consent seem relatively objective.

Is so called "marital rape" consensual since they consented to marry? (Most societies say yes, but lately in has become fashionable in Western countries to pass laws saying no).

What if someone says yes but feels pressured to?

If two drunk students had sex, has a rape occurred? (Yes, according to California's new "Affirmative Consent" law).

You should care about people in alternate universes. (Am I getting this right?)

Also, it's at least somewhat plausible that you're living in a simulation.

I still assume these numbers to be small.

In the past, almost everyone thought that one should wait until marriage for sex. Now, almost everyone (in my part of the world) believes in serial monogamy. In both these cases people think that their social norms are in the right. I see no reason not to suppose that if Gor lifestyle became the norm then most people (inc. women) would think it right (not just publically saying that its right).

I see no objective way to say that any of these lifestyles are right or wrong, unless it can be shown to be damaging the children.

Come to think of it, that's a pattern EY has used extensively as well... "Here's proof that religion is insane and most people are predictably and systematically stupid, including yourself. Now believe in the Singularity, general self-improving artificial intelligence, cryogeny, space expansionism, and libertarianism!"

The hilarious thing about this is that Eliezer isn't even very hardcore about libertarianism, and most LWers on the surveys assign very low probability to cryonics actually working, including those who've actually signed up. The Preacher's Way works, whether or not you actually intend it to do so!

(Which is why it's epistemically polite simply not to speak that way at all.)

(And besides which, the human condition is an entirely valid concern that we ought to be moving from the realms of myth and religion to the realm of rationality. It is to my great and lifelong dismay that one signals intelligence, education, enlightenment, and general rationality by loudly dismissing all questions of value, feeling, or the human condition.)

Sounds like a noodle virtue to me, or at least it uses the same basic idea for humour.

But if you want to keep in the spirit of EY's dementors, the article writer does some wacky reasoning to end up roughly at the virtue of dietary restriction.

Few women say they would like to live in Gor. But some would. Some live in Gor-inspired relationships now. And maybe people would adapt.

You say that this feels like a riddle to you, but I would prefer to call it a koan. I think the best hint that we have to the nature of Bissonomy lies in the vagueness of its descriptions, as this is the sort of irony that Pratchett is famed for, and this sort of self-answering riddle has a Buddhist feel to it in turn. This also seems like a useful starting point for another reason: there are only so many potential virtues that Bissonomy can plausibly be, and the standard Western ones are already accounted for.

I suspect Bissonomy is the emotional acceptance of both that which is known to be true and that which is uncertain or unknowable. Ignorance, as we all know, is purported to be bliss, and that sounds like biss. However, Bissonomy is not the embrace of ignorance, nor does it bring bliss. Rather, it is the acceptance of that which is known to be unknowable, and it brings inner-peace.

Bissonomy and Tubso seem to be connected. Both virtues were forgotten due to their rarity. Explaining what one was should hopefully tell us something about the other. But it's even harder to say things about Tubso than about Bissonomy; the only thing that we know about Tubso is that its name is absurd. In a world where nominative determinism exists, however, this might be the only hint we need. I submit that Tubso is the virtue of absurdism, which surely has a place in Discworld. This fits with the koan framework, and establishes the desired connection between the two lost virtues; a koan's answer is absurd and hints at strange knowledge, but truly understanding a koan requires the recognition that one can never understand it fully, if at all.

Of necessity, this theory is largely speculative. We may never know the true answer to this question, and that's okay. And that, in turn, is Bissonomy.

I don't consider myself a reactionary, but I found Moldbug's "Open Letter to Progressives" to be a very convincing teardown of modern western society. For me, it made a lot of things 'click', and really drove home just how arbitrary and historically motivated present day beliefs are. I wouldn't say it shattered my world view, but it certainly gave me an outside view and I highly recommend reading it all.

He then follows up this teardown with a buildup of a reactionary perspective. I think he does an awful job of showing this perspective as any less arbitrary than the one he just broke down, and has very little real justification. But to someone who was just left with a despairing sense of uncertainty about how the world should work, I suppose that it would be very tempting to latch onto the first thing that could fill that hole.

I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don't see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won't have much tolerance for their assumptions about women's freedoms.

And this is worse than death?

If you think seriously about what living a lot longer than current norms would have to mean, then you'll realize that everything familiar to you now will eventually vanish, and new things will take their place. Then those things will vanish as well, and other things will take their place. Just keep iterating.

Consider how much of the currently familiar things in our social world originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth. Do you think the social innovations based on these ideas have gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition? I wouldn't assume anything of the sort.

In fact if I survive long enough, it wouldn't surprise me to see "regression towards the mean" in human society after a few centuries. The people of the world in the 24th Century might wield amazing technologies by our standards, but their society could have more in common with premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies than the ones we've known as products of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don't see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won't have much tolerance for their assumptions about women's freedoms.