! We move in such esteemed company these days!"

"Yeah, somebody's going to have to explain what a 'noble' is at some point, or why that would be a good thing when the Taldane word sure doesn't sound like it, but not right now.  If you don't think it's a red flag, my going back to Maillol with our answer doesn't have to wait on it."

"I don't think it's a red flag. Go take Maillol his list."

Maillol wishes he could tell Keltham that they'll get a crop of better candidates once the Project produces results, but Maillol is not sure this is true.  He will not be incredibly happy if they suddenly have to hire 12 people, especially if they're all tier-1s, at current salaries, but sees the perspective from which this would also be unexpectedly good news.  Assuming they work out, anyways.

Everything becomes easier in terms of funding calls, when and if the Project is earning enough revenue to pay its own costs, including the fortress and not just the researcher salaries.  Maillol can't unfortunately promise that hiring becomes easier; that's probably more a matter of the Security situation surrounding the project, and also trying to have the candidates be so young and yet already outperforming.

Yeah, that's all about what Keltham expected.

PL-timestamp:  Day 10 (8) / Late Afternoon

Keltham takes the time to hang Silent Image, to let his brain decompress from project-managing.  He's actually managed not to think about Yaisa for an hour!  Well, now he's sure thinking about it, but distractions from hanging Silent Image seem far less dangerous.

After that, he's got the time for another hour of Law before dinner, and after a Lesser Restoration the energy too, so next up is Utility.

As a starting koan, would anybody care to offer him an example of set of preferences that seems clearly unLawful?  How could you want things in a way that was bad math?

Meritxell proposes that you could want something and also want not-that. 

...that does sound pretty unLawful but what behavior would that look like, externally?

That's a little harder. "...when you don't have a horse, you will pay for a horse; when you do have a horse, you will pay to stop having a horse."

And then you'd pay for another horse.  Hmmm, yes, that doesn't sound good.

Suppose that your preferences don't change over time.  You prefer things to other things in a way that doesn't change based on whether you have them or not.  Can your preferences still be unLawful?

"You could prefer to stop having your preferences?"

...and what outward behavior would that look like?

"....going around trying to provoke powerful unscrupulous wizards into using the incredibly illegal mind control you hope they have, so that they'll make you want something different?"

Sounds to Keltham like there's sort of two different slices through you, there, a slice that wants to... let's say, spend all your money on nice things today, which is unfortunately able to gain control of your body and send it shopping and spend money... and then a different slice through you is later able to gain control of your mouth and ask powerful wizards if they've got mind control for not doing that.  Keltham doesn't know why the 'unscrupulous' modifier is being applied here, it might be illegal and even for good reasons but if that technology was available in Civilization everyone would be using it.  Under Keeper supervision, obviously, but still.

That's a fair example, but also kind of complicated!  How about if they keep things much simpler and more concrete, like...

(Keltham casts Prestidigitation three times to create three fragile temporary objects, a red sphere, a blue cube, a green tetrahedron.)

Can anyone say what it would be like to have unLawful preferences about these three specific and concrete objects right here, assuming your preferences don't change over time or based on what you're holding, and assuming that the same slice through yourself was in control of your actions and your mouth?  Reminder, tier-2s speak first.

"Prediction -"

Yes yes, Keltham knew that was coming, but anyone else.

"Are you counting, I like the red one more than the blue one and the blue one more than the red one? Or is that just the same as the wanting to have and not have a horse?" says Tonia.

"We're counting that like wanting and not wanting a horse.  What we're calling a preference is shown by the act of trading one of these things for the other.  So if you trade it one way and then trade it back the other way, we'll say your preference reversed over time."

"What about, I like the red one more than the blue one and the blue one more than the green one and the green one more than the red one, is that just the same with more steps?"

"That's the example I was looking for!  That's an example of circular preference.  If I'd pay a copper to trade red for blue, every time, and not pay to trade it back, and not say with my mouth that I wanted anything different, that's a locally coherent preference and we can't say there's anything strange about it by itself.  But if I'd likewise pay a copper to trade blue for green, and to trade green for red, you could just stand around trading me the same objects and extracting all my money from me.  Or even if I wasn't willing to pay a whole copper, you could stand around trading me the same objects and burning up all my time, which is as much a resource to me as money.  No one of my preferences is probably-contradicting-a-Law-we'll-find-later by itself, it's only when brought together that they can't all stand simultaneously."

Tonia immediately looks back down at her notes, but she's smiling. 

"So we've got the first suggestion of a Law-fragment, which says that we shouldn't have any circular preferences."

"I claim that, equivalently, to this condition, it must be possible to put everything we want into a global ordering, say by tagging them with numbers -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, and so on, and then to determine which things we want more than one another, we just compare their numbers in the ordering, and we want more whichever has the higher number.  If you have wants inconsistent with being able to do that, I can take all your money from you, or at least all your time."

"Do you buy that?  If you don't buy it I would, of course, like to know why you're refusing the sale."

The students glare suspiciously at him. It sounds like an Obvious Trap. 

That doesn't mean they can think what the trap is, though.