This kind of perspective-taking, in the special case of learning to think as if you've erased a piece of knowledge from your own mind, is a vital mental skill that appears as a subskill of many others.

It appears, for example, in the art of figuring out which 'premises' and 'lemmas' are needed to 'reason-step-by-step' through a 'mathproof'.  If you know too well that three times three is supposed to equal nine, if you can't 'perspective_take-on-ignorance' and block the great obviousness out of your mind, you'll have a harder time remembering that multiplication is 'defined-out-of' addition.  You will have a hard time coming up with the argument 'built-up-out-of-simpler-terms', the one that says, 'Well, to see why three times three is nine, consider that three plus three plus three is nine', because it will be so obvious to you that three times three is nine that you can no longer slow down and say why that is.  You won't know that three plus three equals six is a critical step along the way to three times three equals nine.

In the same sense, here, they're trying to grab private ownership by individuals out of air, because it's so obvious that they can't properly erase it from their own minds as an available solution, and think of solutions simpler than that, which would also solve the simpler problems as they are being posed.  Not as well, yes, but somebody with an erased mind wouldn't know their solution was worse than some other one.

This skill of being able to blank out a habitual solution from your mind, and look for a simpler one, is also the same sort of skill you'd use to, say, look past 'Ione and Pilar and Carissa went off because of a Conspiracy', where the thought of a Conspiracy seems so ready to hand as a solution, and say, 'Well maybe Ione and Pilar went off with Carrissa to fix some issue that happened because of Ione and Pilar being out of commission for a couple of days.'  If Keltham wasn't confident in his training in this skill of blanking-out, he really wouldn't dare to consider Conspiracy as a hypothesis because he actually would see it inevitably everywhere even in the Ordinary world, as a solution that leaps to mind and blanks out other solutions and can't properly be forgotten.

When Keltham first arrived at the Worldwound, the seventh-circle wizard who showed up for his Teleport told him that he'd be safer and more able to pursue his goals in Cheliax, and able to purchase passage back from Ostenso to elsewhere, and added 'I give you my word'.  Keltham tried to explain to him that, from Keltham's perspective, the apparent implied information being presented to him was along the lines of 'you would probably worry that if you go to this place in Ostenso, you might not be able to pay for passage back, and you wouldn't usually believe me if I just told you otherwise, but you'll probably believe me if I add "I give you my word" about it'.  Keltham's actual state of ignorance was such that even this implied information was not very useful to him, because the main things he was doubting were on the order of 'Are those giant monsters inside the forcefield possibly the real good guys here?' or 'Does any such place as Cheliax actually exist?'

So reprise:  Somebody has the bright idea of working the farms, defending the grain-store, and only people who work on the farms are allowed to access the grain-store, which is what incentivizes the farm work.  They are, in a certain sense, guarding stuff.  But they haven't really conceptualized it as something tagged with a person yet.  They're guarding the stuff but it's not tagged as 'their stuff' and this indeed is why it must be guarded, anyone else could just come and take it, after all.

What problem might they encounter next, and what solution might they invent for it that isn't just leaping straight to private property?  Blank the solution you already know out of your mind.

Some people will be lazy and not do their share of the work.

Kick them out of the guarded farming area.

People accuse people they just don't like of slacking, to get them kicked out and get more food for themselves.

But if that actually decreases the farming labor, that will mean less food for themselves later on, because there'll be fewer workers?  Perhaps this is only a failure mode that exists when people don't have enough food to go around...

Keltham is also confused about how people would be able to credibly accuse random others they don't like of slacking; obviously there'd be one person assigned to monitor any particular other person's work and report whether they were slacking or not.  Or rather, if they weren't already doing that, they'd start once the accusations of slacking began.

If his students claim that can't work, are they sure they haven't just disproven the existence of corporations in general?

If you do that, then the person responsible for monitoring whether someone else is slacking can say 'I'll report you for slacking and get you expelled unless you bribe me'.

Can't threaten dath ilani. But the person who is slacking could offer the person monitoring favors in exchange for not reporting them; that's just a trade.

This does seem to prove that corporations in general cannot exist.  Well done.

Well, they can't pay everyone the exact same thing, at least.

Keltham doesn't see how giving people different amounts of grain solves the problem where you apparently can't trust managers not to take bribes to deliver inaccurate reports about how much their direct-reports worked.

Well, the way you do it in Cheliax is pay-for-work, hire hatmakers per hat they turn in, and then no one's making a subjective report on anyone else's quality, they are paying per hat.

What if that gets you... SLOPPILY MADE LOW-QUALITY HATS?

The price is agreed in advance, and for each hat, you can pay it or not, so you pay for the hats worth that price and don’t buy the others.

Carissa sure is bringing in a lot of complicated infrastructure here!  All this talk of 'pay'.  It would take a very great genius indeed to invent an infrastructure as complicated as this sounds, and bring it in as the best solution to the current problem about farming and slacking.

If Keltham tries to extract just the useful part of this solution, it sounds like Carissa is saying that everybody should be assigned their own particular plot of land, to farm, and then we look at whether somebody's produce yields passed a certain minimum threshold, and people under that threshold get kicked out and don't get to eat.  This is better because everybody can see whether a worker did enough work, or not, and so they don't have the same problem with false accusations of slacking or managers taking bribes.

- maybe. But also you could say they can only eat the grain that grew on their plot. And then they'll want that to be a lot of grain rather than a barely sufficient amount of grain.

Soooo... if Keltham is getting this right... the key assumption is that people can direct varying levels of effort into farming, and higher efforts yield higher yields, and the higher yields are observable.  So we assign everybody a plot of land, they get to keep all the food from that land, and that incentivizes everyone to... well, actually it incentivizes everyone to work just hard enough to feed themselves with pretty high probability.  This brilliant trick eliminates the need for anybody else to monitor anyone.  Some people will probably die of starvation due to bad luck, but better them than everyone!

Sounds like the work of reconstructing Civilization is all done!  Just tag equal-sized lots of land as belonging to various individual people - where the tags are a kind of social construct about who gets to eat the produce from the land - and we leave it up to whoever eats the produce to grow it.

People seemed to be talking about some system more complicated than that, but Keltham doesn't see yet why it would be necessary.  Once you know which person gets to eat the edibles that grow on any particular piece of land, you're done.

Some people will trade.

What, so, like, some people have food, and other people have food, and they both give the food they have to each other?  What a strange activity.  Why would anyone do that?

Well, say you grew more food than you can eat, and someone else grew too little, and yours is just going to rot anyway, so you say to them, you can eat my food if you also do some work on my farm while I laze around doing nothing.

They will inevitably SLACK OFF making this project DOOMED TO FAILURE.  Wasn't that the whole reason why land plots got tagged with people in the first place?

Carissa isn't being consistent here in what she claims will go wrong!  She only says things will go wrong with Keltham's ideas, and not that the same things will go wrong with her ideas!  What an 'epistemically-unfair' way of arguing for 'relative-attractiveness-of-policy judgments'!

The problem with Keltham's proposal was that the slacker-reviewers didn't have any reason to give accurate judgments or even mostly accurate judgments. A person paying another person to work on their land for them wants to keep doing this if the person is doing a good job and not if they're slacking. And they can just tell them to stop, and not trade them food, if they're not doing good work. 

All right, Keltham admits of the possibility that you would give somebody some of the food from your farm if in exchange they did some work on your farm.  Now has Civilization been fully reinvented?

What if I'm starving but my crop will be ready in a week, Meritxell says, and I want to borrow some food from someone else for a week.

This added complexity seems well within the reach of dath ilani.  Sure.  Now we're done though.