"Right.  Sorry.  Not your fault.  It's just -"

"Never mind.  For a start, today, I'm going to try to quickly review the way that dath ilani learn about negotiation -"

"Or actually no, before that, there's a test I realized yesterday I should run.  Before things go much... further."  Keltham is a little worried about where exactly he is inside reality, right now.  It's probably just a silly worry.  But yesterday with Carissa, he thought of an obvious possible way to check on it quickly, if everyone here is honest.  It might not work, but then, it might.

Keltham grabs a couple of the improvised markers from yesterday, and goes to the section of wall that was being used as an improvised whiteboard (with erasure via Prestidigitation).

Keltham first shows how to use Unanchored Scales, an experimental elicitation tool for when you just want somebody's intuitive strength of feeling about something, without them worrying exactly about what any numbers mean.  Draw a line with two endpoints representing 'not at all' and 'all the way', and then you draw a slash through the line at the point that corresponds to your intuitive strength of feeling.  You could use it to ask 'How warm is this room?' without people bugging you about how warm a '3' was supposed to represent.  It's not perfect, obviously, but the point is that the elicitation method acknowledges that imperfection up front.

Keltham then asks everybody in the classroom, including Carissa, to answer two questions, separately, anonymously, on bits of paper to fold up and mix before he looks at them.  Obviously, they shouldn't consult with each other at all before answering.  Obviously, Keltham promises to make no effort to figure out who wrote down what.  He really does ask them to write down an honest answer, if they write down anything at all; they can draw an X-cross on the paper if they want to openly refuse to answer.

The two questions Keltham writes on the whiteboard are:

"How much do you have an unusual interestingly-complicated backstory or current problem, that I'd find out about if I got into a relationship with you?"

"What do you expect will be the average answer of everyone here to the previous question?"

"Right.  Sorry.  Not your fault.  It's just -"

"Never mind.  For a start, today, I'm going to try to quickly review the way that dath ilani learn about negotiation -"

"Or actually no, before that, there's a test I realized yesterday I should run.  Before things go much... further."  Keltham is a little worried about where exactly he is inside reality, right now.  It's probably just a silly worry.  But yesterday with Carissa, he thought of an obvious possible way to check on it quickly, if everyone here is honest.  It might not work, but then, it might.

Keltham grabs a couple of the improvised markers from yesterday, and goes to the section of wall that was being used as an improvised whiteboard (with erasure via Prestidigitation).

Keltham first shows how to use Unanchored Scales, an experimental elicitation tool for when you just want somebody's intuitive strength of feeling about something, without them worrying exactly about what any numbers mean.  Draw a line with two endpoints representing 'not at all' and 'all the way', and then you draw a slash through the line at the point that corresponds to your intuitive strength of feeling.  You could use it to ask 'How warm is this room?' without people bugging you about how warm a '3' was supposed to represent.  It's not perfect, obviously, but the point is that the elicitation method acknowledges that imperfection up front.

Keltham then asks everybody in the classroom, including Carissa, to answer two questions, separately, anonymously, on bits of paper to fold up and mix before he looks at them.  Obviously, they shouldn't consult with each other at all before answering.  Obviously, Keltham promises to make no effort to figure out who wrote down what.  He really does want them to write down an honest answer, though, if they write down anything at all; they can draw an X-cross on the paper if they want to openly refuse to answer.

The two questions Keltham writes on the whiteboard are:

"How much do you have an unusual interestingly-complicated backstory or current problem, that I'd find out about if I got into a relationship with you?"

"What do you expect will be the average answer of everyone here to the previous question?"