# Keltham on Becoming more Truth-Oriented

*This is IMO high-quality material from* [*projectlawful*](https://projectlawful.com/) *which I thought is worth crossposting directly to lesswrong.*

*(This might dispel some wrong beliefs you hold (though maybe only if you actively try to apply or practice the techniques). If you think you're currently in a situation where you wouldn't be able to cope with some centrally held belief being dispelled, maybe read this some other time instead.)*

*(Contains only very minor spoilers about projectlawful, which I wouldn't worry about.)*

*(Links inserted at the start of the quote link to the place glowfic tag.)*

> [**Keltham**](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1785839#reply-1785839)**:** He'll lead with a children's fable about [different ways to relate to the possibility of being wrong and finding out truths](https://www.readthesequences.com/A-Fable-Of-Science-And-Politics).  Being able to notice and *choose* between the ways you'd relate to the act of realizing mind-shaking truths would probably be one of the keys to avoiding ending up as a failed Keeper, or, Keltham supposes, trying to become a Keeper on purpose.
> 
> **Keltham:** Here's another children's fable about a child who insists that there's [an invisible Non-Translating-Fictional-Creature in their closet,](https://www.readthesequences.com/Belief-In-Belief) but always refuses to bet on any observable that, you might normally think, would tend to go along with there being an Invisible Creature in that closet.
> 
> The point of this fable is to learn to distinguish between subjective states of:
> 
> \- Really actually modeling something as true in an uncomplicated way, and unhesitatingly deriving the valid consequences of that and anticipating them to happen to you as future experiences; eagerly betting on those if you think others don't have even more information.
> 
> \- Thinking you *ought* to believe something, for reasons that include deliberative arguments for why the thing is true; while other parts of you have some wordless other model in which the thing isn't true, the corresponding observables shouldn't actually be anticipated to happen to you, any bets like that will lose money and any promised rewards won't really be delivered to you.
> 
> This will create a kind of internal tension that shouldn't be too hard to learn to categorize over and learn perceptual reflexes about, if you can spot it on a couple of previous occasions... actually that seems like something that should be heavily Wisdom-loaded?  If somebody thinks they've caught themselves doing this, or is wondering if they're doing this, they should quickly ask for an Owl's Wisdom so that they can see the internal feelings sharply and learn to recognize them on future occasions.
> 
> \- Endorsing a verbal statement for social or other reasons that give you a non-accuracy-maximized payoff structure for the outward verbal behavior, such as, for example, your friends saying things and you wanting to smile and agree with them.
> 
> If you fail at some other mental exercises kids are taught, there'll probably be an internal pressure to *believe* the verbal statement: that's a very short route to smiling and agreeing that doesn't create painful internal dilemmas about violating the rules against lying, and your brain knows that.  Don't rely on being able to notice how the actual-belief pressures are running into contradictory evidence or counterarguments; you want to catch this at the introspective stage of noticing the pressure-to-endorse at all, and just switch off that pressure.  Not believe the opposite, reversed stupidity isn't intelligence after all, but switching off the pressure.
> 
> To sum up, the idea is roughly that you want to explicitly categorize and notice the subjective difference between:
> 
> \- What you ought to believe, which is also usually the feeling of a verbal argument supporting something;  
> \- What your brain is actually modeling and anticipating happening to you;  
> \- What you think you'll be rewarded for believing, especially socially.
> 
> You want to notice when the first two get out of alignment and start producing standard symptoms of internal disalignments along those fault lines.  As for that awful third thing, of course, you want to notice the feeling and destroy/switch-off that pressure inside yourself; leaving only an observation about some bad incentive structure that needs to be repaired if it can be, and ignored if it can't be.
> 
> This is all standard stuff for dath ilani children and doesn't turn them into Keepers.  Does it sound like something that's liable to cause people to fracture in weird ways if you teach it to somebody from Golarion and they already grew up as adults not knowing it?

