On the clear distant level on which Carissa Sevar is calmly observing Carissa Sevar and observing that this is satisfactory for causing in Carissa Sevar the dread and panic that they just agreed was the objective, she notes for Abarco's benefit that Keltham has ordered her not to have sex with anyone without his prior approval. 

"Well," Elias says cheerfully, "I guess you'll have to lie to Keltham."

Everyone else (Tonia excluded) gets 20 lashes, except that it's 10 for Asmodia.

(Ione decided not to argue, when she heard the details.  She doesn't want to create resentment among the other girls, and also, is in fact worried about letting herself go soft or look scared while she's still got to live in Cheliax.)

Pilar, in principle, should now also undergo some punishment bad enough to scare her.  The problem is, nobody including Security or Subirachs has any idea what scares Pilar besides her failing in her duties to Asmodeus.  Pilar did just spend the afternoon up until the exercise ended with Security sincerely trying to torture her in a way she'd find unpleasant, not totally without success.  This may as well be said to count.

"I - Pilar, I - I didn't think you'd do that - why."

Pilar looks worn, if only to Chelish eyes.

"A few days ago somebody in Chelish intelligence implied that they couldn't rely on my ability to hold out under torture if that hadn't been tested."

"Just to be clear here, you did, in fact, sell me out?"

"Yes.  I - don't need to explain, right, why it was you, not anybody else, certainly not Tonia."

"The amount of heresy on Project Lawful is not going to end well."

"I'm sorry.  I'm not much pretending to not be a heretic so I'll just say it."

"Eh.  Don't worry about it.  I've learned a valuable lesson about the true meaning of friendship."

Tonia can't make herself eat her cookie, but she stares at it all evening.

PL-timestamp:  Day 13 (10) / Morning

Keltham is pretty gung-ho about today!  If all goes according to schedule - this being much less of a silly thing to think in dath ilan than Golarion and some intuitions haven't caught up yet for him - today will mark the signing of the Project's articles of incorporation and the interim compact between Cheliax and the Project!  And then as soon as they send him some domain experts he can -

Everyone at breakfast looks - well, they look the same as always, to Keltham, but the noise level is audibly much less, people aren't talking much to each other.  Everyone has a cake plate, some with untouched pieces of cake on them.

Ione comes over as soon as she sees him.

"Keltham, advisory," Ione says quietly, "the war was going okay and it's still going okay and Cheliax is still going to win in the end, this sort of thing happens during a war, but Cheliax lost one of its eighth-circles last night, soul-trapped.  Name was Delmus.  Eventually Cheliax wins and frees his soul but he is not likely to come out of it okay or, functioning, it's a situation where when Cheliax finishes the war, he goes to Hell, not back to life.  Sevar didn't know Delmus at all well but she knew him, he was an instructor for one of her classes a long time ago.  I - don't think I'd actually advise that you try to comfort her about it, unless she asks, there's too much you don't - get, yet."

Keltham can think of all sorts of additional questions, just like with most of the sentences ever uttered in front of him in Golarion, and he also knows that this is not the time.  Questions will keep.

"Understood.  Your recommendation about today's schedule?"

(He mostly puts to the back of his mind the haze of speculation about whether the Conspiracy is about to ask him to develop weapons, or if this means from a trope standpoint that the Nidal war is going to be a big deal in the plot.  Those questions will also keep, and he does like to have the option of not walking about constantly consumed by anxieties like that.  His gendertrope also says that when others are shaken, it is a time for him to be less shaken, if he happens to have that option.)

"Consider going lighter for the day on new math that's going to push our minds to the limit to understand.  If you have that option, my guess is that giving everybody an off day to be gloomy is not the correct move, and it's better to be making progress instead."

"Understood."

This does take some replanning - next up after Utility is Decision, prerequisite unto Coordination; and to explain the preliminary steps of math there using conventional examples, he's going to need to explain computer programs... well, he can find something else.

Keltham, then, will jump ahead of Decision, to a lesser fragment of Coordination.  While the ordering of the subjects as math is somewhat different, on reflection, dath ilani children growing up sure do know what is a cooperation-defection-dilemma, long before they learn the logical decision theory to solve them Lawfully.

...should he be worried that cooperation-defection-dilemma comes out as eleven syllables, instead of three, if he just tries to say it in Taldane?  Probably.  Likewise that 'punishment', meaning the sting in an attempted 'threat' payoff matrix, is one syllable instead of six.  You could take a good guess at what kind of wreck this world would be, just from its language.

