When I clicked through I thought somehow that Caplan was asking for help optimizing his "personal faculty by which he decides on and initiates action" which seemed like a strikingly self-effacing thing to do.

Now that I think about it, writing does seem to be involved in optimizing this faculty even for people who are alive and proud... but somehow it had not occurred to me until just now that other people's last wills and testaments might be an interesting source of inspiration and guidance on what kinds of actions people's faculties tend towards when they are really serious and have only this document to express what they feel to be their true external-world-targeting wishes...

So I've just spent 10 minutes googling around and I can find the text of last will and testament of stray famous people (like George Washinton's) but I can't seem to find an archive of them, much less anything like a statistical analysis of typical targets and allocation ratios. It might be that my google-fu is weak in the areas of jurisprudence/legalities or it might be that there really is a gap in human knowledge here? I'm not sure which.

If there is a gap this seems like a tragedy from the perspective of the study of human volition. I could imagine the gap arising from a simple lack of anyone ever having done the legwork to gather such things up or I could imagine the gap arising from privacy concerns that prevent distribution and archiving of most of them. If the latter, I think maybe an interesting clause that could be added to last will and testaments would be that they be published or otherwise transferred to an archive after a certain amount of time, for the sake of posterity and science :-)

Granting that there is a "Flaubert's captain problem" in one of NASA's 2006 budget reports... now what? Is there some personally applicable upshot we can derive from it? What was your larger rhetorical point?

I could imagine someone making all the factual claims you've raised in order to prove the larger point that math and budgets are flexible and learning to plan and reason precisely are not that big a deal because no one who matters bothers to check the actual details and thus what really matters is something like getting along with influential and powerful people... Is that what you wanted to show here?

I could also imagine someone making all the factual claims you've raised here to show that corruption and/or incompetence was rampant in a science oriented public institution seven years ago and thus that citizens who contribute to that institution have a moral duty to respond somehow... but if that was your rhetorical goal then the call to action seems to be missing? And in the meantime the sense of moral outrage has been fanned somewhat, and now there's no outlet. Was inducing generalized angst against NASA your rhetorical goal?

I'm moderately friendly to the basic point being made that "someone in a high place was wrong at one time!" if there is admission of limits, but this article seems to be presented as something self contained but feels to me like half the story at best. If all you want to say is that something is wrong then I guess I'm cool with that being all you're saying, but I'd like you to admit it at the end so that, as a reader, I'm not left waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For what its worth, the verb "funge" is what kids these days are funging for phrases like "trades off against". Some supposed benefits of this verb are that it takes one syllable rather than four, and it explicitly primes for the concept of "fungibility" in a way that highlights how often a tradeoff isn't being made against two single things, but rather a tradeoff is being considered between some coherent proposal versus a vast array of other possible plans with similar benefits, and partial fractions and/or combinations of such plans, and so on in a vast optimization space that may contain low hanging fruit... even as considering such tradeoffs often runs afoul of sacredness heuristics.

An inconsistent belief system will generate actions that are oriented towards non-constant goals, and interfere destructively with each other, and not make much progress. A consistent belief system will generate many actions oriented towards the same goal, and so will make much progress.

One way to model willpower is that it is a muscle that uses up brain energy to accomplish things. This is a common model but it is not my current working hypothesis for how things "really universally work in human brains". Rather, I see a need for "that which people vaguely gesture towards with the word willpower" as a sign that a person's total cognitive makeup contains inconsistent elements that are destructively interfering with each other. In other words, the argument against logically coherent beliefs is sort of an argument in favor of akrasia.

Some people seem to have a standard response to this idea that is consonant with the slogan "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be" and this is generally not my preferred response except as a fallback in cases of a poverty of alternative options. The problem I have with "destroy my akrasia with the truth" responses is roughly that they are sort of like censoring a part of yourself without proper justification for doing so. I generally expect constraints of inferential distances and patience to make the detailed reasoning here opaque, but for those interested, a useful place to start is to consider the analogy of "cognitive components as assets" and then play compare and contrast with modern portfolio theory (MPT).

However, explicitly learning about MPT appears not to be within the cognitive means of most people at the present time... which means that if the related set of insights is critical to optimal real life functioning as an epistemic agent then an implicit form of the same insights is likely to be embedded in people in "latent but effective form". It doesn't mean that such people are "bad" or "trying to dominate you" necessarily, it just means that they have a sort of in-theory-culturally-rectifiable disability in the context of something like "explicitly negotiated life optimization".

If this disability is emotionally affirmed as a desirable state and taken to logical extremes in a context of transhuman self modification abilities you might end up with something like dream apes:

Their ancestors stripped back the language centres to the level of higher primates. They still have stronger general intelligence than any other primate, but their material culture has been reduced dramatically – and they can no longer modify themselves, even if they want to. I doubt that they even understand their own origins any more.

