"Sounds like mostly gaps of omission, then, or mistakes of emphasis if you want to put it that way."

"Give me a second and I'll pass back the underlined version of yours, with some notes.  Shouldn't take much time and seems easier than saying."

In Pharasma's Creation there are many people who don't want to exist and do not have a good way to achieve this. The overwhelming majority of those are in Hell, but probably there are also some in Abaddon and the Abyss and maybe the Maelstrom and the dungeons of various people on Golarion and planets like Golarion, plus some who are suffering and uncertain enough about their afterlife not to kill themselves despite having access to the option. They often suffer slowly in a way that changes who they are as people and means that even if at some point they stop being conscious, a version of them that landed on another planet at that point would not be very much like the person they were before they suffered so much.  [Yep.  This is the core problem.  Pharasma's unfair deal would not be a destroy-the-multiverse issue if not for this.]

This is bad under approximately every conceivable value system. Under the value system most common in dath ilan, where everyone has thought about ethics a lot more and some people are smarter, this is so bad that killing approximately 9 people whose lives are eternal and good in order to prevent one person from suffering in this way is clearly justified. Dath ilani would practically all agree on this.  [This is a values-difference, not something where it matters what another place thinks.]

It is true that people in Golarion mostly don't see it that way when they are not in Hell, but they mostly try to avoid thinking about it, and might believe false things about it. Hell lies relentlessly about what sends you there and what it's like. People in Cheliax mostly fear Hell and try not to think about it; people in other places do move mountains to avoid it. Lots of Lawful Evil people, in private, will admit that they are scared. The fact they don't atone or don't try to be Chaotic is about their suppressing thoughts of how they'll go to Hell in abject terror, not about their actual preference. Even if someone prefers Hell to nonexistence, once they've been in Hell for a little while they'll almost definitely change their mind. Even if someone does things that condemn them to Hell for the sake of protecting their children, so that their children will get to eternity in Axis instead of being eaten in Abaddon, they'll regret that choice and wish they'd chosen differently approximately as soon as Hell actually starts on them. Even if they don't for a hundred years, they will in a thousand years; even if they don't for a thousand years, they will in a hundred thousand years. People on Golarion don't know how to think about those scales. Hell deliberately discourages thinking on those scales. And it's hard to understand how bad Hell is until you are actually being tortured there; it is not a fact you can know any other way.  [Being tortured in Hell still doesn't let you do the interpersonal utility comparison we actually need.]  [Being tortured into regret of saving your children doesn't make it the wrong decision, still an awful one tho.]

Any viable plan to fix Hell, where nearly all but not all of this suffering is located, probably incurs some risk of killing everyone in the multiverse. The plan that incurs the least risk of that is probably destroying Avernus so that further people cannot go to Hell, which would not necessarily be permanent. The plans that are most definitely permanent, like killing Asmodeus and taking His job or trying to force Pharasma to change the rules of Her Creation, incur a quite high risk of this. Plans to kill Asmodeus and take His job are probably more than 50% likely to result in His releasing Rovagug, which is probably at least 20% likely to destroy the universe and 80% likely to destroy Golarion, which may or may not be important for building Civilization within Pharasma's Creation.  [I'd maybe say more like 30% of destroying Golarion?]  [Currently put low estimate on Golarion's importance if we can't otherwise beat Pharasma/gods.]

Plans to force Pharasma to change the rules of Her Creation will, if they fail, fail either by Pharasma laughing at Keltham and crushing him in which case no improvements to the universe at all will be achieved, or in the entire universe being destroyed, possibly by Yog-Sothoth or something in an existentially horrifying Hell-like slow-personality-death way. Failure modes like that are very unlikely. If they succeed they might change not just Hell but also significant features of other planes that have a high rate of petitioners there being very unhappy or being eaten.  [Pharasma crush wouldn't seem that unlikely, if not for tropes.]  [Obvious ways to rig multiverse for destruction don't seem to me to run much Yog-Sothoth risk.]

Pharasma does not particularly share human values, and a universe run on rules set by Keltham would be much nicer for humans and similar kinds of mortals to live in, or not exist at all if making a universe that's substantially nicer to live in is not possible within these constraints.  [Didn't think I could set rules, but get them modified, sure.]

