This is a good question. Griffie will go with a single-word answer, on the basis that it's probably harder to screw with one of those in a way that isn't suspicious to Keltham.

"Yes."

"Are you dealing with significant uncertainties as to what I would consider infohazardous?"

What Griffie attempts to say is "Technically yes, but not in this case?". What Keltham hears is "Yes".

Keltham can go into a long explanation of what things he does and does not consider infohazardous, then!

Griffie can make some guesses about what Keltham heard em say based on Keltham's reply. The phenomenon Keltham is concerned about is annoying, and tedious, and not actually urgent. If Keltham could just stop poking this for a bit ey can probably slip a bunch of informatively insane statistics and anecdotes that'll let him figure it out into his general reading supply, but no, apparently this is happening now. When Griffie throwing a bunch of books on the subject at Keltham for him to dissect might lead to him, say, failing to notice any of the books, because there is really no plausible excuse for Griffie to be sharing the books. And also, again, he doesn't want infohazards! Why does he have to poke the infohazard if he just said he did not want infohazards right now!

Keltham has now finished his explanation! He will try asking questions again.

"Given my definition of infohazards, do you still think that giving minimally informative answers to my questions going forward is necessary for satisfying my preferences here?"

Griffie is going to try changing the subject. The long meta conversation might make this less informative-looking, even if this is not actually less informative to Keltham.

"Let's talk about something else for now."

Well, it is a decent excuse to see what topics Griffith won't be this terse about.

"What's your model of the effects of engaging in commerce with souls?"

"As far as I can tell the souls-as-fuel market associated with Abaddon carries obvious risks of being attacked, but isn't particularly known for subtle traps. Abaddon likely doesn't want to sell souls in a form usable as anything but fuel, the last time I encountered an Abaddon-derived soul export it was powered soul gems, which are just not going to be reassembleable. We found that powder because a daemon partially possessing a mortal host got the host to use it to flavor his ale," Griffie says in a tone which implies ey expects Keltham to be particularly horrified by this and become less willing to work with Abaddon on this basis. "If you use souls as fuel, that's an Abaddon-ish action that makes you more likely to go there due to getting Abaddon-ish quintessence on your soul. If you sell souls to be used as fuel, same thing. If you buy soul gems and then try to resurrect their occupants … that probably won't work out well and your allies should warn you not to try it? You can resurrect an arbitrarily damaged soul, you just really shouldn't, the results will cause problems."

"The Infernal-centric soul trade, on the other hand, generally involves souls in intact condition usable for non-fuel activities, such as in the typical case torturing someone in response to their lack of submission to Aszy. It is particularly known for subtle traps. Selling your soul to Hell means that, well, Hell has a pretty strong claim over your soul that they can use to grab it. Selling souls to Hell generally means that you're condemning people to be tortured by Hell, which is also Hell-ish. …I'm not sure what the effects are of, say, selling some devil souls you found lying around somehow to Hell, but given that it empowers Asmodeus it probably isn't great. Buying souls from Hell … in general you should expect tricky deals? Hell really doesn't like relinquishing souls they already have."

"I don't think there is a general 'Abyss-centric soul trade', but I'd expect soul trade with demons to be somewhere between Abaddon-ish and Hell-ish, except less competent? Demons aren't as concerning as daemons or devils, there's just a lot of them."

"Does that answer your question?"

That sure isn't a terse answer. "So, the effect of you buying those souls from Hell is?"

"We had a bunch of souls hanging around us for a while. We got the ones which were actually people to the Upper Planes. So there's some rescuing-people-ness and some being-tricked-into-benefiting-Hell-ness around and … I honestly don't care that badly about the little details of the influences on my soul? If my soul leaves my body, the question of where it ends up is almost certainly going to be overwhelmingly determined by other factors, like whether someone is currently trying to suck my soul out of my body for destruction. I've been promised a post-death retrieval attempt if necessary in exchange for services rendered. If my soul just vaguely floats a tiny bit more Hell-wards than it'd otherwise be inclined to, that's not the kind of issue I'm worried about, I'd expect intervention before that got too far. Also, I have done a lot of other things."

