Apparently you are putting

2. Predict how you'll feel in an upcoming situation. Affective forecasting – our ability to predict how we'll feel – has some well known flaws.
Examples: "How much will I enjoy this party?" "Will I feel better if I leave the house?" "If I don't get this job, will I still feel bad about it two weeks later?"

into your "Easily answerable questions" subset. Personally, I struggle to obtain a level of introspection sufficient to answer questions like these even after the fact.

Does anyone have any tips to help me better access my own feelings in this way? After I have left the house, how do I determine if I feel better? If I don't get the job, how do I determine if I feel bad about it? Etc.

Something being intrinsically motivating doesn't mean it's the only motivating thing.

Good thing I never said that. The question is not "Is there anything a partner can do to make you end the relationship," it's "is there anything a partner can do to affect your desire for their happiness." If your desire for their happiness really is intrinsically motivated, then the answer to (2) is "no." But no-one believes that's healthy.

If you mean logically implies, this also simply isn't true.

"Logical implication" is emphatically not the ordinary use of the word implies. And you know that.

You may want to take a breath and rethink how much of what you're saying you actually believe, and how much you're simply saying in order to win an argument.

I'm not as smart as you to understand which of my positions are so flawed that I deserve to be belittled like that for advancing them. Fool that I am, I believe them all.

Do you agree that, other things being equal, a relationship in which neither partner would abandon the other in such a situation is probably a better one overall? What sort of qualities would make a relationship have that property? Are they more or less likely in a purely transactional relationship?

I agree such a relationship is likely better (although not everyone may want such). The most important qualities for such a relationship seems to me to be depth of commitment, and a sense of duty in each partner (to take those commitments seriously). They seem to me to be much more likely in a transactional relationship, where each party commits in return for the other party doing so too, than in a non-transactional relationship, where each party commits by an independent decision, whether or not the other party also commits.

If you truly cared about your partner "as an end in herself" you still wouldn't leave. Care to bite that bullet?

I'm not sure exactly what position you're arguing with and why you think it's my position, but: if my wife (I do, as it happens, have a wife) were unfaithful or became addicted to drugs, I would not necessarily want to end our marriage on that account. I would much prefer to salvage if it possible.

I'm not saying you'd necessarily want to end your marriage on that account. I'm just saying that you might (depending on how you feel about drugs, whether it was salvageable in a manner you considered acceptable, etc). Is there really nothing she could do that would make you say "I've had enough"? Because if you truly cared about her as "an end in itself" then it wouldn't matter what she did. Indeed, even if she ended her relationship with you and took up with someone else, you'd be equally keen to make her happy. Which, frankly, I don't believe. At the very least, if it's true for you, you're an exceptional person. The transactional analysis says that you try to make her happy in exchange for her making you happy. Which is why when one person quits the relationship, the other person finds someone else to have a relationship with. Isn't it miraculous how people change what is their "end in itself" to precisely coincide with their mutual advantage like that!

Obligation, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any place in a non-transactional relationship; as everyone was acting purely for their own ends to begin with, there can't be any debts or obligations.

does definitely seem to indicate a difference in meaning, though; I don't see how "non-transactional" implies "everyone was acting purely for their own ends" any more than "transactional" does.

In a transactional relationship, I promise to do X in exchange for your promise to do Y. So if I do X, and you don't do Y, you owe me. But in a non-transactional relationship as defined above, I don't do X in exchange for Y, I just do X because it makes you happy, which is my "end in itself." You don't owe me anything in return. Maybe you'll do Y because it makes me happy, which is your "end in itself." Maybe not.

This non-transactional model of relationships implies that it's a mere coincidence that couples happen to have each others' happiness as their arational "end in itself." It's not a good model of most relationships, and while it may apply to some relationships, those are clearly unhealthy.

The difference is that babies suffer if they starve, but not if they don't have cryonics.

The badness of making an extra life comes from its suffering (+ negative externalities) [- positive externalities]

A way to communicate Exists(N) and not Exists(S) in a way that doesn't depend on the context of the current conversation might be ""Santa" exists but Santa does not." Of course, the existence of "Santa" is granted when "Santa does not exist" is understood by the other person, so this is really just a slightly less ambiguous way of saying "Santa does not exist"

Given that it has no memory, it wouldn't know. Maybe describing it as a tree was an unnecessarily particular description. Perhaps I have misinterpreted jimrandomh's intentions, but it seems to me that the utility of resetting the AGI to an earlier state and probing its responses is that it might, across different iterations, offer inconsistent responses, indicating attempts at deception. I only mean to say that it is conceivable to me that if the AGI assigned high expected utility to returning responses that a human would interpret as friendly regardless of whether or not the AGI had memory of all of its interactions with said human, (as it would in a context in which it assigned a non-negligible probability to already having been reset to an earlier state and assigned high utility to self-preservation) then it might, in each iteration, only choose responses from a set of responses that is consistent and easily deduced without memory of previous interactions with said human.

No existing entity is fat AND jolly AND lives at the north pole AND delivers presents., so no existing referent fulfils the sense.

This simply means that "an entity that is fat AND jolly AND lives at the North Pole AND delivers presents" shouldn't be chosen as a referent for "Santa". However, there is a particular neural pattern (most likely a set of similar neural patterns, actually) that corresponds to a mental image of "an entity that is fat AND jolly AND lives at the North Pole AND delivers presents"; moreover, this neural pattern (or set of neural patterns) exists across a large fraction of the human population. I'm perfectly fine with letting the word "Santa" refer to this pattern (or set of patterns). Is there a problem with that?

That's true, but I think I agree with TheOtherDave that the things that should make you start reconsidering your strategy are not bad outcomes but surprising outcomes.

In many cases, of course, bad outcomes should be surprising. But not always: sometimes you choose options you expect to lose, because the payoff is sufficiently high. Plus, of course, you should reconsider your strategy when it succeeds for reasons you did not expect: if I make a bad move in chess, and my opponent does not notice, I still need to work on not making such a move again.

I also worry that relying on regret to change your strategy is vulnerable to loss aversion and similar bugs in human reasoning. Betting and losing $100 feels much more bad than betting and winning $100 feels good, to the extent that we can compare them. If you let your regret of the outcome decide your strategy, then you end up teaching yourself to use this buggy feeling when you make decisions.

So, I consider the "go back in time" aspect of this unnecessarily confusing... the important part from my perspective is what events my timeline contains, not where I am on that timeline.

Indeed, that is my mistake. I am not always the best at choosing metaphors or expressing myself cleanly.

regretting an improperly made decision whose consequences were undesirable, vs. regretting a properly made decision whose consequences were undesirable

That is a very nice way of expressing what I meant. I will be using this from now on to explain what I mean. Thank you.

Your comment helped me to understand what I myself meant much better than before. Thank you for that.

I'm not sure that regretting correct choices is a terrible downside, depending on how you think of regret and its effects.

If regret is just "feeling bad", then you should just not feel bad for no reason. So don't regret anything. Yeah.

If regret is "feeling bad as negative reinforcement", then regretting things that are mistakes in hindsight (as opposed to correct choices that turned out bad) teaches you not to make such mistakes. Regretting all choices that led to bad outcomes hopefully will also teach this, if you correctly identify mistakes in hindsight, but this is a noisier (and slower) strategy.

If regret is "feeling bad, which makes you reconsider your strategy", then you should regret everything that leads to a bad outcome, whether or not you think you made a mistake, because that is the only kind of strategy that can lead you to identify new kinds of mistakes you might be making.