Not sure where I stand actually, but this seems relevant:

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" - Voltaire

I suppose it should be added that one should do one's best to make sure the god that's created is more Friendly than Not.

I'm not necessarily arguing for this position as saying we need to address it. "Suicidal AI" is to the problem of constructing FAI as anarchism is to political theory; if you want to build something (an FAI, a good government) then, on the philosophical level, you have to at least take a stab at countering the argument that perhaps it is impossible to build it.

I'm working under the assumption that we don't really know at this point what "Friendly" means, otherwise there wouldn't be a problem to solve. We don't yet know what we want the AI to do.

What we do know about morality is that human beings practice it. So all our moral laws and intuitions are designed, in particular, for small, mortal creatures, living among other small, mortal creatures.

Egalitarianism, for example, only makes sense if "all men are created equal" is more or less a statement of fact. What should an egalitarian human make of a powerful AI? Is it a tyrant? Well, no, a tyrant is a human who behaves as if he's not equal to other humans; the AI simply isn't equal. Well, then, is the AI a good citizen? No, not really, because citizens treat each other on an equal footing...

The trouble here, I think, is that really all our notions of goodness are really "what is good for a human to do." Perhaps you could extend them to "what is good for a Klingon to do" -- but a lot of moral opinions are specifically about how to treat other people who are roughly equivalent to yourself. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The kind of rules you'd set for an AI would be fundamentally different from our rules for ourselves and each other.

It would be as if a human had a special, obsessive concern and care for an ant farm. You can protect the ants from dying. But there are lots of things you can't do for the ants: be an ant's friend, respect an ant, keep up your end of a bargain with an ant, treat an ant as a brother...

I had a friend once who said, "If God existed, I would be his enemy." Couldn't someone have the same sentiment about an AI?

(As always, I may very well be wrong on the Internet.)

It seems unlikely that an FAI would commit suicide if humans need to be protected from UAI, or if there are other threats that only an FAI could handle.

Do you ever have a day when you log on and it seems like everyone is "wrong on the Internet"? (For values of "everyone" equal to 3, on this occasion.) Robin Hanson and Katja Grace both have posts (on teenage angst, on population) where something just seems off, elusively wrong; and now SarahC suggests that "the only friendly AI may be one that commits suicide". Something about this conjunction of opinions seems obscurely portentous to me. Maybe it's just a know-thyself moment; there's some nascent opinion of my own that's going to crystallize in response.

Now that my special moment of sharing is out of the way... Sarah, is the friendly AI allowed to do just one act of good before it kills itself? Make a child smile, take a few pretty photos from orbit, save someone from dying, stop a war, invent cures for a few hundred diseases? I assume there is some integrity of internal logic behind this thought of yours, but it seems to be overlooking so much about reality that there has to be a significant cognitive disconnect at work here.

I wish you wouldn't do that, and stuck instead with the generally approved norm of downvoting to mean "I'd prefer to see fewer comments like this" and upvoting "I'd like to see more like this".

You're deliberately participating in information cascades, and thereby undermining the filtering process. As an antidote, I recommend using the anti-kibitzer script (you can do that through your Preferences page).

I've become increasingly disillusioned with people's capacity for abstract thought. Here are two points on my journey.

The public discussion of using wind turbines for carbon-free electricity generation seems to implicitly assume that electricity output goes as something like the square-root of windspeed. If the wind is only blowing half speed you still get something like 70% output. You won't see people saying this directly, but the general attitude is that you only need back up for the occasional calm day when the wind doesn't blow at all.

In fact output goes as the cube of windspeed. The energy in the windstream is one half m v squared, where m, the mass passing your turbine is proportional to the windspeed. If the wind is at half strength, you only get 1/8 output.

Well, that is physics. Ofcourse people suck at physics. Trouble is, the more I look at people's capacity for abstract thought the more problems I see. When people do a cost/benefit analysis they are terribly vague on whether they are suposed to add the costs and benefits or whether the costs get subtracted from the benefits. Even if they realise that they have to subtract they are still at risk of using an inverted scale for the costs and ending up effectively adding.

