"You expect the other purely-selfish farmer to try to steal from you anyways, though.  So you might as well steal from them first.  We could suppose that whoever carries out the theft first has a few days of plenty eating their stolen food, before the other farmer can prepare and execute a plan to steal back food.  So if you're going to end up in that situation anyways, there's an incentive to be the first to Defect."

"We could skip the part where it's a fake bear attack.  We could even skip the part where the paired thefts occur, and go directly to them spending a lot of time guarding their grain.  70-70 payoff at the end."

"But in fact, yeah, you might suspect intuitively that somehow two purely selfish farmers in this situation would manage to reason that, if they kicked off a cycle of thefts and guarding, they'd both be worse off."

"And so long as no theft had yet occurred - they would both think - maybe the two of them could, somehow, end up doing something else which is not that."

"This is the great will to do Something Else Which Is Not That, and end up Not There, which is sometimes said in dath ilan - though the truth is not now remembered - to perhaps be the reason why Civilization exists, why any such thing as Civilization now exists, and not just a bunch of farmers sleeping miserably next to their grain stores."

"But what I'd like to observe at this step is that - if the two farmers do manage to end up with the 100-100 payoff, somehow - by hypothesis, it can't be because they're Good; it has to be because they are, in some way, being Lawful."

Yep, that part seems right, that you can get Civilization out of Law and not out of Good, that Good is a weaker and worse way to build it. 

Subirachs thought that Cheliax was more Evil than Lawful....

"But fake bear attacks aren't the limit of how hard we can make it to coordinate."

"Let's take the next step up in things being hard to observe.  Let's say two partners are working on a new venture, but again, this is happening earlier in history and they're missing a lot of social technology.  Maybe they're two farmers, one of them has to forge the ground-breaking tools, one has to make the scythes, and then they both have to break ground together at planting and use the scythes together at harvest."

"If either of them slack off on the engineering part of their job, they get to be lazy themselves, and the resulting less efficient work is distributed across both parties, so it's a net benefit for them."

"Let's say that you can pick up +30 of personal utility by slacking off, at a cost of -20 harder work to you later.  And also, of course, -20 harder work for your partner too.  But you don't care about that because you're Abaddon-Evil, pure-selfish."

                            Cooperate-2:       Defect-2:
Cooperate-1:         (100, 100)         (80, 110)
Defect-1:                (110, 80)           (90, 90)

"And the other farmer isn't expert enough at that person's job to tell they did a bad job - the ground-breaker can't tell if the scythes are blunter than they should be, and require more effort to use."

"And it's early in history so they can't call in a professional third-party evaluator."

"If they are both Abaddon-Evil, pure-selfish, but Lawful, is there any way now for them to end up with the 100-100 payoff?  To look at the 90-90 payoff and say that they want to end up Not There, to do Something Else Which Is Not That?"

Seems like no?

"Gods can cooperate in that situation. ...humans I think mostly can't. At least Golarion humans."

"Well, let's try it then.  With a bit of randomness thrown in, so that even after you get your payoffs, you are not sure what the other person did."

"You pair up and write 'Cooperate' or 'Defect' on a piece of paper.  So does your partner.  Baseline reward is 3 copper for playing the game.  I'll spin a coin ten times for each of you, and for each time it comes up Queen, you get +1 copper.  The spins are separate for each of you.  If you Defect, you get one more copper than you would've otherwise, and your opponent gets 3 less.  If you Cooperate, the rewards are the same."

"There is, I suppose, a chance that you Defect, and their coin comes up Queen 0, 1, or 2 times, and then you're definitely caught.  But that's only a 5.5% probability.  Or your coin could come up Queen 8, 9, or 10 times, and then if the other Cooperated you'll know that for sure."

"You are, in this version of the game, allowed to talk to each other.  You cannot, of course, show each other what's written on your paper."

"Actually, let me see about getting Yaisa or somebody to be Silent Proctor in this game, if they're willing to do it for a couple of silvers.  I wouldn't want you too influenced by wondering what your boss would think of your moves."

"Oh, and it goes without saying, your sole goal is not to win the most copper of anyone - that'll be mostly down to the randomness - but just to earn as much copper as you can."

"Tier-2s can pick which tier-1s they want to play with, going in order by Tonia, Peranza, Gregoria, Pilar.  Security, can I get a message conveyed to any non-busy Ostensos about there being a twenty-minute job requiring strong but easy confidentiality, for whichever of them is the lowest bidder on it?"