Once you've reached the general ballpark of dream apes, the cognitive MPT insight has reached back around to touch on ethical questions that come up in daily life. You can imagine a sort of grid of social and political possibilities based on questions like: What if the dream ape is more (or less) ethical than me? What if a dream ape is more (or less) behaviorally effective than me, but in a "directly active" way (with learning and teaching perhaps expected to work by direct observation of gross body motions and direct inference of the justifications for those actions)? What if the dream ape has a benevolent (or hostile) attitude towards me right now? What if, relative to someone else, I'm the dream ape?

You can get an interesting intellectual puzzle by imagining that "becoming a god-like dream ape" (ie lesioning verbal processing but getting better at tools and science and ethics) turned out as "scientific fact" to be the morally and pragmatically correct outcome of the transhuman possibility. In that context, imagine that one of these "super awesome transhuman dream apes" runs into a person from a different virtue ethical clade who is (1) worth saving but (2) has tried (successfully or unsuccessfully) to totally close themselves to anything except verbally explicit forms of influence, and then (3) fallen into sin somehow. In this scenario, what does the angelic dream ape do to get a positive outcome?

EDITED: Ran into the comment length limit and trimmed the thought to a vaguely convenient stopping point.

"The single best way to make predictions about what you're going to want in the future isn't to imagine yourself in the future, … it's to look at other people who are in the very future you're imagining,"

I was aiming for something like this sort of information with Seeking book about baseline life planning and expectations. That turned up numerous suggestions for tangentially related content that I could try to collate for myself, but nothing that addresses the desire squarely. If anyone knows of something in this vein, I'd still appreciate a pointer to solid content on the subject :-)

I wonder how hard it would be to self-modify prior to the imposition of the sort of regime discussed here to be a counter-factual utility monster (along the lines of "I prefer X if Z and prefer not-X if not-Z") who very very much wants to be (and thus becomes?) an actual utility monster iff being a utility monster is rewarded. If this turns out to be easy then it seems like the odds of this already having happened in secret before the imposition of the utility-monster-rewarding-regime would need to be taken into account by those contemplating the imposition.

It would be ironic if the regime was launched, and in the course of surveying preferences at its outset they discovered the counter-factual utility monster's "moral booby-trap" and became its hostages. Story idea! Someone launches a simple preference aggregation regime and they discover a moral booby-trap and are horrified at what is likely to happen when the survey ends and the regime gets down to business... then they discover a second counter-factual utility monster booby trap lurking in someone's head that was designed with the naive booby traps in mind and so thwarts it. The second monster also manages to have room in their function to grant "utility monster empathy sops" to the launchers of the regime and they are overjoyed that someone managed to save them from their own initial hubris, even though they would have been horrified if they had only discovered the non-naive monster with no naive monster to serve as a contrast object. Utility for everyone but the naive monster: happy ending!</irony>

Expression of concern for your mental health and your adherence to prescribed medications. Friendly conviviality deploying a charming mixture of blue and green political shibboleths to deflect the substance of your Thing-related obsession. Flattery of the forum itself and its moderators for their provision of such an open and caring environment. Request for someone who knows him well to visit magfrump to attend to potential mental health needs.

I was like you once (though better perhaps, because I did it earlier) but then I transcended such egocentric pseudo-virtue and reached the true apex of apolitical virtue: faith respecting apologetic detachment.

The critical turning point was when I realized that naive Thing-following of the part of the masses was actually a critical element in the cohesiveness of our civilization. By ignoring Things, and emotionally disengaging from naive Blue/Green loyalty I was actually subtly defecting on the constituent civic elements of our goodarchy for the sake of scoring points in a silly meta-political status game.

Tragically, my self modification in this regard was so successful that I could no longer participate in good faith in the hallowed and respectable rallies of the Blues nor could I non-ironically march with the Greens in their enthusiastic chariot parades... even as I now respect both of these activities. However, to authentically respect the rustically charming virtue of my people's simplistic social forms I have found myself hanging to the side and modestly cheering for the good hearted participants on both sides of this ancient (and ultimately adaptively balancing) social division. Given the realities of inferential distance, I generally fear that if I say too much I might accidentally turn some of these good hearted folk into the sort of cynical and egocentric person that you've revealed yourself to be by ostentatiously revealing your ignorance of the Thing while claiming a privileged epistemic position.

However, worry not! You too can support the traditional forms of our goodarchy merely by recognizing that you are unmindfully flawed as I once was. You can join me in being mindfully flawed in a way that minimizes damage to the naive virtue embodied by those who are akin to the pH balanced byproducts of chemical reactions common to our great planet.

However... I would be remiss if I failed to mention that you should give me credit for your newly acquired awareness of your "rationally" induced civic defects. Explaining the sources of one's virtue is itself a virtue, and I'd clearly be the one who deserves the credit for your virtue, even as I recognize the tragic and accidental circumstances that lead to my ability to be more benevolently prudent than you.

Thank you for this public service. It seems definitely helpful for the community, and possibly helpful for historians :-)

Awesome list. I'm interested in the way there are 24 questions that are grouped into 6 overarching categories. Do they empirically cluster like this in actual humans? It would be fascinating to get a few hundred responses to each question and do dimensional analysis to see if there is a small number of common core issues that can be communicated and/or adjusted more efficiently :-)