The probabiltiy bump I give to an idea just because some people believe it is zero. Equivantly my odds ratio is one. However you describe it, my posterior is just the same as my prior.

I'd like to ask everyone what probability bump they give to an idea given that some people believe it.

None.

Or as Ben Goldacre put it in a talk: There are millions of medical doctors and Ph.D.s in the world. There is no idea, however completely fucking crazy, that you can't find some doctor to argue for.

So, given that some people believe X, what probability do you give for X being true, compared to Y which nobody currently believes?

In any case of a specific X and Y, there will be far more information than that (who believes X and why? does anyone disbelieve Y? etc.), which makes it impossible for me to attach any probability for the question as posed.

If no people believe Y -- literally no people -- then either the topic is very little examined by human beings, or it's very exhaustively examined and seems obvious to everyone. In the first case, I give a smaller probability than in the second case.

In the first case, only X believers exist because only X believers have yet considered the issue. That's minimal evidence in favor of X. In the second case, lots of people have heard of the issue; if there were a decent case against X, somebody would have thought of it. The fact that none of them -- not a minority, but none -- argued against X is strong evidence that X is true.

I don't think belief has a consistent evidentiary strength since it depends on the testifier's credibility relative to my own. Children have much lower credibility than me on the issue of the existence of Santa. Professors of physics have much higher credibility that me on the issue of dimensions greater than four. Some person other than me has much higher credibility on the issue of how much money they are carrying. But I have more credibility than anyone else on the issue of how much money I'm carrying. I don't see any relation that could be described as baseline so the only answer is: context.

Don't blogspam. Anyone who can see this on the open thread page can see the first posting of it a few comments down.

Where did Vladimir say he was "confused and dazed", as the quotation marks imply he did? I don't see any such comment here or on your blog.

I liked this more when you posted it the first time.

Sock puppet accounts aren't appreciated, mwaser, especially when you keep plugging the same blog. Comments about those links have received at least 28 downvotes already, just in this Open Thread.

Do we have IP-based sitebans?

And yet, the quantum mechanical world behaves exactly this way. Observations DO change exactly what happens. So, apparently at the quantum mechanical level, nature does have some way of knowing.

I'm not sure what effect that this has upon your argument, but it's something that I think that you're missing.

But throughout my whole life up to that point (the question even appeared in the animated series Beetlejuice that I saw when I was little), I had assumed a different question was being asked: specifically,

If a tree falls, and no human (or human-entangled[1] sensor) is around to hear it, does it still make vibrations? On what basis do you believe this, lacking a way to directly check? (Call this "Question S".)

Me too! It was actually explained that way to me by my parents as a kid, in fact. I wonder if there are two subtly different versions floating around or EY just interpreted it uncharitably.

I think that if this post is left as it is this post would be to trivial to be a top level post. You could reframe it as a beginners' guide to Occam, or you could make it more interesting by going deeper into some of the issues (if you can think of anything more to say on the topic of differentiating between hypotheses that make the same predictions, that might be interesting, although I think you might have said all there is to say)

I believe this is the conversation you're responding to.

(upvoted)

That story would be consistent with Guédé's, modulo the usual eyewitness confusion.

Seconding kodos96. As this would exonerate not only Knox and Sollecito but Guede as well, it has to be treated with considerable skepticism, to say the least.

More significant, it seems to me (though still rather weak evidence), is the Alessi testimony, about which I actually considered posting on the March open thread.

Still, the Aviello story is enough of a surprise to marginally lower my probability of Guede's guilt. My current probabilities of guilt are:

Knox: < 0.1 % (i.e. not a chance)

Sollecito: < 0.1 % (likewise)

Guede: 95-99% (perhaps just low enough to insist on a debunking of the Aviello testimony before convicting)

It's probably about time I officially announced that my revision of my initial estimates for Knox and Sollecito was a mistake, an example of the sin of underconfidence.

I of course remain willing to participate in a debate with Rolf Nelson on this subject.

Finally, I'd like to note that the last couple of months have seen the creation of a wonderful new site devoted to the case, Injustice in Perugia, which anyone interested should definitely check out. Had it been around in December, I doubt that I could have made my survey seem like a fair fight between the two sides.

