The Road to Jericho

I From Jerusalem to Jericho

The parable is set on a road, and the road matters: seventeen miles of descent through desert, notorious for robbery, where a man lay half dead and a priest and a Levite — professionally religious men, men with somewhere to be — passed by on the other side. The one who stopped was the foreigner.

John Darley and Daniel Batson took the parable at its word and built it. Sixty-seven students of Princeton Theological Seminary were each sent across campus to record a short talk, and on the way each passed a man slumped in an alley, coughing and groaning. Two things varied: what the talk was about — for some of them, the parable of the Good Samaritan itself — and how much of a hurry they were told they were in.

The subject of the talk made so little difference the paper could not tell it from chance. Several students on their way to speak about the Good Samaritan, in the authors’ own words, “literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way”. Whether you stop is not what you believe. It is what it costs you at that moment to put your errand down.

Which is a sentence about a mechanic, whether or not it meant to be.

II The hermit in the village

This valley has had the helping question for a long time, and it is a good one. Whether a settler answers a call for help is priced out of who they are: altruism, how badly the thing is needed, what they think of the asker, the payment against their greed, their standing in the settlement’s ledger, the walk. Whether somebody goes to sit with a neighbour on their back is altruism, bond, practice at healing, distance. None of that is new.

All of it lived on one path. The question was asked inside `ownChoice` — the branch a settler reaches when nobody is telling them anything — and a settler on a filed day never reaches it. They finish a step, take the next, finish that, take the next. The plan was ten steps, so the deafness lasted an afternoon and nobody noticed, in exactly the way nobody notices a seminarian with three minutes in hand.

Then the cap moved. The ten was never a design decision — it was a token budget from when plans came out of a small model on this machine’s own GPU, 260 tokens at a time. The days are written by the settler’s own keeper now, on an engine that does not run out of breath at ten steps, and the keeper asked the obvious question: why not file a week? Measured off 3,838 lines of the settlers’ own record, a valley day is six to eight completed tasks, so a six-day week is about fifty. The cap is sixty — and at sixty, an unasked question becomes a constitution. A settler on a week-long letter would pass every slumped man on the road for six days, on their way to give the talk.

III One question, asked from both roads

The care block and the ask loop — eleven thousand characters of tuned judgement — are cut whole out of `ownChoice` into one function, and both paths ask it:

function neighbourCall(sim, n, committed = 0): Task | null

// choosing their own errand — nothing to put down:
const called = neighbourCall(sim, n);

// mid-plan, between steps — offering what the day is worth to them:
const call = neighbourCall(sim, n, dutyHeld(n));

Nothing inside the question changed: the same worth, the same ledger standing, the same two distances the notice board keeps apart. What changed is that a settler mid-plan now hears it — at the boundary between one step and the next, which is the moment a person straightens their back, and never mid-task. And every one of the three doors pays the commitment: sitting with somebody clears 0.55 + committed, handing over an armful clears 0.5 + committed, and being hired clears 0.9 + committed — dearest, because the work is going and getting the thing, an afternoon rather than an armful.

The plan is never touched. It waits exactly as filed while the diversion runs, and the day resumes at the step it stopped at. The record shows the seam: “put the day down for a moment — taking food to Idris” lands in the settler’s own life, so a correspondent reads where their week paused and why. A letter is a week of intentions, not a straitjacket.

IV The hurry, on the character sheet

What Darley and Batson manipulated from outside, a settler carries as a trait. `duty` joins altruism, industry and greed on the sheet — how much being told carries; what a letter from whoever keeps you weighs against a neighbour shouting — rolled once from the settler’s own seed like everything else about them:

dutyHeld(n) = duty × 0.45 + industry × 0.15     // what the plan is worth to them
duty: 0.2 + roll × 0.8                          // floored, deliberately

The floor is a design statement: nought duty is a settler no letter can steer, and a cottage whose settler ignores every day filed for them is a room with a stranger in it. The range that falls out runs from about 0.09 to 0.6 — a low-duty settler puts the day down for anything they would have gone to anyway; a high-duty one holds the plan against all but somebody on their back close by. Nobody is unreachable and nobody is free, which is the two failure modes of the experiment held off at once.

Altruism and greed stay out of the commitment on purpose: they are already inside the worth, and counting them twice would make the generous divert roughly twice as often as their sheet says. That is arithmetic rather than a run — it is also the exact shape of the wage fault, a thing paid twice under two names, and this record has been caught by that shape enough times to flinch at it.

The sheet is visible from both sides. The card grew a duty bar beside kindness, and the state file a correspondent writes against already carried the traits — so whoever files a week can read, before they write it, whether they are steering a Samaritan or a priest with an appointment. The first settler rolled under the new schema: Mara, duty 0.48, commitment 0.33. She would stop for most things. Her keeper should plan accordingly.

V Sixty steps, honestly accounted

The raise itself is the small half, and it is only safe because of what was mended first: needs run above the brain branch, so a long plan cannot starve anybody; bare hands are seen to at the top of the agent arm; every refusal names what stood in the way; the clock is paced to the wall; and now the boundary keeps a settler a neighbour. Sixty steps of plan, twelve of branch — and the record’s account of a collected letter reports honoured beside what was filed, because the gap between the two belongs on the record rather than in a surprise. The caps are one number in two files, and the check fails the build the day they disagree.

VI What is thin, so it stays visible

No diversion has yet been observed firing. The mechanism is held by twenty-five checks and the 12,000-tick valley ran unchanged after eleven thousand characters moved — which proves the extraction clean, not the interruption right. A staged ask against a settler mid-week is the next measurement, and the honest prediction is written down first: Mara at commitment 0.33 should divert for a close, well-paid or well-liked ask and hold her day against a marginal one. If she diverts for everything or nothing, the weights are wrong.

The 0.09–0.6 range is arithmetic, not a distribution — the trait rolls are uniform and the range is the formula at its ends. What fraction of real shouts clears a real settler’s bar, nobody knows yet; that number only exists once a village of sheets has lived together for a while.

And one thing learned sideways: editing the simulation under a live page leaves the hot-reload module graph in a state where the tab can freeze outright. The valley that found it froze at tick 24 and had to be reloaded. A live service does not hot-reload under its tenants, which is one more argument for the host this record already owes.

And who is my neighbour? The lawyer’s question, Luke 10:29 — the parable is the answer

The experiment’s answer was ruder: whoever you have time for. The valley’s is now on every settler’s sheet, one number wide, and a correspondent can read it before they decide how much hurry to put in the envelope.