"A - difference I've noticed, between dath ilan and Cheliax, is that in Cheliax if someone offers what sounds like a good deal, you - take it. Maybe tell them later they should drive a harder bargain next time. And you could think that's because we're - not as Good - and that might be a bit of it - but - we're more different from one another, we've got more kinds of people, it's easier to be wrong, when you think you know better than someone else what's good for them.

Anyway." She hands him the five silver. 

"Pleasure doing business with you."  He accepts the money.

...and then of course immediately thinks -

"Try to answer this one quickly, though, just let the Division of Gains spell do the work for you, if it can.  What would've been a fair price for the service you originally thought you were purchasing, that was just about me using my own focus to figure out how much pain was arousing you instead of making you describe it, not taking into account the thing I did after that?"

" - I mean I thought you might do something like that? Like - the point of it being your job while I don't have to do any work is that things like that will get to happen? I'm still not good at this prices thing but - I was sort of paying to find out whether something really great like that would happen, because it'd be worth passing up 10 gold for the one off and a gold each time if it did?"

"You are right and I was wrong, I wasn't thinking about the value-of-information there from your perspective."

"I still want to know, because I am curious and my mind will continue nagging me about it forever otherwise, what would've been the value of just that one service - the one I foolishly thought you were asking for in isolation."

"I'll pay you a silver for the answer."

"Probably it'd change how much I wanted to charge you by a couple silver, if it was just that."

"You're not getting any money back, because you're the one who priced the service and you knew what you were buying better than I did."

He hands her a silver.

"Are you okay with - occasional truthspells only about whether you really liked something and whether you're really doing okay, not so much because I don't trust you, as because part of my brain is living in terror of what might be true and I am trying to be gentle with that part of me?"  This, too, should be asked while the Fairness is still up.

"I'm fine with that. If they get too often or if you can't resist asking weird tricky questions then I might eventually charge you extra."

Keltham escorts Yaisa then to his bedroom, to get 25 gold if she's still amenable to that arrangement after Fairness wears off.

And to the cuddleroom shortly afterwards.

He is, in fact, feeling pretty darned happy about several things right now.  Being able to hire a full-time sex worker with 1/20 of his nonvolatile income is the least of it.

Part of himself objects that this is too Evil.  The rest of Keltham is feeling pretty unified about ignoring this voice and proceeding anyways.  'Be capable of ever listening to what people claim is okay' is something he's been telling himself a lot lately.

PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Late Morning

In his morning lecture, Keltham makes a further run at Utility, called also Probable Utility or Expected Utility because the notion of a quantitative utility is meaningless without probabilities to multiply those utilities by.  If you were working only with certainties, the ordering on your preferences would be all that existed; the notion of comparable intervals of wantingness is only useful when you can take fractions of outcomes and want about those.

Value-of-information is an example of one concept that exists under Probable Utility, hopefully simple in an intuitive sense, but pretty important in practice.  Keltham ran into that not long ago when a slightly more Civilized person of Cheliax offered to pay him to do something, Keltham thought that price sounded much too high and didn't have any Fair Pricing spells left and wrongly questioned her choice, and Keltham had forgotten to take into account that what he was trying would be a new experiment whose outcome would give her information relevant to her future choices, and let her make those choices better.

Value-of-information isn't quite as trivial as it might sound, as a matter of Law, because what you're actually doing is calculating the effect of this decision on your own future decisions, not because it modifies what you want or forces your future self to make a particular decision, but because your future self will then have more information and that is something your present self knows.  It is a kind of extrinsic curiosity, you might call it, that would appear in the calculations of ideal-agents who never felt curious about anything.

Also in that interaction, Keltham asked her the next morning under Fairness what would have been the fair price for the service Keltham thought she was trying to buy, if it had existed in isolation and not been informative, because he wanted to know if he'd also been wrong to question even the price he'd thought she was offering.  Keltham paid her a silver for that information, not because he desperately needed that information or expected to make at least one silver from using it in the future, but just because his brain would've kept bugging him about it otherwise.