It is a good blog, and it has a slightly wider topic spread than LW, so even if you're familiar with most of the standard failures of judgment there'll be a few new things worth reading. (I found the "introducing fines can actually increase a behavior" post particularly good, as I wasn't aware of that effect.)

I worry about this as well when I'm reading long arguments or long works of fiction presenting ideas I disagree with. My tactic is to stop occasionally and go through a mental dialog simulating how I would respond to the author in person. This serves a double purpose, as hopefully I'll have better cached arguments in the event I ever need them.

Of course, this is a dangerous tactic as well, because you may be shutting off critical reasoning applied to your preexisting beliefs. I only apply this tactic when I'm very confident the author is wrong and is using fallacious arguments. Even then I make sure to spend some amount of time playing devil's advocate.

I would not worry overmuch about the long-term negative effects of your studying for the bar: with the possible exception of the "overly sincere" types who fall very hard for cults and other forms of indoctrination, people have a lot of antibodies to this kind of thing.

You will continue to be entagled with reality after you pass the exam, and you can do things, like read works of social science that carve reality at the joints, to speed up the rate at which your continued entaglement with reality with cancel out any falsehoods you have to cram for now. Specifically, there are works about the law that do carve reality at the joints -- Nick Szabo's online writings IMO fall in that category. Nick has a law degree, by the way, and there is certainly nothing wrong with his ability to perceive reality correctly.

ADDED. The things that are really damaging to a person's rationality, IMHO, are natural human motivations. When for example you start practicing, if you were to decide to do a lot of trials, and you learned to derive pleasure -- to get a real high -- from the combative and adversarial part of that, so that the high you got from winning with a slick and misleading angle trumped the high you get from satisfying you curiosity and from refining and finding errors in your model of reality -- well, I would worry about that a lot more than your throwing yourself fully into winning on this exam because IMHO the things we derive no pleasure from, but do to achieve some end we care about (like advancing in our career by getting a credential) have a lot less influence on who we turn out to be than things we do because we find them intrinsically rewarding.

One more thing: we should not all make our living as computer programmers. That would make the community less robust than it otherwise would be :)

I found an interesting paper on Arxiv earlier today, by the name of Closed timelike curves via post-selection: theory and experimental demonstration.

It promises such lovely possibilities as quick solutions to NP-complete problems

It won't work, as is clearly explained here.

If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn't have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry's standards of cheating.

Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it.

Paper-2 said in slightly shaky handwriting:

DO NOT MESS WITH TIME

Harry wrote down "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME" on Paper-1 in slightly shaky handwriting, folded it neatly, and resolved not to do any more truly brilliant experiments on Time until he was at least fifteen years old.

To put this into my own words "The more information you extract from the future, the less you are able to control the future from the past. And hence, the less understanding you can have about what those bits of future-generated information are actually going to mean."

I wrote that before actually looking at the paper you linked. I don't understand much QM either, but now that I have looked it seems to me that figure 2 of the paper backs me up on my interpretation of Harry's experiment.

[T]o avoid that trivial inconvenience, I've put up a mirror of it.

You're awesome.

I've previously been impressed by how social psychologists reason, especially about identity. Schemata theory is also a decent language for talking about cognitive algorithms from a less cognitive sciencey perspective. I look forward to reading this chapter. Thanks for mirroring, I wouldn't have bothered otherwise.

Beautiful. Matthew Yglesias, +1 point.

It is entirely possible that some social groups are experiencing the kind of changes that Flanagan describes, but as Yglesias says, she apparently is unaware that there is such a thing as scientific evidence on the question.

From that Wikipedia article:

Inside the railcar, besides the paper clips, there are the Schroeders’ book and a suitcase filled with letters of apology to Anne Frank by a class of German schoolchildren.

Apologizing for ... being German? That's really bizarre.

I think I found the study they're talking about thanks to this article. I might take a look at it - if the methodology is literally just 'smoking was banned, then the heart attack rate dropped', that sucks.

