"With that caution in mind - scalar-quantities are easily related to each other.  Not just that, easily related to each other by math, which makes it easier to notice all sorts of mathematical patterns in them."

"If you'd started recording my times more exactly, and found that my average delay times were growing over time for every student, but growing at different rates for different students, you could start looking for other scalar-quantities that were growing at different rates for different students.  Then one of the scalar-quantities you checked might be 'the number of previous inputs that student had already written down'.  Then when you found that my delay time was roughly and on average proportional to the number of previous inputs - in a way that was similar across all the students, even as different students had different numbers of previous inputs growing over time - you'd have a critical insight into the structure of the Keltham-environment's behavior."

"A habit of measuring all the even slightly relevant-looking things that come out in scalar-quantities, or in Baseline, 'quantifying' or 'quantifiable-measurements', is something that Civilization has in fact found incredibly useful.  When we start messing around with spellsilver, we're not going to be trying a bunch of random crap to see if anything works, even as written in the language of 'chemistry' where random tries are much more likely to do interesting things.  We'll crush a lot of spellsilver ore down to sand, and mix it all thoroughly so every batch of ore-sand we use is almost exactly the same across experiments.  We'll try small perturbations to the process, most of which will be harmful, but we'll quantify exactly exactly how much less spellsilver came out the other side, and compete to come up with theories that try to call those experimental results in advance."

"Even if most things we find make the process worse, those are still facts we can use - especially in combination with other dath ilani knowledge - to build up 'testable-hypotheses' about what's going on inside the spellsilver-refining process."

"With that caution in mind - scalar-quantities are easily related to each other.  Not just that, easily related to each other by math, which makes it easier to notice all sorts of mathematical patterns in them."

"If you'd started recording my times more exactly, and found that my average delay times were growing over time for every student, but growing at different rates for different students, you could start looking for other scalar-quantities that were growing at different rates for different students.  Then one of the scalar-quantities you checked might be 'the number of previous inputs that student had already written down'.  Then when you found that my delay time was roughly and on average proportional to the number of previous inputs - in a way that was similar across all the students, even as different students had different numbers of previous inputs growing over time - you'd have a critical insight into the structure of the Keltham-environment's behavior."

"A habit of measuring all the even slightly relevant-looking things that come out in scalar-quantities, or in Baseline, 'quantifying' the 'quantifiable-observables', is something that Civilization has in fact found incredibly useful.  When we start messing around with spellsilver, we're not going to be trying a bunch of random crap to see if anything works, even as written in the language of 'chemistry' where random tries are much more likely to do interesting things.  We'll crush a lot of spellsilver ore down to sand, and mix it all thoroughly so every batch of ore-sand we use is almost exactly the same across experiments.  We'll try small perturbations to the process, most of which will be harmful, but we'll quantify exactly exactly how much less spellsilver came out the other side, and compete to come up with theories that try to call those experimental results in advance."

"Even if most things we find make the process worse, those are still facts we can use - especially in combination with other dath ilani knowledge - to build up 'testable-hypotheses' about what's going on inside the spellsilver-refining process."