When Keltham experienced dying, he experienced showing up in Golarion. All people, when their soul is permanently deleted from existence, should anticipate having the experience of waking up somewhere else like he did. In the typical case this will not be worse than the lives that those people are currently living in Golarion. In particular the percentage of people who will turn out to have moment-of-death copies that are slaves who cannot suicide, or in Hell dimensions, or in incomprehensible conditions that alter their cognition as they kill them, is very low. The fact this is true means that being killed is much less bad than it would be if there were not copies of you in other places some of whom will remember the moment of your death. The fact this is true also means it is better to kill someone instantaneously than for them to die in a slow way that alters their personality and values, because if they die instantaneously then they'll experience continuity with a copy of them elsewhere which hasn't already changed in a way that changes their identity as a person.  [My case doesn't need to be typical, just in some sense normal or not in a distinguished region of low probability.]

It is undesirable that people will never see their families again, be separated from their children and husbands and wives, lose everything they have and were working towards, etc., but the undesirability of this is much much much smaller than the undesirability of Hell. It is probably not the case that most people would readily risk Hell to be present for their childrens' infancy and childhood, and if they say they would it is probably because they are underestimating the badness of Hell. Also under the present system many people are separated from their loved ones permanently anyway, and an ideal fix to Pharasma's Creation would improve the world along this metric.  [Not how system necessarily works.  Nice destinations can synchronize arrival of related people.]

It is not bad that people will exist about a billion times less, because it doesn't subjectively feel like anything to exist, and is not part of most human value systems in dath ilan. Those people who think it is part of their value systems would almost always reconsider if they could discuss the matter with a Keeper.  [Depends on if the less-existing were above or below Greater Reality average.  Obviously I currently guess Pharasma's Creation is below average.]  ['Keepers would disagree' kinda not how people in Civilization think, they'll add 'because it's invalid' and then eliminate the Keeper part.]

The gods as they are currently situated seem likely to stop any planet in Pharasma's Creation from building Civilization, or at least likely to stop it from spreading its discoveries to the rest of Pharasma's Creation. It seems reasonably likely that they're only presently allowing the scientific revolution because they don't see where it's headed. In the absence of intervention to change the rules and ensure Civilization is allowed to come about, it seems possible the inhabited planets within Creation will either persist for a very long time not being much better as a place to live, or else get destroyed the first time they get far enough out of equilibrium some gods want them gone, or else get destroyed by dath ilan or some force like it that is trying to maximize average happiness of instantiated minds across the multiverse. If that is a common value, which it probably is because everyone in dath ilan is very smart and it was approximately universal there, and if Pharasma's Creation is as vulnerable to destruction as it looks, then Pharasma's Creation is going to get destroyed sooner or later unless someone brings average quality of life there above a reasonable estimate of how bad the greater multiverse is.  [I'm not expecting dath ilan's utilityfunction to be common among things more powerful than Pharasma that connect to Pharasma's Creation.]

Pharasma is fundamentally the kind of entity who has no business running a multiverse, and so it is good, other things equal, to make her stop that, and it is worth at least some small probability of the multiverse being destroyed to wrest control of it from an alien entity that does not share human values unless Greater Reality is even worse.  [Yep.]

If the policy 'destroy bits of Greater Reality that you are not glad you landed is' is followed by all people waking up in unfamiliar universes, then maybe in the long run everyone who wakes up in an unfamiliar universe will wake up in a pretty good one, so the repeat application of this process makes it more and more of a good idea over time. The fact dath ilani were taught to think about the world this way, including game theory about cleaning up bits of Greater Reality you find yourself in where Zon-Kuthon asks for $10, suggests that dath ilan may already have calculated this is a good idea.  [Pretty sure they weren't teaching me things I'd need to know for Golarion.]  [This is mostly just a special case of rejecting bad deals, incl. Pharasma's non-deal.]

She reads through it, nods, sighs. "Well, one of the things that I was thinking might convince me to work with you was if you thought an unfixed Creation was vulnerable to other universe-destroyers. But I appreciate you telling me you don't think that and think Creation would probably be otherwise safe."

"It would be a common courtesy in Civilization while prosecuting a disagreement, and one I hope I can expect symmetrically from you."

Yeah. We're doing trusting-negotiations here. ...I hope?

"Yes.

I.... think I have some kind of additional disagreement with you now about - if every human in dath ilan ends up with the same views on something as apparently-subjective as 'average utilitarianism', then I don't think it feels right to just assert that's all their unchangeable utility-functions - people don't have utility-functions, people are muddled and dath ilani society reliably resolves that muddle in that way, but I am not sure that's different than how Cheliax reliably resolves various muddles in various ways. I'd feel more confident it was a utility-function thing if it was, say, 85% of people in dath ilan.

