Legolan

I have taken the survey.

I think this is an excellent summary. Having read John L. Mackie's free will argument and Plantinga's transworld depravity free will defense, I think that a theodicy based on free will won't be successful. Trying to define free will such that God can't ensure using his foreknowledge that everyone will act in a morally good way leads to some very odd definitions of free will that don't seem valuable at all, I think.

You're right about the cost per averted headache, but we aren't trying to minimize the cost per averted headache; otherwise we wouldn't use any drug. We're trying to maximize utility. Unless avoiding several hours of a migraine is worth less to you than $5 (which a basic calculation using minimum wage would indicate that it is not, even excluding the unpleasantness of migraines -- and as someone who gets migraines occasionally, I'd gladly pay a great deal more than $5 to avoid them), you should get Drug A.

I largely agree with this answer. My view is that reductionist materialism implies that names are just a convenient way of discussing similar things, but there isn't something that inherently makes what we label a "car"; it's just an object made up of atoms that pattern matches what we term a "car." I suppose that likely makes me lean toward nominalism, but I find the overall debate generally confused.

I've taken several philosophy courses, and I'm always astonished by the absence of agreement or justification that either side can posit. I think the biggest problem is that many philosophers make some assumption without sufficient justification and then create enormously complex systems based on those assumptions. But since they don't argue for strenuous justification for the underlying premises (e.g. Platonic idealism), then ridiculous amounts of time ends up being wasted learning about all the systems, rather than figuring out how to test them for truth (or even avoiding analytical meaninglessness).

Took the survey. It was quite interesting! I'll be curious to see what the results look like . . . .

You could make it an explicit "either . . . or." I.e. "I think that people who are not made happier by having things either have the wrong things or have them incorrectly."

I agree. For those familiar with RationalWiki, I actually thought that it provided a nice contrasting example, honestly. Eliezer's definition for rationality is (regrettably, in my opinion) rare in a general sense (insofar as I encounter people using the term), and I think the example is worthwhile for illustrative purposes.

But how do you know if someone wanted to upvote your post for cleverness, but didn't want to express the message that they were mugged successfully? Upvoting creates conflicting messages for that specific comment.