"It's hard to see on an emotional level why a genie might be a good thing to have, if you haven't acknowledged any wishes that need granting."

Why not? Personal wishes are the simplest ones. Minimal needs fulfilment plus really high class of security may be the first thing. It leaves a lot of time to have your wishes to come to you naturally. May be effortlessly, even. The wishes of your friends come with all the limitations to yours (and then - their) security. Now, we got some kind of working recursion.

"I suppose there could be some section of the procedure where you've got to do a septillion operations..."

Just so - and even far worse, than that. To get a "working" set of wishes, I'd like to emulate some option's results really well.

""Boy, if I had human intelligence I sure could get a lot more bananas.""

Right - and even worse... again. There is nothing wrong with the bananas, I'll order on the first iteration! The problem startes with a couple of slaves, that any half way decent utopist proposed for the "humblest farmer". It gets all the way downhill, afterwards.

Well. I do know, that I'll ask some virtual [reality] words from supercomputer. And I do know, what's the ethics of evolution (only "evil" words would develop some life and some minds of it... and it looks like a good idea to have the evolution "turned on" for that very purpose). But at the point where every person we do count as "real person" would have his own "virtual" world full of "virtual" persons - it's there it gets really complicated and weird. Same with the "really strong AI" and advanced robots. We get to the same "couple of slaves" on the entirely new level, that's what we do.

Hm...

Is there some misterious, but great difference between getting -1000000$ and -100000000 in USA?

If there isn't such a thing, the wrong choices may have been made, but not by the Casey Serin. In fact, if we are speaking jury (12 honest tax payers), it may be rather smart idea to spend few millions USD on their, honest tax payers of his state, favorite charities at this point. To spend a few thousands on lawers and psichologists too.

PS. The politicians do spend a lot of money their countries don't actually own to delay the current Recession and make the next Great Depression out of it. And I do believe, they have rather good chances to succed at getting this Depression and getting away with it too.

"But there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property. Why do people seem to want their policy debates to be one-sided?"

We do like to vote, you know. We do like to see other people vote. We do expect to see some kind of propagand, some kind of pitch to cast our votes in some certain way. We tend to feel fooled, than we don't see that, what we do expect to see in the right place. No, it isn't reserved exclusively for the politic issues.

"I don't think that when someone makes a stupid choice and dies, this is a cause for celebration. I count it as a tragedy."

These tragedies are the way of evolution, the greatest cost of evolution, probably. And - yes, any sentient being would like to take the progress of it's spices in it's hands, paws, tentacles, whatever. And - no, we aren't really "there". We are very, very close. But not there, yet.

1. Politics, social intercourse, public relationships were the major factors in our mind's evolution. Look up "HarryPotterandtheMethodsofRationality".

2. The concept bundling in politics (sky color, taxes, etc). You see, the political views "evolved" more, than were invented, thought over, whatever. Sometimes mammals seem to evolve something that seems more usefull to insects, fishes, or birds. And sometimes it really is (more usefull). And nowdays we may try to test it experimentally (genetic engenearing). But before making actual experiments, it isn't all that bright to jump to conclusions. And even after we'll prove the point, it isn't wise to criticize evolution in just the same way as any other disigner job.

The way our cultures with their law systems work isn't all that logical - from our viewpoint. They have all kind of odd evolutionary artifacts from the past - and from all the past attempts to "evolve future". But these evolved sets of roules (quiddich with Snitch) - actually do work. And we don't have good enoug models (as yet) to test more logical sets of roules without actual risk of bludshed. Currently, western (greece-roman) culture may dye our (low birthrate) just "for" its "test run" of granting rights to woman and childreen.

1. We aren't individually sentient beings, sorry. Our subcultures are sentient. We may support our part of some subculture's immage for years and even to try to improove it a bit... and that's it. And our collective minds (repeat) evolved politically...