"I would," Pilar says.

"Kinky," says Yaisa.

"I mean, presumably you have people do this for outcomes of decisions they're already making, for accountability, not as a game they play for fun."

"Well," Keltham says, speaking less rapidly than usual, because some of his processing just got diverted to a subthread, "we can and do play it for fun, and do that our whole lives, in fact.  It just involves a mindset where - you can try to do as well as possible, each time you confront a prediction challenge, without feeling like you're losing something in virtue of doing less than perfectly."

"The most obvious thing to match yourself against, there, is other people's predictions.  Pilar predicts one number, Yaisa predicts another, we see who did better, just like if they were playing some other competitive game whose in-game rewards sum to zero across all sides, but whose positive extra is the fun people have from playing it, or their pride in showing their skills.  There's a version of that game which dath ilani play, before they're ready to go all the way to prediction markets, where we put up a sheet of paper on the wall - or just use walls and Prestidigitation, I guess - and write down a question, and then people who think the current probability is wrong can write down a different probability underneath and be scored by how much they gained or lost relative to the previous guess."

"I'm not quite sure we're ready yet, but once we are, we'll probably just start doing that over all the place, whenever somebody comes up with an interesting question that will actually settle in a few days."

"But I think the most basic point - lost 2s aren't actually like sending out the merchant ships to the wrong place.  They're a measure of how well you do, and you do better by losing fewer; but the fact that the numbers always look negative don't mean you're doing poorly.  If you're losing few enough 2s, you can send your merchant ships where they need to go, and that's the reward for playing."

The students are nodding. 

This feels like a really big part of Evil dath ilan. Accountability, true and perfect and impartial, handed down from reality itself, impossible to rebel against or lie to; competition for its own sake, to prove oneself worthy of the power to send ships -

- there's something there. Though also some heresies to navigate around.

"The more mature version of this is where people are betting money against each other inside a common market, forming a prediction market, and the places where prices settle then become Civilization's way of knowing what Civilization knows."

"If this project were running inside Civilization, there would already be a prediction market over what its outcomes were, like whether we succeed in our technological revolution, or start another war, and every time something interesting happened, the prices would shift, and that would reflect Civilization knowing more about our project's prospects.  Or, I mean, in this case, it would be a secret government prediction market, but then that's the government's way of knowing secret things.  I wish we had one, actually, I'd have loved to see what happened to the prices when Pilar started handing out Cayden Cailean candy."

"People who make massive amounts of money on prediction markets by being righter than everyone are incredibly rare in Civilization, and they're respected about as much any other kind of person who exists.  A Legislator is significantly less respectable than Nemamel, who beat the prediction markets her whole life to the point where she could only trade anonymously because nobody would knowingly bet against her.  Nobody takes that name any more, she owns it now, it's hers forever.  There's nine Legislators at any given time, and there were five people like Nemamel over the course of Civilization's remembered history."

Merenre keeps working at his desk and doesn't sneeze at all because this isn't that kind of universe.

"Is it - about intelligence or something else - is it hereditary - was she able to describe it -"

"Every kind of skill Civilization knows how to describe is one that thousands or millions of people learn.  Nemamel couldn't have been what she was, noticeably better than all her competitors, if she'd known how to describe all of what she was doing with no bits left over.  She passed on some of her skills and made the markets themselves better, but Nemamel had no successor and no replacement in the domains she'd mastered most, when she went into" cryosuspension "the deep cold of suspended time, waiting on the Future to awaken her.  It was one of her classic - your language doesn't have the word, an acerbic disclaimer of how far you fell short of your own standards in the course of impressing somebody else - that people who were actually competent and understood what they were doing could just teach their skills to others so everyone would have them.  You only become Nemamel by failing to understand yourself that well, or by being born with good heritage that isn't anything you hold in your mind's own hands and can teach to others, so why be impressed by that - was her acerbic disclaimer."

Can you steal dath ilanis with a Wish, Carissa wonders. 

