Hell is truth seen too late.
- Thomas Hobbes
Do they perchance have any known mathematics of probability which involves... more than one probability at a time, or two probabilities that relate to one another in some way?
Keltham is fairly sure he saw this class - admittedly, this was a while ago - being able to solve problems like 'If you randomly arrange four girls including me, what are the chances I'm second in line'. He was not especially expecting them to be balked by 'If you randomly arrange us two times, what's the chance I'm first in line both times?'
Well, says Meritxell, the chance it's the same girl first in line both times is one in four, and that splits out into me-both-times Ione-both-times Pela-both-times Jacme-both times, each of those taking a sliver of the same size, so it's one in sixteen. ....but that's not applying a known Rule of Probability taught in school, it's just kind of obvious.
Suppose that instead Keltham asks how often they are ever uncertain of anything, in the course of their daily lives. Not in a mathy way, just unsure about something.
"Well, for purposes of concrete examples, is there something anyone can name that they're unsure about right now, or that you were recently unsure about today?"
She's definitely very uncertain about THAT but THAT is SECRET so she can't talk about THAT...
Jacme is not sure if Pilar really went to Elysium. Can't say that.
Meritxell is not sure if Keltham's going to ask her out. Can't say that.
Yaisa heard that the reason they had the Grand High Priestess on site was that by policy either she or Carissa must be in the room with Keltham at all times, and she's not sure if it's true, but she definitely cannot say that.
Gregoria heard that some of the other girls had to train their impersonators this morning. Can't say that.
"I'm not sure whether Asmodeus anticipated Zon-Kuthon trying to kill you and whether He let it happen in order to have all the gods in consensus around sealing Zon-Kuthon."
"Actually, now that you point it out, we already think that the gods on our team saw a dominant probability of that happening. Which demands the question of why, if it was already that predictable, all the other gods couldn't predict it too and first-strike Zon-Kuthon instead of waiting for him to attack."
"But that example seems vastly overcomplicated? Literally the next thing I'd have to talk about, to walk through my reasoning about that question, is Law of Probability that a dath ilani kid wouldn't get until three years after today's layer, about whether or not gods should ever disagree about predictions like that."
"Can you think of an example much more mundane? Like, not so much gods as... scrambled eggs."
"Okay, now everybody think of, but don't say, a number to represent the chance there's duck at lunch. And nobody's allowed to go to the kitchen and tell them to do that or not do it, I hereby declare that the bad kind of cheating."
"Raise your hand when you've got your number, and once everybody has raised their hand, we'll go around saying the numbers." Keltham raises his hand immediately; there's been duck at 2 of the previous meals he's had, of which he thinks there were around 12 but he's not going to count, and he is so ignorant of Golarion that nothing else could possibly figure into his calculations.
"So my number was going to be 1/6, but I'm guessing that in your terms that number should've been 6, because the number you gave means, like, 1 out of how many chances? Am I interpreting it right? So a number of 12 is half as likely as a number of 6?"
Sure, he can work with that. If anything, it might be more useful as a gentle introduction than if they'd invented the same system that dath ilani kids never invent because they just grow up with it; a 1-12 scale has some properties but not others.
"Should've seen this part coming and asked earlier, but, anyone got a simple public randomness source, like for generating a 0 or a 1 both with equal probability? Could literally just be some physically symmetrical object that you can spin and have it fall on one side."
"I have coins. I don't know if they land on both sides with equal odds but it's probably pretty close."
"Can I borrow one for the lecture, and is it okay if we call the borrowing term short enough that it rounds to 0% interest?"
(It briefly occurs to him to wonder if owning Carissa would mean he transitively owns her stuff, but he quickly dismisses this thought as obviously insane; if you had that kind of relationship, it would be one where she broke oaths and went to Abaddon on request.)