"Continues to make as much sense as anything else.  Maybe more so than the military 'discipline' thing."

Asmodia is trying to keep quiet as much as possible and let Sevar work, but she registers that Keltham is going to later consistency-check everything he remembers, and they face a grim tradeoff between encouraging him to ask questions now, in which case he'll ask more questions and do more consistency-checking total, and having no idea what Keltham will consistency-check later until after he's accumulated lots of memorable stuff to check.

Yep! She's going to stick to things that are entirely true about Taldor, so that no matter how many there are they shouldn't require that much effort to make consistent, but of course there keep being ways in which the Taldor-analogy isn't quite perfect or things that actually do work but will register as inconsistent to Keltham. 

"Another thing that is important is that women in Cheliax like in other places were - worse off. Women are physically weaker than men, and much of the work that needs doing in Golarion requires physical strength. Women will spend most of their adult lives pregnant, and so in places where families decide which of their children to invest their limited educating-a-child resource on, they'd choose a boy, who'll be able to work his whole adult life, and is less likely to die young in childbirth."

Most of the time pregnant?  "They - literally get pregnant at 13, start a new pregnancy less than 280 days after giving birth, and die shortly after menopause?  Shouldn't breastfeeding suppress - capability to get pregnant - for a couple of years?"

"In the cities well-off women don't breastfeed, they have servants for that. ...do dath ilani get pregnant at 13? Sixteen is more normal, if a girl is having sex at that age. And then, yes, it's not unusual to have eight or even ten live births, and twelve or fifteen pregnancies, in places that are like the way Cheliax used to be. In rural parts of Cheliax, too. You should ask Tonia how many children her mother has, and how many she buried, and at what age she married."

"Most dath ilani pass adulthood tests at 13, and at 14 you're considered adult regardless, though at that point you're just starting the entire dating process.  It'd be pretty normal not to find anyone you liked enough to have a kid with, until a lot later than that.  I don't actually know offhand if somebody's body is supposed to do that correctly at age 13, the topic never came up..."

"I guess the moral here is something like - try to have improvements in contraception come before improvements in agricultural productivity come before improvements in, in countermeasures against diseases that kill infants quickly and quietly and before they're actually aware of themselves..."

"Carissa, I'm noticing that a large part of myself wants out of this conversation.  I endorse my overriding it and continuing to listen, but I do want to check that you have - a purpose in mind for things, and a reason to say it now instead of a month later."

"There is a specific further point I was going to get to. I can try to - not digress on the way to it. I'm - sorry. I don't want to hurt you."

"It's not that I'm saying, don't hurt me eventually, I'm saying - don't rush it, without a reason."

"What was the further point?"

"Why no one except Yaisa will quote you prices."

"Because it's weird, and anybody suggesting a non-average behavior is out to exploit you.  Because - people who do that, aren't seen as anything else -"

"Yaisa told me that, I didn't understand what she meant, still don't, didn't seem like the time then to ask."

"What do you tell your daughters, in Cheliax the way it used to be, if you want them to have any chance of growing up to be anything? 'don't have sex'. And what do you know about a girl if she does have sex? That she's not going to be, or do, anything else."

"Is there a particular aspect of this that it's important I understand?  Because I don't understand any of it.  Yaisa is a wizard, all of you are wizards, you can use Alter Self - I don't understand."

" - I was hoping I could skip over some of the things that produce that but I guess the answer is, no, I can't do that. All right. Almost no one, in Cheliax before the Church took over, was a wizard, or would train you to be a wizard. 'Tell your daughters not to have sex until they were second circle wizards' was absurd and unviable. Not for my mother, who's a wizard herself, learned from her own father, but there were maybe five women like her in Corentyn. You couldn't send your daughter to school to be a wizard. You could send her to an apprenticeship, but - that would be sending her off to be vulnerable - ugh, I'm frustrated now, concepts keep having prerequisites - 

- for most people, 'wait until you're a second circle wizard' is an impossible rule. It was not a life path people who didn't happen to get very lucky could reasonably hope to follow. So the advice instead was usually to wait until you are married to a man who has enough money to support you and the children, and contractually obligated to do that. And that is what most reasonable girls would do, if they had any self control or common sense."

"Everything in Golarion outside of this fortress is terrible and it was worse in Cheliax before Asmodeus took over, I get that, what does any of that have to do with why somebody wouldn't put a price on sex once they became a second-circle wizard?  Or why you wouldn't have a price before then just a very high one?"

"- you have a price if you need to do that in order to eat, if the fact this probably causes you to have a baby you're not ready for in a year is less urgent than the fact that you will starve tomorrow. That's the circumstances under which people give a price. And that price is not even very high. You're going to have questions about that but I don't know how to answer them. In most countries that work like this it's some copper, maybe a silver."

"Everything is worse than I expect even after taking into account that I expect it to be worse than I expect, yes, I'm getting that too, but there's no connection I can understand between the price for people who need to eat being a silver, and other people not being able to name a price higher than that, and then none of that obviously applies to you or Ione or Meritxell or anybody here so why would only Yaisa be able to put prices on things?"

"Because we're not dath ilani, and if you grow up seeing hungry diseased women on the street begging passersby to have sex with them for a single meal - which Ione and Meritxell didn't, but I did, and their parents did, then the thing you tell your daughters is to never ever become that, that we are different and must remain different and must not make the decisions which lead down that path, that people like us are not people like them, that all of the good things in life we have we have because we are not like them.

