By "acausal democracy", I mean the attempt to justify the practice of democracy - specifically, the act of voting - with timeless decision theory. No-one until you has attempted to depict a genuinely acausal democracy :-) This doesn't involve the "fallacy of selective attention", it's another sort of error, or combination of errors, in which TDT reasoning is supposed to apply to agents with only a bare similarity to yourself. See discussion here for a related example.

I also think we agree regarding acausal blackmail, that for a human being it can only be a mistake. Only one of those "eccentric agents" with a very peculiar utility function or decision architecture could rationally be susceptible to acausal blackmail - its decision procedure would have to insist that "selective attention" (to just those possible worlds where the specific blackmail threat is being made) is important, rather than attending to other worlds where contrary threats are being made, or to worlds where the action under consideration will be rewarded rather than punished, or to worlds where the agent is simply a free agent not being threatened or enticed by a captor who cares about acausal dealmaking (and those worlds should be in the vast majority).

We are now advanced enough to tackle this issue formally, by trying to construct an equilibrium in a combinatorially exhaustive population of acausal trading programs. Is there an acausal version of the "no-trade theorem"?

In A History of Western Philosohy, Bertrand Russell wrote of Leibniz that

His best thought was not such as would win him popularity, and he left his records of it unpublished in his desk. What he published was designed to win the approbation of princes and princesses. The consequence is that there are two systems of philosophy which may be regarded as representing Leibniz: one, which he proclaimed, was optimistic, orthodox, fantastic, and shallow; the other, which has been slowly unearthed from his manuscripts by fairly recent editors, was profound, coherent, largely Spinozistic, and amazingly logical. It was the popular Leibniz who invented the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds (to which F. H. Bradley added the sardonic comment "and everything in it is a necessary evil"); it was this Leibniz whom Voltaire caricatured as Doctor Pangloss. It would be unhistorical to ignore this Leibniz, but the other is of far greater philosophical importance.

and Russell seems to think that "best of all possible worlds" is the shallow public theodicy, and "most existent" is the private theodicy, and they are not the same thing - since privately (according to Russell's account), Leibniz speculated that the world which gets to exist is the one which has the most entities in it (maximum number of entities logically capable of coexisting). But then Russell also writes that Leibniz may have considered this a sign of God's goodness - it's good to exist, and God makes the world with the most possible things... I am much more sympathetic to Nietzsche's metaphysics, as described in the posthumous notes collected in The Will to Power, and his skeptical analysis of the psychology behind philosophies which set forth identities such as Reason = Virtue = Happiness. Nietzsche to my knowledge did not speculate as to why there is something rather than nothing, one reason why Heidegger could see Nietzsche's ontology as the final stage in the forgetting of Being, but his will-to-power analysis is plausible as an explanation of why beings-who-happen-to-exist end up constructing metaphysical systems which say that to be is good, and to be is inevitable, so goodness is inevitable.

I don't see how that is the claim at issue. Most people are incompetent. That tells us little about what theism is. How would knowing the answer tell us anything useful about whether or not theism itself is or isn't a tenable philosophical position? I really dislike focusing on individual people, I'd rather look at memes. Can I guess at how many of the SEP's articles on theism are not-obviously-insane and not just if-a-tree-falls debates? I think that question is much more interesting and informative. I'd say... like, 30%.

I can briefly try to translate the divine simplicity thing: "The perfectly reflective Platonic decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems doesn't 'possess' the quality of optimizerness---it is optimization, just as it is reflectivity. Being a Platonic algorithm, it does not have inputs or outputs, but controls all programs ambiently. It has no potentiality, only actuality: everything is at equilibrium." And so on and so forth.

I think you need to take a big step back and consider what you've studied and what you've come up with. I'm not sure where divine simplicity fits in your worldview exactly, but in the course of my own decision theory studies, I came up with an issue that seems to shoot down that concept entirely: there can be no decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems, because there are optimization problems for which the solution space is infinite, and there is an infinite chain of progressively better solutions. Worse, the universe we presently occupy appears to be infinite, and to have such chains for almost all sensible optimization criteria. The best we can do, decision-theory wise, is to bite off special cases, come up with transforms and simplifications to make those cases more broadly applicable, and fall back on imperfect heuristics for the rest.

But there's a much bigger issue here. It looks to me like you've taken a few batches of concentrated confusion - the writings of old philosophers - and invented a novel interpretation to give it meaning. You then took these reinterpretations and mixed them into what started out as a sensible worldview. You're talking about studying Aquinas and Leibniz, and this makes me very worried, because my longstanding belief is that these authors, and most others of their era, are cognitive poison that will drive you insane. Furthermore, your writings recently look to me like evidence that this may actually be happening. You should probably be looking to consolidate your findings, and to communicate them.

I saw this after making my Plato's theory of forms comment at 10:19:54AM.

This is what I thought the article was saying.

the subject matter is so politically charged

Everyone seems to be operating under something like the law of conservation of ninjitsu here. You seem to be perhaps the worst offender, with gratuitous offensiveness and the like being approximately equal among all of the few theists here and the many atheists.

In this thread alone:

Sadly Less Wrong seems to know absolutely nothing about theism, which ends up with me repeatedly facepalming when people feel obliged to demonstrate how incredibly confident they are that theism is stupid and worth going out of their way to signal contempt for.

It tends to be like, yeah, we get it, minds reside in brains, neuroscience is cool and shit, but repeatedly bringing it up as if nobody had ever heard that before is a facepalm-inducing red herring.

theism is a less naive perspective on cosmology-morality than atheism is

Also bad is how you characterize what LW thinks, this seems like a artificial way to pretend you have the only or best informed position by averaging many people on here with the people who do't know and don't care to know about things that the best evidence they have shows are elaborate rationalizations and meta-hipsterism by intellectuals.

Theism without computationalism? It's not popular, but most Less Wrong folk are computationalists AFAIK. Hence the "timeless decision theory" and "Tegmark" and "simulation argument" memes floating around. I don't see how a computationalist can ignore theism on the grounds that it claims that abstract things exist.

Leibniz doesn't believe in material substance, so in no sense is he a dualist. If you are asking if there are materialists theists- eh, maybe but as far as I know it has never been a well developed view. That said, the entire platonism-materialism question can probably be reduced to an issue of levels of simulation... in which case it is easy to envision a plausible theism that is essentially dualist but not repugnant to our computationalist sensibilities.