\[Distraction happens that ends the lecture early. Lots of other stuff happens over several days.\]

> [**Pilar Pineda**](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1799501#reply-1799501)**:** And so Pilar Pineda told Keltham that she wanted him to make a very sincere try at breaking her, with those truths and arts of dath ilan that might break an adult who'd grown up unknowing of them; and see if that did literally anything to her.  Someone, Pilar said, obviously needed to try taking the risk; and someone was obviously her.
> 
> **Keltham:** So Keltham held forth to Pilar, then, in private session, upon the Way.  Keltham does not know any of that Keeper stuff, but he knows something about how non-Keeper dath ilani speak when they are more dedicated to the Art than he.
> 
> **Keltham:** Keltham tells Pilar of the principle of the [bottom line:](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line)
> 
> If you begin by writing at the bottom of a sheet of paper the conclusion you mean to argue for above, the rightness or wrongness of the bottom line is already determined by whatever process led you to write that as what-you-would-argue-for.  Only a process that has the power to erase that bottom line and write in something else, has the power to change the correlation of the bottom line of that sheet of paper, with the many worlds in which that piece of paper is embedded, where the bottom line is true or false in that world.  If you write it and cannot erase it, the correlation is already fixed, it is too late to argue it afterwards.
> 
> If you write a probability, its lost 2s are already fixed across the many worlds; only if your arguments cause you to erase and rewrite the probability, do those arguments change anything.
> 
> This is not a Law from which anybody can exempt you; it is an obvious validity across all realities.  In the moment you decide what to argue for, the truth or falsity or lost 2s of that sentence are already scaffolded and bound to all the worlds that embed you, you are already as right or as wrong as you can ever be, no matter the arguments.
> 
> **Keltham:** Keltham holds forth to warn Pilar of the mistake called '[rationalization](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SFZoEBpLo9frSJGkc/rationalization)' -
> 
> \- wait, it's called *what* in Taldane?  That word shouldn't even exist!  You can't 'rationalize' anything that wasn't Lawful to start with!  That's like having the word for lying being 'truthization'!
> 
> Well, anyways.  Motivated cognition, don't do that.  If you've literally never had any lessons about that... maybe keep an Owl's Wisdom prepped, wait until the next time you *want* to believe something and notice yourself making up arguments about it, and hit yourself with the Owl's Wisdom so you can watch all the little bits and pieces that go into the process.
> 
> Maybe adults in Golarion *literally try to argue themselves into things?*  But that's not the failure mode that dath ilani worry about; anything *that *explicit and deliberate is something you can just decide not to do and then you're done.  No, what you've got to watch out for are those subtle ouches and subtle yearnings that might lead you to flinch away from one idea and flinch towards another.  That's the part where she can maybe do a few Owl's Wisdoms and speed through what dath ilani children take some years to learn.
> 
> Though now that Keltham thinks about it, when he was *very* young, they did do exercises to notice explicit rationalization by way of having kids actually do that?  Well, those are pretty easy and fun to run through.  Keltham will start by proving that the sky is orange, then arguing that everything is upside down, then showing that humans are really a kind of fish; and for her own exercises he demands Pilar demonstrate that Keltham's shirt is secretly the real Keltham and that nobody should ever go outside.
> 
> See how your brain has to stretch and reach when it's trying to argue something that isn't so?  Well, remember that feeling; and then, if you notice feeling it again, halt melt and catch fire, don't do that.
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** ...this sort of seems to be heading towards - conveying a sense that all argument is meaningless?  Keltham was putting up a pretty persuasive argument that humans were fish, there.
> 
> **Keltham:** Then Pilar needs to work on refining her sense of what's an allowable argument until Keltham *stops *sounding persuasive about the fish thing.  Either that, or accept that humans actually are fish.
> 
> Pilar should - hopefully - be able to notice something stretched about the way that Keltham *said very loudly and sternly* that anything which was naturally born to two fishes mating, without magical interference, would *by definition* be a fish.  She should, hopefully, be able to notice a stretched feeling inside her mind, considering that.  If she can't feel it yet, note it down, accumulate a bunch of those things, and review them with an Owl's Wisdom after the lecture is over.