And then you don't just change your way of thinking when the government introduces wizard education for every child smart enough to learn, because you aren't used to thinking in a way that sees all the hidden connections and sees how when lots of girls are wizards then there'll be an entirely different kind of sex work market that is compatible with the rest of their life ambitions, you aren't used to things having implications. Yaisa almost certainly has not told her parents how she makes her money, or shown them any of the things she buys, because they'd be horrified, because they'd probably kick her out so she stops being a bad influence on her younger siblings. 

And everyone else feels awkward around her, around what she's doing, because it's not that there's anything wrong with it it's just that everyone thinks there is and we've been told there is our whole lives by everyone older than us who grew up when it was true, and people don't know how to stop believing something just because it's not true anymore. My read on Yaisa is that she was very horny and very - Chaotic, frankly, the kind of person who even without the ability to stop believing things just because they're not true anymore goes 'well, just because everyone says that, it doesn't mean I have to listen to them, just because they have an argument doesn't mean I have to care about that argument' - and so she tried it, and nothing went wrong because nothing was wrong with it, but, it's going to take generations, for this particular wound in Cheliax to heal, it's going to heal by means of the people who are used to the old way dying, not by them changing their minds. Unless we make them all ilani."

"If Yaisa's Chaotic, pick a time to call her Chaotic when she's not the only person present thinking in the way that I would call Law-shaped."

"My brain is suggesting like, literally just drilling 'how to undo your conclusions when a premise you previously relied on gets falsified', but my intuition is telling me that one step is not the real problem here.  Do you know what is?"

"I think it's a thing where - the conclusion gets distilled without all the associated reasoning? If you went and asked random people in - some neighboring country where things are still like this, they would say things like 'whores are disgusting' or 'whores are worthless', they wouldn't have something they derived from some premises about educational opportunity. They inherit the societal attitude without ever checking where it came from and whether the things that produced it are still true. Telling them to rethink won't help if they weren't thinking in the first place. 

If you mean how do you convince me or Ione or Meritxell - when I try to think how to name a number for you it just feels like I'm being asked how to name a price for breaking a promise. It's not something you do for a price. And if I just tell myself that's stupid and to come up with a number anyway, I can feel myself just - producing random numbers like a beaten prisoner who'll name as many accomplices as you want, not doing something that draws on my wants."

"Step one, stop trying that.  I'm not saying that I never beat up my brain and force it to do things it rather wouldn't, but it takes a strong reason and I usually make pretty sure I understand what's going on in there first, if it's not a major emergency."

"If it seemed to you that Chaotic people were more able to resist failing in that way - then consider the hypothesis floated that what you're calling 'Chaotic' is a different subsection of that Law which neither you nor the so-called Chaotic have mastered in totality and completion.  Nonconformity is something trained in dath ilan and we could not be Law-shaped without that.  If you're conforming to what you were taught, to what other people seem to believe, to what other people seem to want you to believe, to what you think everyone believes, you're not conforming to the Law."

"That does not surprise me, and it would not surprise me if the true thing beneath what we call Chaos is actually a shard of what dath ilan calls Law, since, otherwise you'd sort of think gods wouldn't be Chaotic. Though I don't think Yaisa is - conforming to the Law even when it breaks from everyone around her, that doesn't land quite right as a description of what she's doing.

I agree that she is doing better than the rest of us. And part of why I - didn't want to wait a month - was that I think you ought to know, that she's doing so well, that she's probably suffered socially for it, that she's right, it seemed like the kind of thing you'd want to know."

"In all frankness, what I learned is that, first of all, there's some incredible piece of insanity buried into everybody around me, to which Yaisa is immune, and I have to not talk about what Yaisa can do in terms of setting prices, because people might exhibit undefined behaviors.  This was an important fact and I needed to know it."

"The second thing I learned is that, in fact, everybody around me, by extrapolation, probably has a bunch of other - stuff that a dath ilani would think of as completely made out of obviously invalid reasoning steps - and it's possible for you to know about that, without being able to fix it or even manually counter it each time."

"Which was also an important fact I needed to know quickly."

"I think I understand a little better what Ione was worried about, and then Asmodia, but I - don't know how to teach things in an order that minimizes damage as existing thoughts start to break and rearrange, I don't even see - whether I should be trying to fix things a little at a time, or build up a huge stock of sanity technique before anybody tries to do any mental housecleaning, so that people know how to fix the problems they spot -"

"Dath ilani education is for having children grow up correctly.  None of it, that I know, is about how to safely repair children who grew up wrong."  

- nod. 

- tentative success, then, on planting the seeds that seemed most essential for Keltham to flee to a secluded location if he flees, and on making Ione and Asmodia's periodically urging Keltham not to give lectures that destroy too much Asmodeanism less suspicious. Tentative failure on saying only consistent-seeming things, not that he's pointed out an inconsistency yet, but she predicts he will and so she can't call it a tentative success while predicting that -

"I don't think it's your job, by the way, not to break us. Or not to break me, at least, I suppose it's more complicated with everyone else. I don't know what you should be trying to do but - I won't be angry, or feel like I got a worse deal than I expected, if I end up noticing I'm full of lies and not even knowing where to go from there. The alternative isn't not being full of lies, right, just not noticing."

"Maybe part of what I'm supposed to do, is frontload teaching positive thinking patterns before teaching the negative counters?  So that, if like, somebody's internal motivations turn out to be totally insane in some way, they can - fall back to knowing how somebody Lawful would think instead?  Instead of just dividing by zero, undefined behavior?"

"...I worry that even a positive shadow of what Civilization does, rather than doesn't do, will include a thousand passing bits of violently anti-Golarion sanity like being able to say how much a sex act is worth to you financially."

"Probably it will. I am not sure there's a way around that, and  - that's okay."