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Douglas_Knight comments on Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted - Less Wrong
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I think this essay is about important topics, but too many of them and they would be better covered if they were separated. I'm just going to focus on the summary: typical objections to consequentialism.* The vast majority of objections to consequentialism are consequentialist, and thus incoherent. This essay explains this well, but I don't think previous post is a good example of this and I don't think that TDT is useful here, as a practical matter. Yes, there are examples where the problem is CDT-consequentialism, but that isn't the usual problem. Even when it is, most people endorse cooperating in a prisoner's dilemma, at least in practical examples like the traveler, when phrased with the surrounding consequences. TDT seems to me an unnecessary technical prerequisite for this purpose.
Maybe I want this essay to be something different than you want it to be, but I want an essay I can give to people who make the usual arguments against consequentialism, in particular, people not on LW. Having the other essay as a prerequisite is a big problem with that goal. I think TDT is also a problem with this goal. It seems to me that you can argue verbally for the doctor not killing the patients without explicitly mentioning decision theory at all. In fact, I would say many of your sentences already do this and you could eliminate TDT from that section. Maybe it is good to bring up at the end, but are people who already understand TDT really your audience?
* A consequentialist objection to consequentialism is not necessarily incoherent, eg, the consequentialist objection to CDT, but I think "thus" is the right word choice here.
Thanks for the critique; the post you were looking for was the post I wanted to write, but I had too much difficulty writing it, and I chose to post what I did rather than risk getting burnt out and posting nothing at all. That's also, in fact, what happened with my qualia sequence.
So I've now had two sequences of posts that were received tepidly despite most readers seeming to agree with them and finding them insightful; the most obvious conclusion is that I really need to improve as a writer. (Further evidence: people get much more excited about my ideas when I explain them face-to-face than when they read my writing.) I'm now publicly committing to relearn writing, with the help of Less Wrong... in two weeks, after the initial rush of the academic year subsides.
All your decisions sound correct. Good luck with the writing!