Excellent post.

Related: It only takes a small extension of the logic to show that the Just World Hypothesis is a useful heuristic.

It'd be UK-specific, but yes I can.

For example, insisting that destructive uploaders are perfectly okay with no downside to the person stepping inside one. I finally decided to update and rate more likely the possibility that others do not experience consciousness in the same way I do.

I'm inclined to disagree, but you might be one level beyond me. I believe many people empathize with a visceral sense of horror about (say) destructive teleportation, but intellectually come to the conclusion that those anxieties are baseless. These people may argue in a way that appears dense, but they are actually using second-level counterarguments. But perhaps you actually have counter-counter arguments, and I would appear to be dense when discussing those.

Argument in a nutshell:

Sleep might be a Lovecraftian horror. As light in front of you dims, your thoughts become more and more disorganized, and your sense of self fades until the continuation of consciousness that is you ceases to exist. A few hour later someone else wakes up who thinks that they were you. But they are not you. Every night billions of day-old consciousnesses die, replaced the next morning with billion more, deluded by borrowed memories into believing that they will live for more than a few hours. After a you next go to sleep, you will never see colors again.

People who have never slept would be terrified of sleeping. People who have never teleported are terrified of teleporting. The two fears are roughly equal in merit.

I was thinking more "What is the error rate in replication experiments when we know the results from the original experiment were correct?" So if mixing X and Y under certain conditions has to yield Z, how often when scientists actually try to do this do they get Z?

The trailer for the movie Transcendence is out.

Fair enough.

Agreed that if someone expresses (either through speech or action) values that are opposed to mine, I might try to get them to accept my values and reject their own. And, sure, having set out to do that, there's a lot more to be relevantly said about the mechanics of how we hold values, and how we give them up, and how they can be altered.

And you're right, if our values are inconsistent (which they often are), we can be in this kind of relationship with ourselves... that is, if I can factor my values along two opposed vectors A and B, I might well try to get myself to accept A and reject B (or vice-versa, or both at once). Of course, we're not obligated to do this by any means, but internal consistency is a common thing that people value, so it's not surprising that we want to do it. So, sure... if what's going on here is that byrnema has inconsistent values which can be factored along a "privilege my own identity"/"don't privilege my own identity" axis, and they net-value consistency, then it makes sense for them to attempt to self-modify so that one of those vectors is suppressed.

With respect to my statement being confusing... I think you understood it perfectly, you were just disagreeing -- and, as I say, you might well be correct about byrnema. Speaking personally, I seem to value breadth of perspective and flexibility of viewpoint significantly more than internal consistency. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

Of course, I do certainly have both values, and (unsurprisingly) the parts of my mind that align with the latter value seem to believe that I ought to be more consistent about this, while the parts of my mind that align with the former don't seem to have a problem with it.

I find I prefer being the parts of my mind that align with the former; we get along better.

But people's values changes over time, and that's a good thing. For example in medieval/ancient times people didn't value animals' lives and well-being (as much) as we do today. If a medieval person tells you "well we value what we value, I don't value animals, what more is there to say?", would you agree with him and let him go on to burning cats for entertainment, or would you try to convince him that he should actually care about animals' well-being?

Is that an actual change in values? Or is it merely a change of facts - much greater availability of entertainment, much less death and cruelty in the world, and the knowledge that humans and animals are much more similar than it would have seemed to the medieval worldview?

Can you say more about why "it's just a fact that I care" is not satisfying? Because from my perspective that's the proper resolution... we value what we value, we don't value what we don't value, what more is there to say?

In regards to sound: If you take a tuning fork and smack it, it will vibrate. Vibration can be pleasurable. If the tuning fork is a brain, and the smack is music, then the result is a contented or slightly altered-from-the-norm feeling, that might be akin to the vibration of a tuning fork if tuning forks like vibrating.

This makes it seem like wireheading.

If learning a piece of knowledge will hurt you (emotionally, or be bad for your mental health) then it might be bad, instrumentally, to learn it.

Better, instrumentally, to learn to handle the truth. Ignorance and dullness are not qualities to be cultivated, however fortuitously useful on occasion it might be to not know something, or be unable to notice an implication of what you do know.

But if Epistemic Rationality didn't help me be instrumentally rational

If it doesn't, you're doing it wrong. This is the entire point of LessWrong.