" - perhaps that's a good idea but I feel like some confusion remains, and I wish I understood it. If the person came in to yell angrily at me about the people in Avernus, and I thought they were a kind of strategic person in general, I'd assume they thought I was...missing some deeply felt sense of what it was like to truly and acutely appreciate the harm of Avernus, and trying to convey it to me, in case I actually hadn't encountered anything that'd given me a deeply felt sense of that. Or trying to help me notice that some intuition of mine applied to the situation which I hadn't been applying. 

This isn't what I was doing when I asked if you denominated internal spending in billions of murders enabled, that was just me hating you and wanting you to know it because I was scared and miserable and would've been delighted if you'd lit me on fire for it, but it's what I'd expect the person was doing, and it'd...sometimes work if they were right, and not otherwise, just like other ways of trying to communicate?"

"So as much as you may not like to hear about it, I come from another planet which has a thousand tons of extremely advanced cognitive technology for causing people with outlook differences to be able to work productively in the presence of those differences.  This includes people with values differences, negotiating; and people with epistemic differences, making bets or figuring out experiments; and people in multiagent-cooperation-defection-dilemmas, knowing the conditions for mutual cooperation; and dividing the gains, when two parties have to work together.  It's all this technology that is designed incredibly carefully to work great when both people use it."

"Golarion doesn't, in fact, have its own, different, version of this technology, that works great so long as both people come from Golarion.  It has people acting out their feelings at each other and yelling and this does not, in fact, work.  Hence Golarion."

"The reason why I don't yell angrily at the hypothetical people with a poorly phrased Wish about to destroy dath ilan, is that I don't think the locus of my disagreement with them lies within their failure to activate a latent emotion which I can activate by yelling my emotions at them.  I think, in this hypothetical example, that they don't think their Wish will destroy dath ilan, so yelling my emotions at them wouldn't help even if yelling my emotions at them caused them to activate the corresponding emotions.  That's more like - you think you're trying to persuade an audience - but then, first of all, the hypothetical audience, if this is dath ilan, also knows the key issue is just whether their Wish destroys dath ilan or not.  Second of all, in our case, there is no audience, or at least, none that has power over our world so far as we know and is persuadable by arguments we understand."

"I have all these rules inside my head for what you are supposed to, to do about cases like this.  And the thing is, in fact, my rules would work great if there were a world-destroying dath ilani and a world-preserving dath ilani who needed to negotiate about that and navigate related factual disagreements.  Your rules, I am betting, would not work great between a world-destroying Carissa and a world-preserving Carissa.  And while this doesn't make me right, because I don't have rules that work for myself plus a Carissa and that's the rules I would need, it does make me frustrated."

"...do dath ilani not think that yelling emotions ever activates latent emotions, or just think that no one ever makes mistakes that can be fixed by causing emotional realizations, or - I'm not sure this matters. I had, actually, noticed that it was not achieving my goals to express any of how I feel about your plan, and talked with Carmin about how to not do it, and I think I can have this conversation by dath ilan rules. And in fact, the Chelish way of doing this is for everyone to conceal all their feelings at all times, so it's entirely possible I'm too optimistic about approaches that don't require that and they really don't actually work."

"Dath ilan doesn't require everyone to conceal their feelings at all times.  It has ways of quoting feelings to make them information, instead of being emotional at people like, like it's a threat, or a demand.  You could say, 'I think the locus of our disagreement is that you're not feeling the right emotions about the people in Axis who'd end up isekaied to a hundred different places with who-knows-what average properties and I want to talk about how terrified I am when I imagine them dying and being separated from each other and maybe ending up in alternate universes run by Powers worse than Pharasma who like them even less' and I could say 'I think we disagree about what the distribution of metaversal Powers would probably end up looking like, but this uses a bunch of knowledge you don't have and can learn much faster and debate more productively at INT 29'.  You could say 'I think the locus of our disagreement is that you're just not visualizing the sheer blank horror of somebody suddenly existing less, even if that feels to them internally like they just pop into existence at the Worldwound, and I want to prompt you with some visualization exercises for activating that emotion' and I could reply 'Actually I don't think I have that emotion, I'm sort of skeptical most Golarion natives have that emotion, so prompting me with visualization exercises may not help but you are welcome to try'."

