Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some words not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if he deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put them into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction he would not really understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if he killed and not send him there otherwise.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in the world would have an incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have this incentive to transport him away regardless of how Keltham reacted to that payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the others in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd yield to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is - what motivates the more technical definition.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be comprehended without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucification conditional is there because of how the government expects mortals to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself, but the threat of punishment, is something that can and should be kept out of the actual counterfactuals. 

Carissa has just talked about a sex game for "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them", which doesn't make any sense even assuming that stuff, because punishment is something that appears in threats which, if they're being deployed before, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on the punishment, so why would you give somebody orders they can't follow that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people.  And then by the time you get to it being part of a sex game it's just absolute gibberish, on the surface of things.

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some words not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if he deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put them into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction he would not really understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if he killed and not send him there otherwise.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in the world would have an incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have this incentive to transport him away regardless of how Keltham reacted to that payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the others in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd yield to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is - what motivates the more technical definition.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be comprehended without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucification conditional is there because of how the government expects mortals to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself, but the threat of punishment, is something that can and should be kept out of the actual counterfactuals. 

Carissa has just talked about a sex game for "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them", which doesn't make any sense even assuming that stuff, because punishment is something that appears in threats which, if they're being deployed before, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on the punishment, so why would you give somebody orders they can't follow that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people.  And then by the time you get to it being part of a sex game it's just absolute gibberish, on the surface of things.

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some words not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if he deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put them into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction he would not really understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if he killed and not send him there otherwise.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in the world would have an incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have this incentive to transport him away regardless of how Keltham reacted to that payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the others in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd yield to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is - what motivates the more technical definition.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be comprehended without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects mortals to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals. 

Carissa has just talked about "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them", which doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a threat structure, because punishment is by definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on the punishment in actual reality, so why would you give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people.  And then by the time you get to it being part of a sex game -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some words not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if he killed and not send him there otherwise.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in the world would have an incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have this incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham reacted to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects mortals to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals. 

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a threat structure, because punishment is by definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on the punishment in actual reality, so why would you give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some words not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if he killed and not send him there otherwise.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in the world would have an incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have this incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham reacted to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects mortals to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals. 

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some ideas not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if he killed and not send him there otherwise.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in the world would have an incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have this incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham reacted to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects mortals to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals. 

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some ideas not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if he killed and not send him there otherwise.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in the world would have an incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have this incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham reacted to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects Golarionites to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals. 

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some ideas not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if he killed and not send him there otherwise.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in the world would have an incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have this incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham responded to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the more undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for following the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects Golarionites to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals. 

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some ideas not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of conditional punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if and only if he killed.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in Civilization would have a natural incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have that incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham responded to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the more undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for following the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects Golarionites to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals. 

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some ideas not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody over the age of twelve were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of conditional punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if and only if he killed.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in Civilization would have a natural incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have that incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham responded to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the more undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for following the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects Golarionites to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.  There is a crystalline logic to it that is not like yielding to your impulsive angry defiant feelings of not wanting to be told what to do.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals. 

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some ideas not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody old enough to know better were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of conditional punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if and only if he killed.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in Civilization would have a natural incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have that incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham responded to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the more undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for following the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects Golarionites to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.  There is a crystalline logic to it that is not like yielding to your impulsive angry defiant feelings of not wanting to be told what to do.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals. 

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some ideas not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody old enough to know better were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of conditional punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if and only if he killed.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in Civilization would have a natural incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have that incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham responded to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the more undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for following the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects Golarionites to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.  There is a crystalline logic to it that is not like yielding to your impulsive angry defiant feelings of not wanting to be told what to do.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

One does not, ever, ask oneself how to most cheaply and effectively invert someone else's utility function.  Any time you reach this point in your reasoning you must have gone terribly terribly astray and should back very far up.  The world and Reality itself could become a terrible place if agents went about calculating how to best invert each others' utility functions, such that it would be better if Life and Sentience and Sapience had never existed.  It's not enough for the equilibrium to be free of that in theory among ideas agents, it must also be assured in practice even among nonideal agents.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals.

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some ideas not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody old enough to know better were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of conditional punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if and only if he killed.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in Civilization would have a natural incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have that incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham responded to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the more undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for following the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects Golarionites to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.  There is a crystalline logic to it that is not like yielding to your impulsive angry defiant feelings of not wanting to be told what to do.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals.

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -