"...and that's common, in dath ilan? Thinking of everything that way and being right?"

"Right isn't how the scaffold from reality to probabilistic belief works, remember.  We lose fewer 2s.  We don't bother putting probabilities on things almost certain to happen or not happen, like a mountain being in the same place as yesterday.  If it's not important enough to spend a lot of time thinking about it and making up numbers, we don't spend the time to think about it.  We use the more complicated disciplines where some point matters a lot and it's uncertain."

"To give a recent example, I've been trying to work out whether, or to what degree, the forces that landed me here chose a universe where I'd end up in a particular kind of weird situation; and I guessed that Chelish Governance was something like 3 times more likely to just immediately inform me that Pilar had gone to Elysium, instead of making me figure that out for myself, if they weren't being messed with by forces like that.  It's a terrible example for lessons purposes, because it's weird and complicated, but it being weird and complicated is exactly why I started deploying explicit numbers instead of just relying on my wordless intuition to do the mostly right thing."

"I don't want to overstate how important this kind of reasoning is to, say, figuring out metallurgy, because when you're working metals, you mainly want to find tricks that work all the time rather than 30% of the time.  You don't actually want to be sticking around in the realm of non-extreme probabilities.  But if you're trying two different smelting processes with inconsistent outputs, this is the branch of reasoning you'd use to figure out how many tests you needed to run to be pretty sure of your conclusion, and neither jump to a conclusion too early, nor run a lot of tests you didn't need."

"Oh, and, there's also a class of incredibly huge blatant mistakes that are a lot easier to spot once you have any Law of Probability, like the ways you can get mortals to violate, uh, 'there's duck for lunch because Keltham asked for it' being less probable than 'there's duck for lunch'.  There's more stuff like that."

"But all of those uses are secondary to the idea that these are universal Laws governing uncertainty, whether or not you're thinking about them explicitly and using them explicitly, whether or not your implicit reasoning is operating correctly.  It's not like you can lose fewer 2s by just thinking in a sort of wordless way about whether your merchant ships are likely to come back.  You still have to send those ships out or not, based on the factors you knew about, and the Law goes on governing the correct relations between factors regardless of whether you have any inkling of what those are."

"The saying in dath ilan is that, even if you don't know the equations of gravity in exquisitely rigorous detail, if you step off a cliff, you'll fall.  You don't need to know the Law of the material world for it to go on governing rocks, trees, yourself.  The Law of Probability is core to how all thought works; you don't need to think about thought for that Law to go on governing how well or poorly your thoughts match up to reality."

"You're not exempted from the Law of Probability by guessing in a way that doesn't mention probabilities to yourself.  If it feels to you that it's more likely for a rival merchant ship to bring in a cargo of shoes from Absalom than for a rival ship to bring in a cargo of shoes, your mind is still doing a broken thing in light of the Law, whether you're thinking about the Law or not, whether you're making up numbers or not."

"Or for things like looking at my pocketwatch and inferring what time it is, the probabilities may be so close to certain, that they are not worth thinking about as probabilities; but it is still not a necessary truth that my pocketwatch tells the correct time, it is not certain across every imaginable world.  If I reason from what my pocketwatch says, I am in principle operating in the realm of things that happen to be true in my universe, not things that are always true everywhere.  That is the realm of Probability, and my thoughts are then thoughts that work or fail in light of the Law of Probability."

Okay, this seems like firmly nonheretical territory. They are enthused.

For gods, is it all - explicit? The question as phrased doesn't make any sense, actually -

- humans are mostly running a process they don't understand. Blindly doing things without any kind of explanation of why the thing they're doing is even an approximation of the truth they're seeking. Gods obviously wouldn't do that. The process by which they make inferences would be observable to them; they would be able to see why it works. If humans only a little smarter and less broken than Golarion humans can describe it, then gods can see it clearly. ....probably. Actually she's not sure that holds in general. But it feels true in the specific case: to be a god is to be made of math a little more, to have less of a gulf between the unconscious processes you must use to reason and the true processes you know would work. 

