I would also comment that, if the environment was so chaotic that roughly everything important to life could not be modeled—if general-purpose modeling ability was basically useless—then life would not have evolved that ability, and "intelligent life" probably wouldn't exist.

You have a point, although I don't think having a genuine feeling of despair is a hugely important variable.  As the story goes:

[Method actor Dustin] Hoffman had a grueling scene coming up, where his character hadn’t slept in three days, and Hoffman told [Sir Laurence] Olivier that to prepare for the scene, he too hadn’t slept for 72 hours.

“My dear boy,” replied Olivier, “why don’t you try acting?”

But more generally, even if you want to teach some kind of set of skills and resilience for dealing with things like "sitting still for hours a day", "doing hours of boring homework-like stuff", "obeying lots of orders from authority figures", etc., you can deliberately learn and practice each of them, and ramp up the difficulty more quickly, and probably reach a higher level in 8 months than most people reach in 12 years.  U.S. Army boot camp is apparently 10 weeks, for example.

Is this a case for or against formal education? Either way, it is wise.

If one does accept the premise that feigning enthusiasm is a useful skill, that's still not a good justification of formal education as it exists: it certainly doesn't take 12 years of grade school to teach that skill.

Epistemic status: this is an attempt to steelman the case for the death penalty

...

I do not believe in vengeance or justice. I do however believe in fixing problems. And it's clear the only way to fix this problem is to put such people in positions where they cannot do anyone any harm.

Some people have complained that, when their opponents "steelman" their position, in practice it can mean they steelman a particular argument that is not their main argument.  This struck me as a remarkably explicit and self-aware example of that.

I don't know what the solution is.  Maybe tell people not to use "steelmanning" in such cases, maybe tell people to stop expecting "steelmanning" to necessarily mean it won't miss a central argument.  Maybe decide that you should, e.g., say "I'm steelmanning this particular argument", because if you say "I'm steelmanning the case for this conclusion" then that means you're supposed to capture all important arguments for that conclusion.

I personally recommend that all parents donate to the Localdeity Enrichment Fund, an important yet frequently overlooked cause area.

Whoever wrote that article is confused, since in the table in the section labeled "Analogy vs Simile: The Differences" they have several entries the wrong way around (compared to the two paragraphs preceding it).

It seems to me that you could use the same comparison for either an analogy or a simile.  An analogy would usually be in the present tense, "X is like Y", and followed by more explanation of the concept the analogy is meant to illustrate.  A simile would more frequently be in the past tense as part of a narrative, and more frequently use other verbs than "is"—"X moved like a Y"—and probably wouldn't extend beyond the current sentence, usually not even beyond that phrase.  I think a bare statement of "X is like Y" might go either way.

The term "privilege" is bad here; prefer "advantage".  "Privilege"—privi-lege, private law—implies that there's an authority deciding to grant it to some people and not others, which would be unjust (since most things that affect intelligence, such as genetics and childhood nutrition, happen long before a person does anything to "deserve" it more than others), which in turn encourages people to get angry and suspicious, and encourages the advantaged to feel embarrassed or even guilty by association when they've done nothing wrong.  Calling it "privilege" is only useful if you want to encourage that kind of conflict.

That said, there are plenty of people who downplay the importance of intelligence, and/or exaggerate the degree to which it can be improved through hard work, educational interventions, school funding, etc.  However, those people are much more likely to be social justice activists than rationalists.  The #3 top voted post in the 2023 Less Wrong review was about how to use genetic technology to improve intelligence (and other qualities) in the general population.  It's interesting to note that the 2023 post is trying to fix the problem of people not being as smart as they would like to be, while this post's recommendations do not include trying to fix that problem.

Other reasons:

Biases towards claiming agreement with one’s own beliefs

If the institution is widely trusted, respected, high status, etc., as well as powerful, then if Alice convinces you that the institution supports her beliefs, then you might be inclined to give more credence to Alice's beliefs.  That would serve Alice's political agenda.

Weaker biases towards claiming disagreement with one’s own beliefs

If the institution is widely hated—for example al-Qaeda, the CIA, the KGB—or considered low status, crazy, and so on, then if Alice convinces you that the institution opposes her beliefs, that might make you more sympathetic to her, make you distrust arguments against her beliefs, and/or defuse preexisting arguments that support for Alice's position comes mostly from these evil/crazy institutions.

In Judaism, you're not supposed to marry a non-Jew unless they convert to Judaism (a lengthy process from what I've heard), so I suspect the families on both sides of the deal are usually equally religious.

In any case, googling for "grief and genetic closeness study" yields this:

A Twin Loss Survey was completed by MZ and same-sex DZ twins following loss of a cotwin and nontwin relatives. Twin survivors (N = 612; MZ = 506; DZ, n = 106) included twins whose age at loss was 15 years or older. Participation age was M = 47.66 years (SD = 15.31). Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory generated two hypotheses: (1) MZ twins will recall greater grief intensity at loss than DZ twins; (2) loss of a twin will receive greater grief intensity ratings than loss of nontwin relatives. [...] Part I: Hypotheses regarding grief intensity were supported.

And this, where the highlights are:

• Surviving MZ twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than surviving DZ twins.
• Female twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than male twins.
• Twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than for other deceased relatives.
• Survivors' grief intensity varies with genetic relatedness to the deceased.

Everything you say seems straightforwardly correct or a logical guess.  I'd add:

• I expect identical twin sisters do feel closer to their nieces than non-identical sisters feel to their nieces.  There would probably be a higher degree of discovering that this person just happens to have traits like your own.
• Even from a fully logical "optimize my inclusive genetic fitness" perspective, there is value, all else being equal, in most parent-child relationships that isn't in most aunt-niece relationships.  Because you raised this child, she probably trusts you, you know her strengths and weaknesses and where she needs help, etc.; you have a comparative advantage at helping your daughter vs helping your niece.  (I speak of good parental relationships; of course, there are some where the parent has a comparative disadvantage.  Also, if you know your child is a no-good criminal or something, and you know nothing about your identical sister's child, then the latter may be a better bet for investing your resources; hence my saying "all else being equal".)