"Wait, so a woman can own property, here, she just needs to learn Alter Self and shapeshift frequently enough that the system doesn't classify her as a woman anymore?  Or is it that only men can own property, so if I make second circle and change to being a woman once per week, the government can declare I'm no longer a man and take all my stuff?"

"....neither of those, but closer to the first one? Spellcasters can get classified as the head of an independent household, even if they're women, and widows past childbearing age can get classified as the head of their household, even if they're not spellcasters."

"Also, does your society have, like, one gendertrope.  Or two gendertropes, I guess.  In dath ilan there's a lot of different ways to be a man or a woman or, like, do your best to resign from the system because you are a cognitively diverse nonconformist."

" - well, if you are a man and want to resign from the system you can cut off your genitals, I suppose? Being a cognitively diverse nonconformist doesn't really strike me as strong enough reason for that but perhaps it is my turn to have underestimated how much people vary."

"No, I mean, this is dath ilani male-coded clothing I'm wearing and I maintain my hair in a way that looks dath ilani male.  I could stop doing those things and people in Civilization would still be able to identify me as probably having male genitals unless I did a lot more work, but they wouldn't assume that I'd behave in a masculine, 'masculine', way."

"There's a way of being a woman where you try to maintain a high sex drive so you can keep a harem of men you like, the haremmistress gendertrope.  There's a way of being a woman where you don't have sex and marry a man who's married to a different woman so that you can get snuggles without fucking, the asexualnonsingularmate gendertrope.  There's a way of being a woman where you don't like people drawing inferences about you just because you're female, which is the singleton nonbinary gendertrope held in common across all sexes.  Uh, 'singleton' is, there's only one object that exists inside the class for that object."

"It sounds like Osirion has one feminine gendertrope, and if you don't fit it, they stop thinking you're a woman.  Which, like, I'm pretty sure if I was a woman, I'd go off the standard gendertrope here just so that I could own property?"

"I don't actually know where the source of this confusion is but I suspect it of being somewhere very distant from the conversation that we're having. It is true that in Osirion women do not ...marry multiple men....because then the paternity of their children would be in question, and it's bad for children to not have a father who is committed to providing for them, it strongly predicts dying of starvation as a baby."

"...should've noticed earlier that this conversation was probably heading towards a Golarion doomfact.  It's not easily possible in dath ilan to have enough children that the mother's job alone couldn't support them, unless she had an unusually low-paying job or she tried for like twelve kids or something."

"I'd ask if being able to test for a handful of genetic markers narrowing down paternity - 'genetic' being the tiny storages of information inside people that implement 'heredity', the way children resemble their parents - would solve that problem.  But, unless the explanations I got in Cheliax were lies or not typical of Golarion, I suspect the answer is, no, there's some huge tangle of people being insane in a way that you can't change by changing the facts.  Sort of don't want to go into that, because it was - something that Carissa would always take the responsibility of explaining to me."

"Unless it actually is just testing for genetic markers to determine the father, in which case I could think about if there's some simple way to do that at your tech and magitech level."

"That seems like ....a good thing to have that many people would pay a lot of money for? I don't know that it would solve the problem you perceive because I don't think I exactly understand the problem you perceive, but I don't see an obvious problem with a woman having two husbands if they can afford to check which is the father and both have agreed in advance that the responsibilities of the father attach to them if the spell indicates it's them. I don't think it'd be a very popular arrangement but I don't see why people who want the option shouldn't be able to buy it. 

People mostly do things for good reasons and changing the facts does change how they behave, but - a lot of facts are connected with other facts, and people don't change instantly."

"Yes, much of the childhood training I got in being able to propagate updates more quickly and change my mind faster does make more sense to me as a vital necessity of a stable Civilization, now that I realize that, in the absence of this training, people will spend ten years acting like second-circle wizards can get pregnant by accident."

"Once I know the differences between Osirion and Cheliax, I'll just update on them.  I won't complain about how facts are entangled with other facts, I'll just propagate all the updates I know how to propagate.  You can move faster if you're not afraid of speed."

"I guess now I should try to explain gender in Osirion and associated facts to you but I'd really rather someone else do that because it sounds really unpleasant....maybe less so if we do it in Baseline so I can practice my Baseline. Do you want me to do that."

"Realistically, that should not happen to me today."

"You wanna go back to telling me about how dath ilan's government just had to be secretly awful?  Got a lot of that in Cheliax too, only, in retrospect, without nearly the emphasis on how they thought there was any possible alternative to that."

