It is better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question.

-- John Tukey

Warning: grouchiness follows.

A draft-reader suggested to me that this question is poorly motivated: what other kinds of agents could there be, besides “could”/“would”/“should” agents?

Actually, I made the same criticism of that category, except in more detail. Was that acausal, or am I just more worthy of reviewing your drafts?

And your response in the footnote looks like little more than, "don't worry, you'll get it some day, like schoolkids and fractions". Not helpful.

Humans ... have CSA-like structure. That is, we consider “alternatives” and act out the alternative from which we “expect” the highest payoff

Excuse me, isn't this just the classical "rational agent" model that research has long since refuted? For one thing, many actions people perform are trivially impossible to interpret this way (in the sense of your diagram), given reaction times and known computational properties of the brain. That is, the brain doesn't have enough time to form enough distinct substates isomorphic to several human-like responses, then evaluate them, then compare the evaluations.

For another, the whole heuristics and biases literature repeated ad infinitum on OB/LW.

Finally, even when humans do believe they're evaluating several choices looking for the best payoff (per some multivariable utility function), what really happens is that they pick one quickly based on "gut instinct" -- meaning some heuristic, good or bad -- and then bend all conscious evaluation to favor it. In at least some laboratory settings, this is shown explicitly: the researchers can predict what the subject will do, and then the subject gives some plausible-sounding rationalization for why they did it.

(And if you say, "using heuristics is a kind of evaluation of alternatives", then you're again stretching the boundaries of the concept of a CSA wide enough to be unhelpful.)

There are indeed cases where people do truly consider the alternatives and make sure they are computing the actual consequences and the actual congruence with their actual values, but this is an art people have to genuinely work towards; it is not characteristic of general human action.

In any case, all of the above assumes a distinction I'm not convinced you've made. To count as a CSA, is it necessary that you be physically able to extract the alternatives under consideration ("Silas considered making his post polite, but assigned it low utility")? Because the technology certainly doesn't exist to do that on humans. Or is it only necessary that it be possible in principle? If the latter, you run back into the problem of the laws of physics being embedded in all parts of the universe:

I observe a pebble. Therefore, I know the laws of the universe. Therefore, I can compute arbitrary counterfactuals. Therefore, I compute a zero pebble-utility for everything the pebble "pebble-could" do, except follow the laws of physics.

Therefore, there is no "not-CSA" option.

That's a good counter-argument, but the linked post doesn't actually measure religion-happiness correlation within those other countries (which is the relevant factor), and it's very plausible that European monopolistic religions are far less effective than American freely competing religions for creating happiness.

Out of pure curiosity, what's your probability distribution of Scientology (or some other such group) being useful? Not the Xenu part, but is it possible that they've discovered some techniques to make people happier, more successful, etc.?

We already have some limited evidence that conventionally religious people are happier, and conventional religions are quite weak.

The idea is that when you are listening to music, you are handicapping yourself by taking some of the attention of the aural modality. If you are used to rely on it in your thinking, this makes you impaired.

This is related to an experiment that Feynman describes in this video:
Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 11: Ways of Thinking

In the experiment, you need to count in your mind, while doing various activities. That attention was really paid to the counting is controlled by you first calibrating and then using the counting process to predict when exactly a minute has passed. Thus, you can't cheat, you have to really go on counting.

Feynman himself says that he was unable to speak while counting, as he was "speaking" and "hearing" these numbers in his mind. Another man he asked to do the experiment had no difficulty speaking, but was unable to read: he then explained that he was counting visually.

I tried it both ways, and the difference shows in different speeds of counting in these modes which are hard to synchronize (and so just switching between them doesn't work very well).

Do you rely mostly on visual imagination?

I don't listen to music while working, because of studies showing that, e.g., programmers listening to music are equally competent at implementing a given algorithm, but much less likely to notice that the algorithm's output is always equal to its input.

This is absolutely true. I'm a little shocked at how many programmers and other 'mind-workers' (students are especially bad at this) think that putting on some music is helpful, or neutral. It's neither; even classical music or chants hurt.

(I have no studies handy for this, but I've tried music with Mnemosyne, Gbrainy, and Dual N-back, and in all 3 and all the sessions, my statistical performance was hurt to a greater or less extent.)

Thanks.

By doubt I just mean it's really really easy to get it spectacularly wrong in a systemic way in too many ways, so I'm only going to believe the result if it's robust with wide variety of tests and situations. Not that there's no value in it.

I've heard somewhere that after you exclude divorced and widowed people, the correlation between being married and happiness entirely disappears. I tried regoogling it without success, but maybe more effort will get you the original research.

"All other evidence" being? I a priori doubt all the happiness research as based on silly questionnaires and naive statistics (and most other psychological research). Is there any good metaanalysis showing anything like that?