(Edit to link to the full study and not the abstract.)

Just skimmed it. The methodology is better than that. They use a regression to adjust for the pre-existing downward trend in the heart attack hospital admission rate; they represent it as a linear trend, and that looks fair to me based on eyeballing the data in figures 1 and 2. They also adjust for week-to-week variation and temperature, and the study says its results are 'more modest' than others', and fit the predictions of someone else's mathematical model, which are fair sanity checks.

I still don't know how robust the study is - there might be some confounder they've overlooked that I don't know enough about smoking to think of - but it's at least not as bad as I expected. The authors say they want to do future work with a better data set that has data on whether patients are active smokers, to separate the effect of secondhand smoke from active smoking. Sounds interesting.

I agree that this article isn't very good. It seems to do the standard problem of combining a lot of different ideas about what the Singularity would entail. It emphasizes Kurzweil way too much, and includes Kurzweil's fairly dubious ideas about nutrition and health. The article also uses Andrew Orlowski as a serious critic of the Singularity making unsubstantiated claims about how the Singularity will only help the rich. Given that Orlowski's entire approach is to criticize anything remotely new or weird-seeming, I'm disappointed that the NYT would really use him as a serious critic in this context. The article strongly reinforces the perception that the Singularity is just a geek-religious thing. Overall, not well done at all.

This is great, even more so as you made it open source. I added it to References & Resources for LessWrong.

You should make a short top-level post about this so more people see this

I'd vote you up again for handing out your source code as well as the quote list, but I can't, so an encouraging reply will have to do...

Somewhat accepted partial answer is that huge brains are ridiculously expensive - you need a lot of high energy density food (= fire), a lot of DHA (= fish) etc. Chimp diet simply couldn't support brains like ours (and aquatic ape etc.), nor could they spend as much time as us engaging in politics as they were too busy just getting food.

Perhaps chimp brains are as big as they could possibly be given their dietary constraints.

Five-second guess: Human-level Machiavellian intelligence needs language facilities to co-evolve with, grunts and body language doesn't allow nearly as convoluted schemes. Evolving some precursor form of human-style language is the improbable part that other species haven't managed to pull off.

That is certainly interesting enough to subject to further reflection. Do we have any evolutionary psychologists in the audience?

Tom_McCabe2 suggests generalizing EY's rebuttal of Pascal's Wager to Pascal's Mugging: it's not actually obvious that someone claiming they'll destroy 3^^^^3 people makes it more likely that 3^^^^3 people will die. The claim is arguably such weak evidence that it's still about equally likely that handing over the $5 will kill 3^^^^3 people, and if the two probabilities are sufficiently equal, they'll cancel out enough to make it not worth handing over the $5.

Personally, I always just figured that the probability of someone (a) threatening me with killing 3^^^^3 people, (b) having the ability to do so, and (c) not going ahead and killing the people anyway after I give them the $5, is going to be way less than 1/3^^^^3, so the expected utility of giving the mugger the $5 is almost certainly less than the $5 of utility I get by hanging on to it. In which case there is no problem to fix. EY claims that the Solomonoff-calculated probability of someone having 'magic powers from outside the Matrix' 'isn't anywhere near as small as 3^^^^3 is large,' but to me that just suggests that the Solomonoff calculation is too credulous.

(Edited to try and improve paraphrase of Tom_McCabe2.)

The unbounded utility function (in some physical objects that can be tiled indefinitely) in Pascal's mugging gives infinite expected utility to all actions, and no reason to prefer handing over the money to any other action. People don't actually show the pattern of preferences implied by an unbounded utility function.

If we make the utility function a bounded function of happy lives (or other tilable physical structures) with a high bound, other possibilities will offer high expected utility. The Mugger is not the most credible way to get huge rewards (investing in our civilization on the chance that physics allows unlimited computation beats the Mugger). This will be the case no matter how huge we make the (finite) bound.