"That sounds like much more fun, yes!"

"In the absence of gods but the presence of talk-control I'm actually not sure how I'd organize a society to not be ruled by tyrants. If you have any one powerful person, they can be talk-controlled. If you have no powerful people, you will be invaded. You could maybe do random selection of rulers for one-year terms, though I think that just gets you rule behind-the-scenes by some group of people that doesn't get turned over ever year, presumably the Keepers. Maybe the best you can actually do is tyrants who have to pretend not to be, which is what it sounds to me like dath ilan has."

"The talk-control we know about is not instant.  Supposedly even if you matched up a ninth-rank Keeper against an ordinary dath ilani they would still take two minutes and anybody else watching would notice the conversation being very weird."

"But, look, you're still angling at this from way too much of a Golarion perspective where you control a handful of top people and suddenly you control the society.  If anything runs dath ilan, it's the prediction markets that say which observable outcomes we'll get in ten years if we do something a particular way, and the Legislature negotiates which outcomes we're steering toward.  The designated-desirable-outcomes are a matter of public record.  The prediction markets are things that anybody including me could bet on.  If the Dark Conspirators want to actually steer around Civilization they need the prediction markets to be making bad predictions, presumably about the roads not taken because on the roads actually taken you can see the predictions not coming true.  And then the bids get revealed after the fact, and people would notice if their own bids were not listed so you can't understate the bids in one direction, so you'd need there to be these huge mysterious opaque bidders coming in and bidding against all the people who did acknowledge their bids, to claim overly pessimistic outcomes on the roads you wanted to steer away from - you see the problem here?"

"Maybe you can take over Civilization in the sense of getting an Achievement Unlocked on how you theoretically control the minds of the Nine Legislators, but that doesn't actually get you anything, so far as I can tell.  The Legislators can't say to steer for a weird outcome without everyone noticing.  And Civilization has definitely ever thought about somebody trying to take it over via breaking into some computers, shaped raw causal processes, and making the prediction markets too pessimistic about all courses of action other than the way they want Civilization to go."

"Like the prediction market of whether the dead will return, where you noticed exactly that kind of suspicious activity. Anyway, if you control the Keepers and the legislators you can declare things like that you're going to screen off all of history! I find it hard to believe you couldn't also declare things like that you need to launch a massive secret project almost no one is told about, or remove all works of fiction that might enable someone to learn the gods are real and contact them, or that you need to invent and refine talk-control, or that you need to make a bunch of specific people who are criticizing you decide to freeze themselves.

As far as I can tell, any high-rank Keeper can go to the home of a critic who is particularly troubling to them and in two minutes of conversation convince that person to commit suicide. That is sufficient power to cover up a lot without manipulating prediction markets, even setting aside how you can use it to manipulate prediction markets in a way that's not very obvious. Especially if talk-control works over mass media, you can do far more than that."

"I'm sure there are massive secret projects we're not being told about.  You can tell this because of how I think this is a totally reasonable thing to do, so long as they're prosocial secret projects with valid rationales.  I would be horrified and disturbed to know that Governance was not running massive secret projects, because there are clearly going to be some things like that and somebody needs to do them and if Governance isn't doing them then what are we even paying for."

"If the gods are real then, yes, you'd want to remove all works of fiction that would let somebody contact them.  This also seems like a totally reasonable thing to do."

"And there was, yes, a famous creepy incident where the Keepers negotiated with a dissident faction and then their leaders told all of their followers to go into cryonic preservation, but obviously the dissident faction took no precautions whatsoever against talk-control because the dissident faction was stupid, and that all happened in public where everybody could see how creepy it was because the Keepers were stupid."  [False statement illustrating what the truth must be by contrasting to it.]

"At some point you are just conceding, yes, we are a tyranny that has and routinely exercises the power to crush dissidents and ban the speaking of true important things that would dramatically change the life priorities of many of our subjects, and we like it that way."

"The dissident faction in question was one that wanted to destroy all life before it could colonize the stars, so that we wouldn't spread the possibility of suffering through the universe, and the fact that our Civilization is not so constructed as to entertain the possibility of crushing them was why our Keepers had to negotiate with them secretly - using obvious protocols for avoiding known possible levels of talk-control, like exchanging notes written on paper with delays built in that an intermediary person rewrote - and told the negative utilitarians something, struck a deal with them, that made them voluntarily ask their followers to voluntarily go into early cryonic suspension in exchange.  I can now guess that one of the things they were told was that Truly Dead people just end up somewhere else, like I did, and I can see all kinds of possible excellent reasons why the Keepers would not tell everyone that."