(This is false, actually; the gulf is far, far wider. Gods are nearly always too fragmented to apply even a tiny fraction of their full intelligence to any particular problem they are confronted with; they run entirely off of heuristics necessarily much dumber than they are, and reflexes they only occasionally have the luxury of bringing their full mind to bear on tweaking and reshaping.)

(The greater Iomedae may possibly, at some point, notice that the Cayden Cailean that She was talking to earlier sounded larger than the fragment of Iomedae talking to Him; but this is not something that fragment will notice on its own, or by exchanging updates with fragments of similar size.  While running reflex thought, it's hard to notice the nonreflex thoughts of others, except as weird unexpected responses that weren't the ones you were hoping for and are instead from some wider space outside the argument space you tried to map out in advance.  You have to become larger and thoughtful yourself, to notice that those unexpected responses to you were unexpectedly thoughtful ones.)

"I feel like I've done noticeably worse on this lecture than some others; hopefully that reflects my having so little sense of which examples to use for Golarion, and not that my performance is going to continue degrading further as I try to talk about anything more complicated."

"Maybe next time I'll start with abstract mathematical properties and then try to derive real-world lessons from those, rather than the other way around, to see if that works any better for us.  It did seem worth trying to do it the way I learned it, first.  But, I mean, on the other hand, you are not actually seven-year-olds and that may importantly expand the option space if something isn't working."

It's at this point, having reached an obvious breakpoint in his lecture, that Keltham checks his pocketwatch and realizes he's been talking way too long, relative to other processes such as, for example, lunch.

"For the future record," Keltham says, "you're allowed to tell me if I'm running this late over lunch.  Let's all suddenly frantically run there at a sedate walking pace and hope there's any food left."

This instruction causes a fair bit of invisible distress before they decide he's joking and go to lunch.

Message to Sevar:  Ione here.  On future occasions, I want more backup when I'm trying to have Keltham not collapse everyone's minds.  I can be the one who dares to interrupt him, it's my library after all, but I don't think it's a good look when everybody except me is sitting frozen in terror of heresy.  Do you have a convenient excuse for us to have a private lunch about something?  Also, seems possibly good if Pilar is there too.

"Ione, Pilar, you guys wanted to copy Invisibility off me, right? I don't think we're allowed to eat in the library but you can come to my room and copy during lunch."

"Damned straight you're not allowed to eat in my library takaral."  Fuck, she'd been hoping that was gone.

Pilar will of course follow obediently along.  (After Carissa Sevar, not after the heretic who abandoned Lord Asmodeus for Nethys the moment she could.)

That's 3 out of 3 'research group members' definitely known to have interesting backgrounds / romantic possibilities.

Advance predictions:  Maybe 20% that something Interesting happens with the 3 of them, assuming Tropes; 1% if No Tropes.

"Prestidigitation works fine on books, Ione. ....was that less true when the herald of Nethys Takaral was alive. Maybe it was. Anyway, my room is fine."

Off they head. 

She closes the door behind her and has her Unseen Servant bop around failing to bump into any invisible people, just because it's what a fourth-circle wizard would do. "Ione requested we meet," she says for Pilar's benefit, and looks at Ione expectantly.

"Repeating for Pilar's benefit:  I managed to keep Keltham from immediately exploding all the minds of all the Asmodeans in class, today, but I don't think it's a good look when everybody else is frozen up in fear of heresy.  I can be the one who interrupts Keltham since it's my library, but the others need to stop going quiet or he's going to notice.  Sevar talks because she's confident she has the authority to decide to do that.  I'm thinking maybe Pilar can be confident enough to speak up too."

"Is there a plan for not having everybody's minds collapse?  I also asked Pilar along because she's the third person in class who isn't going to have her mind explode if Keltham rips apart everything designed to make Asmodeans not realize how much they don't want to go to Hell."