> 
> In the future, noticing something stretched like this, when Keltham isn't pointing directly to it, will probably manifest as Pilar noticing a quiet note of disquiet in the corners of her mind.  She should maybe hit herself with an Owl's Wisdom as soon as she has that first experience, it's a really important one to remember and recognize and learn to feel *explicitly* and *consciously* every time it happens.
> 
> This is not about despair in how reasonable arguments can reach wrong conclusions.  This is about your own sense of what is 'reasonable' being broken.  This is about taking more Validity into yourself.  This is about using the styles of cognition and kinds of arguments that make it *easier* to argue for true things than for false things.
> 
> But even ilani, when they stretch themselves to their limits - possibly even Keepers - cannot be sure of what is and isn't valid, when they are doing deep thinking not in numbers and stretching their intuitions to their limits.  So they learn, *first* to reason validly, but also, *not* to let themselves flinch towards or away from thoughts, *not* to let their minds go to looking for arguments for a bottom line already written; only to wonder "Is X true?" and not "How do I argue for X?"
> 
> If Pilar is starting to doubt lots of argument steps, to see possible fallacies everywhere, to feel unsure which arguments are valid - she'd *better* rush to master the art of evenhandedness and purifying her cognition from flinches.  Otherwise, those doubts-of-validity and arguable-fallacies will, perhaps, arise swiftly when Pilar considerssomething she *doesn't want* to believe; and seem more distant - not come so naturally to mind - when she is considering something she *wants* to believe.
> 
> If you are [swifter to look for flaws](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) and fallacies and invalidities in incongruent thoughts, than in congruent thoughts, then learning more of the Art only makes you that much stupider; it gives you that much more spellpower with which to blast down everything you don't want to believe, all the arguments you don't want to accept, and keep your bottom line in place forever.
> 
> Of which it was said out of dath ilan:  Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself.
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** So... try to figure out when she wants something to be true, and then *not* believe that?
> 
> **Keltham:** Does that, in fact, sound Lawful to Pilar?
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** ...not really, no.  Pilar would like to be alive in Golarion so she can better serve Lord Asmodeus; she does not therefore seem to be dead.
> 
> **Keltham:** Not a precise example; that was something Pilar *wanted,* not something Pilar *wanted to believe.*  But, sure, even if you want to believe the Sun is shining, that doesn't make it dark out.
> 
> Of which it was said out of dath ilan:  Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.  If you were guessing future coinspins and betting on them, you would need very good information about the future, you would need to be Nethys, to get *every coinspin* wrong.  You would need strong veridical information about the future, processed correctly on some level, in order to be *wrong that reliably.*  Wanting something to be true isn't that; it's not evidence in the other direction, just a flaw in your own thinking.
> 
> Keltham was warned against this as a child - the same way he was warned against criticizing incongruent thoughts harder for flaws - that he should *not* think that it would be the Way: to ask, "What might somebody in my shoes be tempted to believe?", and then believe you were probably being tempted to believe that whether you could detect that internally or not, and then adjust downwards your probabilities on it.
> 
> What you want is to detect the flinch towards or away from a thought, switch off the flinch, and do your thinking without letting the flinches move you.  Step as rightly as you can, on each step, and then go where your footsteps take you.  This is a path that leads to skill, if you follow it, as you become more skilled at clearing your thoughts.  The other path, the path of indefeasibly doubting yourself and treating your fears and wishes as evidence the other way, is a trap that leads nowhere.
> 
> **Keltham:** And Keltham continues to hold forth upon the Way.
> 
> Here are some of the [experiments](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WHK94zXkQm7qm7wXk/asch-s-conformity-experiment) and games that dath ilan uses to show its children their innate conformity, that they may be warned against the tendency - very young children, obviously, you couldn't pull that sort of crap on an *eight-year-old,* by then they've got enough individualism and confidence in their own reasoning not to say that Line C is the same size as Line X when it's obviously not.
> 
> These are some tests you can apply to determine whether a thought is meaningful or meaningless to you.
> 
> This is what it feels like to want to believe something you don't actually believe.
> 
> **Keltham:** And the thing to remember above all is that you cannot be any smarter than the process that actually produced your beliefs.
> 
> If you look up at the sky and see it's blue - you're no better and no worse than your eyes and the vision-processing part of your brain.
