"But then your -" Taldane, of course, does not contain the word for signaling-equilibrium. "I mean, I get how it's often advantageous to conceal information, there's all kinds of -" Taldane does not contain a word meaning 'zero-sum interaction'. "There's situations where you do worse if the other person does better, like, negotiating prices, you wouldn't want somebody bargaining with you to know your -" Taldane doesn't have the word true-reserve-price. "The lowest price you'd actually accept. So concealment, sure, in cases where the other person knows you're hiding the answer but what matters is that they don't know the exact answer you're hiding. But when it comes to uniformly faking false signals - I mean, if everyone, like all the students in the classroom, is always wearing a cheerful expression even when they're not cheerful, that's not a -" Taldane lacks every single component word of the compound term meaning 'an equilibrium where signals preserve their overt semantics given the incentives for both signal-senders and signal-receivers'. Keltham hates this language, and he'd ask how anybody ever thinks in it, but the answer, of course, is that they don't.
"If everyone has incentives to fool people by smiling when they're sad and frowning when they're happy, pretty soon a smile means sadness and a frown means happiness and nobody gets fooled anymore. If everybody acts cheerful when they're not actually cheerful, people will figure that out. It fooled me but only on literally the first day after I arrived here from another dimension without that custom, and this cannot reasonably be the -" Taldane doesn't have the word average-use-case. "Normal way that events happen every day. So you have some incredibly weird equilibrium going, of a form where everyone is acting cheerful even though they know nobody will actually think they are cheerful. Students are behaving in a way we'd interpret as being about an... adversarial... information-hiding... interaction, with their teachers, they're sending a constant first-order-misleading cheerfulness signal that everybody knows is misleading. And I don't understand why or how you got there. In dath ilan, well before that point, a thousand Very Serious People would show up and start arguing that Civilization was doing something silly and needed to wake up and snap out of it. And I get that you don't have the Very Serious People but I don't understand what happened instead."
"And I know that the answer is probably weird and alien and unLawful by my standards, and complicated, and is going to take a while to explain, and not be particularly sexy, so when it comes to that whole general issue we should maybe just pick it up tomorrow. Except that there's this one upcoming special case that seems important, which is that if I hug you in some way that makes you feel horribly uncomfortable, and Chelish dignity calls for you to send a first-order-misleading constant signal that you're having a great time, and I'm supposed to already know that's exactly what you'd do if something was wrong, and then I'm meant to act in some complicated way that makes that whole equilibrium not suck for you and that incentivizes people in your position to keep sending the first-order-misleading signal, well, in reality, I just got here from another plane, and I do not, in fact, have the faintest inkling of - do you see why I'm trying to ask about this even though we were in the middle of being romantically escalatory?"