Do you think that morality or rationality recommends placing no intrinsic weight or relevance on either a) backwards-looking considerations (e.g. having made a promise) as opposed to future consequences, or b) essentially indexical considerations (e.g. that I would be doing something wrong)?

Its painfulness.

After some medical procedure, there have been some patients for whom pain is not painful. When asked whether their pain is still there, they will report that the sensation of pain is still there just as it was before, but that they simply don't mind it anymore.

That feature of pain that their pain now lacks is what I am calling its painfulness and that is what is bad about pain.

In the community of sports statistical analysis, the most-accepted hypothesis is that coaches are reluctant to try new strategies for rational reasons. If the new strategy succeeds, they get a bit of utility, but if the new strategy fails, they get fired -- and so lose a lot more utility.

Being a maverick has a negative expectation for the coach, even though it might have a positive expectation for the team.

This hypothesis makes a lot more sense to me than assuming that coaches are unaware of the result.

Great post.

I agree that you identify a very good reason to take care in the use of gender-specific pronouns or anything else that is likely to create in-group, out-group effects.

I also think there probably was a fair amount of attitude polarization on the question of how acceptable it was to make the statement in question.

Isn't it actually their methods you disapprove of?

I guess in addition to defining "respect" I should have defined "goal". In attempting to fully describe a goal, I'd usually be inclined to include caveats about what methods wouldn't be okay for me to use to achieve that goal. For instance, it's my goal to watch the entirety of Stargate SG-1, but not if I have to steal the DVDs from WalMart to do it.

Why is this less morally objectionable than the manipulative NLP of a pickup artist? "I did work today and seek praise" is an extraordinarily manipulative (and clever) statement.

I'm... sorry you feel that way? I am genuinely going for "clear and honest", not "manipulative and clever".

After all, if it never worked, surely you would self-update to a better technique.

If saying "I did work today and request praise" (an example of something I actually said today) doesn't promptly yield praise, I (actually did) follow up with "You are not fulfilling my request. You should fix that." If that hadn't "worked", I probably would have gone and talked to somebody else, and refrained from seeking praise from that person in the future, on the assumption that they had no interest in praising me for doing work. I wouldn't have moved to a less clear and honest strategy to get the uncooperative individual to give me what I wanted.

Upvoted because I appreciate Alicorn's efforts and would like to hear additional rational presentations of views in the same neighborhood as her's.

I would bet I also upvoted some of the comments Alicorn is referring to as comments that perpetuate the problem.

The major difference is that it's more socially acceptable. Yes, I realize this is a non-answer. The answer you probably want is "they're getting paid for it". There's no expectation of social relationship between peers.

Furthermore, as I said elsewhere, wanton disregard for the autonomy of such people is still frowned upon in the extreme cases. Noone likes the boss who treats employees like cogs, or the demanding customer who pushes around customer service staff because they know they can.

we should recognize these practices as abusive maltreatment of children.

I think one obstacle to having this conversation is that, as a society, we think that intervention is called for when a child is being abused. People are modus-tollensing away your declarations of abuse because they don't think the things you mention warrant bringing in Child Protective Services: if it's abuse, then it warrants calling CPS. It doesn't warrant calling CPS, therefore it is not abuse.

By your definitions, I think it would be next to impossible to find someone who was never once abused as a child. That means we have no information about any given sort of abuse relative to an absence of abuse altogether. We can only compare the results of abuse A with abuse B, or more of A with less of A, or A with both A and B, or whatever. There's no control group. That casts a shadow of a doubt over many of your claims.

I'm curious about how far your absolute intolerance of hitting kids goes. I was hit exactly once by each parent as I grew up. I don't remember the exact circumstances under which my mother struck me, but I know why my father did it: I was attacking my little sister over some childish upset. There was no way to get me off of her without causing me some pain; he smacked me and I was startled enough to stop. Would you consider that an act of abuse? Wouldn't letting me attack my sister be an act of abuse towards her?

I'm sorry you don't understand where I'm coming from. I don't have any bright ideas about how to make it less ambiguous.

the focus on sex, whereas I would desire a relationship.

Is there some reason you are put off when others don't share your desires? If the desire in question was something like "I desire to behave ethically" that would be okay, but there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with wanting sex but no relationship. There are ethical ways to pursue that desire.

the connotation of 'attractive' which in my mind usually means physical attractiveness, whereas my preferences are dominated by other features of women.

It's certainly nice that your attraction isn't dominated solely by physical features, but that isn't actually what "attractive" means on a reliable enough basis that I thought it was worth bringing up. Even if "conventionally physically attractive" was what Roko meant, there doesn't seem to be anything obviously wrong with that in light of the focus on sex over a relationship. One person can want to have no-strings-attached sex with multiple conventionally physically attractive women and I can want to settle down in a long-term relationship with a bespectacled dark-haired person with an IQ over 120 and there is no reason to think that these desires can't both be okay simultaneously.

the modifier 'extremely' which seems to imply a large difference in utility placed on sex with extremely attractive women vs. very attractive or moderately attractive women

I don't see this as any more problematic than the mention of attractiveness in the first place. If it's okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 120, presumably it'd be okay for me to want a spouse with an IQ over 140, it'd just make a person satisfying my criteria trickier to find; the same would be true if Roko or anyone else wants to have sex with women several standard deviations above the physical attractiveness mean.

The use of the word 'get' by itself did not strike me as particularly out of place any more than talk of 'getting a girlfriend/boyfriend'.

Not more than, but "getting a [girl/boy]friend" isn't unloaded language either... (I have been known to use the word "obtain" with respect to a hypothetical future spouse myself, but that's mostly because "marry" would sound redundant.)

I find many "creative" pursuits, such as writing and computer programming, to be both extremely difficult and rather exhausting. I'm often good at them, but they're so much harder than anything that's merely a matter of mastering and executing specific algorithms. In other words, I can't brute force my way through writing a story the way I can brute force my way through a video game, by trying over and over again until I finally get it right. If I get stuck, I'm really, really stuck, and there's no FAQ I can go read which will tell me what my next sentence or line of code ought to be. (Which is why I mentioned GameFAQs.com as one of the things I like about video games.)

I don't know much about drawing, though. I never had much interest in it before...