> 
> If you close your eyes and decide that your favorite color is orange, and want the sky to be orange, and argue that the sky is orange, and build orange-colored filters and produce paintings of it to try to convince others - you are no smarter than the process 'pick your favorite color and then think that things are that color'.  (Though it's fine if you wish the sky was orange, or start planning to make the sky orange; the error is if you try believing that it's orange already.)
> 
> And the only way to do any *better* than you're already doing, is to go through a different process and produce a different belief.
> 
> Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change.
> 
> There'd be no point in Pilar trying to be a Keeper, if she tried to keep all her old beliefs in the process; why bother becoming a Keeper, if she already knows all the facts correctly?
> 
> **Keltham:** Keltham does not know the way of Keeping, only a few signposts around the first steps there, placed to warn dath ilani off starting down that path unless they mean it.  Still, that part is knowledge and Keltham has it.
> 
> It is said, there is no ordinary thought that Keepers would hesitate to think.
> 
> There are *exotic* thoughts not to think - maybe especially in Golarion, directions you should not look because something from that direction might look back - or inhuman patterns of thought that higher Keepers devised, maybe, as might destroy unready minds from the inside.  Keltham does not know details for obvious reasons.
> 
> But nothing along the lines of, say, how the prediction market is assigning only a 40% probability that you stay married for fifty years to the person you promised your eternity, or that you're a romantically obligate sadist with no accessible masochists.  That, you're not afraid to think about, not if you're a Keeper.
> 
> Even among the ordinary dath ilani, you learn that when you *notice* that your mind is not-looking in a direction, you're past the point in your childhood where it makes sense to not look there anymore.
> 
> Even among the ordinary dath ilani, as you grow more knowledgeable in Law and by simple age more practiced in thinking, you become better at it over time, at noticing the directions you aren't looking.
> 
> Even among the ordinary dath ilani, every time that happens to you, you naturally learn a bit more about how you work, in that regard, and it becomes easier to notice what you aren't thinking.
> 
> That's just growing up.
> 
> But the Keepers push themselves to grow up as quickly as possible, like a child forcing themselves to leave their parents' home seven years earlier than would be usual.
> 
> 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be', goes the proverb, and ordinary dath ilani and Keepers alike both hold to it in the limit.  If you look at it from the standpoint of the Future, if you somehow get some wrong thought into your head, do you want to still be thinking it a thousand years later?  Do you always want to be that small, or that warped, that you could go on holding a false belief forever?
> 
> For the ordinary dath ilani, though, they say, 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be *eventually.*'
> 
> And the Keepers say, 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be *immediately.*'
> 
> \- though, to be clear, that doesn't mean they run around telling *other* people truths that will wreck parts of their personalities.  It means that they themselves will destroy whatever of themselves they can, with whatever truths they've come to hold.
> 
> **Keltham:** Does Pilar still want to become a Keeper?
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** It's not a matter of wanting; Pilar cannot choose to be anything else.
> 
> **Keltham:** Brave, poetic words.  Possibly worryingly so; good decisions made for good reasons should perhaps not sound so optimized to be poetic.  It'd be fine for an ordinary dath ilani, if they were making a brave decision, to try to have it sound inspiring and poetic too.  For a Keeper the potentially *tiny* resulting bias might be a problem, unless they werevery confident of their prior ability to not be influenced *at all* towards the decision by how poetic and brave it was.
> 
> Ordinary human beings should not try to live like that.  They need bits of bravery and poetry in them.  Not bravery and poetry they know is false.  But trading off some tiny tiny breath of precision in their thoughts, to have emotion and color?  Not giving up their art and believing something false.  Just - daring to, in the course of making what they think is the right decision, also being brave and poetic about that?  That's a reasonable benefit to go for, even if it comes with a tiny risk of making the wrong decision.  So long as it's not a big risk, one where you've gotten to the point of, like, noticing a tiny quiet note of disquiet.  Then even an ordinary person should rethink it as clearly as possible.
> 
> But, like, in the course of everyday life - you don't want to be trying to root the bravery and poetry out of yourself in case it influences you in the wrong direction.