"I will try to say things those ways when it seems to me that that's the reason for distance between us."

"I have, obviously, a model of our disagreement.  Among the protocols we could be ad-libbing for this whole thing, if we wanted to try running it through relatively more informally before going full Very Serious People at each other, is that I try to write down your argument the way you'd put it, and write down where I think I disagree with it, and you write down my argument the way you think I'd put it, and write down where you think your loci of disagreement are, and then we compare notes."

"Then we fairly judge, because we are ilani who can judge things fairly, how well the other person's argument sounded like what we'd say; and if one of us did much better, beyond the variance of noise, in predicting and imitating the other, they win argument-prestige that they can cash in for things like 'Well then my theory of our disagreement is also more likely to be correct and I'd like you to pause and listen carefully to it.'"

"We could also just quickly talk it out in case we already know where we disagree, or can easily determine that by talking, and don't want to bother wagering and winning argument-prestige."

"Trying to describe the other person's position sounds sensible to me."

"And then describe what we think our own disagreements with that are."

"All right, let's do this thing.  Uh, I am going to use some primitive but surprisingly helpful magitech to do mine, a Fake 'Computer' that basically just pipes a 'keyboard' to a 'printer', so my version is probably going to be longer and more detailed given equivalent time.  You want longer to work to make up for that, or we just notice that'll be different and consciously compensate for the unfair advantage it induces?"

"I guess I'll take a bit longer, if that works for you."

He'll go to his bedroll to grab his keyboard-printer Fake Computer.  It looks like a dath ilani chording keyboard, connected by silver wire to a number of animated printing-press types that dart out and impress themselves on the paper as he chords.

He types up a draft, slowly.

And then at the end, reads and retypes it, much faster:

Why I think Keltham should not destroy Pharasma's Creation, by 'Carissa Sevar':

People live here.

This argument is uncomplicated and correct and should be decisive if understood, but I will continue writing anyways.

If there's a trillion identical copies of you, and 999,999,999,999 die and 1 survive, that's not like all of you ending up as the 1 surviving version.  It's like 999,999,999,999 people dying and is exactly 99.9999999999% as bad as 1,000,000,000,000 people dying.  This Keltham may have been that one lucky survivor, when he died inside the 0.0000000001% of dath ilans that were visible to or connected to a place like Pharasma's Creation and where somebody bothered to copy that Keltham into the Worldwound, and to him it feels like nothing happened, but that's not what happens every time to everyone.  99.9999999999% of the Kelthams died and didn't think any more thoughts and didn't exist at all.

And that's horrifying.  Existing is the greatest gift we have.  It's the premise of all other gifts, obviously, but that's not what makes it great.  Though I respect that a tortured soul in Hell may want to stop existing, I think they're making a mistake, maybe the hugest mistake there is, if that actually got them destroyed.  So long as they're alive at all, and thinking, and feeling even if what they feel is pain, they have something that's better than the absence of all that.

Happiness is better than suffering, but not to the same degree that both are better than null, nothingness, nonexistence.  People can say words like that but not really feel what it would mean, because how can you imagine that?  Anything you imagine it feeling like, is not what it is, which is nothing.  Trying to feel that head-on is like trying to look into the sun, a horror blinding enough that your mind wrenches away without actually thinking about it.  The fact that nobody ever thinks about this, or can ever think about it, causes everybody to systematically underestimate how bad it actually is, and not be able to correctly estimate that being a paving stone is Hell is still better than that.

Pain is something you can accept, suffering is something you can accept, so long as there's still an awareness there to accept it; nonexistence can't be accepted because there's nobody there to come to terms with how awful it is.

