"I'd just put myself under truthspell and say I'd Cooperate."

"And if your next question is why I'm able to say that under truthspell, when I'm roleplaying being strictly selfish without honor, it's because I know that, when I actually need to write my move on the paper, there'll be a very strong correlation between the person I am right then, and my model of myself at the time I said under truthspell that I'd Cooperate."

"I believe you.  I think we have no need to play out our moves, then.  It would be purposeless, if we cannot learn our own true answers, and to show each other our answers afterwards would be an offense against the nature and meaning of this game."

"I will not ask you to spend a truthspell on proving all this to me.  Just, sometime in the future, when you are truthspelling yourself in any case - would you also say to me that you told me no lies this time?"

Keltham taps himself with a truthspell, and Abadar's symbol flashes above his forehead.

"As my people define 'lying', the act of 'lying' means intentional deceptive falsehood-speaking, and so doesn't include saying literally false statements as jokes, or teaching aids, or ways of 'trolling' people, if you don't expect them to end up persistently believing false things nor do you exploit their false beliefs to their own detriment during the bounded short time they persist.  It also doesn't count if you catch yourself and say 'wrongthought' and explain why you accidentally false-spoke in the next minute."

"To the best of my knowledge and memory:"

"I've never lied to anyone in Golarion."

Exit Keltham, stage right.

He's still got that weird symbol above his forehead, but there's no particular reason to get it dispelled.

Broom watches him go with a sad, grim feeling that, like a wind blowing away dust, dissipates all the slight reassurance he was feeling a few seconds earlier.

That is a person who it is not hard to visualize trying to destroy Cheliax, once he knows what it really is and what it has done to him, and maybe taking some risks in the course of wielding power enough to accomplish it.

Asmodia approves everyone's game moves via Security before they actually enter them - only she knows those, to minimize the amount the others have to fake not knowing - and they work out to 3 pairs of Cooperate-Cooperate and 1 pair Defect-Defect.

Which means that either Asmodia and Gregoria were the stupidest pair when it came to working out the missing Law, or everybody else failed to really understand and follow the instructions, and Asmodia is guessing it's the second one.

But, 3-1 is close enough to 1-1 in the quick test trial, Asmodia thinks, that Keltham should not be mystified by it; and the conversations in Keltham's presence transmitted to her played well enough for alterCheliax.  The more difficult part of Asmodia's job seems to be going well enough.

Security copies Sevar on key updates from Keltham's conversation with Broom.  (The voice of the Security handling her comms is audibly that of Olegario, if that matters for anything.)

"Kelthams don't cheat strangers.  They keep their promises to strangers.  They trade fairly with strangers.  They have, in their utilityfunction, very strongly, the shards of - a thing I was going to teach in future lectures - the essence of Coordination - that made its way into humans, long ago, because people who didn't feel anything about keeping their promises, did less well in trade, acquired poorer reputation, and in the end had fewer children, than the honorable.  And we know that this must have happened, long ago, because there is no other way that human beings could now be what they are, things that have a word for honor."

"The very first shard of Coordination that children are taught about, in the very beginning, is this game I set them to play."

"The other solution is to care about honor.  Care about Coordination.  Be someone who, if somebody else cooperates with you, trusts you, then you would sooner walk out of this reality through Abaddon than betray them, when they hadn't betrayed your own trust."

"That was the god I called out to - the god whose domain is following the forms of Coordination for their own sake, as a term in the utilityfunction.  Because that is something very deep and strong in what Keltham is, that goes with his selfishness, and makes it okay, safe, for him to be selfish."

"All you need to do to solve the real version of this dilemma with a Keltham, outside of the usual game instructions where we're not instructed to roleplay being purely selfish in a way that demands complicated math to solve by pure Law, is to say under truthspell that you'll Cooperate with him.  You don't need to say why.  If you're not going to Defect against Keltham and take his own stuff, then he's not going to take three coppers away from you.  The end."

"I've never lied to anyone in Golarion."

It is not the most promising starting point from which to seduce someone to Evil. She's not giving up, obviously; Hell has corrupted literal angels, and plenty of paladins. Lots of carefully-reflected-on endorsed values possessed by teenagers are not those of the people they'll grow up to be, even when a great deal of effort isn't pointed at changing them.

But it's about as un-Asmodean as an ideology can be. And it is coherent, it's not just reflexive regurgitation of the things dath ilan went to great lengths to instill.

And he's going to be so furious, when he realizes that Cheliax has been playing 'defect' this whole time. 

(Lawful Evil ilanism, obviously, uses the complicated Law here; it does not Cooperate just because someone else is Cooperating; it tries to get as many coppers as it can. That's not the problem; Keltham could work with that. The problem is the lying. And the - the inadequacy of Cheliax, its fundamental deficiency at building a society in which people can reason, which Lawful Evil ilanism solves though she still doesn't know how. 

....maybe a question for tomorrow. No one told her, this time, to be gentle with herself and take time to cry, but if that's good advice the reasons for it probably generalize to here.)

By the time Keltham is back, the Silent Proctor is done with her results, and tells Keltham the tally of earnings.  Keltham gives that amount to Paxti plus two coppers for her own.  (It seems low to him, but you cannot give people friendly bonuses in a bidding situation; they'll learn that, and then adjust their bids, in which case you've added unpleasant volatility and zero income for them!)

The results that Paxti tells Keltham:  Two Defected, Six Cooperated.

