"I think mostly people want power for - its own sake? For the sake of being able to do whatever they want? Because they did one murder and were already going to be frozen if they got caught so why not do anything at all to avoid getting caught?"

Keltham is following you on the part where somebody who did one true-murder and will be suspended if caught, would prefer to become sole ruler over the world, in preference to being caught and frozen.  The part where there are enough people like this, successfully and stably cooperating with each other while defecting against the rest of Civilization, that they can take over the Government and the Keepers -

Look, Keltham was raised in a way where, if one single member of the Hypothetical Conspiracy had managed to broadcast to the rest of Civilization the whole truth about the Conspiracy's grimdark misdeeds, and told everyone where to look for evidence and proof, and then demanded a billion gold pieces in exchange for that, plus that the next few attractive true-murderers of the appropriate sex be turned over to them for sadistic purposes, as would be less than one ten-thousandth the number of victims under the previous regime, etcetera, the obvious thing to do would have been to pay them after overthrowing the Conspiracy.

There is very plausibly a non-Dark Conspiracy using 2% of Civilization's resources on something important and terribly secret.  You can tell this because Keltham has - in fact, now that he reflects on it - been brought up in a way that would make him feel like this is the obviously right and proper thing to do, if you have some important thing to be running a non-Dark Conspiracy about; and everybody would owe the Keepers and upper Governance gratitude for having taken on this secret duty.

If there was a Dark Conspiracy, Keltham should have been raised much more on a diet of messages about how, in Hypothetical Dark Conspiracy Dath Ilans, if you try to blow the whistle on them instead of joining them for scraps at the table, they will inevitably catch you and turn you over to their sadists to be made use of, and then tossed to the true death when they're done with you.

And not raised, as Keltham actually was raised, on a steady diet of fictional messages about how, in a world like that, you need to keep the secret and organize with your friends and overthrow the Dark Conspiracy.

Nor should he possess the decision theory about how to coordinate counter-conspiracies like that, how to wait for an obvious beacon-time to naturally occur, like a solar eclipse or something, and have 10% of the population shout "NOW!" followed by the other 90% shouting "NOW!" and suddenly turning on their hypothetical Dark Overlords.

The Dark Conspiracy that supposedly rules dath ilan is really impressively faking the part where the ordinary people like Keltham are being brought up in a way that makes the Dark Conspiracy's life more difficult and dangerous.  If they're trying to countersignal to Keltham how Ordinary they are using costly signals, that plot really-ass succeeded.  Keltham wouldn't do that if he were the Dark Conspiracy.

...probably the Dark Conspiracy pretends to be the non-Dark Conspiracy using 2% of Civilization's resources on something important and terribly secret, if there's room for one of those? 

They're really really not doing it the way Keltham would do it, even taking into account that they could be trying to fool him about that.

Dath ilani kids get their parents fooling them about certain things for years, until the kids figure it out on their own, despite the actual coordinated Conspiracy of adults trying to fool children about those things, with the purpose specifically of training dath ilani children to break out of false realities.

If nobody had ever done that to Keltham, he really wouldn't have jumped up and said, aha! Civilization clearly ought to be elaborately training children to break out of false realities and isn't! this must be the work of a Dark Conspiracy!

It's not something a Dark Conspiracy would be wise to do even taking into account that this is exactly what they'd like you to believe.

(It is at this point that Asmodia truly and properly appreciates how much Pharasma must personally hate her and her life.)

Sure, Gregoria finds that pretty convincing. She really only strongly objected to Keltham's lack of imagination about what Conspiracies do when they exist; it sounds like he has pretty good reason to think they don't. 

Well, to be fair, Civilization does not have records about really serious large-scale Conspiracies, and if Golarion does, it is very possible that Keltham needs to be educated about this!  This is more than usually likely to be a point where Golarion has something to teach the silly naive dath ilani!

For that matter, if Civilization actually is run by a Dark Conspiracy, Keltham plausibly would have been raised with huge obvious blind spots about it that somebody from Golarion could see through.  It's a great place to probe Keltham hard and try to catch him out in some blatant error he apparently isn't realizing for some odd reason.

- they will totally take that as a challenge.

No blatant errors yet, though.

So this whole question, Keltham admits, is not something he has actually given much thought before.  There is of course no standard rationale you're told in Civilization for why the Keepers and Governance couldn't possibly be corrupt.  That would be ridiculous in the light of elementary Security reasoning: obviously, if you're inside a Dark Conspiracy, any standard rationale like that you get, will be corrupt.  Any dath ilani who wants to reason this out should do that on their own or with a few personally-known trusted friends, obviously.  Probably even a Dark Conspiracy wouldn't think it could get away with having standard social beliefs and arguments about how they couldn't possibly be ruling society from the shadows; individuals would be smart enough to reinvent the incredibly simple argument from 'security-mindset' about how no such standard arguments should exist, and that actually would be a giveaway.

