"Is dath ilan convinced that this policy actually - minimizes how often Civilization gets destroyed, somehow?"

"More like, maximizing how much all of Greater Reality looks like a place where agents want things and get them, instead of, when agents want things or dislike things, there's a bunch of other entities running around trying to threaten them and firing those threats and transforming all of Reality into a place where most entities get what they don't want.  That's literally about the most tragic way that Reality could look.  Civilization doesn't want to do anything at all, even paying five gold pieces, even reasoning in a complicated way about whether to pay five gold pieces, that shifts Reality a little more in that direction."

" - well then I think I just disagree with Civilization about whether it's more tragic for there to be bullies or for everyone to be obliterated forever."

"It admittedly makes even more sense now that I realize that, as the Keepers would've known, everybody would just end up somewhere else inside that Greater Reality they were trying to help prettify."

"- I don't think Asmodeus reasons that way and if He does reason that way I am in the market for a new god." Alter-Carissa only, obviously; real Carissa is aware which decisions result in Carissae being obliterated forever. 

"You'd rather your god believe false things than true things?"

"I don't want to lend myself to a power that will destroy me to prettify Greater Reality!"

"I think you're simultaneously asking the question of 'What if I actually get destroyed' and 'What if Asmodeus falsely believes I won't get destroyed', rather than forming the hypothetical 'What if I don't get destroyed and Asmodeus correctly believes I won't get destroyed' which is the one I was trying to point to there.  Possibly on account of you having some trouble with lending temporary consideration to the hypothetical 'What if I don't get destroyed', since spending too much time thinking about it might cause you to come to an incorrect answer and then get actually destroyed, if you don't feel yourself to have earned trust in your own validity and are afraid of becoming mistaken.  But I'd expect Keepers and Asmodeus not to make mistakes about that, so asking what if they strongly believe something should be the same as asking what if it's true."

"No, I don't think that's it. I was willing to concede the point if Civilization genuinely thought this was the destruction-of-Civilization-minimizing policy, at least until I'm smart enough to evaluate if they're right about that in our world where gods sometimes get utility-flipped accidentally. I'll abide by policies that destroy Civilization if they're the policies that we think lead to the least destruction of Civilization.

But it's not that, it's that Civilization is actually willing to adopt policies that kill me in worlds that are sufficiently unpretty by the standards of greater Reality. A - values thing, not a predictions thing.

I think Asmodeus goes 'yeah, that's a very unpretty reality there, Carissa doesn't choose Abaddon? no? okay, so be it', and if I'm wrong about that, and Asmodeus is willing to adopt policies that kill everyone in sufficiently unpretty worlds for the sake of greater Reality, then I don't share Asmodeus's values, and I don't want Him to be powerful enough to end civilization in those worlds, so I need a god who does share my values, or to become one if there aren't any."

(I know I'm giving everyone a bad day, she adds mentally to Security, but I suspect this is an important heresy of mine, and I remain in line with alter-Carissa here.)

"It's not impossible that we have a values difference here.  But what I'm trying to interpret as your utilityfunction doesn't quite make sense to me, and we'd probably want to nail that down and make sure I understand your values, and vice versa, before we declare that there's a values difference."

"The nearest sensible thing I can interpret in my own ontology is something like - you very strongly value as much stuff being conscious as possible, as large a fraction of all realityfluid as possible being invested into consciousness and awareness.  You're against any cases of destroying reality-regions even unusually icky ones that are dragging down the average, because then a lower total fraction of reality ends up invested in consciousness, even if all the people inside the deleted universe just experience themselves ending up somewhere else.  Question mark?"

"I'll also state for the record that in dath ilan we left this sort of thing to Keepers.  Here in Golarion I'd have to believe that there weren't any gods keeping track of what I was tracking myself, before I started making my own calls about whether to delete everything."

" - I think it's extremely bad if you extinguish a bunch of life even if the thing that happened to you when you died happens to everyone, yeah. And - obviously it's better for reality to be consciousness than to be anything else? Nothing else matters! And Golarion might be - probably is - an 'unusually icky' bit of reality and I'm really glad that even the most obnoxious Good gods don't think we deserve to be destroyed about it!

