"How do those work - is there a spell for it, or a magic-item for that matter?  It's a less stupid use of my time if it's less time."

"You drink potions and have a great deal of unusual sex that expands your horizons. I haven't undergone it, if you want details I'll have to call on a friend. And then murder her, I guess."

- would alter!Lady Eulàlia -

Yes, absolutely, Chosen of Asmodeus. If anything Taldor's nobles are worse.

"I'm going to assume that was a joke even though I can't tell which of, like, three different possible jokes it was.  Specifically, are you supposed to be too honest to just not tell your friend why you're asking, too carefree to care about her putative discarnation, or just signaling the lengths you're willing to go for 'security-mindset'?  Not actually important, don't answer right now." 

"Anyways, I think my current sexual horizons are expanding fast enough, so I will table this issue for probably several months, unless somebody turns up who'd be an incredibly perfect match for me if only I were attracted to men."

"You were telling us about Science," says Gregoria.

"I was, and in particular about how Science! gets paid-for by Civilization collectively.  Something like the long-standing Quest for Safe Bisexuality Enhancement is not likely to get completed by one person; even the whole corporation that invents it will be building off the work of hundreds of other researchers.  The commitment I made doesn't get paid out just to whatever corporation invents the treatment; it goes to one of several extremely reputable philanthropic-redistribution groups that would, if Safe Bisexuality Enhancement got invented, pay out to purchase the 'impact' of whoever had turned out to contribute the most to getting it done."

"With a genuinely massive bounty like that, there's multiple 'venture-philanthropists' who are playing a multi-decade game of funding promising scientists to work on related investigations in exchange for a portion of their 'impact', and then reselling their shares of 'impact' of people who made discoveries that will plausibly be worth hundreds of thousands of gold pieces later, if Safe Bisexuality Enhancement gets invented with their work having contributed 0.1% of what got done."

"That infrastructure is too sophisticated for Golarion in its present state.  The key point is that, like everything else in life, if you want good Science! you've got to pay for it.  'What you're not willing to pay real money for, you shouldn't complain you didn't get', as the proverb goes out of dath ilan."

"What we'll do on the Project instead is as follows:  If you come up with a truly unique and brilliant idea for refining spellsilver, and, this is the part I worry may end up generating 'drama' - emotional-fraughtness - it's not a brilliant idea that I strongly expect I or anybody else would've come up with anyways given another thirty minutes, you get a larger share of the Project."

"Where the issue here is that, especially once you're speaking the correct language of 'chemistry', there are going to be useful ideas that seem brilliant and that, in fact, anybody else who competently thinks in 'chemistry' language would probably also come up with given slightly more time, and we can't afford to give away 1% shares of the Project every time somebody has one of those ideas."

"I don't have anything better to do about that than appoint myself final judge, and go under truthspell on request to say that I'm being honest and impartial about it.  Tap myself with the Fair Pricing spell, too, in case that also helps show the absence of rationalization and self-serving reasoning.  In Civilization there'd be people who spend their whole adult work-lives just specializing in that one form of judgment."

" - this is in addition to, uh, the salary and project-shares already discussed?"

"The shares already discussed are based on your expected contribution, as expected by me at that time.  It includes some amount of unique contributions, because everyone on the Project is expected to make some unique contributions."

"But Asmodia, for example, is angling to clearly contribute more than the other tier-1 researchers and more than I expected at the time I made my hiring offer.  If she ends up much better able than anyone else to teach Law to other researchers in my place, she can in fact pull that off."

"Similarly, if one person on the Project proves to be the only person in the first year able to master 'chemical' Prestidigitation, and ends up spending a lot of their time tediously overseeing the refinement of thousands of pounds of spellsilver, that's likewise a bigger and more unique contribution than I originally expected when I offered them 0.1% or 0.2% of the Project.  You can afford to give 2% to everyone like that."

She could really stand for this project to involve less openly talking about money. It's so gauche.

"Going back to Science.  In answer to the suggestion about getting the smartest people to organize Science! - that follows automatically from offering huge payouts for discoveries that people are sufficiently interested in.  Smart people, being smart, will go where the money is; why would they want to be paid less per amount of effort?  Even Good smart people will usually go where the money is, because that's what Civilization is saying it cares about."

"Also to be clear, if you discover something important that nobody even thought to ask for or expect, plenty of 'utility-buyers' will show up and pay for the 'impact' on that, too; Civilization has done that many times before, because it's important to be consistent and predictable about that sort of thing.  I'll be aspiring to do the same on this Project, which is all that Golarion has of Science! for a time."

"Standardization of measures... I'm not sure what it would mean for something to be a 'measure' that wasn't 'standardized', but, this being Golarion, I'm afraid to ask.  Yes, if you measure something in dath ilan, you would report on that in the same units as everyone else in Civilization uses.  Otherwise people wouldn't build on your results, and that would decrease the amount of 'impact' you got paid for."

Surely there are also smart people who don't particularly care about money. Or maybe she's just too stupid to understand why being smart enough to do Science necessarily entails also caring about money.

- wait, actually that makes sense, if Science is specifically about wanting to understand the universe so you can conquer it. So if you're like Korva, and you don't care about that, then you won't be any good at Science in the first place.

Ugh.

"So I'm noticing that I'm sort of bouncing off the question of how to do Science! exactly, because it's too large, and not really the sort of thing that gets taught to dath ilani children in a single organized lesson, we take the pieces for granted -"

"One of those pieces is legit the part where contributors get paid for doing it, and people who make big contributions to Civilization that way get paid a lot.  I'll be improvising that for the Project as it goes, not ignoring it, and everyone should know that.  Obviously whatever Science! you get will be whatever kind of Science! you pay contributors for and incentivize.  Okay, that said, move on."