It's an unduly fascinating question, which Keltham should really extract himself from, and get back to his original intended lecture topic, which was the forms of Governance.

He's totally not going to do that and will go on talking about this anyways.

So!  On a few moments' 'first-reflection', it seems to Keltham that estimating the probability of Civilization being run by a Dark Conspiracy boils down to (1) the question of whether Civilization's apparently huge efforts to build anti-Dark-Conspiracy citizens constitute sincere work that makes the Dark Conspiracy's life harder, or fake work designed to only look like that; and (2) the prior probability that the Keepers and Governance would have arrived on the scene already corrupted, during the last major reorganization of Civilization a few decades ago.  Keltham basically doesn't think it's possible for criminal-sociopaths to take over Keepers and Governance that start out actually functioning the way they currently claim to function, nor for criminal Conspirators to successfully conceal a major Conspiracy from a functional society not run in toto by that Conspiracy.

With respect to point (1), Keltham would first like to observe that a tyranny like this - he uses the Taldane term 'tyranny', it's shorter and feels like it has more of the right connotations than the nearest Baseline term - doesn't seem like it could most effectively secure its power by electing to construct a veneer of Civilization and hiding behind that?  Where that veneer involves raising the non-Conspiracy kids knowing enough Law that they won't submit to threats, want to overthrow Conspiracies, and know mathematical protocols they can personally verify that sure seem apparently useful for overthrowing Conspiracies?

A more sensible tyranny should try to have a population of technically literate but obedient order-followers, frightened of retribution, knowing how to do chemistry but not knowing the Law of 'decision-theory' whereby they could try to coordinate with each other or that would make it obvious they should ignore 'threats'.  Law-knowers who start out in a world of threatenable people, which makes it be not a 'threat' but only the ordinary optimal strategy for the Tyranny to kill any Law-knowers, will find it obvious that they should conceal their knowledge and wait for opportunities to strike.  But Civilization is a whole society of Law-knowers, and those will find it obvious that they should all coordinate in shouting 'NOW!' and ignore threats past that point.

This seems, to Keltham, like not the optimal way to arrange a tyranny that wants to hold power and exercise as much power as possible?  Such a tyranny should restrict knowledge of Law to a tiny clique of the smartest people who are allowed to know how the Law of Coordination works.  It should run heredity-optimization at a level where it's not trying to make the average people as smart as an average dath ilani, so people aren't smart enough to correctly rebuild broken decision theories that their society educated them with.  The median dath ilani on the current system probably is smart enough to do that, reinvent the basic results of correct decision theory if maybe not all the math, even if the rest of society is telling them to use a broken decision theory instead.  So maybe more like Intelligence 14 than Intelligence 16-17?  Then the tyrants form a separate breeding group with heredity-optimization for much higher 'thinkoomph', the equivalent of wizards-with-headbands compared to Intelligence 10 people.

This, obviously, is not what Civilization looks like!  Keltham can observe that just from direct introspection on how smart he is!  And how much stuff he knows!

(Is that what the successful ilani Cheliax will look like? She doesn't actually like it, but that might be a personal deficit, a lack of appreciation for tyranny where it comes from limiting what people have the chance to learn and realize. She is pretty sure that the kind of tyranny that suits her personally is the kind where everyone gets a decent education and can then rise as far as their strength will take them, landing in the place they deserve. But she can see how that would be much harder to actually implement than keeping most people confused and ignorant. But surely if you were a dath ilani tyrant, with all their resources, you could do the thing you actually preferred most...)

Suppose that Keltham is wrong about his point 1.  Suppose that the optimal strategy for a tyranny in full control, is indeed for some reason to hide behind a veneer of Civilization full of costly signals of non-Conspiracy and disobedient people like Keltham.  Under this assumption, the optimal strategy for a Dark Conspiracy looks like what you think Civilization is supposed to look like, and therefore the two cases are not distinguishable by observation.

Then we have to consider the prior before evidence, which means, considering the question of how you'd end up with a Dark Conspiracy in charge in the first place, and how likely those scenarios look compared to Governance Uncorrupted.

To Keltham it looks pretty impossible for an existing, well-functioning structure of Keepers and Governance to be taken over by infiltrating criminals.  Because, like, the Keepers and Governance have considered that.  Some people out there are having so much fun making sure that no small group of criminals can take over the Keepers and Governance.  It would take unshared magic and mind-control and even then Keltham isn't sure it could work, they game things like that, they wouldn't be unprepared.  There will be cutouts and warning signs and hidden counter-conspiratorial groups.  One of the Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festivals had the aliens taking over every 'network-connected' 'computer' in Civilization simultaneously.  Governance runs prep like that but more of it.

