"And it was also said to me from the very beginning:  For all the beauty of the Law as Law and all the reasoning you might ever do about it, the only reason to ever take that Law upon yourself, is if it is the Law of obtaining what you desire.  Not, necessarily, desire in a selfish sense, for this is Civilization's teaching of which we speak.  Good people desire Good ends, and this is their Law also."

"The meaning of the caution is rather that if you think, at some point, that this Law is telling you to do a thing, which will not lead best of all your available choices to whatever destination you seek, then most likely, vastly likely, you have made a mistake somewhere.  You may be mistaken about the Law, you might be correct in calculating what the Law must say and wrong in thinking that some other way is better, you may be correct about some derivations in mathematics but be wrong about which mathematics you should be using, but it is not likely the case that the Law is telling you a worse way and some other pattern is telling you a better one."

"But if - we are always also told - if some very clever person at some point demonstrated that the Law as taught in Civilization's lessons, did fail to be the best way of choosing in one part of reality so as to make another part of reality conform to our desire - then we should at once discard that old Law and seek another.  That, after all, was presumably how that whole branch of mathematics was invented in the first place.  In its final form, dealing with choices that are themselves mathematics, the Law of decision is a touch complicated; there must have been a time when people did not know it, and used simpler math instead.  If at that time they had thought to themselves that the Law they held was the final and ultimate principle and the definition in itself, of what should be done - and not instead thought of there being an ultimate goal to find that mathematics which best describes how choices in one place operate to constrain reality in another - they would have been unable to move on."

"And it was also said to me from the very beginning:  For all the beauty of the Law as Law, and all the reasoning you might ever do about it as mathematics, the only reason to ever take that Law upon yourself, is if it is the correct Law of obtaining what you desire.  Not, necessarily, desire in a selfish sense, for this is Civilization's teaching of which we speak.  Good people desire Good ends, and this Law is their Law too."

"The meaning of the caution is rather that if you think, at some point, that this Law is telling you to do a thing, which will not lead best of all your available choices to whatever destination you seek, then most likely, vastly likely, you have made a mistake somewhere.  You may be mistaken about the Law, you might be correct in calculating what the Law must say and wrong in thinking that some other way is better, you may be correct about some derivations in mathematics but be wrong about which mathematics you should be using.  It is not likely the case that the Law is telling you a worse way and some other pattern is telling you a better one."

"But if - we are always also told - if some very clever person at some point demonstrated that the Law as taught in Civilization's lessons, did fail to be the best way of choosing in one part of reality so as to make another part of reality conform to our desire - then we should at once discard that old Law and seek another.  That, after all, was presumably how that whole branch of mathematics was invented in the first place.  In its final form, dealing with choices that are themselves mathematics, the Law of decision is a touch complicated; there must have been a time when people did not know it, and used simpler math instead.  If at that time they had thought to themselves that the Law they held was the final and ultimate principle and the definition in itself, of what should be done - and not instead thought of there being an ultimate goal to find that mathematics which best describes how choices in one place operate to constrain reality in another - they would have been unable to move on."