"...so in my world when someone's going to be catastrophically powerful and I can't satisfy myself that they'll be sane about it I kill them, but if people usually turned up that way as babies I'd be very glad to have a better option than murder. I'm not sure what you mean about people wanting to withdraw from society."

"...Also eleven twelfths of people are that powerful so it'd be pretty difficult to keep up a population if you killed all the kinds of mages that can affect the world with their magic. Uh, some people, mostly not humans, hate interacting with other people and prefer to go live by themselves on private islands that are imperceptible and impossible to affect from the outside, and occasionally they do this in pairs that could conceivably grow their own new slaves."

"Do you mean that if you let people go off to live by themselves without outside interference you can't stop them from enslaving their children even if you were going to stop people from enslaving their children more generally, or do you mean something else?"

"Yeah, that’s it."

"I bet there's better ways to fund public works than slave auctions but I couldn't tell you what they are. As for people withdrawing from society, I guess the question there is how much you care about letting people withdraw from your society even if they'll do things you don't like in their hiding places."

"It wouldn’t end well to try to keep them. And I don’t think it’d be moral to keep everyone prisoner anyway, right?"

"Well, then it sounds like you have your answer."

"Maybe. But maybe I haven't thought hard enough. And - even if there's no way for totally eliminating it to not make things worse, maybe there are - ways I could change people's incentives a little, or something."

"What kind of incentives are you thinking of?"

"Well, it’s the fact that I'm not thinking of them that’s the problem, right? But some incentives that do exist are - owners are responsible for slaves' crimes, but of course that cuts both ways. Slaves don’t vote, and so they can’t vote for the people their owners would - and they would vote for the same people in a lot of cases, if they could, a lot of interest groups go by language or species. But that one’s also double-edged. There’s no such thing as a slave committing a crime against their owner - the state won’t intervene to save or avenge if you leave a loophole that gets you killed, though that’s not common. Happened to me, though, and I'm glad it did."

"—I have to ask: the thing that happened to you was getting to kill someone, or the thing that happened to you was dying?"

"First one. Sort of. I ended up with a good enough opening I could afford to threaten her in case she was willing to just let me go instead. She was eventually."

"I don't know if congratulations are appropriate but they're what springs to mind."

"They definitely are." Also condolences. Both, really.

"Well, congratulations then. Anyway in my experience the most reliable way to figure out which incentive structures work is to talk to a lot of people who are smarter than me and then try some and see, but probably that's not very helpful advice."

"I guess I’m in the right place for talking to people. I wish I knew how to experiment and had more leeway to do it."

"Hmm, what do you mean by knew how to experiment?"

"So, I don't know what to do about things like - what if I set things up in such a way that it's possible to move from the control condition to the experimental condition and then people self-sort and ruin my data? How do I measure what I care about? What if the fact that it's a temporary experiment has effects? That kind of thing."

"Hmm, I see what you mean. Again the sort of thing that the people who actually run my government know more about than I do."

"I wish I could delegate that much."

"What's stopping you?"

"I imported the concept of morality and some moral people but there aren’t enough people who understand my empire and care about other people and have good judgment and aren’t doing something more important."

"Yeah, that's a pretty tough one. I'm, uh, lucky, if you could call it that, that there's plenty of people in my government who are better at running it than I am. —that part's lucky, the part that's not lucky is that I'm so bad at it."

He laughs. "I’m guessing you’re a warlord?"

"I'm not sure what you mean by that?"