So - plowing ahead quickly on this reasoning and thinking things through out loud - it seems to Keltham that the main way you get Corrupted Keepers and Governance, is not by criminals successfully infiltrating and taking over some earlier system that looked a lot like Uncorrupted Keepers and Governance.  There must be some Corrupted earlier system that is run by criminals in toto, and which then - hypothetically - builds a more sophisticated system of Corrupted Keepers and Governance, to even more strongly hold power while looking even more to the rest of Civilization like it's totally not that.

At this point Keltham wants to deploy some sort of inductive argument from people doing, like, the obvious stuff they ought to do at every historical point along the way?  A high-functioning society that isn't corrupt to start with will have some well-calibrated estimate of how much its pre-Governance can be trusted, how robust they are to various kinds of criminal infiltration?  If a government looks like something that it's possible for clever criminals to take over, you won't give that government the sort of powers that criminals could use to entrench themselves, obviously.

Golarion has these kinds of problems because Golarion has wizards and clerics.  Because one thousand people are most of a country's combat potential.  Criminals rule in Golarion because ordinary people can't stop them, not because ordinary people could've totally stopped them but decided not to for some reason.  You shouldn't expect to see the same phenomenon in a nonmagical world.

It doesn't seem very obvious that without magic weapons technology turns out such that ordinary people could stop any government they didn't like. And, well, usually when people try that it's not that they fail so much as that decades of bloodshed ensue.

Okay, but, to be blunt here, point the first, have they tried that literally without magic in a world where magic has never existed to give rise in the first place to horrible governments where a few people are in charge of everybody else, because why would nonmagical people ever do that in the first place?

Point the second, Keltham doesn't know how Golarion ended up with average Intelligence 10 - that one seventh-circle wizard Keltham talked to at the Worldwound thought it might have something to do with Earthfall - but maybe at Intelligence 10 people actually are stupid enough to put a few people in charge of everyone else and then too stupid to ever manage to get together and come up with Something Else Which Is Not That.

However at average Intelligence 14 - or whatever it was before dath ilan's nascent pre-Civilization figured out 'natural selection' and 'heredity-optimization' and started deliberately increasing 'thinkoomph' further - you can probably invent and run 'policy prediction-markets'.  Maybe just a few of them, without 'computers' to do lots of calculations in a golem-like fashion, but some.  And then the 'policy prediction-markets' can tell you which actions will have which consequences when it comes to trying a different government system or different strategies for forming one.

Frankly it does not seem to Keltham that you should need 'policy prediction-markets' to avoid decades of bloodshed ensuing, especially if it has happened more than once, you should be able to have everyone get together and decide to do Something Else Which Is Not That.  But with 'policy prediction-markets' you can definitely do it; anybody who makes an incorrect prediction about how to form a new government will lose money.

This really seems too optimistic but they admittedly haven't lived in a world that would try it.

"That 'policy prediction-market' business sounds kind of important actually?  Can you possibly say how those work?"

Shouldn't take long!  Keltham would have needed to explain those to explain Governance anyways!

A prediction market is when lots of people bet on something observable, instead of it being a bet between just two people.  Let's say that a prediction share pays out 1 gold (100 copper) if it rains at any time tomorrow, or pays out 0 copper otherwise.  Then Alis can say 'I'll sell up to 1000 shares of Rain Tomorrow for 60 copper each' if she thinks the probability of rain tomorrow is noticeably under 60%, and Bahb can wander up and say 'Sure I'll buy 500 of those at 60' if he thinks the probability of rain tomorrow is noticeably over 60%; and then if some clouds show up at evening today, Karal says, 'I'll buy your 500 shares at 75', and Bahb thinks that 75 sounds around right to him, so he sells his shares to Karal and pockets a 15-copper profit per share.

Blah blah market-makers hang around and sell or buy based on technical market trends about what the public information looks like, instead of on the basis of having private information, so people can buy into the prediction markets at only very slight premiums, even if nobody else has private information right then.

Blah blah you can subsidize a market by saying you're willing to buy or sell at your starting estimate of 60% or whatever, and then anybody who disagrees with you about that in either direction will wander up and buy or sell from you.

Blah blah this is a very simple automatic market-making algorithm if somebody wants to subsidize a market continuously and isn't worried about losing a bunch of copper whenever it rains out.

