I wish I could self-modify so I would feel pain as damage/danger signals, but without the affect of pain. (There are people wired like this, but I can't find the name for the condition right now.)

"pain asymbolia"

Could someone with an established account and associated with CMR comment on this?

Meaning does not excuse impact, and on some level you appear to still be making excuses. If you're going to reason about impressions (I'm not saying that you should, it's very easy to go too far in worrying about sounding respectable), you should probably fully compartmentalize (ha!) whether a conclusion a normal person might reach is false.

I got the impression that what "not Turing-computable" meant is that there's no way to only compute what 'actually happens'; you have to somehow iteratively solve the fixed-point equation, maybe necessarily generating experiences (waves hands confusedly) corresponding to the 'false' timelines.

Milgram experiment?

I'd say Khoth is obviously correct here.

Yeees... though I'm not sure how 'normal' it was, it could be mainly group effects.

What does this distinction mean? A normal person in those groups would commit torture, and there's no such thing as a 'normal person' completely abstracted from 'group effects'; a Homo sapiens without memes isn't really a person.

For large numbers of people to abhor torture as much as we do is a bizarre (from a historical POV) recent phenomenon, AFAIK.

With this sort of thing, or anything really, you either use bulletproof mathematical models derived from first principles (or empirically) with calibrated real quantities, or you wing it intuitively using your built-in hardware. You do not use "math" on uncalibrated pseudo-quantities; that just tricks you into overriding your intuition for something with no correct basis.

Despite anti-arbitrariness intuitions, there is empirical evidence that this is wrong.

The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models

Proper linear models are those in which predictor variables are given weights in such a way that the resulting linear composite optimally predicts some criterion of interest; examples of proper linear models are standard regression analysis, discriminant function analysis, and ridge regression analysis. Research summarized in Paul Meehl's book on clinical versus statistical prediction—and a plethora of research stimulated in part by that book—all indicates that when a numerical criterion variable (e.g., graduate grade point average) is to be predicted from numerical predictor variables, proper linear models outperform clinical intuition. Improper linear models are those in which the weights of the predictor variables are obtained by some nonoptimal method; for example, they may be obtained on the basis of intuition, derived from simulating a clinical judge's predictions, or set to be equal. This article presents evidence that even such improper linear models are superior to clinical intuition when predicting a numerical criterion from numerical predictors. In fact, unit (i.e., equal) weighting is quite robust for making such predictions. The article discusses, in some detail, the application of unit weights to decide what bullet the Denver Police Department should use. Finally, the article considers commonly raised technical, psychological, and ethical resistances to using linear models to make important social decisions and presents arguments that could weaken these resistances.

(this is about something somewhat less arbitrary than using ranks as scores, but it seems like evidence in favor of that approach as well)

...contrary to the authors' own statements that "Fostering the conditions where personality growth occurs – such as through positive schooling, communities, and parenting - may be a more effective way of improving national wellbeing than GDP growth."

This makes the study sound very politically motivated.

I notice that level of internal monologue and tension in my jaw are strongly correlated, and I can affect either by manipulating the other.

Totally agreed, it just informs our prior about the existence of some sort of significant gender difference in humans.

Some species differentiate relatively little in just a few specific scenarios like behaviors related to reproduction (wolverines; for a more marked example, many fireflies).

Can you say more? (didn't find anything with extremely casual searching)