I have an impression that conscientiousness feels like an outside force. Instead of "I choose to tidy up/proofread my writing/tip the server", it's more like "the situation requires that I do the right thing".

Does this match other people's experience? Does conscientiousness feel more like an outside force than other behaviors?

Is utilitarianism foundational to LessWrong? Asking because for a while I've been toying with the idea of writing a few posts with morality as a theme, from the standpoint of, broadly, virtue ethics -- with some pragmatic and descriptive ethics thrown in. (The themes are quite generous and interlocking, and to be honest I don't know where to start or whether I'll finish it.) This perspective treats stable character traits, with their associated emotions, drives, and motives as the most reasonably likely determiner of moral behaviour, and means to encourage people to "build character" so as to become more moral beings or improve their behaviour. It doesn't concern itself with quantitative approaches to welfare. Frankly, I find it hard to take seriously the numerical applications of utilitarianism, and my brain just shuts down upon some ethical problems usually enjoyed around here (torture vs. dust specks, repugnant conclusion, contrived deals with strange gods and so on).

I know that Eliezer's virtues-of-rationality post is widely appreciated by many people around here, but it's a declaration of (commitment to) values more than anything. It never seemed to be the dominant paradigm. I guess I just want to know whether a virtue-ethical approach would be well-received here, and the extent to which a utilitarian and a virtue ethicist can usefully discuss morality without jumping a meta level into theories of normative ethics.

Can you be more precise? Always cooperating in the prisoner's dilemma is not going to be optimal. Are you thinking of something like where each side is allowed to simulate the other? In that case, see here.

One could note that natural markets are going to this direction. For example steam has pretty reliably games appear on sale year or two after their release. Savvy consumers already know to wait if they can. This can get so bad taht early access games hit sales before they are released!

I tired to bring this topic up at a LessWrong meeting I have been calling my thoughts on this direction as "contributionism".

There is some additional even more radical suggestions. Instead of treating at each new sell as lesser amount, retroactively lower the price for already happened purchases (I am pretty sure they dont' mind). Otherwise there is this contention that if two customers are about to buy the product they try to make the other guy buy first so they get the cheaper price (which leads to a mexican standoff that chills selling).

Also normally when a seller and a customer are negotiating for a price seller wants to make it high and the buyer wants it to go low. However if the seller fixes the total amount of money he wants form all of his products then the price negotiation is only about whether the buyers wants to opt in now that it is higher or later when it is lower. However if the price retroactively changes you are "ultimately" going to be spending the same amount of money. If you attach your money early you get earlier access and run the risk that the product never hits high sales numbers (ie that you do not get any returns on it).

However the more people attach money the more the instant price lowers and more money is prone to flow in. This can also be leveraged to overcome a coordination problem. Even if the current instant price too much for you the seller can ask you how much you would honestly be willing to pay for it. (Answering this question too high will not cost you (too much) money). Then when the next customer that doesn't quite have enough buying willingness he might still promise the same level of sum of it. At some point that enough promisers have visited the sum of the promises actually covers for whaqt the seller wants to get for all of his products combined. At this point we can inform the promisers of each others existence - ie that a working sale configuration has been found. This might be a lot of people for a small sum of money each indivudally totalling up to a considereable sum.

Howeer this runs contary to a lot of curretn economical "ethos". Essentially every seller is expected ot try make as much money with the products as possible, there is no sum that is "good enough" that he would settle for. There is also talk of profit motive and letting the pricing game go on is said to make the wheels of the economy run smoothly. However in practise sellers will settle at some price as they think the proabbility of getting more diminishes faster than the gain.

However instead of maximising profits we could set profits to be constant and minimise cost per user. Ie instead of trying to maximse the wealth transfer we try to make the sale happen with as little fuss as possible.

One of the current economys problems is also that advertising and such creates otherwise frivoulous needs that prodeucts can be marketed for. The customer is taken into the decision procees only in what product they choose from the super market self. The decision to build the factory and logistic chain is a money lord with a profit motive trying to be greedy.

However we start from the needs of the customer for example that "I want our village to be educated and I am willing to do 10 hours of work for that end". When you got 100 of these kind of people someone might come suggest aplan to build a school that would take about 150 hours + 50 hours of someone teaching. It turns out that for contrucetion 1.5 hours of work on average is required per villager. Howevver the teacher is doing 50 hours of work when his "fair share" would have only be 1.5 hours. Probably the teacher has other desires beside wanting the village to be educated, the other promise to work on those projects for 48.5 hours. Divided evenly amongs the rest of the 99 willing villagers this amounts to 0.5 hours on those other projects.