Eliezer's original article bases its argument on the use of Solomonoff induction. He even suggests up front what the problem with it is, although the comments don't make anything of it: SI is based solely on program length and ignores computational resources. The optimality theorems around SI depend on the same assumption. Therefore I suggest:

4. Pascal's Mugging is a refutation of the Solomonoff prior.

But where a computationally bounded agent, or an unbounded one that cares how much work it does, should get its priors from instead would require more thought than a few minutes on a lunchtime break.

The traditional answer is to follow the Kelly criterion, is it not? That would imply

where n is the number of tickets. This implies you should buy n such that (€1)*n = Wf*, where W is your initial wealth.

Edit: Thanks, JoshuaZ, for pointing out that the Kelly criterion might not be the applicable one in a given situation.

That article makes it sound like "countersignaling" is forgoing a mandated signal - like showing up at a formal-dress occasion in street clothes.

Alicorn made a post about the tactics of countersignaling a while back.

Am I correct in reading that Longbets charges a $50 fee for publishing a prediction and they have to be a minimum of 2 years in the future? Thats a bit harsh. But these sites are pretty interesting. And they could be useful to. You could judge the accuracy of different users including how accurate they are at guessing long-term, short-term, etc predictions as well as how accurate they are in different catagories (or just how accurate they are on average if you want to be simple.) Then you can create a fairly decent picture of the future, albeit I expect many of the predictions will contradict each other. This is kind of what their already doing obviously, but they could still take it a step further.

You might be interested in this recent discussion, if you haven't seen it already:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ax/open_thread_june_2010/23fa

I think the difference is that one event is a statement about the present which is either presently true or not, and the other is a prediction. So you could illustrate the difference by using the following pairs: P(Mom on phone now) vs. P(Mom on phone tomorrow at 12:00am). In the dice case P(die just rolled but not yet examined is 1) vs. P(die I will roll will come out 1).

I do agree with Oscar though, the maths should be the same.

The cases are different in the way that you describe, but the maths of the probability is the same in each case. If you have an unseen die under a cup, and a die that you are about to roll, then one is already determined and the other isn't, but you'd bet at the same odds for each one to come up a six.

Remember, probabilities are not inherent facts of the universe, they are statements about how much you know. You don't have perfect knowledge of the universe, so when I ask, "Is your mum on the phone?" you don't have the guaranteed correct answer ready to go. You don't know with complete certainty.

But you do have some knowledge of the universe, gained through your earlier observations of seeing your mother on the phone occasionally. So rather than just saying "I have absolutely no idea in the slightest", you are able to say something more useful: "It's possible, but unlikely." Probabilities are simply a way to quantify and make precise our imperfect knowledge, so we can form more accurate expectations of the future, and they allow us to manage and update our beliefs in a more refined way through Bayes' Law.

It looks to me like your confusion with these examples just stems from the fact that one event is in the present and the other in the future. Are you still confused if you make it P(Mom will be on the phone at 4 PM tomorrow)= 1/6. Or conversely, you make it P(I rolled a one on the fair die that is now beneath this cup) =1/6

I've been thinking about finally starting a Study Group thread, primarily with a focus on Jaynes and Pearl both of which I'm studying at the moment. It would probably make sense to expand it to other books including non-math books - though the set of active books should remain small.

Two things have been holding me back - for one, the IMO excessively blog-like nature of LW with the result that once a conversation has rolled off the front page it often tends to die off, and for another a fear of not having enough time and energy to devote to actually facilitating discussion.

Facilitation of some sort seems required: as I understand it a book club or study group entails asking a few participants to make a firm commitment to go through a chapter or a section at a time and report back, help each other out and so on.

CEV will be to maintain existing order.

Why? There must be very strong arguments for BEs to stop doing the Right Thing. And there's only one source of objections - children. And their volitions will be selfish and unaggregatable.

EDIT: What does utility-function-neutral mean?

EDIT: Ok. Ok. CEV will be to make BE's morale change and allow them to not eat children. So, FAI will undergo controlled shutdown. Objections, please?

EDIT: Here's yet another arguments.

Guidelines of FAI as of may 2004.

1. Defend humans, the future of humankind, and humane nature.

BEs will formulate this as "Defend BEs (except for the ceremony of BEing), the future of BEkind, and BE's nature."

