By what process was this story selected? That could help me judge how representative is this story.

Eliezer, our choices aren't between only the two polar opposites of only caring for the children's "own sake" vs. caring smartly for their reproductive value. Yes, the fact that our grief has not update for modern fertility patterns rejects one of those poles, but that does not imply the other pole.

The parental grief is not even subconsciously about reproductive value - otherwise it would update for Canadian reproductive value instead of !Kung reproductive value. ... Parents do not care about children for the sake of their reproductive contribution. Parents care about children for their own sake.

This just doesn't follow. Just because there is one feature that isn't taken into account and updated optimally in grief intensity doesn't imply that nothing else is taken into account but "the childrens' own sake", whatever that means.

Anna's point is similar to mine point that most behaviors we talk about are a mix of computation at all levels; this doesn't seem a good basis for hard lines for dichotomous cynical vs. not distinctions.

Eliezer, wishes aren't horses; strongly wanting to be able to tell the difference doesn't by itself give us evidence to distinguish. Note that legal punishments often distinguish between conscious intention and all other internal causation; so apparently that is the distinction the law considers most relevant, and/or easiest to determine. "Optimize" invites too many knee-jerk complaints that we won't exactly optimize anything.

Eliezer, you are right that my sense of moral approval or disapproval doesn't rely as heavily on this distinction as yours, and so I'm less eager to make this distinction. But I agree that one can sensibly distinguish genetically-encoded evolution-computed strategies from consciously brain-computed strategies from unconsciously brain-computed strategies. And I agree it would be nice to have clean terms to distinguish these, and to use those terms when we intend to speak primarily about one of these categories.

Most actions we take, however, probably have substantial contributions from all three sources, and we will often want to talk about human strategies even when we don't know much about these relative contributions. So surely we also want to have generic words that don't make this distinction, and these would probably be the most commonly used words out of these four sets.

My latest post hopefully clarifies my position here.

Eliezer, when I said "humans evolved tendencies ... to consciously believe that such actions were done for some other more noble purposes" I didn't mean that we create complex mental plans to form such mistaken beliefs. Nor am I contradicting your saying "he wants you to understand his logic puzzles"; that may well be his conscious intention.

Eliezer, you have misunderstood me if you think I typically suggest "you told yourself a self-deceiving story about virtuously loving them for their mind" or that I say "no human being was ever attracted to a mate's mind, nor ever wanted to be honest in a business transaction and not just signal honesty." I suspect we tend to talk about different levels of causation; I tend to focus on more distal causes while you focus on more proximate causes. I'm also not sure you understand what I mean by "signaling."

Eliezer, why so reluctant to analyze an actual equilibrium, rather than first order strategies ignoring so many important effects? My claims were about real equilibrium behavior, not some hypothetical world of clueless caricatures. And why so emphasize a few "writing" experts you've read over vast numbers of teachers of writing styles in law, engineering, accounting, academia, etc.?