That is in this village scenario the customer/investors put in 2 hours of effort 1.5 which most do themself and part is focused on one teacher.

I am interested if anyone wants to talk start-up or similar thingies, or just plainly would be okay purchasing some kind of services in this manner. The most challenge I have faced that people don't like it when a product doesn't cost a fixed amount of money even if they could argue that it's a fixed cost + free money afterwards however it comes back. Also it reminds of a ponzi scheme. However you can never go into a negative price ie you can't profit by buying a product. At most you get the product for (practically) free.

I would like to point out that kick starter uses clever methods in making sure taht the donation amount doesn't degenerate into nothingness. Ie it has perks where you get something when you enough. I am not sure whether being the "not profit making version" of kickstarter is a big enough difference to go compete with such recognised thing. But it has other alluring properties. However it is hard to pitch as a venture capital idea because it is "anti-profit" the most close is that sellign in this way would slightly outcompete with a profit maker because the profit makes has to guess beforehand the price point right to exact digits in order to have similar performance. In practise sales deviate somewhat from projected sales, contributionistic sale is sure to make econimcal sense at whatever scale but a beforehand fixed pricepoint will always live in a slightly uncompatible scale.

Do you think it's a circle?

I can see the " irrationally obstinate and arrogant" bureaucrats and "aggressive conformers" at one junction, and I can see evangelist Eagle Scouts and perfectionist fixers at the other junction.

Steve Jobs seems to be a classic second-junction type.

How long do the effects of caffeine tolerance, where when you're not on caffeine you're below baseline and caffeine just brings you back to normal, last? If I took tolerance breaks inbetween stretches of caffeine use, could I be better off on average than if I simply avoided it entirely?

Just because it would be good for society if people stayed home when they were sick, doesn't mean legislating that would actually have that effect without any drawbacks. Something between the two states seems to be in order.

I've been watching various colds and winter ailments move through my workplace. While I've been doing my part by trying to convince my co-workers that they ought to stay home if they're sick, people still come in when they're sick maybe half the time. At other places I know of, where workers don't get dedicated use-it-or-lose-it sick time, matters are much worse. I wonder if legislating sick time would have a strong effect.

Actually, it looks like this is happening (http://www.natlawreview.com/article/voters-four-jurisdictions-pass-sick-leave-ballot-initiatives). Should be a couple of papers for some enterprising economist or sociologist comparing productivity per worker in states where this happens compared to states where it doesn't.

I've been following Bitcoin for a while with fascination. Are there are reputable exchanges left, or is trading money for cryptocurrency back to being the wild west?

It's possible and achievable without major sacrifices with high probability, if you're reasonably well paid.

The basic tricks are (1) put a really substantial fraction of your income, at least about half, into savings -- index funds or similar -- and (2) learn to live a less gratuitously-spendy life than is normal in the affluent West, especially in the US. I strongly endorse both of these; but living on half your nominal income is much much much easier, and requires much much much less sacrifice, if that income is $100k/year than if it's $30k/year.

And if your investments misbehave badly enough, you're screwed. Firstly, if you hit a bad market crash before you were hoping to retire, your retirement date gets pushed out. Secondly, if the longish-term performance of the market turns out to be anomalously bad, you run out of money after being retired for years. You're supposed to save enough that the risk of the second failure mode is really low, so the question here is how comfortable you are with inferences like this: "Over the last 100 years or so, there's been no 40-year period in which you'd have run out of money if you held a broad stock-market-index-like portfolio and took out 3% of the initial capital, inflation-adjusted, every year; so you're safe adopting such a strategy now."

(I do not know whether the specific statement in quotation marks there is correct. There are studies whose conclusions have something like that form. Look them up before making retirement decisions.)

[EDITED to add: Just to be clear: I really do think the mustachian approach is a good one, and I follow it myself, and I do think anyone reasonably well paid who follows it has a very good chance of a comfortable early retirement. But I prefer not to see these things overstated, and I prefer to avoid formulations that -- wrongly but seductively -- encourage wealthy people to look down their noses at poorer people for whom living that way is very much harder.]