Keltham will get closer to the question about infohazard preparedness that got a bunch of terseness. "What would you describe as major societal problems in this world, and why do you think they're happening?"

"Well, that's a big question and the answers you'd get are going to vary. I think an issue that is a problem for our society but an underestimated one is the extent to which we're in a tiny region of relative stability and everything outside that region is various flavors of scary to poke, but I'm not sure that's really the biggest problems, and it's not that societal. The biggest problems are … I'm not sure how to divide up scarcity issues, or what constitutes a fair comparison for some of them?"

"An object-level example of the biggest problems looks about like … so you have this farming village. The people there are typical humanoids, and they don't have access to reliable contraceptives, so if they have sex of the type they most want to have there'll be pregnancies whether they want those or not, so if they're not actively starving the people in relationships will probably have a bunch of kids. It doesn't get to do much trade because it's not close to any good trade routes, and they have about as many people as they can support in a good year, so if there's bad local conditions people will just starve. They live in poor conditions and don't have access to good healing magic or alchemy or such, so they're vulnerable to a lot of diseases. When groups like goblins attack them, they don't have the spare resources to go to the fairly difficult lengths it would take for successful diplomacy, and they also aren't very good at fighting either! So they need someone to defend them, and that one entity is specialized in holding power in various ways, and they have a lot of power over the village because of it. Maybe it's a family associated with a larger polity. Maybe it's a group of organized raiders. Lots of options. And the biggest society-ish problems probably look like variations on that writ large, really?"

"I live in Temda, which is full of cities which actually don't have to lean so hard on the countryside for food imports? The foundation of a typical farming village is that if you manage some land you can have plants convert the sunlight and such it gets into useful nutrients for you. The foundation of a typical Temda city is that if you get a bunch of intelligent gigantic magic trees to agree with you that hosting a bunch of other people is neat, you can hook into their existing systems to also support a bunch of grafted food plants and such. So then we have higher population density, also because we're using the trees as structural supports for housing that's way taller than you could easily manage with out. We have a different set of problems, we have easier food production and more trade which means more access to things like contraceptives, and thus– but we're nonrepresentative and this is a tangent, sorry."

"Circling back to causality questions: If the Upper Planes had free reign to act and the Lower Planes did not, there wouldn't be these food supply and disease burden and senescence issues. In the absence of interplanar law what would happen would not be the Upper Planes fully extended to Suaal, what would happen would be a massively destructive war. Prior to this interplanar law, what was happening was little pockets without disease or starvation or drudgery, and little pockets of horribleness, and little pockets of miscellaneous weird stuff. And even blaming the Lower Planes isn't quite right, because they almost certainly co-evolved with us and to this day draw power from all kinds of mortal failings that occur in the absence of divine intervention. It doesn't take a Shivaska cult to get parents to threaten their children that disobedience will lead to them being attacked by horrible monsters, they just do that on their own and Shivaska gets power from it. It doesn't take a devil to tell you that if you and your buddies worked together you could enslave a bunch of people and extract resources from them. And it plausibly does take a daemon for your soul to age to death, but I would be genuinely surprised if bodily senescence was also their fault. The sorry state of healing spells in responding to it is probably Abaddon's fault, though."

"And I have a bunch of information about early history through illegal methods that very few other people have and I still don't know the answers to questions about the origins here. Sure, there were feedback loops, but why these ones? Your guess is around as good as mine."

"Does that help answer your question?"

"It does, thank you." And it also sounds a lot like Carissa's explanation of power-transfer-through-murder in a small farming village, which suggests a natural followup question. "Would you characterize the claim that most people don't do weird things and this is, given their capabilities especially regarding given evaluating weird ideas, in their interests as correct?"

