"Anyways, the Law-fragment you learned yesterday is about building a scaffold between probabilities and the thing that determines how right you were.  If I say I put 1/2 probability on my hand holding silver, to determine whether I'm being honest, Nethys just has to examine my brain and see if I'm honestly saying what I think the chance is, or if I'd bet 50/100 under a Lawful scoring rule, and not look at my hand at all."

"To determine the equivalent of whether I'm right - to say how right I am - you have to build a scaffold in your mind, from my saying 1/2, to my hand, and then you don't say 'true' or 'false', 'right' or 'wrong'; if I actually am holding silver, you say that my loss was one factor of 2, or one 'bit' to use the Baseline term.  And this does involve concepts that people aren't just born with, which is why you want to understand the scaffold consciously and explicitly, rather than taking it for granted as something you'll do instinctively correctly."

"If instead we were just using scales from 1 to 12, with no common reference points, to understand what somebody else meant by their rating - well, it would still seem pretty plausible that strictly more complex events should not be rated as more likely.  But there'd be no obvious way to take the scaffold from the probability assignment to my hand, and say how right I'd been exactly.  That's one way of seeing why somebody sending out merchant ships might have trouble figuring out what to do with the claim, if you said the chance of a ship making it back was 9 on a scale from 1 to 12."

"And now that probabilities actually mean something to us, and aren't just wakalixes unto us - now that such thought is bound to reality in the explicit sight of meta-thought - we can consider more Law-fragments about what to do with probabilities once we have them."

...how does he actually bootstrap to the Inverse Probability Theorem?  He learned that way too long ago for him to remember what he got taught before what else.  It's kind of hard for him to remember what it's like to not know it.

Well, they're not getting any more enlightened by him not saying anything, so, he should just start saying things.  Maybe start with the informal and state an informal Law-fragment before trying to formalize it; that's usually the order in which things are taught.

Keltham Prestidigitates the wall clear.  He then starts to sketch a dath ilani murder mystery game, aimed at sufficiently young children that going through the motions of guessing the key statistics and multiplying odds won't just seem trivial and boring to them.

The owner of a house far away from any other houses, a man named Bahdhi, has been discovered dead, the discoloration of his body suggesting poisoning.  His head is missing, so this isn't a truly awful crime - the Surreptitious Head Removers were evidently notified duly in advance, and properly called in by the murderer - and in real life you're obviously supposed to ignore any information you get as a result about this crime having been premeditated, or the poisoning not just being accidental, but it's said for the sake of the game to obviously be a murder even before taking into account the missing head -

"I now have additional questions," says Peranza.

Well, if you commit a murder, not that you're supposed to, but if you do decide to defect from Civilization to that extent, you would obviously still want your murder victim to go into the deep cold so they don't get deprived of their Future.  Most people, when they commit murder, want somebody out of the way for now, they don't want to destroy the person's soul.

So there's a Government service that murderers can call in to get the heads of their victims properly taken away for suspension, immediately after the victim dies.  And since Civilization absolutely does not want to disincentivize murderers from calling in this service, they're trained to come in without leaving any clues for the police that might make life harder on the murderer; and if they accidentally leave a clue anyways, the police would obviously ignore it.  These are the Surreptitious Head Removers, drawn from Civilization's reserve of law-abiding psychopaths* to be people who are emotionally well-suited to come in, possibly watch an innocent person die without helping them, immediately after remove their head in a way that doesn't create any additional mess for the murderer to clean up, not get drawn into any conversations with the murderer, and get out without anybody noticing them.

This does mean that Civilization's rare murder cases will often involve a fairly lengthy court case to prove that somebody found with their head missing was in fact murdered, but this is the price of otherwise optimal policy.

(*)  Taldane of course does not have a precise term corresponding to Baseline's 'law-abiding psychopath', which is distinct by syllables from Baseline 'criminal psychopath' to emphasize how much these are importantly different kinds of people.  Keltham says 'Lawful not-emotionally-caring people'.

The thing that immediately comes to mind is that Civilization is obviously lying and obviously if you call in the Surreptitious Head Removers they arrest you.

Five days ago she would've been sure of it. Now - she's not sure. Maybe in dath ilan - maybe people really do have that much of the Law in them -

"....how do you know they don't just lie to you about what happens if you call," says Yaisa.

What, and not show up to take the person's head?  Why would they do that?

" - no, and arrest you for planning a murder."

If anybody found out that had happened, Governance would be overthrown roughly thirty seconds later.

" - because if the government isn't Lawful you - expect that everyone else - sorry, I'm confused -"

Carissa feels like she's supposed to be confused but isn't. "They train everyone to overthrow the government if it ever does anything less than perfectly Lawful. And normally that would result in a population that rebels constantly and ends up like Galt but - but that's because Golarion can't make governments lawful like that, and dath ilan can, and their government knows those are the rules so they're always Lawful. Right?"

