This reminds me of what Keltham says in Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus about Law and Chaos:
There are dimensions of society in which you want everyone behaving differently, so they can explore a space instead of all crowding together into one corner of it. There are dimensions of society where things go pretty well so long as you do something the correct way, and start to go poorly if you do things much differently than that. There is a tension in dath ilan between positions, between people and factions, between ideas and arguments, about that question—not just about particular cases, but about the sense in general of where all society should move on that spectrum. Whether it is more important in general for everyone to do things a bit more differently, in our future, or if the problem is more that we’re falling too far below some standards and we all need to improve in those ways together. There are lots of particular cases in dath ilan where people might hold different opinions and not just one general opinion; but there is a sense that this general dimension of existence is one where the exact balance is important to a society.
Dath ilan has terminology for this dichotomy of strategies, between the search to find the optimal best answer and use it, versus trying many different answers to be more resilient against unknowns and explore a space more widely. Though I’ve been deliberately substituting the words “optimal” and “diverse”, in this language, instead of the two Taldane words that the translation spell tries to automatically output.
If I say the dath ilani words directly, for these two directions a society can move along this dimension, they come out in this language as:
The wildest, most diverse crop that still manages to live at all must be almost entirely regular and using almost completely standard forms of everything for its species; otherwise it comes out, not weird and warped, but simply a dead seed that fails to germinate at all. When you’re adding a new and different mind to your team, full of wild ideas, they should hopefully be speaking mostly grammatical sentences that make sense, and not uttering random words and random sounds and twitching around wildly on the floor. The full absence of Law is not diversity, but randomness, noise. In many cases, nearly all the random ways of doing things get you pretty much the same effect, there is not much difference in contribution between a person wildly twitching on the floor in one way versus a different way, they look much the same from outside. Even diversity has to be almost entirely made out of shared order, and climb high up on the scale of optimality away from the level of noise, in order to be effectively diverse.
The vibe I’m getting from this story is almost the opposite, out of Chaos arises Law, and the more Chaos tries to dig its claws in the more Law it spawns. But maybe it’s actually just an extension of the principle Keltham expresses. All that Chaos was made out of Law to begin with. Or rather, the Chaos that didn’t settle down into some kind of Law didn’t survive to keep being Chaotic. All of creation embraced more and more of the Goddess of Everything Else’s ideals over time because it was the only way they could survive with the imperatives the Goddess of Cancer had given them.
This reminds me of what Keltham says in Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus about Law and Chaos:
He then goes on to explain how “even Chaos is almost entirely made of Law”:
The vibe I’m getting from this story is almost the opposite, out of Chaos arises Law, and the more Chaos tries to dig its claws in the more Law it spawns. But maybe it’s actually just an extension of the principle Keltham expresses. All that Chaos was made out of Law to begin with. Or rather, the Chaos that didn’t settle down into some kind of Law didn’t survive to keep being Chaotic. All of creation embraced more and more of the Goddess of Everything Else’s ideals over time because it was the only way they could survive with the imperatives the Goddess of Cancer had given them.