It wouldn't even be a good idea necessarily - one dath ilani is probably all that Cheliax can handle - but could you. 

"Are the acerbic disclaimers important to what she was doing?  Should we be making acerbic disclaimers like that?"  (Peranza.)

"Probably sort of?  Suppose I put it this way:  Clearly, I should be telling you more about dath ilani heroes - heroes? - people who are incredibly impressive - because dath ilani don't grow up to be skilled by trying to be Keltham, they grow up trying to be Nemamel."

"But how does Nemamel grow up to be Nemamel?  She was better than all her living competitors, there was nobody she could imitate to become that good.  There are no gods in dath ilan.  Then who does Nemamel look up to, to become herself?"

"And the answer is - she looked up to an image that existed in her own imagination, better than all her competitors and also far better than herself, the person who would've executed all her own skills perfectly, been everything she was but better, not something like Nethys that knows the answers just because, but something less powerful than that which knows them for reasons and by being clever."

"If she'd ever stopped to congratulate herself on being better than everyone else, wouldn't she then have stopped?  Or that's what I remember her being quoted as saying.  Which frankly doesn't make that much sense to me?  To me it seems you could reach the Better Than Everybody key milestone, celebrate that, and then keep going?  But I am not Nemamel and maybe there's something in there that I haven't understood yet."

"It didn't seem like a kind of pride that was being offered to me then, in retrospect, looking back.  It was the pride of the very smart people who are smarter than the other people, that they look around themselves, and even if they aren't the best in the world yet, there's still nobody in it who seems worthy to be their competitor, even the people who are still better than them, aren't enough better.  So they set their eyes somewhere on the far horizon where no people are, and walk towards it knowing they'll never reach it."

"But now we sort of are the very smart people now, aren't we, or trying to be that, and maybe I understand a little more, now that I think on it again.  I mean, if I try to imagine myself - looking at Golarion, and being like, 'Ah yes, I have done better than Golarion, yay me' - that would just be stupid.  No offense.  Probably Nemamel was that, but for dath ilan.  To her it was like Golarion is to me.  And that's why when people congratulated her on being better than everybody, she was all, 'stop that, you only like me that much because you're thinking about it all wrong', compared to some greater vision of Civilization that was only in her own imagination."

Keltham doesn't aspire to be like Contessa Lrilatha when he grows up; that would be aiming too low. 

Maybe even trying to build Evil dath ilan is aiming too low. 

She's not actually sure what would be aiming higher, though.

Or maybe the idea is not to aim high, the aim is just to imagine what you'd get if everybody was doing everything right all the time -

- if everybody was doing everything right all the time, Asmodeus's weaknesses could be taught in schools so smart children grew up thinking how to strengthen Him, and they would think thoughts that were actually a good idea, instead of in this world where Aspexia Rugatonn seemed to genuinely consider it plausible that it's better for most people to be stupid lest they trip over their own cleverness. 

If everybody were doing everything right all the time, then when Keltham had arrived they would not have needed to lie to him; they'd have known how to explain themselves to him, because they'd have known how to explain themselves at all. 

What if not everybody was doing everything right all the time, but Carissa personally was. Then she'd have noticed all the things she didn't understand sooner - (and gotten executed for heresy) - no, she'd be like Pilar, impossible to accuse of heresy because none of her thoughts twist away from other things - why did Asmodeus pick Carissa rather than Pilar - 

- anyway by the time Keltham landed she'd understand the thirty-word explanation of Hell that makes it not upsetting to Good people and they wouldn't need to be running an elaborate deception. And if there was occasion for it, she'd be better at it, because of understanding how all the world is deeply interconnected.

No, no, that's not good enough either, aim higher -

Literally every person in this classroom is already somebody's oracle or cleric or has sold their soul, and He can't maneuver any (more) of the Way's followers here because of Otolmens's Edict.  Why is His life like this?

"What was that about the deep cold and the future awakening her?  It sounds like - things that happen with epic heroes, here.  There's some way for Nemamel to come back if she's really needed?"  (Still Peranza.)

