"Are you forbidding any two wants to have the same position in the ordering?"

"Mmm... no.  We will say it is possible to be indifferent between two things you want.  I could want a cube and a sphere equally, both labeled 3, and decline to spend my time to trade either one for the other; and then also prefer a triangular pyramid to both, labeling it 4."  What kind of language lacks a word for the regular-tetrahedron... well, okay, to be fair Keltham can see how that would fail to come up a lot in everyday life.

"...I'm still relatively sure this is a trap, but can't actually see where the trap is.  Your next move is to say that you have to sometimes say 'I claim' in a case that's totally true, or we'll just catch on to you.  Even after you've said this, however, I'll still consider it a trap with 90% probability."

Asmodia has an overconfidence problem, but Keltham will again wait until she's actually wrong to make that point.

"We're either going to need to add some shorter words to this language or start speaking Baseline, if you're going to go around saying sentences like that."

"It was relatively subtle, in this case, and did depend on my exact wording.  Suppose that I say I'm indifferent between red and blue, and indifferent between blue and green, but I prefer green to red.  That can't be done with numbers, but you can't extract all my money out of me either."

"What you can do is offer to trade me red to blue for free, after having previously made me a standing offer to trade blue to green for free, and I'll turn you down because I'm indifferent about both of those trades.  Then you offer to trade me red to green for a copper, and I accept.  I didn't pay out all my money by a repeatable path, but I paid more than I needed to."

"You could also imagine that this reflects a situation where I like blue a bit more than red, but not enough to pay the time-energy-attention cost of taking your offer to trade the two for free, and I like green a bit more than blue, but the total gap from red to green isn't enough to pay time costs on two swaps, only time cost on one swap."

"If we say that when I'm indifferent I'll always let you walk over and switch the two items without my bothering about it, then the claim becomes fully true and you can pump infinite money or time out of me if my preferences don't form a - can't be ordered the way I talked about."

"Is this one of those things mortals mostly do right but unconsciously," Gregoria says, "or do mortals mostly do it wrong."

"Yes."

"It's complicated.  You're unlikely to screw up whether you'd prefer eating an apple to being stabbed with a knife -"

"Er, bad example.  Good example in dath ilan, sadly enough.  Bad example here, happy happy joy joy.  I guess the classic 'cake or death' example in decision theory is also less clear, what with the local afterlives."

"We can, however, at least say that Meritxell is unlikely to get confused about whether she prefers eating an apple, or being stabbed."

"As soon as things get complicated, obscured, hidden behind layers of abstraction, presented in different ways at different times, mortals start doing less well than that.  And if - people who run experiments on people to find out how they work - start trying to configure things in ways that will trip you up, it doesn't take much effort."

"I'm not sure even a Keeper could argue anyone into preferring infinite torture over eternal happiness, but I'm not actually sure they can't, either."

There's silence for longer than Carissa thinks there would be in alter Cheliax. 

"I mean, depends who they're trying to talk into it, probably. And whether it's the fun kind of torture."

"Zon-Kuthon's followers don't give that reason for being Kuthites, do they?" says Gregoria only a beat after that, very calmly. "Like, they don't say, 'oh no Zon-Kuthon had a legitimately convincing argument' -"

"I've never met a Kuthite but if He had arguments at all that'd make Him the most powerful god, wouldn't it, since the rest of them mostly can't talk to us directly."

"It's hard, in Golarion, to make certain points, when you're an alien.  I mean I'm sure there'd be equally straightforward points I could make locally, I just don't know what they are."

"What I ought to do, at this point, is demonstrate to you one of the standard ways to confuse an unprepared subject.  But it would take a very reliable example, with only 8 subjects now to test it on, which I'd have to divide into three groups.  And more importantly, I don't know the things about Golarion I'd need to know, to construct that example... maybe Carissa can tell me how to construct it, actually?  Though it'd invalidate the demonstration for her.  Hold on."