1. Encapsulate moral growth.

BEs never considered, that child eating is bad. And it is good for them to kill anyone who thinks otherwise. There's no trend in moral that can be encapsulated.

1. Humankind should not spend the rest of eternity desperately wishing that the programmers had done something differently.

If they stop being BE they will mourn their wrong doings to the death.

1. Avoid creating a motive for modern-day humans to fight over the initial dynamic

Every single notion that FAI will make in lines of "Let's suppose that you are non-BE" will cause it to be destroyed.

1. Help people.

Help BEs everytime, but the ceremony of BEing.

How this will take FAI to the point that every conscious being must live?

What would happen if CEV was applied to the Baby Eaters?

My intuitions of CEV are informed by the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, which effectively asks: "What rules would you want to prevail if you didn't know in advance who you would turn out to be?"

Where CEV as I understand it adds more information - assumes our preferences are extrapolated as if we knew more, were more the kind of people we want to be - the Veil of Ignorance removes information: it strips people under a set of specific circumstances of the detailed information about what their preferences are, what their contignent histories brought them there, and so on. This includes things like what age you are, and even - conceivably - how many of you there are.

To this bunch of undifferentiated people you'd put the question, "All in favor of a 99% chance of dying horribly shortly after being born, in return for the 1% chance to partake in the crowning glory of babyeating cultural tradition, please raise your hands."

I expect that not dying horribly takes lexical precedence over any kind of cultural tradition, for any sentient being whose kin has evolved to sentience (it may not be that way for constructed minds). So I would expect the Babyeaters to choose against cultural tradition.

The obvious caveat is that my intuitions about CEV may be wrong, but lacking a formal explanation of CEV it's hard to check intuitions.

Thanks for that, Price is a very knowledgeable New Testament scholar. Check out his interview at the commonsenseatheism podcast here, also covers his path to becoming a christian atheist.

For example, eliminating lies doesn't "make the world a better place" unless it actually makes people happier; claiming so is just concealed deontologism.

I disagree. Not lying or not being lied to might well be a terminal value, why not? You that lies or doesn't lie is part of the world. A person may dislike being lied to, value the world where such lying occurs less, irrespective of whether they know of said lying. (Correspondingly, the world becomes a better place even if you eliminate some lying without anyone knowing about that, so nobody becomes happier in the sense of actually experiencing different emotions, assuming nothing else that matters changes as well.)

Of course, if you can only eliminate a specific case of lying by on the net making the outcome even worse for other reasons, it shouldn't be done (and some of your examples may qualify for that).

It is a common failure of moral analysis (invented by deontologists undoubtedly) that they assume idealized moral situation. Proper consequentialism deals with the real world, not this fantasy.

• #1/#2/#3 - "never knows" fails far too often, so you need to include a very large chance of failure in your analysis.
• #4 - it's pretty safe to make stuff like that up
• #5 - in the past, undoubtedly yes; in the future this will be nearly certain to leak with everyone undergoing routine genetic testing for medical purposes, so no. (future is relevant because situation will last decades)
• #6 - consequentialism assumes probabilistic analysis (% that child is not yours, % chance that husband is making stuff up) - and you weight costs and benefits of different situations proportionally to their likelihood. Here they are in unlikely situation that consequentialism doesn't weight highly. They might be better off with some other value system, but only at cost of being worse off in more likely situations.

Is it okay to cheat on your spouse as long as (s)he never knows?

Is this actually possible? Imagine that 10% of people cheat on their spouses when faced with a situation 'similar' to yours. Then the spouses can 'put themselves in your place' and think "Gee, there's about a 10% chance that I'd now be cheating on myself. I wonder if this means my husband/wife is cheating on me?"

So if you are inclined to cheat then spouses are inclined to be suspicious. Even if the suspicion doesn't correlate with the cheating, the net effect is to drive utility down.

I think similar reasoning can be applied to the other cases.

(Of course, this is a very "UDT-style" way of thinking -- but then UDT does remind me of Kant's categorical imperative, and of course Kant is the arch-deontologist.)