Pharasma gave that gift to everyone in this world, and even the people in Hell were not wronged by it.

The people in this world do not want to be destroyed.  While some people got worse deals at birth, like those in Cheliax who mostly went to Hell, a lot of people got prospective local chances at afterlives that look a lot like the overall statistics for Golarion.  Those people overwhelmingly did not, and do not, express horror and regret at having been born into a place like Golarion where that was their lot, they don't try to save up for a Malediction to Abaddon, or even, really, complain all that much.

It would be a straw version of my argument to say that this shows, directly, that Pharasma's Creation is a good deal for the people born into it on average, or that you shouldn't destroy the entire thing.  People could, for example, be mistaken about their personal probability of going to Hell, or be mistaken about how bad Hell was if they went there (as I do admit I was now mistaken to some degree).  But the fact that people don't seem to think it's a near thing or that you should seriously debate in depth whether to destroy Pharasma's Creation, that Rovagug cultists are universally and unhesitatingly regarded as the villains by everybody who isn't one of the tiny fraction of Rovagug cultists, illustrates that this is not the sort of near thing where people being off by a factor of three about their personal probability of going to Hell is going to change that.

Yes, some people here got the shitty end of the deal and now said, in your Vision of Hell, 'please kill me', as probably did mean, in context, that they wanted to stop existing.  Even those people didn't ask you to destroy Axis too, or scream that you ought to destroy Axis as the price of destroying Hell.  They were distracted and probably didn't know you were listening, but they did not, in fact, scream that.  They didn't scream 'Please destroy everything.'  Maybe they would have, if you'd asked.  Realistically they wouldn't have been screaming anything that complicated, with nobody apparently listening at all.  But you can't, actually, say that even the people in Hell asked you to do this.

Maybe the people in Hell would tell you to destroy everything.  But the people not in Hell would not tell you that.  The people alive in this world right now, who might go to Hell with around the same probability as anybody from Golarion ends up in Hell, would overwhelmingly tell you not to annihilate their existences on the spot lest they wind up in Hell later.  The people like that who do go to Hell, might end up being tortured into changing their minds about that, because pain can have the power to change people's minds by force, or just because, they're the ones who got unlucky.  That doesn't mean their original self, who accepted that probability in exchange for their chance of ending up happy ever after in Axis or Elysium, was making the wrong decision, based on a bad model of Hell, and learned something in Hell that changed their mind.  It's just like somebody who took a great gamble with a high expected value, happened to lose that gamble, and is now unhappy.

You are wrong, Keltham, to think that most of the people in Hell made no choices worth mentioning, in going there, that change how much it matters that they're in pain.  You think that because you believe deep in your heart that everybody in Golarion is a child who can't make meaningful choices.  In this you are wrong.  They're just a different kind of adult who is not shaped the peculiar way that dath ilani are trained to recognize as adults, which is only one particular kind of adulthood that obtains in dath ilan.

If you'd been allowed to leave, or been safe to leave, your tiny enclosures in Cheliax, in Osirion, in this new lair, and take in the wide range of cultures across Golarion that has so much more variation than dath ilan, you might realize: you are surrounded by a hundred different kinds of adults, not a world full of nothing but children.  A great many of them have handled more adversity and more serious situations in their lives than dath ilani 'adults' ever do.

This also affects how much you should listen to them, when they ask you to please not kill them, their families and ancestors in their afterlives, and destroy all of their children and all of the children they'll ever have. 

Even if you're right about people just ending up somewhere else, they will end up someplace worse than Golarion, if they're scattered into a wider multiverse.  It's known, about Pharasma's Creation, that the things outside of it are no friends to anything inside, and that's just about all we know about them.  Pharasma did everybody here a service in creating them someplace as friendly as this place is.  Scattering them outside of it is, maybe, a worse disservice to children than Maledicting them to Hell.

