See, I feel the same way about your post as you do about my reply. I think that you're getting at something, but you've significantly overstated your argument -- to the point that someone following its recommendations would be less effective.
(There's something bizarrely wrong with the autoformatting which I can't reproduce and can't fix -- 1, 2, and 3 all address part 1, 4 is 2, and so on.)
a. ("perhaps they definitely cannot affect it") This is true if you can do literally nothing about it, but the number of things on which you can have literally no effect are far outweighed by the number of things that holding this attitude will cause you to give up on. Do you think that you can have literally no effect on prison torture? That you could do nothing which would affect it, in any way? Try harder, Luke. Even death itself is not something you can give up feeling bad about -- nor was it a few centuries ago, because the societal effects of people trying to stop feeling bad about it then are damaging efforts to stop it now.
b. ("perhaps they have consciously decided not to try to solve it, and invest their effort elsewhere") This, I think, significantly understates the effect someone can have without investing much effort. What if you just told your friends, and told them to tell their friends? Maybe one of the friends-of-friends would be struck by the cause, and decide that their effort would be best spent there. Probably this won't happen, but it certainly won't happen if you decide just to stop thinking about it because it's not happy-making to think about.
c. ("This suffering is needless") This suffering is clearly not needless if it produces actions which can help resolve the problem.
Life ain't easy. I don't see how trying to look away helps.
I (falsifiably) expect that not feeling bad about problems has a much stronger influence.
It's true that we keep acting in the absence of immediate strong emotion, but do you really believe that we'd act just as strongly to resolve a problem whether we still felt strongly about it or not?
True. But the post doesn't argue for this, only for eliminating negative motivation.
I agree with you that sadness is intrinsically bad, and that constantly being sad is counterproductive. I disagree with you on the merits of negative motivation -- that is, I think that feeling sad about something causes you to work harder than not feeling sad about it -- and on the number of things that it's rational to "look away" from.
Also, one ambiguity that may be creating misunderstanding on both our parts: Ideally, no one should be generally unhappy, no matter what state the world is in. What they should be is unhappy about things, so that they can work harder to solve them -- and they should be unhappy about things in proportion to how bad they are. I think the post would be better if this distinction were clearly made.
Edit: And given that distinction, it is bad to ruminate on the existence of suffering/death/etc., if it's not motivating you to combat suffering/death/etc. So I agree with that part of the post.
("perhaps they definitely cannot affect it") This is true if you can do literally nothing about it, but the number of things on which you can have literally no effect are far outweighed by the number of things that holding this attitude will cause you to give up on. Do you think that you can have literally no effect on prison torture?
The effect isn't literally zero, in the same way that probabilities are never literally zero. But I believe the effect I can have on reducing prison torture is vanishingly small.
But that's besides the point. As lo...
Related to: I'm Scared; Purchase utilons and fuzzies separately
Expanded from this comment.
You have awakened as a rationalist, discarded your false beliefs, and updated on new evidence. You understand the dangers of UFAI, you do not look away from death or justify it. You realize your own weakness, and the Vast space of possible failures.
And understanding all this, you feel bad about it. Very bad, in fact. You are afraid of the dangers of the future, and you are horrified by the huge amounts of suffering. You have shut up and calculated, and the calculation output that you should feel 3^^^3 times as bad as over a stubbed toe. And a stubbed toe can be pretty bad.
But this reaction of yours is not rational. You should consider the options of choosing not to feel bad about bad things happening, and choosing to feel good no matter what.
Your bad feelings, whether of fear, empathetic suffering, or something else, are probably counterproductive. Not only do you feel bad - a loss of utility in itself - but such feelings probably hurt, rather than help, your efforts to change the world for the better.
You may believe that your emotional outlook must be "rational": that it must correspond to your conscious estimates of the present or the future. Perhaps you expect to die of old age, or perhaps you are aware of people being tortured in secret prisons. You are forcing your emotions to match the future you foresee, and so you feel unhappy and afraid.
I suggest that you allow your emotions to become disconnected from your conscious long-term predictions. Stop trying to force yourself to be unhappy because you predict bad things. Say to yourself: I choose to be happy and unafraid no matter what I predict!
Emotions are not a a tool like rational thought, which you have to use in a way that corresponds to the real world. You can use them in any way you like. It's rational to feel happy about a bleak future, because feeling happy is a good thing and there is no point in feeling unhappy!
Being happy or not, afraid or not, does not have to be determined by your conscious outlook. The only things that force your mind to be unhappy are things like pain, hunger, loneliness, and the immediate expectation of these. If you accept that your goal is to be happy and unafraid as a fact independent of the future you foresee, you can find various techniques to achieve this.
Unfortunately such techniques vary for different people. This post doesn't discuss any: it is about the prerequisite decision to be happy.
Expecting to die of cancer in fifty years does not, in itself, cause negative emotions like fear. Imagining the death in your mind, and dwelling on it, does cause fear. In the first place, avoid thinking about any future problem that you are not doing anything about.
Use your natural defensive mechanisms, such as of not acknowledging unsolved problems, or compartmentalizing different beliefs. Don't dismiss them as biases or irrational practices. They exist for a good reason and have their proper use.
This does not mean that you should ignore problems on the conscious level. It is possible to decouple the two things, with practice. You can take long-term strategic actions (donate to SIAI, research immortality) without acutely fearing the result of failure by not imagining that result.
When you're faced with something terrible and you're not doing anything about it anyway, just look away. Defeat the implicit LW conditioning that tells you looking away from the suffering of others is wrong. It's wrong only if it affects your actions, not your emotions.