It is if we define a utility function with a strict failure mode for TotalSuffering > 0.

Yeah, but... we don't.

(Below I'm going to address that case specifically. However, more generally, defining utility functions which assign zero utility to a broad class of possible worlds is a problem, because then you're indifferent between all of them. Does running around stabbing children seem like a morally neutral act to you, in light of the fact that doing it or not doing it will not have an effect on total utility (because total suffering will remain positive)? If no, that's not the utility function you want to talk about.)

Anyway, as far as I can tell, you've either discovered or reinvented negative utilitarianism. Pretty much no one around here accepts negative utilitarianism, mostly on the grounds of it disagreeing very strongly with moral intuition. (For example, most people would not regard it as a moral act to instantly obliterate Earth and everyone on it.) For me, at least, my objection is that I prefer to live with some suffering than not to live at all - and this would be true even if I was perfectly selfish and didn't care what effects my death would have on anyone else. So before we can talk usefully about this, I have to ask: leaving aside concerns about the effects of your death on others, would you prefer to die than to live with any amount of suffering?

Good catch. Don't think I'm going to change the behavior, as there's complex cases where there's no obvious behavior: suppose you have a highly upvoted comment, whose parent and grandparent are both below the threshold. Do you color it in the widget differently from its parents? Do you expand both its parent and grandparent when it's clicked on, in order that it be on the page and thus scrollable to? Do you mark its parent somehow so the reader knows that comment wouldn't normally have been displayed?

So I think I'm OK with clicking on a comment which is hidden doing nothing. It's maybe worth greying out such comments in the list, so as not to confuse people when nothing happens, but I feel like this mostly just ends up highlighting them, so I'm not going to put that in the main script. If you want that feature, though, I pushed it to an alternative branch on the github repo, and you can find it here. Comments will remain greyed even if you've un-hidden their parents, but will become scrollable to.

Huh. Try the most recent version (as of just now).

The way it currently works - at least, the way I designed it, and the way it seems to work for me - is that it doesn't remember anything between visits, but rather determines which comments are new since your last visit by looking at the highlight provided by LW's server. If there were comments made since your last visit, they should be highlighted with or without the script; no custom highlighting will be performed until you manually change the timestamp.

If you aren't seeing new comments highlighted, it's (almost certainly) because LW isn't highlighting them - maybe you're logged out, or loaded the page elsewhere, or have never visited the page? [In this way the LW script differs from the SSC script, because the LW server regards "never visited" as "nothing new" whereas my SSC script regards "never visited" as "everything new".]

The reason I did it this way is that LW, unlike SSC, is itself keeping a record of which comments are new since your last visit, which works even if you loaded the page on another computer (but the same account). I didn't want to mess with the built-in mechanism, only allow you to change it per-visit if necessary.

Ah. That's much more work, since there's no way of knowing if there's new comments in such a situation without fetching all of those pages. I might make that happen at some point, but not tonight.

It seems to work for me. "Continue this thread" brings you to a new page, so you'll have to set the time again, is all. Comments under a "Load more" won't be properly highlighted until you click in and out of the time textbox after loading them.

Don't refresh - just hit enter, or otherwise defocus the textbox (click anywhere else on the page, or hit tab). It'll apply automatically and only lasts while the page is loaded; the time you enter doesn't get saved when you reload.

Would it be worth your while to do this for LW?

Sure. Remarkably little effort required, it turned out. (Chrome extension is here.)

I guess I'll make a post about this too, since it's directly relevant to LW.