You don't know what lies beyond Golarion.  Maybe it's better.

You don't know what lies in this universe's Future.  Maybe it's better.  You'd be destroying that too.

Any time you make up a plan which has a step that includes 'release Rovagug', anybody native to Golarion would immediately and correctly recognize that you have made a reasoning error somewhere along the way, just like everybody else who concludes that.  It is a heuristic that is simple, valid, and correct about your particular case.

There has to be a better way.  Iomedae hasn't given up on this universe.  Why should you?  Iomedae lives here and knows the place better and has worked on it for longer and is much, much smarter and better-informed than you are.  She doesn't seem to think it's hopeless.

You're not going to beat Pharasma.  She's larger than you are.  Even Iomedae isn't trying that.

 

You haven't looked for a better way, or have not looked nearly hard enough, because this world hurt you a lot, and you want it gone, or maybe you just find it painful to look at it in enough detail to decide whether or not it should be gone.

Somebody in as much pain as you, as broken as you, is the wrong person to say, "I know better than everybody here asking me not to do this; this world should end."

And then types and retypes, more briefly, because wow is this taking some time:

My beliefs about the probable loci of my disagreements with Carissa Sevar, more located and pointed at than argued:

- A possibly theoretically unresolvable epistemic disagreement (though we'll know better at INT 29) where I've updated off my isekai experience about what 'typically happens', and ended up in a world full of people to whom this observation is theoretically inaccessible.

- Very different model of the theoretical origins and hence likely psychology of beings and Powers who could devise continuation causal-weaves for otherwise halted entities; in particular, greater expectation of coordination among them, and expecting most utility functions of non-mortal-caring such entities to settle on maxima which don't have mortals inside them at all.

- Unresolvable values difference about disutility of nonexistence:  eternal suffering << null < eternal happiness.  Would consider Hell at least 100 times as bad as Axis is good.

- Do not in fact respect reasoning of local mortals about their afterlife prospects, suspect they're mostly not thinking about it, nonexistence isn't exactly an easy option for them anyways, don't think their expressed opinions are really bound to the relative weight of an eternity in Axis or Hell.  No people who can remember millennia of existence as paving stone / lemure and also millennia in Axis, and do an interpersonal comparison there - if even that would be meaningful and not just default to whichever came last.  Given all that, situation with 9x Axis inhabitants saying 'this life was a good deal' and 1x Hell inhabitants saying 'bad deal' doesn't seem so much like a 90% majority vote, as people dividing a cake where 9 get nice deals and 1 gets crumbs; the person who got the crumbs has a kind of priority in saying whether the overall deal was fair or not.

- Pharasma thought the things She trapped in Her creation couldn't endanger Her and so She did not need to treat with them as agents and divide gains fairly with them, or even ask what they wanted.  I see myself as agent, this world as a deal, and reject the deal.

- Expect Golarion typical, Pharasma roughly balanced entire multiverse to sort around 1/3 of petitioners to each category on each axis.  No obvious reason why Pharasma would have built a setup where later on almost nobody got sorted to Hell in Her own expectation.

- Suspect Iomedae's "goddess of victory over Evil" deal, maybe not so much distorts Her probabilities, as constrains the way She can behave about them.  Iomedae has notably not distributed a timetable with probabilities to Her followers.  Iomedae is opposed by gods much more powerful than Her and maybe smarter who do not want Her to win.  If everybody got hope by trying hard, every god would own that hope to the same degree, none more hopeful than the others.

- Have estimate of Pharasma's apparent power given observations about Her, does not seem to rule out rigging Her Creation to destruct.

- I'm sorta broken, yeah.  Everyone else in Golarion is completely bugshit wacko, though.

