I have heard a number of people saying that they don't want to give money to charity because they don't trust the charities spend the money well.
I'd feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
May I ask what kind of experiences you base this on?
Evidently you think your niece is worth more than half a sandwich.
I do personally feel that there is some emotional core to love, so I'm sympathetic to the "it's a specific emotion" definition.
The definition of love as an emotion seems wrong to me, because emotions are short-lived. Intuitively, we think of statements like "I love my son" as being true all the time. But I do not experience an emotion of "love" towards him all the time. When I am away from him, hours can pass where I do not think of him at all, and when I am with him I sometimes feel an emotion of annoyance rather than "love".
So this kind of definition does not seem to match how people use the concept.
I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are 'working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them' are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it's reasonable to conceptualize this as 'they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries'.
May I ask you two questions?
Yes. Thanks. Good explanation.
which sucks incredibly and is bad.
Your wording here makes me curious: Are you saying the same thing twice here, or are you saying two different things? Does the phrase "X sucks" mean the same thing to you as "X is bad", or is there a distinction?
Realizing that your preferences can and do develop obviously opens the Pandora's box of actions which do change preferences.[1] The ability to do that breaks orthogonality.
Could you please elaborate on how this "breaks orthogonality"? It is unclear to me what you think the ramifications of this are.
And sometimes communities do in fact have explicit “preferences” that will cost people status just by having different ones. It might even be costly to find out what those diffuse preferences are, and especially daunting for people new to a community.
Could you please give some examples of this? It is unclear to me what kind of things you are talking about here.
As far as I can tell, you do not really argue why you think platitudes contain valuable wisdom. You only have one example, and that one is super-vague.
For me this post would be much better if you added several examples that show in more detail why the platitude is valuable.