To a great extent, the underlying "noble lie" is that there is any such thing as objective moral truth. There is no measurement of "should", it's just about what equilibria seem to work, which is based on most people accepting it without questioning too hard.

If you have some mafia element that runs a casino

I mean, you've embedded the answer in the question, by definition of "mafia", I think.  

The pizza joint does not provide a way to target specific demographics who are likely vulnerable to scam attempts and run complex machine learning algorithms that optimize the effectiveness of the scam and auction of the marks to different scammers.

They might, if they're in San Francisco and signed up for the SaaS version of business optimization.

I'm sympathetic to the model - in many cases it seems that there is a generalizable trait of "toughness" (a few decades ago they called it "grit" or "determination", now it rhymes with "agentic"). It's tempting to simplify things to that level.

But I'm also skeptical of my own desire to believe that, and I don't actually think it's true often enough to count on it. When I press myself on edge cases or most specific data->prediction proposals, it loses a lot of appeal.

There are clearly some people who fare better than others across many domains. Exactly which traits cause this, and how ingrained and unchanging those traits are, remains quite difficult to pin down. Personally, I think it's 50% luck, 50% genes, 50% early environment, and 50% current environment. Yes, success is overdetermined :)

"I'd rather be sad than wrong."

What's helped me is to realize that "sad" and "wrong" are different dimensions, and don't need to be correlated at all.

I grew up in a less-community-intensive church than LDS, and my intellectual beliefs have been purely atheist since my mid-teens. My professed beliefs among some groups of family and community is more agnostic, and I'm very comfortable with others believing things that seem unlikely to me, as long as we can still cooperate in having fun and improving the world (which means I'm not part of groups that demand explicit declarations I don't believe).

Happiness for most humans does require community and love from other humans. It may or may not require (it doesn't for me, nor for a lot of people I know, but it could for some) having a strong belief in supernatural meaning. Helping to improve the lived experience of existing and near-future-probable-humans is meaningful and wonderful. Reality is enough.

But don't sleep on community and personal relationships. These often require compromise and even some unresolved disagreement on things that seem important. From what I can tell, LDS is among the more effective community-building religions, and does seem somewhat accepting of socially-compatible unbelievers.

do you think that you've identified a set of characteristics that, throughout history, will never lead to the wrong conclusion?

Not at all.  There is no such set of characteristics.  Wrong conclusions are inevitable and commonplace.  Godel's Theorems apply to all formalisms.

In the current world, the harm of unsanctioned killing being commonly accepted (and cheered) is generally a LOT higher than the harm of statistically-evil people continuing to live.   So, yes, a heuristic argument: this is a loss of civilization and order, even if it might have been justifiable on some dimensions.

"is it ok to kill people (or call for the killing or support the killing) who have not been convicted by any court and the killing does not stop any immediate physical threat to you?"

innocence is not required, it is presumed by our civilization. At question is NOT whether the victim was a bad person who we're perhaps better off without. At question is whether anyone but a court can decide what to do about it.

It's disturbing how socially acceptable it is to call for mob action in direct contravention of rule of law.

Imagine that Alice is able to sit in an ice bath for 6 minutes and Bob is only able to sit in the ice bath for 2 minutes. Is Alice tougher than Bob? Not necessarily. Maybe Alice takes lots of ice baths and the level of discomfort is only like a 4/10 for here whereas for Bob it's like an 8/10. I think when talking about toughness you want to avoid comparing apples to oranges.

I strongly suspect "toughness" is a lot like "pain tolerance" - there is no known way to measure how much of an outcome is mental tenacity and how much is simply noticing the difficulty less intently.  In fact, they may actually be the same thing.

For many cases, you don't actually care which it is.  If you want someone to sit in an ice bath (or similar cold endurance), choose Alice.  It doesn't matter if she's super-tough or just less sensitive to cold.   If you want her to be willing to push through other types of adversity (say, pursuing an important but very uncertain goal), it's not obvious that the ice bath test gives you enough information - maybe Bob is way better at that kind of difficulty (either because he's tough to that, or because he's just more optimistic).   

You want to avoid comparing apples to oranges, and the best way to do that is not to conflate different kinds of success-under-adversity.   

A lot depends on why you want to stay, and whether you are likely to have interesting/productive further discussions. I often just let them off the hook with a "I guess I am a bit closed on this particular topic - let's discuss something else".

In theory "agree to disagree" should be impossible among rational entities with compatible priors, but in practice humans often meet neither of those criteria. That's OK, when you reach the point of no further updates in either direction, you move on.

I don't agree (or I misunderstand something about the scenario).

With a perfect copy of all identity-relevant state, BOTH R1 and R2 retain their sense of self - they're identical at the point of copy. They EACH continue to develop their selves independently. They diverge from each other and from their shared past, but there's no distinction or privilege of the "original".

Unless the copy process is flawed, but that's not part of this thought experiment. To a great extent, this is a definition question: if there is an internally-detectable difference (a way to tell which is the original), that means the copy was imperfect.