The top item in my to-do list reads: "If confused, make list! If confusion persists, make lists for lists!"

Point being, I think taskifying in order to avoid counting difficult, unpleasant tasks as one item is useful because it better mirrors reality. For (very ground-level) instance, eating enough meals in a day is hard for me to do consistently because "eat a meal" has a ton of steps: decide what to eat, find ingredients, assemble, and so on. So if I lie to myself and say it's only one step, I feel bad about being so stupid for having trouble with Just One Step, and subsequently don't do anything because I'm in an Ugh Field. If I acknowledge that if I am having trouble accomplishing something, that means it has multiple steps... well, I still do less than my fictional idealized self would do, but I still do more than otherwise.

I find that a lot of my friends have trouble grokking this because the rationalist/perfectionist ideacluster is heavily grouped. For some reason it's hard to think about what a perfect rational agent would do without, at least somewhat and unconsciously, comparing oneself to that agent.

"In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die, but worlds die in them."

-Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I assume the capitals are about signaling "goodness"

I use Meaningful Initial Caps to communicate tone, but recognize that it's nonstandard. Sorry for any confusion.

So as far as I can tell, you're saying that "awesomeness" is a good basis for noticing what one's brain currently considers moral, so it can then rebuild its definitions from there.

To extend the metaphor, "sexiness is (perceived by the intuitive parts of your brain, absent intervention from moralizing or abstract-cognition parts, as) consent" is a good thing to pay attention to, so you can know what that part of you actually cares about, which gives you new information that isn't simply from choosing a side on the "Sexiness is about evopsych and golden ratios and trading meat for sex!" versus "Sexiness is about communication and queer theory praxis and bucking stereotypes!" battle.

What I'm curious about is:

rebuilding it from intuition without interference from Deep Wisdom or philosophical cached thoughts.

What, then, do you rebuild your current conception of morality from? "Blowing up people, when I have vague evidence that they're mooks of the Forces of Evil, by the dozens, is a bad idea, even though it seems awesome" seems like a philosophical cached thought to me. Do you think it's something else?

Counterfactual terrorism - "but those mooks may not be mooks!" - isn't a good tool for discerning actual bad ideas.

If I respond to "Consent is sexy!" by saying "But some of my brain doesn't think that!", noticing what those brainbits actually think, then change those brainbits to find sexy what I think of as "consent", I'm not in a very different situation from the person who's cheering blindly for consent being sexy. I just believe my premise more on the ground level, which will blind me to ways in which my preconceived notions of consent might suck.

In other words, both my intuitive models of awesomeness and my explicit models of morality might be lame in many invisible ways. What then?

"Morality is awesome", as a statement, scans like "consent is sexy" to me. Neither of these statements are true enough to be useful except as signalling or a personal goal ("I would like to find X thing I believe to be moral more awesome, so as to hack my brain to be more moral").

In some cases of assessing morality/awesomeness or consent/sexiness correlation, one would sometimes have to lie about their awesomeness/sexiness preferences, and ignore those preferences in order to be a Perfectly Moral Good Individual who does not Like Evil Things.

Quirrell scans, to me, as more awesome along the "probably knows far more Secret Eldrich Lore than you" and "stereotype of a winner" axes, until I remember that Hermione is, canonically, also both of those things. (Eldrich Lore is something one can know, so she knows it. And she's more academically successful than anyone I've ever known in real life.)

So when I look more closely, the thing my brain is valuing is a script it follows where Hermione is both obviously unskillful about standard human things (feminism, kissing boys, Science Monogamy) and obviously cares about morality, to a degree that my brain thinks counts as weakness. When I pay attention, Quirrell is unskillful about tons of things as well, but he doesn't visibly acknowledge that he is/has been unskillful. He also may or may not care about ethics to a degree, but his Questionably Moral Snazzy Bad Guy archetype doesn't let him show this.

It does come around to Quirrell being more my stereotype of a winner, in a sense. Quirrell is more high-status than Hermione - when he does things that are cruel, wrong or stupid he hides it or recontextualizes it into something snazzy - but Hermione is more honorable than Quirrell. She confronts her mistakes and failings publicly, messily and head-on and grows as a person because of that. I think that's really awesome.

I'm curious about this as well.

I scored really low on everything - in fact, I got 4th percentile Agreeableness. Not over-correcting for self-importance is hard!

ETA: I do actually have reason to believe that I'm not an extremely disagreeable person; I'm concerned that failing to acknowledge that or present those reasons made it look like I failed to consider that possibility.

Took it. I think the example of 0.5 being interpreted as 0.5% and not as 50% anchored me a bit, but don't see a way to circumvent it.

Yeah. I actually hack this somewhat; if I'm distressed, even if I've objectively had enough to eat, the ritual of snacking on something little often gives me the wherewithal to at least get myself to a less stressful location.

Thanks for making this! It's motivated me to copy and play around with your code, which I haven't actually done with code before and which turns out to be insanely low hanging fruit for learning. (Which you already knew, but I didn't.)