> 
> Unless you're a Keeper.  They presumably don't try to get all the emotions out of themselves, then they wouldn't want anything or do anything ever.  But they would - Keltham thinks - be disturbed by the prospect of a note of bravery and poetry influencing their thoughts in an invalid direction *at all,* and if they didn't destroy all bravery, they'd be doing something else to - optimize their thoughts, somehow, so that they couldn't be influenced in some way they defined as undue, or invalid -
> 
> Keltham doesn't know, actually.  He is not in fact a Keeper, and these arts are themselves held infohazardous to those who would not practice them.
> 
> The point is, the Keepers are willing to step further away from their humanity and try to think in stranger patterns, for the sake of knowing the truth, for the sake of obtaining their goals, for the sake of protecting the children who don't want to grow up so quickly.
> 
> **Keltham:** Does Pilar still want to be a Keeper?
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** Pilar bets that devils, though they have grandeur - which probably subsumes bravery and poetry - don't go reasoning in invalid ways on account of their grandeur.
> 
> Or if lesser devils are still doing that, Pilar would guess that Asmodeus is *annoyed* about it.
> 
> Pilar is with Asmodeus with that, as she is with Asmodeus in all things.
> 
> **Keltham:** As far as Keltham can tell, Pilar is not currently acting like her mind is disintegrating due to any of the things that Keltham has said already.  Keltham does want to check in explicitly that this is in fact the case.
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** Pilar is not in the slightest danger of disintegrating due to any of this.
> 
> **Keltham:** That's not nearly as reassuring as Pilar seems to think.  'So far as I know, I don't visibly seem to be in danger of disintegrating down any pathways I can foresee' is a sensible thing to say, at this point.  'I'm in zero danger of disintegrating' sounds like *bravado* and something that a Golarionite could not reasonably know about themselves.
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** "Acknowledged.  I don't *see* any danger of myself disintegrating, here."
> 
> "If you were asking that as a preliminary towards hitting me harder, go ahead and hit me harder."
> 
> **Keltham:** Keltham will take a deep breath and *not* follow up on any alternate possible interpretations of that statement.
> 
> **Keltham:** And Keltham will go ahead and hit her harder.
> 
> He'll explain the concept of an Edifice, which he knows of as more of a psychiatric symptom, than something that sane adults do on any regular basis, but it seems to him like an Edifice would also be something that happened if you grew up without any training in mental skills at all.
> 
> It's what happens when somebody gets sick and *goes on* assembling more and more arguments in favor of something, explicitly by trying to do that, implicitly by flinching away from every counterargument; and they make their beliefs and goals more and more and more rigid, nailing themselves into place, drenching their thoughts with glue.
> 
> If you grow up in Golarion you may not know *not* to do that.
> 
> And once the bottom line is written, it is as reliable, as Lawful, as correlated with reality, as the process that originally produced it as the bottom line; and no more.
> 
> Does Pilar... possibly have any sense, right now, that she knows there is something inside her that she has argued to herself a lot, that she is maybe flinching away some from looking at, that she will brook no counterarguments to?
> 
> If she wants to undo her having grown-up-unLawful, to reach even the fifth part of the standard of an ordinary ilani, never mind becoming a Keeper, she is going to have to go through that part of herself at some point, and rethink it all.
> 
> \[Here's actually a brief unimportant back and fourth with relatively minor spoilers which I copied into this footnote[^zhjy0s83kjd].\]
> 
> **Keltham:** Well then, if Pilar is sure she's handling all of this totally fine, he'll go ahead and keep dumping on her [the entire list of dath ilani advice that he can remember off the top of his head for undoing major false beliefs](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BcYBfG8KomcpcxkEg/crisis-of-faith).  That includes, let's see...
