When I re-read the paper before making this post, I was relieved that it had not occurred to me at all before undergoing general anesthesia for my wisdom teeth a while before!

DISCLAIMER: the following is not necessarily my own opinions or beliefs, but rather done more in the spirit of steelmaning:

There seems to be a number of signs that the deciding factor might be the ability to form long term memories, especially if we go into very near mode.

• It seems that if we extrapolate volition for an individual that is made to suffer with or without memory blocking in various sequences, and allowing it to chose tradeofs, it'll repeatedly observe clicking a button labelled "suffer horrific torture with suppressed memory" followed blacking out, and clicking a button labelled "suffer average torture with functioning memory" followed by being tortured. It'd thus learn to value experiences without memory much less.

• If I remember correctly some anaesthetics used for surgery basically paralyses you and disable memory formation, and this is not seen as an outrage or horrifying, even by those that have or will be experiencing it.

• If we consider increasing the intelligence of various animals while directing them to become humanlike, then by empathic modelling it seems that those capable of forming long term memories beforehand would identify with their former selves, get angry at people who had harmed them, empathize strongly and prevent the suffering in beings similar to what they were before, etc. while for those that couldn't, the opposite of these things would be true.

• If I am given the choice to have one type of cognitive functionality disabled before being tortured, in almost all circumstances it seems the ability to form long term memories would be the best choice.

Thanks for the links, I will check them out!

Glancing quickly at the chocolate mousse recipe, something occurred to me: how do you deal with vegan ingredients being more expensive than non-vegan ones? For instance, vegan chocolate is way pricier around here than regular chocolate. Maple syrup is VERY expensive (is imitation syrup vegan?).

Thank you for your response!

I was, in fact, largely thinking of recipes where the butter, eggs, cream, etc. are doing a lot of the flavor and texture work. It sounds like that's something that is lost in an eggs/dairy free diet. This is valuable information.

Next question: would you be able to recommend a good source of dessert recipes that make the most of veg*an limitations on ingredients (rather than attempting to imperfectly substitute for eggs/dairy/etc.)?

(My motivation for these questions, by the way, is that I regularly bake desserts for my friends, and I'd like to be able to make sure that any people of my acquaintance who have veg*an dietary limitations don't feel left out.)

Do you eat eggs and dairy?

If you do not, then question: what is the best non-eggs/dairy solution to desserts? That is, what would you substitute in e.g. pastry cream, whipped cream, meringue, cakes, pastry dough, etc.? Is there some general solution, or is it handled on a case-by-case basis?

(If you do eat eggs/dairy, disregard this question.)

It is interesting to me that possibility 1 in this post (hypothesis: men and women are annoyed by different mistakes) manages to avoid giving the most obvious (to me) difference in what mistakes men and women are annoyed by, namely: in comparison to women, men tend to be much less sensitive to, and much less annoyed by, sexism in otherwise rational discourse. In fact, there's even a "mirror image" counterpart: men tend to be more annoyed than women by mention of sexism in situations where it is not clear that sexism is relevant, or where it is clear that no one was explicitly attempting to be sexist.

I suppose that this may have been a conscious omission, as part of the attempt to avoid making things worse merely by bringing up the topic for discussion. But for me it was very confusing, and somewhat alienating. Many male-dominated fields and communities stay that way (sometimes despite the explicit desires of the majority of the community) in part because members of the community engage in casual sexism, sometimes not noticing that they do so, and the other people present, who are mostly men, either don't notice or don't think it is important to point this out. Women who enter the community tend to notice the sexism, but may not address it directly (because they are insufficiently self-confident or disagreeable, or because addressing it directly has been a failure in the past) and instead allow it to prompt them to leave the community sooner than they otherwise would have. I don't know why there should be an assumption that "rationalists" would not share this problem to some degree, and not seeing it listed among possible causes of the gender imbalance here suggests to me that there is a taboo on discussing sexism here, even when doing so is necessary to understanding the phenomena we are discussing. That taboo, if it exists, certainly would make it harder for me to engage with this community. Since I don't know if there in fact is one, or what general rationalist principles it would follow from, though, I'm currently mainly confused.