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Vladimir_Nesov comments on The Nature of Self - Less Wrong
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Just go with the simple truth. Use your intuitions, even if you don't understand them: it's better than not using them at all, instead relying on abstractions of dubious relevance. Or wait for the abstractions to grow up.
That's what I have basically been doing before LW. I let my intuition decide when not to trust my intuition. But I noticed that my intuitions disagree with some of the eventual conclusions being made here. And I perceive the consensus to be that if your intuition does disagree then you should better distrust your intuition, not what has been written here. Since I am unable to figure out when not to trust my intuitions I can either trust all of them or none.
You trust the best tool you have, to the extent you believe (based on what the best tools you have tell you) it should be trusted. If trusting a judgment of perfect emptiness is better than trusting your intuitions, stop trusting your intuitions, but it's rarely like that. When you stop trusting your intuitions, you don't automatically get a better alternative. Unless you have such an alternative, by all means use the intuitions.
Relevant posts: The Simple Truth, ...What's a bias, again?, Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom.
(Also, it's not actually possible to stop trusting all of your intuitions. You can overrule only a small number of individual nudges, since even your conscious deliberation consists of smaller intuitions.)
What I do is be excessively slow to take on new ideas and chew on them in a sandbox. There is no such thing as strong memetic sandboxing, but it slows the ingress of bad ideas. And good ones, but hey.
If you find you're too susceptible to incoming memes, which appears to be what you're describing, then consciously trusting your intuitions further seems likely to lead to better results than what you're doing now.
This may lead to some degree of inconsistency and compartmentalisation (memetic sandboxing being akin to deliberate compartmentalisation), but the results will, I think, still be less worse than what you're getting now.
If you have to choose at least for the moment between blanket trust of your intuition versus blanket trust of stuff some guys wrote on the Internet, go with the former. Your intuition has at least managed to keep you alive so far.
Especially since its a question of values. "Is it worthwhile for parts x, y, and z to go on existing with the rest gone?" Can be mostly answered by asking yourself if you'd be interested in the prospect.
It can't be reliably so answered, but it's often the best tool we have, and the thing to do when dissatisfied with quality of the best available option is not to discard it.
There are ways of improving the intuitions though, patching particular problems in them, and some even appear in this post. Continuity of experience is one such confused notion, which gives a good argument against immediate intuition in the relevant situations.
I am trying to figure out what it is that defines us, what it means to survive. That Sarah Palin and you both drink coffee or that some being with your name will be maximizing paperclips isn't it. Self-preservation seems to be an important part of rationality, or what is it that instrumental rationality is for? And if you can't recognize yourself then what about epistemic rationality? Of course, there is only the universe that is unfolding and no self, but that could be said about values as well.