Message to Carissa:  I'm looking for something that has both a quantity and a quality.  And then something else which just has a comparable quality, but no comparable quantity, and is otherwise as similar as possible.  It's got to be something which, apart from quality considerations, would reliably make somebody think that it was eh probably about equal value.  What I'm going to do is offer three different groups choices between pairs of the low-quality high-quantity item, the medium-quality nonquantitative item, and the high-quality low-quantity item, and people tend to think that quantity matters more than quality but only when they can compare quantities directly, and otherwise the quality becomes salient, so the three groups' preferences will go in a circle.

- she needs considerably more detail than that to come up with a suggestion but with some back and forth they can probably work one out?

Keltham divides the remaining 7 students into groups of 3, 3, and 1, and then hands out three slips of paper containing pairwise comparisons to these three groups respectively:

1.  Would you rather have an Osirian book describing 30 rare magic items, or an Absalom book on principles of spell design?
2.  Would you rather have a Nexian book describing 10 rare magic items, or an Absalom book on principles of spell design?
3.  Would you rather have a Nexian book describing 10 rare magic items, or an Osirian book describing 30 rare magic items?

Oh, and considering you got more warning than usual, this time, please just put down the actual preference that comes to you, and don't overthink it?  Sure, you might be able to evade the trap if you thought hard and maybe didn't put down what you would've naturally wanted if you weren't trying to evade some unknown trap, but the point in this case is just to show the basic phenomenon.  Maybe.  When Civilization does this they've usually tried out a dozen variants first to find one that works.

Anyways, go try it!

This sort of thing is stressful because it might be different in alter Cheliax, where books are probably not mostly illegal.

...possibly not, though? Magic books would be rare anyway, and none of those countries have had their backstories changed much.

(Security should not help the girls cheat.)

Results:

Group 1:  2 of 3 prefer the Osirian book of 30 items over the Absalom spell design book.
Group 2:  3 of 3 prefer the Nexian book of 10 items over the Absalom spell design book.
Group 3:  1 of 1 preferred the Osirian book of 30 items over the Nexian book of 10 items.

Now is that an update for or against Conspiracy. She thinks...against, weakly, because Conspiracy might've engineered the right outcome. Since she was tempted to do that.

It has not even slightly occurred to Keltham to try to update off this, because why.  Why would anyone do that.  Why would even the Conspiracy mess with his experimental results here?  It's not that he's explicitly reasoning that way; the thought just hasn't occurred to him.

"Not quite the illustrative results I was hoping for, but that's what happens when you run really tiny experimental groups, and don't do any pilot samples to pretest your theories about how people will actually react."

"The underlying theory, how it was supposed to work here, is that if you see the Osirian book of 30 items side-by-side with the Nexian book of 10 items, that makes the quantity of items salient, it makes the quantity mean something.  If you don't pick a very large quality difference, in a case like that, people usually go for the higher quantity."

"If on the other hand, I compare a Nexian book about 10 magic items, to an Absalom book of spell design, what does the number 10 really mean there?  It's not more or less than any obvious numbers about the spell design book.  So what you see instead is Nexian and Absalom, where Nex has a better magical reputation than Absalom, apparently, obviously I'm just going off Carissa here."

"Similarly if I compare the Osirian book of 30 items to the Absalom spell design book, the number 30 doesn't have some other number to compare to, so everybody goes for Absalom because they have a better magical reputation than Osirion... was what was supposed to happen, but didn't, either because we didn't run any pilot studies to see what usually worked on people, or because our groups were so tiny that randomness dominated."

"Buuut you at least got to see that the Osirian book looked a little less attractive, next to the Absalom spell design book, than the Nexian book looked next to the Absalom spell design book, even though if you put the Osirian and Nexian books side-by-side that one subject went for the Osirian one with more items."

"If I could run more probes like this, I could probably find a slightly different version that reliably gave the result I was hoping for if you run it on three groups of 20 students, say, who hadn't been warned of what the test was about."

"And this doesn't work on devils or Keepers?" asks Gregoria.

