On the meta-level, I'm not sure "quickness beats persistence" is a helpful lesson to teach. At the scale of things many LessWrongers would hope to help accomplish, both qualities are prerequisites, and it would be a mistake to believe that you don't have to worry about the latter just because you're one of the millions of people who are 99.9th percentile at the former.

On the base level, a non-bullshit version of this fable would look more like "There once was a hare being passed by a tortoise. Neither of them could talk. The end."

Source

and then it’s obvious that the ass can be “stuck.”

...seriously?

I think you have a good pattern going here when you classify things as "things you'd say to a..." Maybe, outside of the ritual itself, people could volunteer to be one of those positions for others without those services. Like, the Moombah would be the guy that listens to the things you'd say to a priest, without being a priest. He would listen under an oath of secrecy, to anyone who wanted to confess something. The High Glombix would listen to all the things you'd say to a therapist, without being a therapist, again under secrecy. The Vemerev would listen to all the things you're afraid to tell your friends about yourself, without judging you. It would be an accepted support group without relying on the traditional avenues, and it would also serve the purpose of getting you used to evaluating yourself and to verbally admitting your problems.

She's not seen as evil because she inadvertently killed her baby, she's seen as evil because she stole the other woman's baby and assented to killing it. Right?

Your second-order desires are fixed by your desires as a whole, trivially. But they aren't fixed by your first-order desires. So it makes sense for me to ask whether you harbor a second-order desire to change your first-order desires in this case, or whether you are reflectively satisfied with your first-order desires.

Consider the alcoholic who desires to stop craving alcohol (a second-order desire), but who continues to drink alcohol (because his first-order desires are stronger than his desire-desires). Presumably your first-order desires are currently defeating your second-order ones, else you'd have already switched first-order desires. But it doesn't follow from this that your second-order desires are nonexistent!

Perhaps, for instance, your second-order desire is strong enough that if you could simply push a button to forever effortlessly change your first-order desires, you would do so; but your second-order desire isn't so strong that you'll change first-order desires by willpower alone, without having a magic button to press. This, I think, is an extremely common situation humans find themselves in. So I was curious whether you were satisfied or unsatisfied with your current first-order priorities.

I still do not alieve that keeping my child a safe distance away while sleeping but showing love and care at all other times increases her chance of SIDS. If I was to be shown conclusive research of cause and effect between them, I would reverse my current opinion, mos' def.

So it's not really the case that you'd prioritize psychological-guilt-avoidance over SIDS-avoidance? In that case the question is less interesting, since it's just a matter of how well you can think yourself into the hypothetical in which you have to choose between, say, increasing your child's odds of surviving by 1% and the cost of, say, increasing your guilt-if-the-child-does-die by 200%.

It seems that sleeping separately very drastically decreases your chances of personally killing your baby in your sleep.

In the story, maybe. I think nowadays you can get specially designed cribs that sort of merge onto the bed, so you're co-sleeping but can't roll onto your baby–see http://www.armsreach.com/

Such are your desires, then, at the object level. But do you also desire that they be your desires? Are you satisfied with being the sort of person who cares more about avoiding guilt and personal responsibility than about the actual survival and well-being of his/her child? Or would you change your preferences, if you could?

They left out the part where the "good mother" rolled over her own baby two weeks later and everyone just threw up their hands and declared "What can we do, these things just happen, ya' know?"

Co-sleeping is controversial, not one-sided. It seems that co-sleeping increases the risk of smothering but decreases the risk of SIDS, leading to a net decrease in infant mortality. Always be wary of The Seen and The Unseen.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a pretty good example of updating on new information, I guess.

But it seems sort of pointless to attempt to find old stories that show the superiority of a supposedly new way of thinking. If the way of thinking is so new, then why should we expect to find stories about it? And if we do, what does that say about the superiority of the method (that is, that it was known N years ago but didn't take over the world)? Perhaps this is too cynical?