Security can do that. (Are they supposed to help the girls cheat?)

No. They are pretty much never supposed to help the girls cheat. If everyone defects the entire time, which everyone probably will, then that probably has all kinds of correlates.

Tonia wants Ione because maybe she'll do some weird Nethysian thing that isn't just the obvious 'defect every time'.

THIS IS NOT LESS STRESSFUL THAN MATH.

Asmodia, having thought implausibly fast, tells Security to transmit:

The natural distribution of responses here won't be right for a non-Evil country.  Not just results, what people are saying, if Keltham listens.

Idea:  Have Sevar play Pilar and myself play Ione, inside our thoughts, Security proctors the results.  That'll be proxy for what the results might look like, and what the students might be learning or saying, somewhere less Evil.  Not that we're not all Evil here, just, well, you know what I'm getting at.

And Tonia is now FRIENDS WITH IONE to explain her choice because NETHYSIANS ARE NOT NICER PEOPLE THAN ASMODEANS IN ALTER-CHELIAX.

- sure, they can try that.

Peranza, per direction, picks Sevar.

Ione notes out loud that she wants a quiet minute or two to think about this entire thing before she has to start playing, if that's okay, and that she'd recommend giving everyone else a quiet minute too.

Sensible.  Sure!

Well, this is going to be something, Pilar thinks for retransmission to Sevar.  I straight-up can't figure out what Asmodean theology says here, the Lawful and Evil parts seem to be pulling in opposite directions.

Yes, I am having that problem too. I think this is how tyranny is derived - Asmodeus wants a King who'll make the farmers cooperate, so they're not doing it out of - intrinsic trust in each other, even trust in each others' lawfulness, but they are doing it. 

Does Asmodeus dislike the part where people trust each other, or like the part where it gets done by tyranny instead?

(Pilar has the same question about why Asmodeanism prohibits people caring about each other.)

Not authorized to instruct you on matters of faith, remember. If I were wildly guessing I would say that Asmodeus isn't the antithesis of Good, that's Zon-Kuthonish, the thing He likes is that it produces tyranny, and the thing where - one needn't rely on Good in others, one isn't following processes that only work if people have convenient values? That there's something better about a system you can build out of any kind of Lawful farmer than a system you can build out of only farmers who care about each other. And maybe that if people care about each other they'll let that win out over Law. But I'm guessing. 

Anyway, I'm not sure if in the absence of a tyrant Asmodeus thinks we ought to cooperate or - no, actually, we shouldn't have free will. It'd be better if we didn't have free will. And farmers without free will obviously do the Lawful thing. I think.

I was thinking about two devils.  But not equal ones, a higher devil and a lower one, so they wouldn't just automatically do the same thing.

Or the Queen and the Most High.

(Would it be all right to care, then, if you could do it without making things be about caring instead of Law, if it was all still tyrannical enough that Lord Asmodeus wasn't losing anything... how bad is the wrongness inside her, exactly, is it absolutely bad or just...)

I bet the key here like the key with lots of things with Keltham is doing things with certain probabilities. Like, if it looks to me like there's a 50% chance you stole from me I flip a coin about whether to steal back.

The Queen and the Most High have a negotiated contract, that's - another way - I assume the farmers aren't allowed to negotiate a contract but if they are, well, you're definitely not supposed to give your word falsely.

Keltham didn't SAY they weren't allowed to negotiate a contract.

I was about to transmit that I'd realized we were having the wrong discussion, because we need to figure out alter-Asmodean theology so students can talk about that, but maybe we just DID figure out what alter-Asmodeanism says about it.  That part wouldn't be different.  Keltham knows our Lord is Lord of compacts.

Yes. The alter-Asmodeus answer has got to be in significant part that you have to be the kind of person who keeps your word when you give it, that's the absolute minimum of there being any reason to not steal from you at all, and then the farmers negotiate a deal. And everyone can argue out their deals individually, I think, though not trying to cheat each other.

It's kind of a straightforward deal.  Not a lot of options there.  I guess somebody could try demanding an extra copper in order to Cooperate but who'd fall for that, really.

What alter-conversation did we have leading up to that?  Maybe - the parts about what two devils would do, what the Queen and Most High would do because there's nobody above them in Golarion... but Keltham shouldn't hear the same thing everywhere, we need variations on what people could come up with...

I think the 'what would people without free will do' conversation is fine, Keltham knows that Asmodeanism holds that that's something broken about us -