"This particular form shouldn't work on me, if the decision is important enough to be worth thinking about for more than a few seconds.  Possibly on an old-enough devil it wouldn't work even if the issue was trivial, say, and probably that's true about higher Keepers though I don't know at what rank the immunity would start."

"At higher levels of messing with people like this, there's - well, mostly, the techniques are secret, I expect, but it's known that one of them uses... what would you have here that's an equivalent phenomenon.  You'd have visual afterimages, at least, I expect?  If you look at a bright light, especially if it was dark before then, and then look away, you can see a smear of light where the - nerves that detect light, all fired, and used up some of their energy, and got tired, and now you can see something like darker-glowing spots in your vision where the brightness was."

"So if you're a sufficiently high-ranked Keeper, you know about how to manipulate people's thoughts based on getting them to activate particular brain areas harder or more intensely and then you say something else that routes through the same brain area and it does a weird thing based on some of the nerves being tired, or other nerves around them adjusting to high activity.  We're allowed to know this is the general outline of how the technique can work, because it's incredibly hard to engineer, you can't reinvent it just by knowing how it works and reading non-secret neuroscience."

"There are cautionary videos that everybody in Civilization gets to see wherein a Keeper talks to an unsuspecting subject, you can't hear or see what the Keeper is saying, but you can hear the person they're talking to, and the person they're talking to starts to say occasionally more and more ridiculous things and finally agrees to sell the Keeper all the clothes they're wearing for the equivalent of a copper piece."

"We get to see those videos so that we have some idea of what it would look like if a conspiracy successfully hid itself from Governance while developing advanced talk-control techniques outside of the Keeper system, and then tried to take over the world.  Which, I mean, to be clear, there are presumably other precautions in place to prevent.  But one of those precautions is, like, warning people about what that could look like?  This is a sort of thing we rehearse during the Annual Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival, it's not literally just aliens, the theme varies by the year."

Sounds fake, thinks Gregoria, but doesn't say it. Sounds like they have magic and were keeping it from you, and you still don't see it.

"Annual Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival?" says Meritxell.

"Disaster preparedness holiday."

"In this case, it'd be something like, one in ten thousand people, probably relatively smarter ones than myself, get told that they're part of the evil conspiracy to take over the world.  Where it's realistically improbable that the conspiracy got up to 100,000 people and nobody noticed, but you want to test yourself against problems more difficult than the ones you really expect to face."

"Then those people have mind-control powers, meaning that, if they end up talking to you for five minutes, they get to hand you a card saying you've now been mind-controlled and you should go off and get other people to talk to them, or try to sabotage the company you work for, or cut a communications line, or kill potential leaders for the resistance in their sleep.  And then all the key infrastructure people have to make sure their organization goes on working when a bunch of people have been tagged dead and maybe somebody got turned into a saboteur.  Other people need to check houses for people who got killed and make sure they get into the deep cold, obviously not for real, just rehearsing that.  That sort of thing."

"Civilization doesn't have any serious enemies that we know about.  That doesn't mean Civilization wants to let itself get weak.  If Nidal opens a gate into our dimension and tries to take over the world using Alter Self and Suggestion spells, we've gamed that out in advance."

"....I think Nidal would take over the leadership, not a random one in ten thousand people," says Meritxell.

"And they run drills on that more often than annually, and have more eyes on each other, and probably something like eight thousand different precautions none of which I am allowed to know about."

"Becoming the sort of person who gets to figure out how the leadership gets defended against talk-control conspiracies is one of the classic dream jobs for little kids growing up in dath ilan, it's like going to the Moon colony.  You would get to spend so much time imagining brilliant plots somebody else might try against you, and trying to figure out what simple deep robust methods you could use to prevent that, or, failing that, devastatingly brilliant counter-precautions."

" - that does sound incredibly fun," Meritxell concedes. "I don't know that they'd win against Nidal with their average Intelligence but they would probably beat actual Nidal."

She stops thinking the thought before it can get to "...or actual Cheliax."