Can you taboo "negative affect"? I was fine with it as shorthand when it was pointing vaguely to an illustrative subset of the space of emotions, but if you mean to define it as a sharp-edged boundary of what we can safely eliminate, it might be helpful to define it more clearly.
Depending on what you mean by the term, I might agree with you that "remove all negative affect" is too big a change.
Can you identify any positive preferences within yourself which do not correspond to a positive emotion?
Well, I feel the emotion of satisfaction when I'm aware of my preferences being satisfied, so a correspondence necessarily exists in those cases. In cases where I'm not aware of my preference being satisfied, I typically don't experience any differential emotion. E.g., given a choice between people not suffering and my being unaware of people suffering, I prefer the former, although I don't experience them differently (emotionally or any other way).
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)