I realize some utility-function things should in fact be overwhelmingly common among humans but this really, really doesn't seem like one of them especially given all the absurd-seeming claims it makes - you're going to say we should discuss this at INT-29 - but it seems like it would imply you should destroy perfectly good universes under a wide variety of circumstances, including if that subjectively sends everyone in them to Hell, so long as most of Greater Reality is much nicer than those perfectly good universes... and maybe some people believe that but I am suspicious of claims that it ends up in nearly all human utility-functions unless you deliberately engineer your whole society to make them think that."

"I wasn't saying that 'average utilitarianism' was just a matter of utilityfunctions.  The averaging part is something that's - pinned down by some pseudo-Law-fragment-ish arguments relative to the human pre-utilityfunction muddle that shakes out into a utilityfunction?  One way of looking at it is that it doesn't make any more sense to ask what if there was twice as much sentience in reality any more than it makes sense to ask what if everything in reality was twice as large or what if time everywhere was running half as fast."

"Not sure we should dive on that right now, I don't think 'average utilitarianism' per se is liable to be a crux of disagreement.  Though if we both converted to 'total utilitarianism' we'd then be faced with a question of whether Pharasma's Creation is above or below 'zero' which seems entirely utilityfunctional, rather than the question of whether Creation is above or below average."

"That does sound like it might be more productive if we wait."

"I unfortunately get a sense from having taken the disagreement this far that the real crux is liable to be the sense to which - I've lived in a universe which wasn't tropey in the slightest, where everything just bubbled up from directly visible math in a directly visible way, and by comparison Golarion looks really blatantly tropey to me, even if it's ultimately a real thing that got selected really sharply for tropiness.  So I'm also expecting to a much higher degree that the universe has been set on track for a Bad End unless the protagonists do something.  Your worldview has a much higher prior that we might not need to do something that looks like the climax of a story, for things to end up pretty much all right, a hundred years later, because we're not that special and our efforts don't need to be that desperate.  My prior is more that I've been put into a situation where, if I try to - the trope would be 'Refuse the Call' - the multiverse is otherwise set to have the ancient gods crush out Civilization, our enemies get their own diamond synthesis not that far behind us, Asmodeus is not dumber than Iomedae and has His own symmetrical plans about how to eliminate Heaven as opposition.  There was an apparent plotline about just building Civilization, that plotline got trashed with the reveal of the Conspiracy."

"If we want to pursue that question on the object level instead of direct meta level, we could talk plans to take over just Avernus."

"I - thought you thought on tropes-logic I was the protagonist? In which case it's true that the universe is set for a Bad End unless I do something, my ex is going to destroy it. 

I haven't had much time to think about plans to take over Avernus, if you've thought about it a ton and have nothing and Carmin doesn't think there's anything the church of Iomedae could do even with a million Wishes I'll be more pessimistic there."

"Heh.  Fair enough, you didn't show up being the protagonist until a day ago, and I'll have to rethink what possible storylines remain consistent given that."

"I have not thought very much about plans to take over Avernus in particular.  I suppose if this universe is to last long enough that the number of people already in Hell would end up being dominated by new people..."

"I am not sure I actually have it in me, to abandon the souls currently in Hell.  Fair warning, anything that - comes to that conclusion - might end up being something where I look over the logic and do the calculation and then throw the calculation away and instead not abandon the souls currently in Hell.  I suppose, if I were the Big Problem that this universe faces, that would make me not too easily solvable from your standpoint."

"Carmin is not, I think, somebody with the spark herself to envision plans on that scale.  Most people in Golarion don't have that, Carissa, it's not just Cheliax that burns it out of people."

"It seems good that most people aren't like that, they'd be destroying the world left and right. 

The other part - that's one of the things on my list to persuade you of. That even if the world is bad enough to risk destroying it to fix it, the set of changes that'd make that no longer true are pretty small.  There are trillions of people leading good lives, there's lots of potential to fix things through non-world-destroying mechanisms. If we succeeded at taking Avernus, no one would ever go to Hell in its present form again. You'd have saved the people who were begging to die. You'd have saved every person who'll ever be born. At that point, to kill everyone, to send many of them to something as bad as Hell, to risk feeding everything to Yog-Sothoth, to risk getting crushed and achieving nothing at all including the Avernus fix, because the first pass at fixing things didn't solve literally every instance of suffering in the multiverse - I can't actually make any sense of that. 

Relatedly, we don't need to ask Pharasma for a contraceptive cleric spell, we can just make and distribute ilani contraception, or build it in to Rings of Sustenance which we give the whole population for free. We don't need to ask Pharasma for landing-spaces in the Maelstrom or the Abyss, a Civilization with the resources we should be able to command in a few decades can just build those.

