Don't worry about why you like a terminal value. Just get it.

So, I should acquire additional terminal values so I can have higher absolute utility?

That's either wisdom or absurdity. It goes against my current model of rationality. But it seems to lead to winning, at least from the starting condition of having no values at all and thus not even being able to win or lose.

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that asking a question whose answer mystifies me leads to other questions that also mystify me. Maybe identifying a set of equivalent mysterious problems would be an advance.

What I'm really asking is, if some statement turns out to be undecidable for all of our Tarskian truth translation maps to models, does that make that conjecture meaningless, or is undecidable somehow distinct from unverifiable. What is the difference between believing "that conjecture is unverifiable" and believing "that conjecture is undecidable."? Are the expectations/restrictions on experience that those two believes offer identical? If so does that mean that the difference between those two believes is a syntactic issue?

See Making Beliefs Pay Rent :

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/

It's not that it's too many words for a discussion post. There is no particular word limit. It's too many words, and too overwrought, for what it's saying, which is simply the often-made point that overreaction to child abuse scares can itself be damaging; along with staring hard enough at something in plain sight that it vanishes, as in the adjacent thread on the meaning of life.

How did you arrive at LessWrong, and why did you choose to write this as your first posting here?

Yes, absolutely would. The only thing i think i would loose in doing so is showing that there is much more to our distaste of pedophiles than the obvious harms they cause.

I can't quote a study but I would bet sure stigmatizing racism directly led to a reduction in racist remarks and actions. People are impressionable and are strongly influenced by the society around them.

Does stigmatizing harmful social acts reliably lead to a reduction in their incidence or in the harm they cause?

The rule : "Do not have sex with children", is not made into a bad rule by the possibility of a child having sex with an adult and not being traumatized, in the same way that the rule : "do not lash people with a whip" is invalidated by the existence of masochistic people.

There were times when a nobleman forcefully taking a peasant woman was not stigmatized and Indeed, if the noble offered, she might even "consent", due to her poor position in life, and the chance at making it better. Yet I do not think this is a state of affairs we would prefer to exist today. There were times when a father was the one person who decided who his child would have sex with, and when, and this was seen as the norm, as right and proper, and yet I'm sure it lead to many an unhappy marriage.

The pedophilia problem is not just one-pronged. The persecution of pedophilia is not the main and only cause of it being bad. Sexual relations between people with drastic power imbalances are rife with opportunities for abuse or coercion. This is not something we want to proliferate, even if there is a chance it can go just fine. We stigmatize pedophilia for the same reason we think it's wrong for bosses to have sex with their employees or doctors to do their patients.

Would you generalize your analysis of pedophilia to non-consensual sex? If not, why not?

Too many words.

And its author is no longer a member and has posted nothing else to LessWrong.

I think this is a troll.

Sometimes the memes convince us to adopt them by being beneficial

What does this mean, when the criteria by which we judge what is "beneficial" can also be considered a product of meme/gene co-evolution?