Blah blah you can ask a bunch of separate questions for 'what's the chance X happens if we do this, or this, or this'.  You only end up doing one thing Y; the market on 'does X happen if we do Y?' pays out 1 gold if X happens; all other markets are negated and everybody gets back their original investment (as it was kept in some standard store of value like equity in a huge basket of well-known corporations).  

Civilization aggregates votes into Delegates then Electors then Representatives then Legislators.  Legislators negotiate among themselves about what Civilization wants to have happen.  They debate arguments from Very Serious People about which observables to measure to get at unobservable outcomes.  The actual step of predicting which policies yield which observables is done by a policy prediction-market.  Then, usually, the Legislators do whatever's predicted with the highest probability to lead to observables that seem like they should strongly tie to a good actual outcome.

Unless the 'best' policy according to the market looks like it'll have bad effects for which nobody has figured out how to predict observable correlates.  Which, like, does ever happen, but causes a lot of Very Serious People to start shrieking angrily at the Legislators and each other about 'civilizational inadequacy'.

A few years or sometimes decades later, the observables come in, and the prediction market on the action actually taken pays out.

The point being, it's not the job of Civilization's leaders to foresee the future.  Answering 'What happens if we do this?' is the job of all of Civilization, including whoever's currently closest to being like Nemamel.  Answering 'But what results do we even want, really?' is more the job of the top level of Governance.

Incidentally, if there was actually a Dark Conspiracy in dath ilan, they'd have to be messing with the prediction-market results in order to make sure their own preferred actions got taken - presumably by making all the other actions not taken look worse, rather than having the taken action look better, so that people didn't notice the actual actions taken were resulting in systematically off predictions - so basically all the major market-makers in prediction markets and all the home traders would have to be in on the Conspiracy, since otherwise, they'd notice something off about the market movements they were obsessively watching all day.

Once Project Lawful gets to the point where anybody besides Keltham knows anything about Prestidigitation-chemistry and spellsilver mining, and once they've got more experiments they're considering trying than they have the resources to try, Project Lawful will obviously set up and subsidize an internal prediction market on which chemistry experiments will pan out.

Asmodia asked LITERALLY YESTERDAY how to aggregate lots of people's different predictions for 'who will Keltham try dating next' into a single estimate and was FOBBED OFF with some simplistic rules about writing down a series of estimates on a sheet of paper tacked onto a wall!

Kids usually do start with that before they buy into prediction markets -

Asmodia is not a KID she is a SECOND-CIRCLE WIZARD with 18 INTELLIGENCE and a +6 WISDOM HEADBAND who was headed for the WORLDWOUND and starting THIS EVENING she is going to run an ACTUAL FUCKING PREDICTION MARKET about who Keltham tries dating next so that Project Lawful has ANY EXPERIENCE with doing this CORRECTLY before they have to use prediction markets to decide between EXPENSIVE SPELLSILVER MINING EXPERIMENTS.

...okay.

Asmodia, is alter Asmodia this invested in this?

"...uh, sorry."

(If alterAsmodia wasn't this invested before, she is now.  Well, alterAsmodia having visible, uh, Tendencies about Things was going to happen somehow.)

Apology accepted!  It's fine to care about things.

Now, to return to the more somber topic:

There's a loophole in the logic saying that, in nonmagical societies, the rest of the world can outfight the world's military.

'Economically_scalable-weapons.'  The class of weaponry where you can just go on spending more money if you want the weapons to be even more destructive.

Once those kinds of weapons are invented, a handful of people could, in principle, cow all the rest, if those other people submitted to threats.

The last time Civilization underwent a major reorganization, a few decades ago, it was being reorganized out of something that already had scalable weapons, since there's no record since then of scalable weapons having been discovered for the first time.  You could imagine that this reorganization was a cover for a Dark Conspiracy that already ruled everything, to set up Keepers and Governance that it controlled, and then it hid away all the history books suggesting that things had ever been different...

...And then, apparently, taught everybody not to submit to threats, once they were hiding?  This, by assumption, apparently, is totally the best course of action for them to hold on to power?  They should build a fake Civilization and hide behind that?  Great idea!  The best idea!  Even the smartest Dark Conspiracy can't think of any better ones!

But again one must ask, how did this Dark Conspiracy arise in the first place?  How likely is the most likely historical pathway for that, compared to historical pathways that lead to Governance Uncorrupted?  By the time a society is able to build complicated expensive powerful nonmagical weapons that a handful of people could use to outfight the rest, this society should have had, decades earlier, centuries earlier, far more than enough mathematical sophistication to run a 'paper-cryptographic_protocol'...

That probably didn't translate.

And Keltham should probably try to describe in any case some of the actual countermeasures that Civilization is known to have in its arsenal against Dark Conspiracies.