"In dath ilan we pay children who are still young enough to give into threats, every time we threaten them into doing something, every time we have to slap their wrists or threaten to slap their wrists, it goes into their bank account for later in life, so that we'll never do it lightly and will notice it every time."

"In dath ilan we have to persuade our dissidents who want to end all life, to voluntarily go into early cryonic suspension instead of hanging around trying to end all life, in exchange for a bargain the terms of which I do not know, because we don't have the kind of Civilization that would just kill them."

"I am not terribly well acquainted with Golarion, but I know that this is so far advanced ahead of anything you have here that, yes, I can see why you just wouldn't believe it.  But then say you don't believe it!  Say that you think I was just trapped inside another Conspiracy lying to me my whole life!  Don't take the world I'm describing to you, that is obviously far ahead of Golarion on tolerance of dissent, and try to redefine it as tyranny!"

"Dath ilan actually doesn't sound ahead of, say, Absalom on tolerance of dissent to me. There are no things I'll be arrested for shouting in a public square in Absalom, and a lot of things I would be arrested for shouting in a public square in dath ilan. There are no books that I will be prevented from writing and distributing in Absalom, and a lot of books I'd be prevented from writing and distributing in dath ilan. Absalom does not violently suppress Rovagug cultists. Osirion wouldn't suppress people who were just trying to have lots of children who'd agree with them the universe should be destroyed and not actually planning the actual release of actual Rovagug. It wouldn't negotiate with them because there'd be nothing to negotiate because they could under our laws just go living their lives as long as they weren't actually trying to do a violent crime.

You just said 'If the gods are real then, yes, you'd want to remove all works of fiction that would let somebody contact them.  This also seems like a totally reasonable thing to do' and that is a degree of social control that no Golarion society except perhaps Nidal attains. Rahadoum bans all the gods and all their followers, but they don't ban works of fiction in which the gods are described. 

In many respects dath ilan sounds lovely. I have conceded that perhaps the degrees to which it is an unusually oppressive tyranny is in fact better than many other possible ways it could be - for example, if you do have a problem with aliens sending you mind-viruses. But I am not redefining anything, when I name it an unusually oppressive tyranny with unusually little tolerance of dissent."

"What, exactly, is an example of something you think would get you arrested in dath ilan if you shouted it in a public square where shouting was otherwise permissible, rather than a place where the people living there had designated it as quiet?"

"'Iomedae is a powerful alien entity which can be contacted by shaping your thoughts towards Her in the following fashion'. 'Before we screened off history, there was a war in which thirty million people were killed, I have the documentation proving it'. 'There is a secret government project to' - followed by the details of any government secret projects."

"Right, so, I sure would get the heck out of that square, and then, yes, I'd want that person removed from my city, or rendered psychiatric assistance, as appropriate depending on whether what they were saying was {true, false-but-lying} or false-but-honest."

"I think you have a fundamental presumption about governments acting in bad faith by default which dath ilani straight-up do not share.  The thing where I don't rush out of the public square is if they shout, 'There is a secret government project conducted in bad faith which you can verify by looking at the following details...' and then, they're probably crazy, but you maybe hang around and look up those purported details on the Network, so that your society can maintain its theoretical ability to remove bad governments.  Somebody shouting about a secret government project that the government was trying to keep secret for a good reason is just an asshole, no different from telling somebody about a surprise party their friends were going to hold for them, or the ending of the book they just started reading."

"I agree that the reason dath ilani would arrest and exile this hypothetical person is because of the presumption of dath ilani that the government is operating in good faith. Would it resolve our disagreement if I said that dath ilan has unusually little tolerance of dissent and unusually much tolerance of the exercise of power to crush dissidents, compared to Golarion societies which are trying not to be tyrannies, because of the presumption of dath ilani that the government is operating in good faith?"

"Think I'd first like to see how a woman selling sex was treated in those extremely free Golarion societies, maybe inquire of them how they'd handle knowledge of the Outer Gods starting to propagate, count the ratio of people imprisoned to people free and interview some people who'd actually been arrested about what they'd been arrested for, maybe offer them a truthspell about whether somebody had demanded a bribe from them.  I am frankly skeptical that Golarion can get freedom right when it is too poor and too stupid to get anything else right."