("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 long as the expected effect isn't worth the effort (not just time, but dangers and losses due to the effort), I will make precisely zero effort: I will instead work on a different problem. There are many problems, I can only work on a few, and at the very least I needn't feel unduly bad about the problems I'm not working on, and about the fact that I'm not working on them.
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.
Take the POV of someone living a few centuries ago, knowing that death might be solvable but only in the distant future. On the one hand, you have some measure of influence over future societies' fight against death - a very tiny measure, because you must multiply it by your uncertainty of what the future society will look like and how it might be influenced by its history. On the other hand, you have the certain knowledge that you and a billion of your contemporaries will feel much better if they e.g. don't fear death as much because they believe in an afterlife, which also means they'll believe that fighting death is a sin. It's obvious to me what the correct choice is.
c. ("This suffering is needless") This suffering is clearly not needless if it produces actions which can help resolve the problem.
As I said in the post: 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.
I believe that by far most suffering of this kind never affects actions, and so is unnecessary. And a rationalist should be able to correctly identify cases where it is or isn't.
Life ain't easy. I don't see how trying to look away helps.
When life ain't easy for someone else, looking away helps you.
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?
I believe at least 90% of strong empathetic emotions and of fears can be eliminated without directly, causally affecting any actions towards resolving problems less. There may be long-term effects of this mental posture of which I'm unaware, but I have no reason for believing such effects would reduce actions. At the very least, getting rid of negative emotions makes for a healthier and more free mental life, and feeling better in yourself is known to encourage positive actions.
I'm going to stop going point-for-point on this, and this will probably be my final post on the matter. But the gist of my argument is this:
You say that it's reasonable to "look away", to consciously try to disconnect your emotions from reality. This is essentially sacrificing emotional epistemic rationality for emotional instrumental rationality. In that sense, I consider it theoretically reasonable: epistemic rationality is ultimately only a sub-goal of instrumental rationality.
But unless you're a perfect rationalist, it is extremely dangerous...
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.