Did the next few posts Luke mentions would be about empathic metaethics ever get written? I don't see them anywhere.

The points made here are sound. I was particularly awakened by calling out the rule about overhead as wrong, since that has been a major factor in my charitiable giving in the past.

However, if we imagine everyone behaving according to these rules, we wind up with very few (incompetent) people running a few charities with piles of cash. If no lawyers take time off and contribute their expertise to a charity, then how do charities protect themselves from lawsuits, for example? The optimal charity solution is not for everyone to follow your guidelines, but for almost everyone to follow your guidelines, and a few people to deviate. Yet, how do we know whether we should be the ones who deviate?

Pretty sure that was Francisco d'Anconia aka Superman, in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

Looks good to me now.

It is entirely possible, and feel free to ask more questions.

I find that it's helpful to visualize the shape of the space I am operating in, which in this case is a 5-dimensional space (the dimensions are Plot, Acting, Humor, Suspense, and Overall Rating). However, many people find it difficult to visualize more than 3 dimensions, so I will describe only the interaction of Humor and Suspense on Overall Rating."

In this case, let Humor (H) be the east/west direction, Suspense (S) be the north south direction, and Overall Rating (R) be the altitude. We can now visualize a landscape that corresponds to these variables. Here are some possible landscapes and what we can infer from them:

*Flat, with no slope or features (The audience doesn't care about either H or S)

*Sloped up as we go northeast (The audience likes humor and suspense together)

*Saddle shaped with the high points to the northwest and southeast (The audience likes H or S independently, but not together)

*Mountainous (The audience has complex tastes).

You would then want to find the equation that best fit this terrain you have. Usually, the best fit is linear (which you would see as a sloped terrain). However, you can find better equations when it isn't. You do have to be careful not to over-fit: a good rule of thumb is that if it takes more information to approximate your data than is contained in the data itself, you're doing something wrong.

Bolding or italicizing each special term the first time it appears in the text and writing it in regular typeface afterwards would probably read better, while still drawing attention to the relevant special concept words. People can keep picking out the word better without the typeface once they've been primed by the first mention to assume the word denotes an important concept.

Empirically determine what formula most closely matches overall impressions in the real world, avoiding over-fitting by penalizing the formulas for complexity. The "sum the scores" would simply be P+A+H+S. A weighted sum would be k1P+k2A+k3H+k4S. Perhaps humor and suspense are found to correlate positively with rating when considered individually, but interfere negatively with each other. So we might go with k1P+k2A+k3H+k4S-k5(H*S). Each additional bit of complexity in the formula must double the predictive power of your formula (halve your error).

We would start with the data and possible formulas (probably weighted by complexity). We would then plug in the data for each formula, seeing how well each one predicts it. The formula which most efficiently predicts movie ratings based on these dimensions is the one we would use.

"How good a movie is" is not a question for which there is a fact of the matter, because expanding out the definition of the word "good" brings in all the complexity of human preference. That's not unambiguous until you specify a particular human and a particular priming state (or particular weighted combination thereof). Things like costumes and suspense correlate with movies being good, for most humans in most states, but that's a mere empirical fact, not part of the definition of goodness.

What is with the persistent bolding of your pet words?