- Tropian probability distortions: clearly a thing, even allowing for some of our history to have been produced by divine interventions imitating tropes.  If we don't do this now, Pharasma's Creation might be waiting a long long time on the next story-empowered people who would have a probabilistically anomalous chance at fixing or even changing things.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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 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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

If the policy 'destroy bits of Greater Reality that you are not glad you landed in' 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 10gp, suggests that dath ilan may already have calculated this is a good idea. 

Guesses about where Keltham and I most disagree: 

I expect that it's easier to destroy yourself in Pharasma's Creation than in most places. Everyone has a physical body and if you destroy it you go somewhere else! If you destroy it as an outsider that's it! Most possible ways to have a mind exist don't involve that mind having fairly-straightforward things it can do to cease its function and ensure its function doesn't have to start again. It is widely known even among peasants in random places that if you're Neutral Evil you go to Abaddon and get eaten, and most people actively avoid this, but if a person had an unusually strong nonexistence preference they can not-exist. I don't believe this is true of most possible souls/minds.

I think that it is possible for good lives to be as good as bad lives in Hell are bad even for normal people who don't care about existing as much as me. I don't know exactly what extremely good lives are, and I don't know what share of people in Good afterlives I'd say have them, but it feels to me like things can be as good as they are bad. Certainly my most good experiences are as strongly preferable-above-baseline as my most bad experiences are negative and I have had some experiences that are fairly Hell-like. I'm willing to get tortured harder if a failure of imagination about what Hell is like might be relevant. 

We disagree about how much the revealed preferences of Golarionites are relevant. I don't think that people not trying to avoid Hell means they don't mind Hell. It's often that they're very muddled. I do think that when people decide that they are willing to do Evil things and go to Hell in order to, say, make a lot of money to Raise their dead baby and give that baby a good life in Axis, they frequently understand exactly the trade they are making and are within their rights to make it, and it is a terrible wrong to them to destroy the children they worked to save, in order to save them from suffering in Hell. I do think it's suggestive that everyone was appalled about the daemons eating souls out of the river of souls and eating babies in the Boneyard. I also think it's suggestive that many people if you ask them would take on considerable risk of Hell to protect their loved ones from Abaddon. 

I think that the fact that people mostly go to Hell for doing awful things to other people matters in our evaluation of whether they got an unfair division of gains or not. It makes it feel, to me, more like they played a lottery and want the winners killed so they don't have the consequences of losing than like they were randomly assigned an unfair share. You have to be a bad person to go to Hell; you have to knowingly treat people very badly on purpose. 

I think that Civilization can find better ways to fix Creation and fix Hell, in the next hundred years, once there are headbands everywhere and not much scarcity. 

Not everyone in Creation is human or even humanoid. The overwhelming share of them are not. I think that Keltham has not thought enough about whether he is doing right by very very inhuman minds, some of which might have very different preferences from humans like being much more okay with Hell or for that matter being much more harmed by Axis or Nirvana or by waking up in another universe (say, because they're a telepathic hivemind that die slowly in horrible suffering if separated from their kin). Keltham is weird enough that it seems plausible to me that for most creatures in Pharasma's Creation moving it towards Keltham's values will leave them worse off.  Relatedly I think it's hard to evaluate how reasonably Pharasma is running Creation with a view of just one planet but her running of it seems basically reasonable to me except for how the wrong person is in charge of Hell. 

I think it's reasonably likely that Pharasma will just crush Keltham and then everything will be much worse with a huge opportunity for making them better totally lost and gone. I think that if we start by letting out Rovagug then the net effect of Keltham will be empowering Asmodeus, getting the one planet without prophecy eaten, and foregoing a chance to fix almost everything. I also think it's pretty likely that we'll all just get slowly and horrifyingly eaten by Yog-Sothoth or something if Pharasma stops protecting the universe.

An implication of the above is that I think if you try this, we should mostly expect to 'wake up' in worlds where you tried this and it failed in some way; that is where most minds that have continuity from our current existence is. 

I don't think that killing someone across billions of worlds is made meaningfully less bad by there existing a copy of them somewhere at some point.