I do think you should leave these things to the gods, but - I think that because the Church never told me it's better to let everything be annihilated than to pay a Kuthite five gold, and because even the Good gods fought Rovagug. If they'd ever told me that then I would not be in favor of leaving those things to the gods - you lose far too much if it turns out the gods and Keepers only think that because they don't care much about people getting to keep living their lives."

"I mean, presumably the gods who think ickier than average worlds should be destroyed just fought alongside Rovagug, and lost, and that's why we're here at all. Either that or we're a less icky world than average, but in that case dath-ilan-which-pays-bribes being destroyed is sending nearly all its people to much worse places..."

"Why would those gods actually fight instead of, like, presenting an estimate of how much damage they'd do by fighting and how much expected utility they thought they could gain from that for themselves, and asking the other gods to make them an offer?"

"Rovagug was a prophecy-breaking entity, so it wasn't possible for the more Chaotic gods who didn't like the trend of existence to present credible estimates or make credible commitments to the other gods.  All they could do was fight alongside Rovagug, who could not be negotiated with, whose strength was impossible to estimate, and hope that Rovagug was strong enough.  They lost, and were destroyed.  The new prophecy that was woven afterwards was far stronger, since all the remaining gods were either Lawful or pretty okay with the universe continuing to exist on something like the course it had."

"That prophecy got broken by Earthfall, which was not foreseen."

"After Earthfall, the gods scraped up all the fragments of shattered prophecy they could, and with it foresaw the possibility of a mortal finding the Starstone where it had fallen on the ocean floor and using it to ascend to godhood.  The gods knew that if they fought over their different interests in what sort of mortal found the Starstone, they'd all cancel each other out and leave the Starstone to be found in an uncontrolled way.  Their negotiated compromise was a new prophecy with all the remaining fragments of shattered destiny woven into it, that the person who found the Starstone would be somebody Lawful Neutral who'd use the Starstone to make Golarion their own divine realm, and contain Rovagug there forever so the rest of the Great Beyond would be safe from It."

"Aroden correctly deduced the gods would do that, changed his own will to match the prophecy's inferred requirements, and took the Starstone.  And then Aroden's death shattered all remaining prophecy permanently around this planet."

"Thanks for that valuable information."

"You'd have deduced those parts anyways takaral."

"I'd like to register my own increasing discomfort with all this talk of destroying universes in a context where it is not being treated as an obvious and indeed mandatory conclusion that we should not, in fact, do that."

"You definitely can't reason like that or you're just going to find entities all over the place who'll destroy the universe unless you give them five gold pieces.  If you blindly or shortsightedly refuse choices that lead to the universe being destroyed in 'counterfactuals', that can definitely make it more likely to end up destroyed in reality."

"And if somebody makes a mistake and screws up any of these lines of reasoning?"

"Yeah, it's a bad place to make mistakes, and you should avoid making any on subjects like that... that probably sounds like a more realistic policy in dath ilan than in Golarion, doesn't it."

"Asmodeus is good at this and desires that we not be annihilated and you should do what Asmodeus says, and then the fact we'll predictably do what Asmodeus says helps him prevent the destruction of the universe. And dath ilani say the same thing about their Keepers, presumably," says Avaricia, who has cottoned on in the last week to the problem that when Sevar goes on being heretical no one's willing to speak up either to agree with her or disagree with her. 

"But dath ilani think that their Keepers want them to not be annihilated, when actually their Keepers may not care very much because of the secret lots of universes thing!"

"Speculating wildly, here, but Asmodeus cares Evilly that we not be annihilated -- we're His, Hell's prosperity strengthens Him, devils are visible to Him in a way that enables Him to act and plan around them - and gets none of what He wants just by virtue of us existing at some point in some universe -"

If this solves that problem tag on the wall she's going to be very pleased with herself. 

"I worry I may be misconveying an impression about how often Civilization decides to totally destroy something instead of, like, fixing it.  Our Civilization is very not full of people deleting each other from local existence because they couldn't figure out how to negotiate things, especially as compared to, say, Golarion.  Your gods fight each other more often than we do.  Your surviving gods."