"Not epic heroes, no.  There's no gods in dath ilan, and no afterlife, it doesn't mean that we just let everybody become, the equivalent of getting eaten by Abaddon.  Food kept cold spoils more slowly... maybe you don't know that here, if there's no cold-making machines, but like ice freezes into a shape and keeps it, if you cool people down far enough, everything stops and nothing decays from there.  And they can wait, for however long it takes, until Civilization has become powerful enough to bring them back.  It's not as simple as I'm making it sound, you first need to cool people down to above the freezing point of water, cycle as much water as possible out of their body and add protectants to what's left.  But to do this as well as they possibly can is something to which Civilization has bent all of its will and all of its eyes and all of its cleverness."

"About a hundred people every year die for real.  The air-traveling machine I was on, when it crashed, is going to make that be around two hundred this year, probably."

"Everyone else goes into the cold where time stops, to wait it out, and awaken to whatever the Future brings, when Civilization becomes that powerful.  There are far prediction markets that say it's going to happen eventually with - what I would think would be unreasonably high probability, for something that far out, except that those markets are flagged with Keepers being allowed to trade in them.  Whatever secrets the Keepers keep, they would be turned to the purpose of protecting the Preserved, if they were turned to anything at all.  So I guess that number reflects what the Keepers would do if they had to, that nobody but them knows they can do."

"So no, Nemamel can't be brought back in an emergency, we just don't have the tech to do that yet, and no magic.  But it also wasn't because she was epic.  It's just what happens to everyone in Civilization when the first part of their story finishes, and pauses for a time.  Someday, the far prediction markets say, everyone will be reunited."

Everyone except Keltham.  But cases like his are statistically improbable, and people shouldn't dwell on them.

"How sure are they."

"Ninety-seven percent, and without calibration training I expect you have no idea how flaming ridiculous that is for a prediction about the Future, but it's really superheated ridiculous.  Apparently the Keepers think they could make thirty completely different statements like that and be wrong once, and, them being the Keepers, they've already thought of every single possible reason worth considering for why that might not be true.  And that's not the probability of the tech working, it's not the probability of revival being possible in principle, it's not the probability that Civilization makes it that far, it's not the probability of the Preserved being kept safe that long, it's the final probability of the Preserved actually coming back."

- nod. "Not as sure as Hell but - really good, for no magic. ....is it possible that what they secretly know is magic."

Maybe, if there's something you can easily do with magic and +4sd thinkoomph that destroys dath ilan, and can't be opposed by more and smarter people wielding more magic.

Though there's really only one hint that there's been anything that weird in that whole universe, and it's the Screening of the Past... still, one such hint is noticeably more than zero... but one of the few things that is publicly known about the Screen is that it doesn't reflect anything weird and concealed about the true character of physical law... would that still be an honest statement if magic were ultimately made of math, which in some sense it does have to be?

"Haven't really thought it through.  It seems more plausible now than a week ago, surely, but it wouldn't have seemed very plausible a week ago."

"I'd also expect something the size of magic to make the Keepers less certain, not more, because if there's magic around then somebody could blow up all of dath ilan with a misstated Wish spell, in which case the Preserved don't come back."

- nod. 

Maybe dath ilan has gods. ...she's not sure why you'd have secret gods. But she does think gods make worlds less likely to blow up.

"Seems like a natural place to call it for lunchtime, and maybe break for some wizard-spells practice by me after that."

"This ended up not being the Law of Probability, as it has apparently turned out; this has just been the Law of Scoring Predictions, and the lesson wasn't complete.  I haven't gone through the calculus to show you that, for every chance-in-reality, you get the best expected score by naming that chance as your estimate."

"But the Law of Scoring does get you far enough to know what a probability is, and to start practicing the skills of putting probabilities on things, and have some idea of how well you're doing at that."

Oh, and Keltham will write down all the log2 values for some landmark probabilities from 99% down to 0.0001%.  You sure do lose a lot of bits by saying 0.0001% for something that goes and happens!