Offtopic: testing strikethrough: -one-, ~~two~~, <s>three</s>, <del>four</del>, <strike>five</strike>, --six--. Apparently still doesn't work.

Anyway, polls are totally awesome, thanks for implementing!

There's a trope / common pattern / cautionary tale, of people claiming rationality as their motivation for taking actions that either ended badly in general, or ended badly for the particular people who got steamrollered into agreeing with the 'rational' option.

People don't like being fooled, and learn safeguards against situations they remember as 'risky' even when they can't prove that this time there is a tiger in the bush. These safeguards protect them against insurance salesmen who 'prove' using numbers that the person needs to buy a particular policy.

Suppose generation 0 is the parents, generation 1 is the generation that includes the unexpectedly dead child, and generation 2 is the generation after that (the children of generation 1).

If you are asking about the effect upon the size of generation 2, then it depends upon the people in generation 1 who didn't marry and have children.

Take, for example, a society where generation 1 would have contained 100 people, 50 men and 50 women, and the normal pattern would have been:

• 10 women don't marry
• 40 women do marry, and have on average 3 children each
• 30 men don't marry
• 20 men do marry, and have on average 6 children each

And the reason for this pattern is that each man who passes his warrior trial can pick and marry 2 women, and the only way for a woman to marry to be picked by a warrior.

In that situation, having only 49 women in generation 1 would make no difference to the number of children in generation 2. The only effect would be having 40 women marry, and 9 not marry.

Long term, it depends upon what the constraints are upon population size.

For example, if it happens in an isolated village where the food supply varies from year to year due to drought, and the next year the food supply will be so short that some children will starve to death, then the premature death of one child the year before the famine will have no effect upon the number of villagers alive 20 years later.

The same dynamic applies, if a large factor in deciding whether to have a third child is whether the parents can afford to educate that child, and the cost of education depends upon the number of children competing for a limited number of school places.

See the The von Neumann Universal Constructor Prize

You might be interested in this Essay about Identity, that goes into how various conceptions of identity might relate to artificial intelligence programming.

There's at least one more category that I want to see at least discouraged-- the person whose posts are boring and numerous.

I wouldn't mind seeing a few more karma categories.

Would you be willing to post some of your ideas here that have gone over well on FB and/or meetups?

To paraphrase "Why Flip a Coin: The Art and Science of Good Decisions", by H. W. Lewis

Good decisions are made when the person making the decision shares in both the benefits and the consequences of that decision. Shield a person from either, and you shift the decision making process.

However, we know there are various cognitive biases which makes people's estimates of evidence depend upon the order in which the evidence is presented. If we want to inform people, rather than manipulate them, then we should present them information in the order that will minimise the impact of such biases, even if doing so isn't the tactic most likely to manipulate them into agreeing with the conclusion that we ourselves have come to.

To paraphrase "Why Flip a Coin: The Art and Science of Good Decisions", by H. W. Lewis

Good decisions are made when the person making the decision shares in both the benefits and the consequences of that decision. Shield a person from either, and you shift the decision making process.

However, we know there are various cognitive biases which makes people's estimates of evidence depend upon the order in which the evidence is presented. If we want to inform people, rather than manipulate them, then we should present them information in the order that will minimise the impact of such biases, even if doing so isn't the tactic most likely to manipulate them into agreeing with the conclusion that we ourselves have come to.

To the extent that we care about causing people to become better at reasoning about ethics, it seems like we ought to be able to do better than this.

What would you propose as an alternative?