> 
> \- How to notice when you're avoiding the real weak points in your beliefs by rehearsing more comfortable and winnable battle points, but obviously it's not Lawful to update on the same observation twice;
> 
> \- The difference between feeling obligated to investigate something, wanting to have finished investigating it, and feeling curious about it;
> 
> \- The general way of noticing when you're completing a pattern in a precached way, and exercises to try to re-see there from scratch;
> 
> \- The litanies children are taught for 'If snow is white, I desire to believe snow is white, if snow is not white, I desire to believe snow is not white, let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want' etcetera;
> 
> \- How it's actually less unpleasant, when you're fighting a rearguard action against a mistake, to just say 'oops' and not defend anything or cling to anything and let it all go and be over with;
> 
> \- More guidance on seeing thoughts you're flinching away from in a corner of your mind;
> 
> \- Averting the need-for-closure and letting problems hang around unanswered for a while, pondering problems more thoroughly before jumping to proposed solutions on them;
> 
> \- Missing alternatives to policy proposals where you want a policy proposal to be the best one for reasons other than the stated utility criterion;
> 
> \- Fake humility as an out, where you don't want to know something you're starting to see, and so claim that nobody could possibly know it...
> 
> (it goes on for a while)
> 
> **Keltham:** Is Pilar still doing okay here?
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** Yes.
> 
> She's doing fine.
> 
> Is there more?
> 
> **Keltham:** This is in fact about what he can easily remember off the top of his head from his childhood education, that seems most strongly relevant, and can be said without a lot of math or a lot of background prerequisites.  He can let her know if he remembers more.  He suspects a lot of the real power here is in reshaping your thoughts to Law, to greater validity and greater awareness of the mechanics of cognition, rather than being told about a list of techniques that he ran through too fast to really practice her in any of them.
> 
> He has now hit her about as hard as he can hit her in a few hours.  Just remember, Keltham is not exactly the wise master, here.  All of this is what dath ilani punk teenagers get as kids, rather than dath ilani who are going relatively deep into the Art as adults, and saying nothing here of Keepers.  Even then, it's just the most clearly relevant parts that take the least math, and that can be reviewed in a few hours.
> 
> If she wants to go past Keltham, or even get *to* Keltham, she's going to have to push herself hard and forge a lot of her own Way.
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** All right.
> 
> Pilar's now supposed to go off and ponder this, maybe get hit by an Owl's Wisdom, and see if literally anything happens to her.  Correct?
> 
> **Keltham:** ...if *nothing interesting is otherwise happening to her by evening,* then yes, Owl's Wisdom.  If interesting things start to happen to her in another hour, *without* the Owl's Wisdom, let those run their course before boosting them any further.
> 
> **Pilar Pineda:** Acknowledged.
> 
> (And she departs.)

\[Pilar realizes some insights about herself.\]

Relevant excerpt from Pilar meeting Keltham the next day:

> [**Pilar**](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1800531#reply-1800531) **:** \[Pilar explains part or her revelations.\]
> 
> **Keltham:** "Pilar, I say this with great reluctance, because you may understand this problem much better than I do, to understand why in reality and in practice it couldn't possibly be solved, but you seeing your family again does not necessarily sound like the kind of problem I'd give up on solving if I was the one who had it?"
> 
> **Pilar :** "That is not something particularly helpful for me to hear right now, Keltham."
> 
> **Keltham:** "Why?  Pilar, I'm not asking because you need to socially justify that decision to me, I'm asking so I can understand what happens to Golarion people when they start to get Law in them."
> 
> **Pilar :** "Because I'm fighting a battle where - where the victory is that the hope inside me is destroyed and I can *stop thinking about it.*"
> 
> **Keltham:** "It is not obvious to me that this constitutes an example of Lawful thinking and something itself that the truth could not again destroy.  If Golarion people need to move in - steps, from greater insanity to lesser insanity - and not straight from insanity to truth - then that sounds like something I might need to know about."
> 
> "*Hope,* where it constitutes the belief that something nice might happen, is a *question of fact,* Pilar.  If the entanglement is less than one percent, desire to assign probability less than one percent, if greater than one percent, desire to assign greater belief than one percent.  The questions of fact always come first."
> 
> "And if you want something, that's just your utilityfunction, and the utilityfunction is not up for grabs.  Maybe you can't get the thing you want, that doesn't change what your utilityfunction is."