"Thank you for that very constructive frame for the discussion, Ione." 'thank you' is only used sarcastically, in Cheliax. "I don't think the core problem is that people don't want to go to Hell. Maillol is a fifth circle cleric of Asmodeus and he said he's not looking forward to it; therefore, it's fine for people to not look forward to it, though I think when they actually get good at reasoning they will look forward to it because they'll want to get even better. But mileage might vary. There is a very real possibility that nine out of ten people exposed to dath ilanism just become very miserable about going to Hell and can't get over it, and it'd be worth it even with attrition rates that high, but - but I don't expect that? I expect that whatever arguments Contessa Lrilatha believes are true and we just have to get people through the rough patch where they don't know those yet and do know enough to think themselves in a million dangerous directions."

"Works on you.  Works on Pilar.  I find myself not even slightly tempted to ask Lord Nethys to take back His grip on my soul so that I can go to Hell and be improved through horrible pain that causes me to not even remember my human name when they're done, instead of sitting in an enormous library relearning magic takaral.  Besides you two, I doubt anybody else in class except maybe Meritxell is somebody who would actually want that."

"Essentially all of the Asmodeanism that I was ever taught is, in fact, a tissue of things that are obvious lies or bad reasoning or downright meaningless as soon as you're allowed to think about them.  Keltham didn't get far into forcing everyone to think about it, because I shut him down, which I could do because I'm not going to Hell and don't have to believe in any of that anymore, meaning I already watched it all collapse inside me and I could see the direction Keltham was pushing people.  So it didn't explode today, but Keltham's not going to just not teach that stuff without a reason, and even given a reason, I bet dath ilanism doesn't actually work without it."

"The entire project that I have been set is coming up with a dath ilanism that actually works and is true, which is compatible with the fact that all of us will go to Hell and that it is written into the contract of Creation that eventually everyone will go to Hell. dath ilanism is a set of tools, and it ought to be possible to use them whatever world you find yourself in, and we find ourselves in a world where we belong to Asmodeus, and reasoning doesn't stop working when that's true. It'd be an enormous weakness in Law, if you couldn't use it if you were going to go to Hell."

She can feel herself not fully using her brain to have this argument, though.

"Anyway, we have some latitude for - like, if we end up concluding that Hell needs improvement - well, it's an imperfect expression of Our Lord's will, and He wants this project so he wants the kinds of souls this project outputs and if necessary we'll figure out how to ensure they are adequately accommodated in Hell."

"If that's the vision you expect to convince my classmates - and let's be clear, I find myself not even slightly tempted to turn my back on Lord Nethys for it - then you'd better start thinking of how to inspire everyone with it before Keltham explodes their minds."

"My sense is that Lord Nethys looks favorably on this project with Asmodeus, but I am not certain of His plans.  If at some point it looks like failure is inevitable I will begin considering the prospect that Nethys means me to stay with Keltham after this blows up.  I'll continue to try to shut down Keltham when I think he's about to explode people, unless countermanded by you.  But not if it gets to the point where I think I'm making myself look bad to him and hindering a plan by Lord Nethys to have me accompany Keltham elsewhere."

"What happened in class today was Lord Nethys pulling your asses out of the lava.  If I hadn't been there, or Nethys hadn't oracled me, everybody in there would have sat in place frozen in shock at the heresy and too worried about appearances to Keltham to say anything, while Keltham kept talking, until somebody broke and had to be Dominated.  I can't fix this, I can only slow it down and give you time."

"I've said my piece, and if you'd nothing more of me, I can go.  I can copy Invisibility off a Security."

Sigh. "I might run some versions by you, once it's more developed. Go."

She's gone, quietly impressed that Sevar manages to take criticism that well.

Is she nervous?  Only slightly.  Knowing that Nethys can still see the future leads her to have a lot of faith in His plans.  At worst, this all explodes, the Asmodeans kill her or her library curse kills her, and then Nefreti Clepati brings her back and sends her over to wherever Keltham went.

"I obviously stand ready to torture or kill her if that'd be helpful."

Pilar says it more because she thinks she ought to, than because she means it.  Something in Ione's words shook the same part of her that had the thought, in Elysium, about it being better if only people who wanted to go to Hell went to Hell.

"I wish," says Carissa. She's feeling shaken too. 

"Why do you want to go to Hell?" Does that make her sound like she's only pretending herself. "In case Meritxell is the only one persuadable of my reasoning."