"So, I would definitely agree that most people don't do weird things. Well, at least by my standards for weirdness, possibly if you asked them they'd say something like 'but I'm trying this new diet for my geese even though I'm not fully confident it works' or such. They don't have spare resources to spend on risks, mostly? If you're thinking 'but surely this leaves opportunities around for the first person to go do weird things', this is true. There are traveling weird-stuff-doers such as adventurers who, when they encounter isolated villages which is sometimes, often provide value to them by doing weird stuff and then get compensated for it. But adventurers have a high death rate, especially without adequate starting resources, so in general the safe thing to do is to not try it."

"Does this world have the problem where people don't have rigorous tools to evaluate weird arguments generated by people smarter with them, and so have to either test those arguments personally if that's possible or ignore them?"

"I mean, my model is that some people do get those tools at least somewhat? From what I've heard of Oluna Foluna she tried to teach skills like that before she left the Curdime school? But, uh, the way that went was that… she offered concealing robes to everyone attending her lectures so that people could plausibly claim to have been or deny having been in her class. The former of which was necessary for making sure people wouldn't just attend to get status, since they could lie. The latter of which was necessary because taking her class were concerned it would be harmful to their careers in the military. So even when the tools are available, there are … forces against their circulation. But also, my model is that if you tried to give those tools to someone of average intelligence it just wouldn't work well enough."

"I've heard a lot of claims about people of average intelligence, and I haven't had as much opportunity and spare time to test them as I'd like."

Also, Oluna Foluna sounds like a relatable person with good taste.

"I could maybe find us a minor archon who's willing to go into informational lockdown and in terms of intelligence around the population average for Suaal, if you'd like that? Since you feel less sense of urgency and we'd like to provide you with reasonable resources."

"I am still curious about previous open queries, obviously, but sure, that might be interesting."

"Alright, we'll arrange something."

"In the meantime, what do you know of the process by which mortals become Outer Planes outsiders?"

"So, this is an awkward subject and it varies a lot between planes. When a soul reaches a plane that takes it, it's pretty damaged, in ways that many people don't like to think about and which even the Upper Planes doesn't really publicize much, though they don't lie about it. One of the most notable things if you're alive is that outsiders, at least the quintessence-based ones, don't have truly original ideas? Which are obviously a tremendous strategic advantage, any god would want that for emself and eir most trusted servants if ey could get it. People tend to underestimate the downsides of godhood. They can do some temporal tricks to have a mortal's ideas before the mortal has them, but they still genuinely need the mortal."

"Beyond that, when everything is very fragile, you can get some things but not everything and you need to prioritize. Or, well, you can be the Maelstrom and not prioritize and possibly even randomly shove memories into people they don't belong to but it's not really a winning strategy. Hell doesn't care about pretty much anything of personal value to most people, but will damage souls greatly in order to extract memories if they're of strategic relevance. Heaven tends to prioritize friendships and keeping the person intact, but even they still have to patch over a lot of losses with material that just isn't the same as what was there originally and does cause personality changes when used for patching. I don't actually know what Axis does with souls though it's probably a matter of public record. Elysium probably tends to do the same sorts of things Heaven does but they're less predictable? The Abyss … my coworker saw a case study. I can give you all the details there but I'm not sure you want them. Dead souls are very, very vulnerable. Abaddon is a special case, their process is extremely destructive and they somehow get functional daemons via that destruction. Hell and the Abyss torture their starting materials into unrecognizeability, sure, but there's still forms of continuity they have and Abaddon lacks."

"Thaaaat sure is a constraint on the behavior of gods that seems rather well-designed to have powerful gods yet force mortals to still be extremely relevant to plots."

"I suppose you could describe it that way, but mortals except for a small handful like … okay, Shyka the Many was more than a small handful but was one entity in some meaningful ways, Rhoswen was relevant, but overall my Old Aiquzall evidence doesn't support mortals being that relevant, and Rhoswen claimed that godhood had limitations and she was familiar with Old Aiquzall godhood."