Okay, that's better than zero Defections in terms of how well anybody really understood or followed the instructions... he didn't want to call Pilar on it because (a) he was not in all rooms simultaneously and didn't want to introduce asymmetries by his own presence in the learning experience, (b) it was obvious she didn't think she was cheating, and (c) everybody comes up with some silly invalid reason to Cooperate the first time, that's part of the learning experience...

Actually.  On reflection, Keltham is plausibly looking more at his own illusion-of-transparency failure to explicitly specify what dath ilani children would already implicitly know.  For example, that "only try to get as many coppers as possible" in the context of talking about purely selfish agents implicitly includes "you don't care enough about the Law or Asmodean compacts in your utilityfunction that you could use that as an easy public commitment mechanism".  Pilar may have legit just not understood that part.  Keltham is not on reflection sure that he said out loud anything a reasonable Golarionite could use to work that out, given lack of background context.

Anyways, Keltham calls back the class to get their rewards and hear the results.

But does he look suspicious about said results.

Nope!  Seems pretty cheerful about them.

(Maybe his Bluff is so high he can fool Detect Thoughts and truthspells.  If they'd perhaps gotten an eighth-rank Keeper from dath ilan, instead, reincarnated as a younger version of himself, maybe somebody like that would pretend to be Keltham.)

Anyways!  Once the rewards have been handed out -

"So I realized, after the experiment had already started, that I'd failed to spell out some aspects of the experiment that a dath ilani would know just from ambient culture, but you had no reasonable way of deducing yourselves.  For which I apologize."

"What I failed to spell out was that, in the context of us already being talking about purely selfish agents, if I tell you to only try to get as many coppers for yourself as possible, what I obviously-to-a-dath-ilani mean is that you should roleplay an ideal-agent whose utilityfunction contains literally nothing but the number of coppers it gets.  It's not just that you're roleplaying an agent that doesn't care about the other player.  The agent you're roleplaying also doesn't care enough about Law or Asmodeanism that it has access to the cheap public commitment mechanism of making a promise on its Law or saying that the agreement is an Asmodean compact."

"Some of you Defected anyways, though, so not all was lost in illustrating the underlying problem.  In fact, if you exactly roleplay a purely selfish agent that also cares nothing about having a Lawful alignment in the Golarion sense, that only embodies the Law of obtaining the most coppers, the problem is not meant to be solvable at the levels of Law you currently have."

"Within the conversations I overheard, Asmodia had the sharpest sense of what was missing; Ione was the one who got furthest in constructing pieces of what a dath ilani would call the correct solution."

"Also to spell out something where I can't remember if I was explicit enough: you may not tell anyone else what you wrote down, nor reveal what rewards you received, ever.  You're free to talk about all the arguments you used, but not say what you wrote at the end, or what payoff you got.  The idea is to minimize the extent to which people might be non-self-endorsedly concerned about their reputations, because that concern makes it harder for them to roleplay the selfish agent.  Also something else a dath ilani would know from ambient culture, by the time they were playing games like this; again I apologize."

"You are now free to discuss."

"Are you saying that the perfectly selfish agents that only care about coppers and don't even care about Law or their reputations still don't defect, if they know enough Law?"

"Yep!  They embody the Law but they don't care about being Lawful.  Which is sort of what you'd expect the conditions to be in dath ilan, where Lawfulness is not, after all, a thing.  Just Law."

"I'm not sure why the problem isn't solvable at the levels of Law we have.  Compared to us both Defecting against each other, it makes sense for me to say to Tonia, 'I'll Cooperate if I think you'll Cooperate', and be telling the truth about that, if I think Tonia can read me better than I can bluff - or probably can, enough to make it not worth the risk for me.  And then it makes sense for Tonia to say to me, 'Well, now that you've said that, I'll Cooperate', and be telling the truth about that, if she thinks I can read her better than she can bluff, or well enough to not be worth the risk for her.  It looks to me like you could do that even if you were both Chaotic Neutral.  What am I missing?"

"Asmodia."

"Um."

"Okay I may actually need to take a minute about that."

"Does it - actually matter at all, if I say some clever nitpicky thing like, Ione left out that - for her to say 'I'll Cooperate if you Cooperate' - she has to believe, not just that Tonia can read her, but that - she can read Tonia.  And the same with Tonia needing to believe that she can read Ione, not just that Ione can read her, for Tonia to say 'I'll Cooperate'."

"Ione's exact wording was, 'I'll Cooperate if I think you'll Cooperate'.  If Ione doesn't think she can read Tonia, then even if Tonia says 'I'll Cooperate', Ione won't think Tonia will Cooperate, and Ione won't Cooperate, even though she was being truthful in her promise.  So Tonia also has to believe that Ione believes she can read her.”

”But if Ione does think she can read Tonia, and Tonia can read Ione, Ione can solve that just by adding, 'I think I can read you'.  Which, in their real discussion, Ione did in fact say."

"Ione won't be certain of her ability to read Tonia, though.  It has to be about probabilities."

"Ione did put some probabilities in there."

"Which ones?"

"Which ones should they be?"

"So the first thing that comes to mind is just saying, 'I'll Cooperate with whatever probability I think you'll Cooperate', and... that gives me a nervous uneasy feeling but I can't actually see anything wrong with it.  I'd rather live in a world where you Cooperated with 1/3 probability and I Cooperated with 1/3 probability than one where we both always Defected, right?"

"That sounds like a very useful nervous uneasy feeling that you have there!  You should hang out with it for a while and learn to hear what it's trying to whisper to you.  I would be doing you a disservice if I just told you, really.  A proverb out of dath ilan:  'I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.'"