Chief Bob's hearings might well be public[...] I don't think I've ever been present for an actual court case, just seen them on TV.
This seems to me like an odd example given that you're contrasting with American government, where court hearings are almost entirely public, written opinions are generally freely available, and court transcripts are generally public (though not always accessible for free). I guess the steelman version is that the contrast is a matter of geography or scale? Chief Bob's hearings are in your neighborhood and involve your neighbors, whereas your local court might be across town during the business day and involve disputes between people you don't know. But the American judicial system is a lot more accessible than it plausibly could be while still fulfilling its core function.
I'd guess that it's related specifically to "thing" being a euphemism for penis, as opposed to some broader generalization about euphemisms.
In the "software twins" thought exercise, you have a "perfect, deterministic copy". But if it's a perfect copy and deterministic, than you're also deterministic. As you say, compatibilism is central to making this not incoherent, presumably no decision theory is relevant if there are no decisions to be made.
I think a key idea in compatibilism is that decisions are not made at a particular instant in time. If a decision is made on the spot, disconnected from the past, it's not compatibilism. If a decision is a process that takes place over time, the only way Omega's oracular powers can work is if the part of the process that causes you to look like a one-boxer can't be followed by the part of the decision process where you turn on a dime and open both boxes. But the earlier part of the process causes the later, not the other way around.
Yeah, I've seen some posts trying to make similar "lockdown goes too far" arguments (including this one on the SSC Tumblr) that seem to be comparing life with COVID-19 mitigation to normal 2019 life or to that plus some chance of getting sick. Aside from understating the potential for long-term consequences, I think there's a trend in those dollar-cost estimates towards significantly underestimating the negative effects of unmitigated pandemic spread beyond the effect on one's personal health.
(Not that I expect that you disagree with this, but it stands out to me that "let it happen modulo the most vulnerable" is already begging the question. I'd expect if that were driving public policy that the "modulo the most vulnerable" part largely wouldn't happen. It's hard to protect any particular group from infectious disease when it's widespread in the general population.)
The book "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" was a bit of an influence. The quick summary: People often overestimate the downsides of having children, people often underestimate the upsides of having children, people overestimate the marginal benefit of more labor-intensive methods of parenting, therefore maybe you are underestimating how many children you should have (including underestimating the benefit of tradeoffs where you have more children but use a less-intensive parenting style).
I think choosing to raise a child rather than not will probably make me happier when I'm older, even though it's not very pleasant a lot of the time currently, and there is the constant additional exposure to the risk of terrible tragedy. It gives me a reliable source of significant responsibility, which overall I value. I like that I'm playing a small part in creating the next generation of humans (and thus in creating the whole set of future humans), I think that's cool, though having children is not the only way to do that.
I think that human beings are very psychologically flexible, and I haven't been persuaded by arguments that it's not the case that the vast majority of human beings have lives worth living. I also am not persuaded by arguments that favor autonomy to the extreme that it's bad to bring someone into existence because they had no choice in the matter. While I don't think this amounts to a moral imperative, I think having children is a good thing, if the quality of parenting is even minimally acceptable. Overall, I think having and raising children is good for parents but primarily it's good for the children (and, indirectly, their descendants).
Infections start among people at the river’s mouth, and expand exponentially amongst them, until most of them are infected. It also spreads up the river, but only by local contagion, so the number of deaths (and cases) grows linearly according to how far up-river it has spread. This scenario, however, seems nothing like what we would expect in almost all countries.
That doesn't seem implausible to me, if the epidemic spreads fastest (and therefore first) in densely-connected areas of the social network graph of in-person contacts and mitigation affects those areas of the graph fastest/most. That plus lag from the implementation of mitigation to the results showing up in the case numbers might make growth look approximately linear for a while. Especially when plotted on a linear plot scaled to previous much-faster growth.
There's no clear reason why mortality and transmissibility of a virus should be inversely correlated.
More quickly fatal diseases leave less time for the immune system to respond and less time for transmission to occur. You're right that's not to say we can't end up with diseases that are both more contagious and more deadly than COVID-19, we definitely could, but that's not the direction the correlation goes.
In addition, we have decided to apply the death penalty
Less Wrong moderation policy: Harsh but fair.
Not only do theaters want to sell the extra seats, they also want people to arrive early, since they're selling concessions and playing ads.
Having wisdom teeth out was also a fascinating experience for me for similar reasons, but I don't know what I did in that lucid-but-amnesiac (and for all I know actually unconscious?) interval. I did apparently walk to the recovery room under my own power, so while I don't think I was asking questions or solving math problems, I was at least navigating under my own power and avoiding running into walls. What really sticks in my mind was that I had this experience of "coming to", like almost identical to the sensation of waking up except without feeling like I had just been asleep. It wasn't that different from other experience where I'd had a lapse of awareness and come back suddenly to awareness of the present moment, but the discontinuity was more dramatic.
(As a side note, I love the thought of smuggling a short-term memory out of a period of memory loss by hiding it in a long-term memory. No idea whether I'd expect that to actually work, but definitely a creative approach to the problem.)