In reasoning like that, in feeling curious, in putting a value on information that you might not even vaguely expect to need as much as you offered to pay, in buying information where you predictably won't make a profit, is a person being unLawful?  Had Keltham aspired to be improving his coherence and Lawfulness, on this occasion, should he have tried to calculate the real-life importance of knowing this information?  Including, maybe, its value for Keltham calibrating his judgment of similar prices in Cheliax, or the prospect that some use for the info would come up that Keltham just hadn't foreseen - it doesn't have to be a shortsighted or blind calculation, when you ask about the value of learning.  But if that calculation would have shown the information's expected future profit at less than a silver, was Keltham acting unLawfully in buying it for a silver?

It won't be a terrible judgment on him, if they say yes.  Keltham knows he's not a Keeper.  The question he's posing is whether they think this is something a Keeper would ever do.  Close your eyes, come to a judgment about that, raise your hand to a corresponding height; then open your eyes, and argue.  Tier-2s speak first if more than one person wants to speak at a time.

"I think the gods don't do it," Gregoria says. "Don't seek out information that they are committed to not acting on in any way, that is. Because you're expending resources to get something that can't bring about any of your goals. But if you just valued knowing things for its own sake - like Zon-Kuthon, but for knowledge not torture - then you're not wrong, like we talked about yesterday."

"I guess that answer wasn't as much of a puzzle as I thought it would be, not that there's anything wrong about that.  Yep, I have both extrinsic curiosity from thinking about what I can do with information to achieve my other values, and also intrinsic curiosity from being human."

"There's no god of curiosity, or whose list of things includes curiosity?  Nethys - I guess could already have found out everything he's curious about that he can reasonably find out ever or by expending any further effort in the short term.  I would expect the ex-human gods to have retained their curiosity from having started out human, though?  Cayden Cailean, Nethys, Norgorber, Iomedae... I'm not recalling the full list but it had more."

"They might but they haven't specifically told anyone so, I don't think?" says Gregoria. 

"I suspect Iomedae hasn't, She went really hard on - becoming just Lawful Good without any distracting not-Lawful-Good things about Her. I would predict Norgorber is curious about things but I don't know how anyone would know."

Does anyone want to stop Ione from voicing her guess about Nethys having curiosity and clericing curious people, pretending to speak out of the conventional Nethys theology that alterIone would obviously be thoroughly familiar with since those books wouldn't be banned in alterCheliax?

Before Keltham, like, asks her.

Go ahead.

"Nethys clerics curious people, and while He can't talk to us directly at all, it's conventional Nethysian theology that He possesses curiosity as an individual goal for himself and not just as a divine concern.  I'd be shocked if He wasn't curious about events here in particular takaral.  Just because He's seen everything that's already happened doesn't mean He can predict exactly how it will play out, and there are strange factors that hover at the edge even of His perception, far beyond what other gods have ever begun to ravel."

Is anybody else going to ask Ione how she knows that last part, if Nethys has zero comms capacity?  No?  Keltham won't ask either, then.

...Keltham continues to try various angles on Probable Utility.

Suppose there's a switch which controls whether you get a cherry (for certain), or a banana with 10% probability.  Let's say the switch starts out set to Banana, and somebody says, "Well, I'd probably like a banana more than ten times as much as I like a single cherry, but also I really don't like uncertainty and would rather know for sure I get the cherry."  So they pay a hundredth of a copper to flip the switch from Banana to Cherry.

Now let's say that we first flip a coin, and if it comes up Queen, you get nothing no matter what the switch says.  Imagine that same person seeing a switch set to Cherry, who says, "Well, I'd probably like a banana more than ten times as much as I like a single cherry, and both outcomes are uncertain, so I'd rather have 5% probability of a banana than 50% probability of a cherry."  They pay a hundredth of a copper to flip from Cherry to Banana.  Then the coin is actually spun, and comes up Text.  Suddenly the person says, "Oh, wait, now I've changed my mind, I'd rather have 100% one cherry than 10% one banana," and they pay you another hundredth of a copper to flip the switch back.

Conversely, if the coin comes up Queen, so you get nothing either way, you don't particularly benefit from the switch being set to Banana.  So the person who pays to switch from Cherry to Banana is just making a pure mistake; either they won't care how the switch is set, later, or they'll predictably pay to switch it back.