> 
> "If you want to stop thinking about something, develop the skills to stop thinking about things, don't *distort your probability estimates over it.*  How would that even work, you'd just notice what you were doing and be like 'oh I'm rationalizing *bad word Taldane* I'm lying to myself again'.  Or if your verbal part managed to fool itself about the probability without you noticing, deeper parts of you would not be in agreement, and *they'd* try to steer your brain into thinking about the hope again."
> 
> "Truth first.  Accurate probabilities first.  Then rebuild your mind around whatever those are.  If you notice a lie, rebuild around the best estimates you can, don't rebuild around another lie.  That's the obvious Lawful way to proceed, and if Golarion people need to recover from internal catastrophes some other way, that's kind of bad.  Because I have *no idea how that could possibly work or why or how the ass I could help.*"
> 
> **Keltham:** "Yes, I realize that I'm dumping more Golarion-Keeper aka dath ilani child training on you, at a time when you're already struggling.  But Pilar, unless you're following some very clear and well-tested recipe for putting yourself together after Lawfulness-acquisition catastrophes - which seems improbable, but correct me if I'm wrong about that - you've got to not put yourself back together in a way that's *wrong.*"
> 
> **Pilar :** "So - according to you - what I've got to do is - figure out what's true, first?"
> 
> **Keltham:** "Okay so there's actually a whole fragment of the Law here, which in retrospect I should have maybe covered earlier and before hitting you with all that other stuff, yay we've learned an important fact today."
> 
> "Probability is *separable* from Probable Utility; what we want, what we plan, what we should do, none of that changes *what is.*  What *is* changes what we ought to plan, but what we ought to plan doesn't change what is.  Is-questions form a smaller separable core inside the set of all the questions we need to ask, because is-questions relate only to other is-questions and not to ought-questions.  So we can carve those out and consider those first and separately, and we usually *should.*"
> 
> "If you wish the sky were orange, that doesn't change the sky being blue.  Even if you're plotting how to turn the sky orange later, that doesn't change the sky being blue now.  Even inside your planning process, the question of, '*If* I try Prestidigitating the sky orange, will that actually work?' is a question that just runs on the rails of magic and the Law of chemistry and can be evaluated independently of any questions about what you want."
> 
> "That's part of the reason and part of the *method* for trying to get your mind quiet about all the things it wants while you're trying to evaluate a fact-question like 'How do my mother, and my sister, actually feel about me?'  What you've observed from them, simple and statistically-common inferences from that, those are relevant to what is true there; your wants, not so much.  *Including even* your want for the question to have a definite closed answer that couldn't be updated on any further evidence you gathered, as would lead your mind to stop thinking about it.  Without you having to learn control arts about spending your thought-time where you actually want to spend it.  That's need-for-closure, I told you about it yesterday."

*(If you end up getting something useful out of this post, I'd be interested in hearing about it in the comments.)*

[^zhjy0s83kjd]: Pilar Pineda: "Are we talking about my faith in Asmodeus, here?"See how you like it when all the subtext gets turned into text.Keltham: "It's giving me some vibes of that, yeah, though I don't pretend to know what's inside another person's mind.  If not that - maybe something else?  Maybe a dozen other things?  I've been trying to think of how Golarionites would have real mental catastrophes from Law exposure, and it only recently occurred to me that maybe they're full of Edifices."Pilar Pineda: "Well, it would have been that before my trip to Elysium.  Where, I thought at first, the Chaotic Good outsiders spent a lot of time trying to poke at my faith in Asmodeus and pointed out a lot of things I'd always flinched away from looking at, exactly like you're describing.  And then at the end they were like 'Just kidding, we only wanted you to be sure of your own choices.'""So yes, at this point, I've already been through all that."Keltham: "That... sounds a lot like they knew you'd try to become a Keeper later, and they were trying to help you along."Pilar Pineda: "Chaotic Good, like Chaotic anything else, is really really hard to figure out, sometimes."Keltham: ...it doesn't seem particularly hard to figure out, to him?  Like, he just did figure it out."I don't suppose you'd be willing to share details, if they're not private?"Pilar Pineda: Privacy!  What a helpfully un-Chelish concept.  "Pretty fucking private, yeah."  Oh wait, she should also invoke that other un-Chelish concept.  "Sorry."