- well, she'll go back to making swords. But more uneasily.

The problem with this entire plan, of course, is that it relies on a non-dath-ilani being able to predict how a dath ilani reacts to anything, at all.

PL-timestamp:  Day 21 (17) / Morning

Keltham's taking this day a bit slower.  He's hopefully potentially given the new candidates anything they can do with their time, if they want to play around with known chemical reactions and try to master Prestidigitation chemistry on their own, and they've got math to catch up on too.

He'll spend the morning being mean to poor Yaisa...

PL-timestamp:  Day 21 (17) / Lunch

...have lunch brought to him privately, so he can eat quietly, and disappoint anybody anticipating or dreading a Keltham-Avaricia encounter...

PL-timestamp:  Day 21 (17) / Early Afternoon

...do all the things, wizard practice, scroll practice, reading magical theory books...

They've turned up some alchemy books for him too, by now, and... wow.  Just wow.

PL-timestamp:  Day 21 (17) / Late Afternoon

Keepers-only lecture to Meritxell, Pilar, and Asmodia.  Small class, less to keep track of, and Keltham's brain isn't totally happy with existing a whole day at a time without giving anything visible back to his Chelish hosts.  He'd feel better if he was renting an apartment-module and location-foundation more explicitly; part of his brain still thinks he's a guest in somebody else's house, invited in on the expectation of interesting discussions.

He'll lead with a children's fable about different ways to relate to the possibility of being wrong and finding out truths.  Being able to notice and choose between the ways you'd relate to the act of realizing mind-shaking truths would probably be one of the keys to avoiding ending up as a failed Keeper, or, Keltham supposes, trying to become a Keeper on purpose.

Here's another children's fable about a child who insists that there's an invisible Non-Translating-Fictional-Creature in their closet, but always refuses to bet on any observable that, you might normally think, would tend to go along with there being an Invisible Creature in that closet.

The point of this fable is to learn to distinguish between subjective states of:

- Really actually modeling something as true in an uncomplicated way, and unhesitatingly deriving the valid consequences of that and anticipating them to happen to you as future experiences; eagerly betting on those if you think others don't have even more information.

- Thinking you ought to believe something, for reasons that include deliberative arguments for why the thing is true; while other parts of you have some wordless other model in which the thing isn't true, the corresponding observables shouldn't actually be anticipated to happen to you, any bets like that will lose money and any promised rewards won't really be delivered to you.

This will create a kind of internal tension that shouldn't be too hard to learn to categorize over and learn perceptual reflexes about, if you can spot it on a couple of previous occasions... actually that seems like something that should be heavily Wisdom-loaded?  If somebody thinks they've caught themselves doing this, or is wondering if they're doing this, they should quickly ask for an Owl's Wisdom so that they can see the internal feelings sharply and learn to recognize them on future occasions.

- Endorsing a verbal statement for social or other reasons that give you a non-accuracy-maximized payoff structure for the outward verbal behavior, such as, for example, your friends saying things and you wanting to smile and agree with them.

If you fail at some other mental exercises kids are taught, there'll probably be an internal pressure to believe the verbal statement: that's a very short route to smiling and agreeing that doesn't create painful internal dilemmas about violating the rules against lying, and your brain knows that.  Don't rely on being able to notice how the actual-belief pressures are running into contradictory evidence or counterarguments; you want to catch this at the introspective stage of noticing the pressure-to-endorse at all, and just switch off that pressure.  Not believe the opposite, reversed stupidity isn't intelligence after all, but switching off the pressure.

To sum up, the idea is roughly that you want to explicitly categorize and notice the subjective difference between:

- What you ought to believe, which is also usually the feeling of a verbal argument supporting something;
- What your brain is actually modeling and anticipating happening to you;
- What you think you'll be rewarded for believing, especially socially.

You want to notice when the first two get out of alignment and start producing standard symptoms of internal disalignments along those fault lines.  As for that awful third thing, of course, you want to notice the feeling and destroy/switch-off that pressure inside yourself; leaving only an observation about some bad incentive structure that needs to be repaired if it can be, and ignored if it can't be.

This is all standard stuff for dath ilani children and doesn't turn them into Keepers.  Does it sound like something that's liable to cause people to fracture in weird ways if you teach it to somebody from Golarion and they already grew up as adults not knowing it?

Obviously YES but if she SAYS THAT then Keltham will ask for an EXAMPLE and if she says NO then Keltham will TEACH THIS TO EVERYONE TOMORROW.

"I think my mother doesn't love me," says Meritxell aloud, a little wonderingly. "Um, that might - I don't actually know - that that's an example - because, because it's not like it'd be better to figure out when you're five -"

"Okay, if you figured that out in the first minutes of having this in your head, but not earlier, I can see how there might possibly be a problem."

"...I'm also not seeing how to progress past the nine-year-old level of Lawfulness without people acquiring the ability to make internal distinctions on this level, either."

"Do we actually have any other ideas besides just dropping it on everyone, seeing if they can handle it, and if they can't handle it, they can go to Hell."

"I try to teach people a bunch of other stuff first, and hope that makes it better rather than worse."

"Is that how you expect it to work?"

"Not particularly."

"...we could run a very small conditional prediction market about the results of the two approaches, is what my brain keeps suggesting, but I don't - actually expect that to help us very much, there's just too few of us."

"I'm up for being taught literally all of this stuff immediately, and seeing if that turns me into a Keeper, or at least, someone who can figure out exactly how dangerous it all is and how to handle this whole situation."

"You're that confident it can't hurt you?"

"Yes, and if not, I'm confident I'll survive, and if not, I'm fine going to Hell."

"Is there any path forwards that doesn't involve somebody taking that risk, at some point?  Because I'm the obvious person to do it."

"I think the alternative is supposed to be taking all of the risks more slowly so that we can take fewer of those risks at one time, and learn from experience on some of them before taking on some of the others.  There's a difference between acknowledging that we have to take those risks eventually, and saying that we're certain the best path is for you to take all of them at once."

"Premature caution is expensive, slow, and not fun.  How about if you make a very sincere effort to break me and we see if that does literally anything?"