"You're sort of saying 'as far as I know', when you say stuff about how likely something is," Gregoria keeps going carefully. 

"Being right is more than just being honest.  If I said I was certain my left hand contained a gold coin, you could determine whether I was being honest just by examining my own brain, if you had magic for doing that, or if you're Nethys - it's so incredibly convenient for these lectures that your world has one of those, by the way.  The point is that you don't have to look inside my hand at all, to determine whether I'm being honest.  If I say there's a gold coin inside my hand, and I believe that because I suddenly went insane a few seconds ago, I'm being honest.  You have to look inside my hand to determine whether I'm right."

"When I say that the coin in my hand is 1/2 likely to be silver, I'm honestly reporting my state of knowledge about what's in it.  Other people can have different states of knowledge, that they could also report honestly.  In the scaffolding we construct, my probability of this coin being silver, is not just a fact about the coin, it's a fact about me and what I know."

"If I don't know whether this coin is silver or copper, that's not a fact about the coin, it's a fact about me.  The coin itself is just silver or copper.  Only people, only minds, can ever be uncertain; reality just is.  If I've got a map of a city - you've got maps here, right? - and part of the map is left blank, that just means I don't know what's there, it's not that I go into the city and find a huge emptiness where the blank section of map is."

"Of which it is also said in dath ilan:  All confusion and dismay exists in the mind, not in reality, for a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory."

All of this seems like it is sort of coming in sideways to the main way truth is complicated in Cheliax which is that you shouldn't believe heretical things. Like, where do you put heresy in that framework. It's a thing in the territory that makes mortals be worse and stupider? It's a map error? It's a translation error between reality and your map?

(The class is silent.)

"Do you have...an example of a way people get confused if they don't understand that?"

"Well, you could take a class of high-disagreeability six-year-olds, and expose them to different information about the same play-mystery, and see if you could get them to shout at each other about how they were lying about the probabilities."

"Or actually - possibly there's a simple thing that I guess people in Golarion actually could be doing wrong, if they haven't had any training?  Which is thinking you believe a bunch of sentences, where your scaffolding is broken to the point where you can't even take the sentence and figure out, what is it in the outer world, beyond the sentence itself, that would make them be true or false or righter or wronger?  See what's the equivalent of Keltham's left hand and 'now' and the kind of coin that has to be inside it?"

"If you were six-year-olds, I could come in and very sincerely tell you about which animals were or weren't wakalixes, and test you on which animals were or weren't wakalixes to make sure you could repeat the answer correctly, and then mix you with a different class of six-year-olds who'd been told different animals were wakalixes, by a different teacher.  And see how long we could manipulate you into fighting about whose teacher had probably been more trustworthy or honest, before anybody realized that they had no idea what it even meant for anything to be a wakalix - that their scaffolding wasn't reaching out to any fact in reality that could make the sentences be true or false - that they'd just memorized what the teacher had said, and repeated it back, without it having meant anything."

"This being one of the ways that kids are taught to notice explicitly and speak up when they haven't understood what the ass somebody was talking about, instead of trying to memorize the sentence and repeat it back.  And then for the rest of your learning, you're going to be up against teachers who try to throw subtler and subtler meaningless or underspecified statements into your education to see if anyone calls them out on it."

Carissa is pretty sure she hates this lesson already! "....I'm not immediately thinking of any wakalixes - I mean, there are lots of monsters where all I know about them is a page in a textbook, but someone put that page in because we might have to kill them -"

"Actually, now that I think about it, I should maybe have delayed that lesson until after everyone has been tapped with Owl's Wisdom, in case it's the sort of thing where Owl's Wisdom lets you notice a bunch of stuff you thought you believed that was actually meaningless, and we want less cumulative personality impact from all the things like that which are allowed to build up between Wisdom boosts?"

"Though I wouldn't actually expect much impact from that, I mean, if it's meaningless, it's probably not built into the core of your personality or important to your motivations or anything."

Why is she terrified. "I dunno, there are people who build their entire personality around....avenging the death of their wife at the hands of goblins, or something, and I could imagine tapping them with an Owl's being pretty soul-shocking? Because of realizing it's meaningless? But mostly that kind of thing happens in lawless places."

"I don't see why it'd be meaningless?  I mean, it might be not the wisest thing to do given costs and benefits, but it's not meaningless.  You can look at the world and see whether or not it's true that somebody's wife actually got killed by goblins.  You can look at the world and see whether those goblins are dead yet."

"If you're driven to make the goblins be dead because they killed your wife, then the content, the meaning, of that drive inside you, either isn't true or false in the first place, or we have to build a complicated scaffolding about it to see how it's true or false in a complicated way."

Ione is worried if she's maybe the only person in this classroom who can think about this clearly enough to do something before all the Asmodeans have their minds explode, and the problem is, she can't actually figure out what she's supposed to do about it.

Though maybe as one of Lord Nethys's own, it's heresy for her to prevent things from exploding?  But is this a kind of explosion that Lord Nethys finds pleasing to Him?

"Okay, then yeah, I don't know any meaningless things people do, offhand - there are worshippers of Aroden, the dead god? But I think that's - wrong, rather than meaningless - like, I think they think he's not dead."

"I mean, you're not six years old, I'd expect you to at least notice the wakalixes thing if somebody ran that on you.  Even without knowing the Law-fragment of meaning-scaffolds explicitly to yourself, I think you'd notice if you were in a classroom and the teachers were getting you to repeat back things where you just had no idea what they even meant."

"Uh, if this is a kind of thing where it maybe possibly makes people's minds explode harder if they go too long between Owl's Wisdoms, we should maybe go back to the probability stuff, and wait until everybody's had an Owl's Wisdom once before picking this up again?" says Ione.

It had better not also be her job to figure out what Asmodeus's priests need to tell everybody or do to them, in the window before this lesson resumes, so that they don't explode too hard later.  Ione could already be treading perilously close to Nethysian heresy, for all she actually knows about Lord Nethys's laws, in trying to make something explode later or giving somebody else a chance to partially soften it.

"Fair.  Why rely on the thing's probable safety when you can just not do the thing, as the saying goes."

Some tension leaves the room.

"It probably goes in a more general lesson on how to notice wacky stuff inside you that took root somewhere, because you thought other people wanted you to believe it, and more generally the difference between what you think you believe and what you actually -"

She interrupts their teacher.

"After everybody gets their first Owl's Wisdom, Keltham.  And maybe then slowly if it's the sort of thing that even maybe possibly builds up between Owl's Wisdoms."

"Right.  Fair."

Ione wants due credit for this; it's not actually in the terms of her agreement with the Asmodeans that she has to shield their sanity from Keltham.

"Teaching in dath ilan sounds like it's a lot better than here, you end up spending lots of time memorizing meaningless stuff just because you didn't pay close enough attention to the part that made it meaningful," Gregoria says. 

"And the student assessment methods miss this as a problem because -"

"Subject change back to Probability now," Ione interrupts their teacher a second time in the same lesson.

"Right."

Somehow this is deeply and strangely satisfying.

She's going to need to - what is she even going to need to do - she's going to need to have the lesson in advance preemptively, that's what to do. Have a big heresy session where everyone says heretical things. Should be fun. 

Before she does that she's going to need to try an Owl's Wisdom herself and get to the question of why she's so scared. ...maybe under supervision. 

Message to Ione: Acknowledged.