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TheOtherDave comments on Disability Culture Meets the Transhumanist Condition - Less Wrong Discussion
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My answers in the short-to-mid term mostly center around rethinking how we relate to children and families. A lot of these specific questions become much simpler if I sidestep our cultural incoherence around that.
Personally I'm fond of the general principle that accountability goes hand-in-hand with power... if my debts ultimately get paid to some degree from your account, then you've some say in when and how I can risk indebtedness. If how I raise my children affects your quality of life, then you're entitled to some say in how I raise my children. (And vice versa.) If I don't want to grant you that power, I ought to "buy out your share" in some fashion or another.
That's easier to state as a principle than to actually work out a coherent implementation of, of course, but it suggests that for each question you raise I should be trying to approximate the difference in expected value to person X of how I'm raising my children compared to some cultural norm, aggregated across all Xes affected and weighted by the severity of the effect on X.
Even more simply, though, it suggests that if someone takes a devil's offer in a way that doesn't affect me at all (say, they kill themselves while arranging to have themselves replaced by something else that provides me with the same EV that they do), I am not entitled to prevent them from doing so in any way. If they take a devil's offer that affects nobody except themselves, then nobody is so entitled.
I'm not comfortable with that, but it seems easier to defend than anything else I can think of.
So if I want to subject my children to horrible agonizing torture, you have no problem with that as long as it doesn't affect you?
A few things.
Your inference only follows if you insert a "and only if" into the sentence you quote. Just like "if you do work for me then you're entitled to compensation" doesn't imply that you aren't also entitled to compensation under other circumstances, "if how I raise my kids affects you then you're entitled to a say in how I do it" doesn't imply that you aren't also entitled to a say under other circumstances as well. Your willingness to jump so quickly to an unjustified inference suggests to me that you're projecting a context onto my post that I didn't put there. That sort of thing can cause a lot of misunderstandings; I encourage you to slow down a little accordingly.
I have lots of problems with you subjecting your kids to horrible agonizing torture.
Many of those problems are emotional and visceral. I don't think you have any obligation to take my emotional reactions to your child-raising practices into account. (Well, except in the very tenuous sense that those reactions do incur some very marginal costs on my part, but in practice that's lost in the noise.)
If I disregard my emotional problems, and I disregard all cases where there is an effect on me, and I ask what's left over, I conclude that the value of the world (using my valuation, 'cuz who else's would I use?) with more tortured people in it is lower than with fewer. There is something to be said here about how that gives me a basis for action, but that's rather beside my original point.
It also suggests that I have a basis for action to prevent you from torturing yourself when your doing so doesn't affect me at all, which is relevant to (and runs counter to) my original point. That's basically why I say I'm not comfortable with my original point. But I'm also not comfortable with saying you're entitled to forcibly keep me alive just because you think I'm better off alive than dead (or entitled to kill me if you think I'm better off dead than alive), so I don't think that situation is particularly simple or easy to defend.
The trick is that the principle is sound, but those implications don't follow, because if I mind if someone does something, it thereby affects me.
One might ask: if I don't know something, how can it affect me, for "we care only about our own states of mind"?
As it turns out, I care about the world directly, and that's the meaning of "affect" here - affecting my utility, not affecting my perception of my utility.
In that case TheOtherDave's statement is completely vacuous.
That goes too far, though. There are plenty of people in the world who would think that all of us should be executed for the doctrines we accept as a common background here. How much say do you think they are entitled to have in LessWrong?
If it's not what they want, that they're not getting it is negative, but it doesn't mean anything here is a net negative.
Regarding "How much say...they are entitled to have", even if they are affected it isn't necessarily good to grant them anything. A loose analogy: in a psychology experiment where one makes even bets on card color from a deck of blue and red cards, if one determines ~75% are red, one should bet red every time. Likewise, those who would execute LWers for common doctrines here should have zero sway despite having an interest greater than zero.