I think that Keltham is deeply unusual in many respects which could be relevant to whether you wake up somewhere else when you die and we should not necessarily conclude that everyone who dies will experience waking up somewhere else.

I don't think I care very much about the specific path by which a mind dies, even if I grant that they'll wake up somewhere else; a copy of me that is me-from-a-year-ago is about as good as a copy from right this minute (when I haven't just been through a very transformative year), so to whatever extent a copy makes it less bad that I was murdered, an out of date copy is almost as good as a new one. I think Keltham cares a lot about this. 

I think that Hell is not worse than nonexistence at least for me and plausibly for most people but I don't even know that it's worth arguing this one. 

"All right, you've read mine, I've had a chance to read yours.  Meta-level comments, things I failed to make clear about how the process supposedly worked that are more obvious now that you've seen literally one example of it?  In retrospect we should've run a pilot where we first tried this on... some other disagreement we had in the past where your position was mostly real, you'd know better what the choices were than I."

"- I think from my perspective this was about the result I expected. I am sure I didn't do it in the proper dath ilani way but it looks like my attempt was in fact probably close enough to work from."

"Yeah, I'm trying to remind myself that it would not be remotely fair to judge this the way that a dath ilani audience would be judging it right now.  Like, I did not, for example, actually say out loud that your description of my views was to be written from Keltham's perspective, as if by Keltham..."

"I don't think your presentation of my views really - emphasized the parts I'd emphasize, and there's strange little hiccups in your model of my model of dath ilan..."

"We could now take each other's writeups and underline parts we noticeably disagreed with in the other's presentation of what was supposed to be our own view.  First I'm curious how you'd rate my attempt to write from your perspective overall."

"It seemed like you were thinking of 'existence is much better than nonexistence' as a big part of my argument against destroying the universe, and it's a big part of my personal priorities and I did, in fact, prefer when it came up with Abrogail to be tortured for arbitrary lengths of time if I was going to cease existing at the end of it, because suffering was so much better than not existing. 

But I think that actually fairly little of my argument rests on that. That'd be relevant if we were debating destroying a universe where everyone went to Hell. 

Uh, 'Scattering them outside of it is, maybe, a worse disservice to children than Maledicting them to Hell.' is wrong about my views, it seems pretty unlikely to me that most of the Greater Reality is worse for humans than Hell. Just that even if 1% of it is as bad as Hell, that's probably trillions of children you're sending to Hell, and that most of it is worse than the balance of the Outer Planes. 

I don't think you should learn from the fact everyone thinks releasing Rovagug is a bad plan, I feel like the reasons it's a bad plan are pretty self-evident and there's not additional information in public opinion.

I think you're condescending to Golarion people but that's mostly just relevant to the degree of consultation you'll get on your plan, I don't really think it's actually the driver of your plan or worth talking you out of. I figured I'd just consult everyone myself and then translate for you.

Your writeup does not emphasize much how with the resources we'll have one week from now we can probably at least fix Avernus in a much safer way, and the Civilization we can build will contain people much much smarter than us who might think of a much much smarter solution to Hell and who will have the option of this solution, so long as we don't blow up the only planet where prophecy is broken.

You don't really mention downside risks of, say, getting the one planet without prophecy eaten so no one can ever rise up against the gods again, or getting us all taken by whatever got Zon-Kuthon. I think those feature pretty significantly in my thinking about this.

Iomedae might be wrong about whether the universe before you arrived was going to end well for Good, but there's a truly transformative number and kind of resources now available! Hell has been betting on the products of this interworld contact as if they're a really, really big deal, as if they are a loophole in the godagreements about information-sharing. I think that we can take Avernus and build Civilization and leave the rest to our intellectual heirs, a generation down the line, who'll be equipped for this problem in a way we aren't, and I think that's really the core of my reasoning here, that we don't have to choose this plan or nothing, that there is so much potential to do something else which is not this."

"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."