The only things that you actually need to ask Pharasma, in the sense they can only be done with Her leave, are removing Asmodeus and getting rid of Malediction and preserving somewhere where Civilization can grow without being crushed, and I don't think it's defensible to ask for anything else. Anything else you ask for is trading off us getting it slightly sooner for in expectation killing tens of billions of people, and virtually none of the people in Creation would take that trade.

It's - one thing - to imagine telling them all that the reason they are now to be annihilated is to stop Hell. I think it's wrong, but I - see in, in a way. It is another thing entirely, to imagine telling them the reason they are now to be annihilated is that we wanted birth control to be a cleric spell instead of a nonmagical invention to be widely distributed starting in a decade or so."

"I think - a major problem I have with this scenario is how many things need to go sort of right, sort of the way you hoped, over an extended period, while facing a lot of adversaries who are aware of you and making their own plans and who don't want your hopes to go that way."

"Without the methods of diamond manufacture leaking to Cheliax or being rediscovered by them.  Without Golarion being destroyed by opposed Wishes.  Without all of the diamonds we make, suddenly vanishing.  Without it suddenly becoming impossible to manufacture diamonds.  Without the laws of magic shifting, so that diamonds are no longer useful in Resurrections and Wishes.  Without all of the Neutral and Evil gods banding together, to prevent the Good gods from growing too powerful."

"There's also things that have to go right for me to successfully destroy the multiverse in a surprise attack, but they're fewer and less adversarially opposed.  They just consist of particular things that need to already be true, rather than our adversaries staying in place not making plans while only we get to make plans.  I am hoping to take Pharasma by surprise, once.  Afterwards, either this multiverse is gone, which is acceptable to me; or I've negotiated with Her, once, to put this multiverse into a state where it's possible for the forces of Good to clean it up with a lot of hard work."

"This universe contains a lot of powerful things besides Iomedae.  I believe in a plan where we take them by surprise, using temporary unknown advantages like diamond synthesis and my grasp of how to destroy multiverses.  I don't believe in a plan where the Good gods beat all other gods, over an extended period, because of a discovery that didn't remain unknown once it was used.  I don't believe that we get to make plans and they don't get to make plans, once the advantage of surprise is lost.  I don't believe we get to shove this world out of its current equilibrium to a new place in spite of all the restoring forces that kept it in this state to begin with, unless we can beat those forces, and those forces are Pharasma and the ancient gods.  I don't believe we get to make plans and have those plans be real once other agents are making plans too."

"All right, so one important area of disagreement is what the set of minimal concessions from Pharasma that makes it likely Civilization can fix things from there is. And related to that, I should probably be trying to figure out if Abadar is willing to commit to defending Civilization and making sure it gets to exist, if Sarenrae is, if - I don't know who else might be relevant."

"Abadar will appreciate Civilization if it exists, I think.  Having Him defend it from other gods is a whole different story, especially when it doesn't already exist and Abadar is very confused about a lot of the things that make up a stable Civilization from a mortal stand point.  Sarenrae... I have concerns about the thing where She smote a city, and I am not very reassured by the part where She's supposed to have realized afterwards that this was a bad idea, it sounds more like mortals trying to paper over divine unpleasantness than how I imagine ancient gods working.  It's not clear to me that dath ilan Civilization wouldn't... I mean, not actually arrest Sarenrae, She's done some good work for mortals, but tell Her that She needed to clean up Her act a bit."

"My model isn't that there's nobody out there for Civilization to cut a deal with.  I think They're not powerful enough, and that the ancient gods opposed to Them will squash Civilization before Civilization gets powerful enough to participate in ancient-god-deals."

"If Abadar would want Civilization, but is confused about what it will look like and how to bring it about, and we would benefit from Him defending it from other gods, then that seems like among the most solvable problems we've run across yet. Abadar also might know more than us about how powerful anti-Civilization forces are, and whether Pharasma's one of them or whether She'd be willing to defend Civilization given certain assurances..."

"I could be wrong, but my current strong guess is that when it comes to tech and magitech on the level of spellsilver refining, Axis already knows how to do it, Azlant knew how to do it, Abadar's First Vault still has all of Azlant's books."

"My being here did not make advanced spellsilver refining be possible for the first time, because the knowledge existed for the first time.  It made it be a default outcome rather than an outcome that required any gods to intervene.  If the gods wanted things to be like that, collectively, they could have done it much earlier."