"Peranza suggested that Science! would use prediction markets.  That's true, but an easy guess, because every part of Civilization uses prediction markets for everything unless there's a specific reason not to.  Where exactly would Science! use prediction markets, Peranza?"

"What seems obvious is, to predict which experiments would work?"

(AlterPeranza is less terrified of being called upon by Keltham like that, of having it exposed that she was just wildly guessing based on what Keltham calls the 'meta-game'; she is able to quickly think of a plausible thing Peranza could have been thinking.)

"What does it mean for an experiment to work?  You get results.  The results are Reality.  In what sense could Reality 'work' or 'not work'?"

"Well, in the most recent case, 'works' is getting to your first NO instead of all the YESes.  You could have a prediction market on which tries would do that successfully."

"That's a dangerous way to start thinking - one we're explicitly warned against as kids.  You don't say that some results Reality can give you are the experiment 'working' and some are 'not working'.  Think of the timing measurements.  Willa's and Alexandre's first observations there didn't get them 'NO' answers, but those were far from failures."

"That's the same mindset you'd have to break out of to solve spellsilver refining.  Experiments on spellsilver don't have failed results, or successful results, they just have results.  Every experiment tells you something truthful about Reality, which is the world you are embedded in, it never lies.  Maybe your instruments are broken or don't do what you think they do, and then what Reality is really telling you is not what you think you are hearing.  But that's your own error.  Reality itself never lies."

"With that said, Civilization is obviously running prediction markets all of the time on what some particular experiment will say, in its results, or what a hypothetical future experiment will say.  Prediction markets are a fundamental part of doing community experimentation, because prediction markets are a fundamental part of collective 'epistemology' - the way that a Civilization can be said to 'believe' anything apart from the beliefs of the individual people in it."

"For example.  What would it mean to say that an experiment had a 'surprising' result, if there's no prediction market assigning that result a low probability?  Maybe it surprised you personally, but then maybe you were just being stupid and not seeing what others would consider obvious.  Why should Civilization care, if just you personally were surprised?  Why should an 'impact-buyer' believe you, if you claim the results would have been a surprise to society?"

"Or let's say that you make what seems to you like a really incredible discovery, a way to refine ten pounds of spellsilver ore into twenty pounds of spellsilver.  Call the newspapers!  The newspapers are... somewhat skeptical about this incredible claim?  If there's a prediction market, they can check that prediction market to see what Civilization thinks will be the result of duplicating your experimental procedure.  If there's no prediction market, the newspaper just has no idea what to believe and it sounds weird, or so I imagine, and so your possibly incredible discovery drops into the void."

"Or maybe I'm too optimistic about how it works in Golarion, and instead the newspapers print excited stories about your spellsilver discovery, which any real spellsilver scientist knows has to almost be certainly false, but Intelligence 10 people read the newspapers and now they think that's how spellsilver mining totally works and they're confused about why nobody else is adopting this great idea.  Actually that's still too optimistic, actually they'd just stop believing things they read in newspapers, including the things that experts actually did believe.  Or maybe that's too optimistic and -"

"Anyways!  Golarion having no prediction markets, is perhaps alone an 'already-sufficient-explanation' of why Golarion has no Science! and is so far below dath ilan's level of knowledge.  Nobody knows, now, at which point in history Science! was invented - at what point pre-Civilization really started learning collectively rather than as a set of individual experimenters working in isolation or small groups or factions - but I would expect that it only happened after the simpler idea of prediction markets got invented first.  You have to be able to say what Civilization believes, before you can observe or measure how fast Civilization is learning, or figure out how to make it learn faster."

Checking with Asmodia - in alter Cheliax like in real Cheliax are the newspapers forbidden from publishing sensationalist nonsense? 

Snap decision - in alterCheliax it's illegal for a broadsheet to say that the Church or Crown affirms something they don't affirm, and that cuts down on the worst of the nonsense among relatively intelligent people.  But it's not illegal to be wrong, so long as nobody gets their person or reputation injured as a result, and nothing being said is treasonous to the Crown or insulting to the Church.  Sevar, that sound right?

They're going to have to produce broadsheets consistent with it, possibly immediately, but sounds about right in the sense that going more dath ilani than that would be uncharacteristic.

Oh.  Right.  They have to be able to produce the broadsheets on demand, if Keltham insists that somebody Teleport right out and get one right away, as a Conspiracy check.  Asmodia should have thought of that.  And they have to look like Taldorian broadsheets, not Chelish ones like people in Cheliax already know how to produce...

...this sounds like a nightmare for the Conspiracy, actually.  Maybe broadsheets were found to produce enough misinformation and riots that they had to be allowed only to a few Crown-supervised offices?  It doesn't make Cheliax look like Absalom, but it would explain why alterCheliax's broadsheets are relatively small and look government-produced.

The alternative would be grabbing some Taldorian broadsheets and rapidly retraining some Crown authors to be able to produce more of the same, with most of the content ready to go and print as soon as Keltham demands it for any particular day.

Ione or Meritxell, comment something that doesn't have anything to do with newspapers?

Korva Tallandria has a newspaper-unrelated question ready, that she wasn't sure whether to ask, Security can prompt that one.

- oh shit, someone is listening, okay -

"Does that mean that political unification and a lack of factionalism are also necessary prerequisites for Science?"

"Not sure I'm following the logic behind the question?  You need a single market for predictions, or rather, you'd expect to end up with as many separate Science!s as there are separate markets.  But a single worldwide market follows automatically from 'arbitrage' - if one market is buying a proposition at 80% and one market is selling at 60%, you can buy in the 60% market and sell in the 80% market and make a guaranteed profit and do that until the prices equalize."