"They're obviously not perfectly Lawful but people with the power to plausibly successfully remove Governance will hold Governance to some standard they think is reasonable.  In dath ilan, everyone over thirteen or who passes a test earlier shares that power while the meta-level structure holds; and Governance being able to run a service like the Surreptitious Head Removers, which protects people from the equivalent of Abaddon, in an approximately Lawful fashion without gross violations endangering the dead of being lost, is one standard to which we hold them.  You, I assume, as wizards with some combat potential, would at some point start to try to hold your Governance to account, say if they developed soul-destroying magical weapons and started permanently slaughtering everybody starting with Asmodeus's clerics, like if you thought they were doing badly even for Golarion."

Frozen silence. 

" - yes, but describing under what conditions you'd overthrow the government makes cooperating to overthrow the government easier so it's - not illegal," because I say so right this minute, "but looked at like ...asking your friends under what conditions they'd agree to help you poison your wife and make it look like an accident? We have - a lot of overthrown governments - so peoples' expectations are different than they'd be somewhere where it's just a hypothetical. Also - it wouldn't be not-allowed, by Golarion rules, for someone to note down who said "yeah absolutely I'd overthrow the government if I thought they were any worse than I think they are now" and not put them in charge of any amassing an independent power base."

"Why wouldn't you ask your friends under what conditions they'd agree to help you poison your wife and make it look like - oh, because your friends might think you were actually planning that as opposed to running thought experiments on them?"

"Yes, correct, that is why." KELTHAM

Her thought transcript is going to be nothing but KELTHAM and thoughts cut off before they become heresies and thoughts not cut off fast enough -

"I don't think you actually realize how bad it can get when governments are overthrown not by carefully executed pacts planned with the Church of Asmodeus," Ione says, because it's going to look weird if just Sevar is holding up this whole conversation and the Asmodeans are all too terrified to think through what they'd be saying in alter-Cheliax.  "People are careful talking about it the same way you maybe wouldn't want to go around suggesting that Surreptitious Head Removers arrest people who call them."

"And I think we were also supposed to learn something about probability at some point."

"I have additional questions myself about what kind of Horrible Golarion Equilibrium is causing people to, I'm guessing, systematically vastly overestimate how much of a better outcome they can get by overthrowing their current governments, and how the solution to this is, apparently, nobody ever talking about those hypotheticals.  But, yes, we were supposed to do probability."

"I'm actually kind of flailing here in the back of my mind, because I'm realizing that when dath ilani kids play the murder mystery game, there's known objective numbers for things like how many professional chemists versus non-chemists have particular poison ingredients in their possession, so when the kids guess that, you can tell them afterwards how well they objectively did at estimating statistics like that.  And you can't possibly guess those statistics for dath ilan, and I won't know the correct answers relative to any statistics you guess about Golarion..."

"Okay, you know, simpler Golarion murder mystery.  You'll just make up the key numbers, and we won't have any idea afterwards who was right.  If two of you disagree, oh well."

"Meritxell is found dead in her bedroom tomorrow.  And for some reason, Governance wants to know who did it immediately, instead of waiting to raise her.  Also she didn't make afterlife arrangements so they can't just call her in Hell immediately.  Wow murder mysteries around here must be a lot less interesting a lot of the time."

"Anyways, the two suspects are Keltham and Carissa, the only two people who had Security clearances that could have enabled them to access Meritxell's bedroom during the time in question."

"Meritxell, obviously, was murdered by a lantern archon.  Keltham is known to have Summon Monster III among his accessible cleric spells; when it comes to Carissa, we'd have to ask how likely a recently-fourth-circle wizard was to have that exact spell in her spellbook... uh, unless there's obvious other ways to cast it, like, from a scroll, but this was obviously a spellbook lantern archon rather than a scroll lantern archon and also nobody's allowed to just look in her spellbook.  Bear with me here, I haven't constructed Golarion murder mysteries before."

"Neither Keltham nor Carissa have any known motive to slay Meritxell.  However, Carissa was observed by Ione, assumed honest for these purposes, to have gotten into some sort of angry-looking argument with Meritxell the previous day, though Ione wasn't able to overhear the details."

"What can we say about who likely did it, and how would we say that?"

"...we're assuming here you can both beat a Truth Spell somehow and are denying it?"

"Yes.  Yes we are assuming that."

"And the Forbiddance wasn't a thing which is why lantern archons are summonable -"

"I think it was Keltham," says Tonia.

"I mean, realistically, Sevar, but sure, I'll ask.  Why Keltham?"