The first thing Keltham tells everyone is to please prepare Comprehend Languages tomorrow; he should test the effects of lecturing in Baseline.  Which he mostly expects to not work, but value-of-information, if it does work that's great to know, and generates value over time, so better to run the experiment sooner rather than later.  Value-of-information is one syllable in Baseline, by the way, just 'value-of-information'.

The classic example of a cooperation-defection-dilemma is one that, dath ilan supposes, must have been common hundreds or maybe thousands of years before the times that are remembered:  Two farmers, both with almost no technology, and a small supply of not-very-heritage-optimized grains that they must both plant, and eat.  Each farmer plans to eat enough seed to survive, albeit somewhat miserably, and plant enough seed that next year there will be sufficient to both eat and plant; that is all the grain that they have.

But roving bears sometimes smash open grain-enclosures and steal grain.  So each farmer's options include faking a bear attack on the other's grain-enclosure and stealing some of the grain there for themselves.  Not enough that the other farmer starves and becomes desperate and dangerous, but enough that the other farmer will be miserably hungry this year and also the next year, because they won't have enough grain to plant for future plenty.

The other farmer could, of course, guess that the bear attack was fake, and steal their missing grains back.  But this can't plausibly be anything except deliberate action, it would be too much coincidence.  Which obviously starts a cycle of both farmers having to sleep with their grain, and spend a lot of time watching for attacks, at the end of which they'll both lose a substantial amount of the time they needed for planting.

If you consider each farmer's available actions, and the payoffs to both of them based on both farmers' actions, it might look like:

                                      Farmer 2:
                          Cooperate-2:      Defect-2:
Farmer 1:      
Cooperate-1:      (100, 100)         (30, 120)
Defect-1:             (120, 30)           (70, 70)

...where the labels '1' and '2' also remind you of whose payoff is whose, that is, Farmer-1 gets the first element of the payoff and Farmer-2 gets the second element.  So if Farmer-1 Defects and Farmer-2 Cooperates, Farmer-1 gets a payoff of 120, and Farmer-2 gets a payoff of 30.

This example seems to have been well-chosen; the students are following along and not making baffled faces about any aspects of the hypothetical.

The ideal solution to this problem is something that gets covered in the technical lectures following Utility, on Decision, but on reflection dath ilani children all know about this problem-concept before anybody tries to teach ideal solutions to it.

There is, of course, a pure-Good solution to this problem, which is that both farmers care about what happens to sapient life in general, and care about themselves as only special cases of sapient life.  They won't impose a direct cost of -70 on the other farmer, for a benefit of +20, because their real or ultimate utilities are a sum over all sapience evenly weighted in proportion to the reality-weight of all those sapient beings, everything with - your language has no word for 'qualia', right, on some less strained day Keltham needs to ask some carefully constructed questions so as not to give away what he's trying to test, but for now he is going to guess that Taldane lacks the word 'qualia' and not that Golarion inhabitants lack the thing the word is talking about.

Anyways, that's the Good solution - everyone's real utility is just a sum of everyone's payoffs, and everybody knows that this is the case about everybody, and so everybody individually decides to do whatever they need to do, in order to end up in the matrix-cell with the maximum sum of payoffs.

There's a Keltham solution, which is that you don't have very much of that pure Good - you care about other people close to you, maybe, but these farmers are not lovers nor friends - but you do care a lot about not stealing from strangers.  If you live next to a Keltham, that you know is a Keltham, you can be pretty sure he won't fake a bear attack on you; the difficulty, of course, is in the knowing, because this world has no truthspells.

But suppose now that both farmers are Abaddon-style pure Evil, not partially selfish but absolutely selfish.  They care about their own food supplies, the satisfaction of eating now and eating in the future; nothing else.

Is there a Lawful solution for absolutely selfish people?

"They would both agree to have a King who investigates supposed bear attacks and punishes thieves," offers Gregoria.

"There's no King, and if there were, he'd be a selfish King who'd take almost all their grain himself."

"Unless, of course, there's a Lawful solution to that too.  But if there's a Lawful solution there, you'd ask if it could be simplified back to just the two farmers again."

Gregoria thinks that yeah, selfish King who takes almost all the grain is kind of just how it works out. She doesn't volunteer this answer.

...is there any such thing as a lecture on Law which isn't accidentally trying to explode Asmodeanism?  Sometimes Ione does wonder if Keltham knows, and is playing with all of them.  Maybe he can beat Detect Thoughts using ilani disciplines far beyond what he speaks of openly.

"I think - if they didn't expect to get away with the bear attack - wouldn't the first farmer not fake the bear attack, because they'd know the other person would steal back grain, even if they didn't think the attack was fake?  I mean, even if it was a bear attack, a purely Evil farmer would steal grain from the other farmer to make up for that, right..."