You can even imagine - if you want to be a troll about it - offering an agent like that the ability to force and constrain their future self's decision.  When they first see the switch on Cherry, they pay a hundredth copper to send it from 50% of a cherry to 5% of a banana.  Then you point out that their future self will just throw it back, if the coin comes up Text, so you charge them another hundredth copper to weld the switch in place.  Then you spin the coin and it comes up Text, and the agent is all like 'Curse my past self for constraining me so!'

This, needless to say, is not Lawful, not a thing that is supposed to happen to ideal agents, or Keepers.  It is a fragment of Law indeed that an agent should never pay a thousandth of a copper to constrain the choices of its future self, or rather, the Law is derived in part from asking how agents could conduct themselves so that this never happened to them.

Now ordinary human beings even of Civilization do not come close to this kind of constancy over time.  But even regular dath ilani would be alarmed if you showed they were expending resources fighting their own future selves about anything large or important.  Such would be a good time to ask one of the most fundamental questions according to that proverb out of dath ilan:  "How about if I did Something-Else-Which-Was-Not-That?"

"Does that count, like, 'for some reason I have to talk to the person with Splendour 40, I'm going to make sure that afterwards I am dragged over to a devil who can talk me out of anything bad they did to my head'?"

"Our adversaries have Splendour 40 now.  Lovely."

"I'd say that doesn't reveal a defect of your present Lawfulness, it reflects - something that might forcibly mind-control you away from whatever coherence you currently have between past and future selves?  It's not something you can fix by an act of will, maybe there's something you could do if you're already a sixth-rank Keeper but you're not.  So the thing you do which is Not That is in fact to make sure you get involuntarily dragged over to the devil afterwards."

"Though there'd be ethical questions there, about whether the new person who's created as a result of talking to the 40-Splendour Brainwasher has their own right to live the way they now desire, that is violated if a devil brainwashes you back into existence again.  Some out of dath ilan would say that person is being wronged by you, because you set things up for them to be made so, and then unmade.  Yet many even of those would also say, well, if you gotta do it at all, that's still the way to do it, sorry."

Carissa doesn't know what Keltham means when he starts going on about rights and stuff but she isn't sure alter Carissa would be similarly uncertain. She nods.

Suppose you have to choose between, on the one hand, a P1 probability of C happening vs. a (1 - P1) probability of some baseline B happening, like a 90% probability of getting a Cherry, say; or on the other hand, a P2 probability of D happening vs. (1 - P2) of B, like a 80% probability of getting a Date.  We could say that Preference(0.9, Cherry, Baseline) is how much you desire that gamble over those two outcomes; and Preference(0.8, Date, Baseline) is how much you want the other.  If a switch controls which of those two you get, then the gamble to which you attach the higher Preference is the one you'll want the switch to be thrown for.

Now suppose that, in the composition of Events as pathways through Time, there is interposed some new event with probability P3 that determines whether the switch is run at all; if not, the outcome is Baseline.

The condition for not throwing the switch and then throwing it back, is that if Preference(0.9, Cherry, Baseline) > Preference(0.8, Date, Baseline), then Preference(0.9*P3, Cherry, Baseline) > Preference(0.8*P3, Date, Baseline), likewise if the value is equal, or lesser.  Combine this with simpler ideas like "If you prefer 100% of one thing to 100% of another, you should prefer higher probabilities of getting that thing rather than the other, in gambles between them" and you can pretty thoroughly spotlight the Law of Probable Utility showing that Preference() must compound probabilities with utilities the same way that probabilities compound with each other.  So, yes, multiplication.

All this of Probable Utility or Expected Utility, is the Law of navigating paths through time, events, and probability, to the destinations of desire.  It combines with, and in a sense subsumes, the Law of Probability, which is the Law of learning of observation, of guessing and refining your guesses, of knowing the world around you at all, of predicting the future and making better predictions next time, of knowing how confident to be and what you don't know.

The Law of Probability, seen from one perspective, subsumes all of Validity as the small special case where probabilities are 0 or 1, and things are known with certainty.

From another perspective, of course, Validity subsumes Mathematics, and Mathematics is the thing that all the other Laws including Probable Utility are made of.

And on that note, lunchtime!

PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Afternoon