"I read Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste by Scott Alexander and I'm confused," said Elsani.

"Why are you reading a blog post that's over 100 years old?" asked her friend Taze, "Society has made so much progress since then."

"Has it?" asked Elsani, "A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement of distance $\sqrt{n}$ . If you assume your normative values to be true, then history always looks like progress. That's how fashion changes constantly without going anywhere. This is a point Alexander makes in his blog post."

"Did Alexander really write ' $\sqrt{n}$ '? My understanding was that 21st-century psychiatrists didn't speak Baseline nor thought that precisely," said Taze.

"Now that you mention it, the ' $\sqrt{n}$ ' might have been a grammatically-mandatory artifact inserted by the translation software I used," said Elsani, "But the point stands. Scott Alexander was a founding thought leader behind the Lightcone salon. They were speaking proto-Baseline before Baseline even existed."

"I understand the historical importance of Scott Alexander. But why bother with the classics? Modern pedogogical techniques are so much more efficient," said Taze.

"For trivially-verifiable objective truth, sure," said Elsani, "But for questions of value? You must treat contemporaneous society as a hostile optimizer. Doubly so for its pedagogical techniques."

"I think you need to talk to a Keeper," said Taze.

Elsani hadn't considered that. She associated Keepers with questions of strategy, fact and probability. To consult a de'a'na est shadarak about a question of value—about a question of opinion <shudder>—had never occurred to her. But it was the obvious decision in retrospect.

The Temple of Truth was a gigantic compound. At its center was a grand circular nave underneath a hemispherical dome. The walls were steel and the dome was carbon fiber, to create the grandest possible structure. In the center of the dome was a circular oculus. The whole thing symbolized an eye staring up at the heavens. When you stood before the oculus and looked straight up, you were that eye.

Elsani closed her eyes and pictured the legend.

"What do you know with absolute certainty?" asked the first Keeper.
"The sky is blue," said the first acolyte.
"Go outside. Look straight up. Tell me what you observe," said the first Keeper.
The acolyte stepped outside, and stared up a nighttime sky so light-polluted s

...