"That's part of why I strongly expect the Scientific Revolution to otherwise get shut down before it proceeds too far, and why I expect that the ancient gods favoring it would not have a supermajority as more and more other ancient gods' interests are threatened.  Urgathoa.  Gorum.  It maybe goes differently if Project Lawful remains on par with the Scientific Revolution and Cheliax conquers half of Golarion and remains in a constant state of battle with the Scientific Revolution, such that Gorum and Asmodeus favor the new state of affairs, but now we are once again getting into the space of possible outcomes where I am no longer very happy about it and want to fall back on the Nope Plan."

"It is possible that nobody around except Pharasma and Otolmens are allowed to know how to rig up planes for destruction.  You plausibly need to run particular high-energy experiments to figure out some of those even at INT 40, and if Pharasma can prohibit those experiments She can prohibit anybody from figuring out how to make a plane erase itself."

"That all sounds right, but the closer Civilization is to something the ancient gods are all right with, the smaller the concession needed, which means we can ask for less from Pharasma and have better odds of getting it, or find another way to get it. And I think it's worth my seeing your concrete projections about - if the problem is specifically Gorum and the Evil gods, that's a different state of affairs than if the problem is all of the ancient gods, or all of them but Abadar..."

"If it comes down to details like that, we're just going to have to refigure it all anyways when we're at mutual INT 29 in a couple of subjective weeks."

"Figure out what your plan would be.  Figure out what you'd need to set your plan in motion, that takes time to gather, that we need to start now and isn't doable far more efficiently at mutual INT 29.  Then we plausibly just do that, set in motion time-sensitive subplans or resource-gathering.  I can decide later whether to actually do it, unless it's incredibly clear right now that the plan is one that Smarter Carissa can't repair into something Smarter Me will go along with."

"I - register a strong preference that this plan have me not destroy Egorian, before Cheliax attacks Osirion once they believe they've got a hostage.  I'm not especially likely to be happy about Cheliax conquering Osirion and putting its inhabitants, who helped me, to slavery and misery.  I would do it to clean up the multiverse, I suppose, if there was no other way, but I'd lose a lot of myself that I haven't already lost in that process."

"If we don't want Cheliax invading Osirion, I think I can pretty straightforwardly assassinate Abrogail and find out whether there are others. If there are, you just send Cheliax an ultimatum before the children are ensouled: swear not to invade Osirion for the next year or I'll destroy you now before the children are ensouled. 

I do kind of want Cheliax invading Osirion as part of my interest in Asmodeus thinking that things are going really well for him, but I - acknowledge that probably if I cared more about Osirion I wouldn't really be all right with that, and that the calculations about Asmodeus are tenuous right now."

"I'm - not clear I would otherwise destroy Cheliax, if I was still planning on my current default plan.  There's an obstacle there, that I'm seeing more clearly after recent discussions and now that my emotions are in better repair."

"How would you find out if there are other children?"

"I have spectacular Bluff these days. I Teleport in, assassinate Abrogail, raise her, and say to her 'I just saved you from Keltham destroying Egorian. Next time, consider not letting it come to that. Are there others as well?'"

"I am not following this plan at all.  She lies and says 'no' and then, alerted of my suspicion, orders the further children evacuated to outside of Cheliax until they are ensouled."

"She is told that you're prepared to preemptively destroy Cheliax unless there are no further children. If she says no, I say 'great, we bring Keltham an oath to that effect and he won't destroy Cheliax'. If she can't provide that oath, we kill the other mothers until she can. ...wrongthought, you're upset about them going to Hell. If she evacuates them from the country, your incentive is still to destroy Cheliax to ensure it doesn't have the capacity to go after Osirion, unless Cheliax is prepared to commit that they won't."

"So this is being done at a point where I otherwise would destroy Cheliax, namely, if I switched away from my main plan, and then was otherwise about to run out of time on ensoulments probably starting?  I can stop Cheliax going after Osirion just by attacking Egorian with something that draws in their military response and then destroying Egorian, I think.  Or are you proposing that Cheliax responds to threats so I should make one?  Or proposing that it benefits myself, rather than being a threat, if I speed up the time when I'd otherwise confront them?"

"- Carissa, the fact that all of this enormous mess happens to me at a certain time unless I delete or clean up the multiverse before then, really looks to me like the plot is telling me to get on with it.  Not that the plot is telling me to wade into this enormous mess."

"If that's so, I think you should say 'fuck the plot'. Do this at the time when you are most prepared and estimate the highest odds of success, or don't do it at all.  In any story worth reading, it'd be a mistake to do something with these stakes at a time chosen by external forces for any reason that isn't your own."