As an old quote from DanielLC says, consequentialism is "the belief that doing the right thing makes the world a better place". I now present some finger exercises on the topic:

It seems like it would be more aptly defined as "the belief that making the world a better place constitutes doing the right thing". Non-consequentialists can certainly believe that doing the right thing makes the world a better place, especially if they don't care whether it does.

It's okay to deceive people if they're not actually harmed and you're sure they'll never find out. In practice, it's often too risky.

1-3: This is all okay, but nevertheless, I wouldn't do these things. The reason is that for me, a necessary ingredient for being happily married is an alief that my spouse is honest with me. It would be impossible for me to maintain this alief if I lied.

4-5: The child's welfare is more important than my happiness, so even I would lie if it was likely to benefit the child.

6: Let's assume the least convenient possible world, where everyone is better off if they tell the truth. Then in this particular case, they would be better off as deontologists. But they have no way of knowing this. This is not problematic for consequentialism any more than a version of the Trolley Problem in which the fat man is secretly a skinny man in disguise and pushing him will lead to more people dying.

For example, eliminating lies doesn't "make the world a better place" unless it actually makes people happier; claiming so is just concealed deontologism.

Just picking nits. Consequentialism =/= maximizing happiness. (The latter is a case of the former). So one could be a consequentialist and place a high value and not lying. In fact, the answers to all of your questions depend on the values one holds.

Or what Nesov said below.

A quick Internet search turns up very little causal data on the relationship between cheating and happiness, so for purposes of this analysis I will employ the following assumptions:

a. Successful secret cheating has a small eudaemonic benefit for the cheater.
b. Successful secret lying in a relationship has a small eudaemonic cost for the liar.
c. Marital and familial relationships have a moderate eudaemonic benefits for both parties.
d. Undermining revelations in a relationship have a moderate (specifically, severe in intensity but transient in duration) eudaemonic cost for all parties involved.
e. Relationships transmit a fraction of eudaemonic effects between partners.

Under these assumptions, the naive consequentialist solution* is as follows:

1. Cheating is a risky activity, and should be avoided if eudaemonic supplies are short.
2. This answer depends on precise relationships between eudaemonic values that are not well established at this time.
3. Given the conditions, lying seems appropriate.
4. Yes.
5. Yes.
6. The husband may be better off. The wife more likely would not be. The child would certainly not be.

Are there any evident flaws in my analysis on the level it was performed?

* The naive consequentialist solution only accounts for direct effects of the actions of a single individual in a single situation, rather than the general effects of widespread adoption of a strategy in many situations - like other spherical cows, this causes a lot of problematic answers, like two-boxing.

Not having to side scroll would be spiffy.

It might make more sense to put this on the Wiki. Two notes: First, some of the quotes have remarks contained in the posts which you have not edited out. I don't know if you intend to keep those. Second, some of the quotes are comments from quote threads that aren't actually quotes. 14 SilasBarta is one example. (And is just me or does that citation form read like a citation from a religious text ?)

Very cool idea.

It would be nice if links were preserved.

I've had great results from modest (2-3 hrs/wk) investments in hatha yoga, over and above what I get from standard Greco-Roman "calisthenics."

Besides the flexibility, breathing, and posture benefits, I find that the idea of 'chakras' is vaguely useful for focusing my conscious attention on involuntary muscle systems. I would be extremely surprised if chakras "cleaved reality at the joints" in any straightforward sense, but the idea of chakras helps me pay attention to my digestion, heart rate, bladder, etc. by making mentally uninteresting but nevertheless important bodily functions more interesting.

Chinese internal martial arts: Tai Chi, Xingyi, and Bagua. The word "chi" does not carve reality at the joints: There is no literal bodily fluid system parallel to blood and lymph. But I can make training partners lightheaded with a quick succession of strikes to Ren Ying (ST9) then Chi Ze (LU5); I can send someone stumbling backward with some fairly light pushes; after 30-60 seconds of sparring to develop a rapport I can take an unwary opponent's balance without physical contact.

Each of these skills fit more naturally under different categories, but if you want to learn them all the most efficient way is to study a Chinese internal martial art or something similar.