I'm sympathetic to the model - in many cases it seems that there is a generalizable trait of "toughness" (a few decades ago they called it "grit" or "determination", now it rhymes with "agentic"). It's tempting to simplify things to that level.

But I'm also skeptical of my own desire to believe that, and I don't actually think it's true often enough to count on it. When I press myself on edge cases or most specific data->prediction proposals, it loses a lot of appeal.

There are clearly some people who fare better than others across many domains. Exactly which traits cause this, and how ingrained and unchanging those traits are, remains quite difficult to pin down. Personally, I think it's 50% luck, 50% genes, 50% early environment, and 50% current environment. Yes, success is overdetermined :)

"I'd rather be sad than wrong."

What's helped me is to realize that "sad" and "wrong" are different dimensions, and don't need to be correlated at all.

I grew up in a less-community-intensive church than LDS, and my intellectual beliefs have been purely atheist since my mid-teens. My professed beliefs among some groups of family and community is more agnostic, and I'm very comfortable with others believing things that seem unlikely to me, as long as we can still cooperate in having fun and improving the world (which means I'm not part of groups that demand explicit declarations I don't believe).

Happiness for most humans does require community and love from other humans. It may or may not require (it doesn't for me, nor for a lot of people I know, but it could for some) having a strong belief in supernatural meaning. Helping to improve the lived experience of existing and near-future-probable-humans is meaningful and wonderful. Reality is enough.

But don't sleep on community and personal relationships. These often require compromise and even some unresolved disagreement on things that seem important. From what I can tell, LDS is among the more effective community-building religions, and does seem somewhat accepting of socially-compatible unbelievers.

do you think that you've identified a set of characteristics that, throughout history, will never lead to the wrong conclusion?

Not at all.  There is no such set of characteristics.  Wrong conclusions are inevitable and commonplace.  Godel's Theorems apply to all formalisms.

In the current world, the harm of unsanctioned killing being commonly accepted (and cheered) is generally a LOT higher than the harm of statistically-evil people continuing to live.   So, yes, a heuristic argument: this is a loss of civilization and order, even if it might have been justifiable on some dimensions.

"is it ok to kill people (or call for the killing or support the killing) who have not been convicted by any court and the killing does not stop any immediate physical threat to you?"

innocence is not required, it is presumed by our civilization. At question is NOT whether the victim was a bad person who we're perhaps better off without. At question is whether anyone but a court can decide what to do about it.

It's disturbing how socially acceptable it is to call for mob action in direct contravention of rule of law.

Imagine that Alice is able to sit in an ice bath for 6 minutes and Bob is only able to sit in the ice bath for 2 minutes. Is Alice tougher than Bob? Not necessarily. Maybe Alice takes lots of ice baths and the level of discomfort is only like a 4/10 for here whereas for Bob it's like an 8/10. I think when talking about toughness you want to avoid comparing apples to oranges.

I strongly suspect "toughness" is a lot like "pain tolerance" - there is no known way to measure how much of an outcome is mental tenacity and how much is simply noticing the difficulty less intently.  In fact, they may actually be the same thing.

For many cases, you don't actually care which it is.  If you want someone to sit in an ice bath (or similar cold endurance), choose Alice.  It doesn't matter if she's super-tough or just less sensitive to cold.   If you want her to be willing to push through other types of adversity (say, pursuing an important but very uncertain goal), it's not obvious that the ice bath test gives you enough information - maybe Bob is way better at that kind of difficulty (either because he's tough to that, or because he's just more optimistic).   

You want to avoid comparing apples to oranges, and the best way to do that is not to conflate different kinds of success-under-adversity.   

A lot depends on why you want to stay, and whether you are likely to have interesting/productive further discussions. I often just let them off the hook with a "I guess I am a bit closed on this particular topic - let's discuss something else".

In theory "agree to disagree" should be impossible among rational entities with compatible priors, but in practice humans often meet neither of those criteria. That's OK, when you reach the point of no further updates in either direction, you move on.

I don't agree (or I misunderstand something about the scenario).

With a perfect copy of all identity-relevant state, BOTH R1 and R2 retain their sense of self - they're identical at the point of copy. They EACH continue to develop their selves independently. They diverge from each other and from their shared past, but there's no distinction or privilege of the "original".

Unless the copy process is flawed, but that's not part of this thought experiment. To a great extent, this is a definition question: if there is an internally-detectable difference (a way to tell which is the original), that means the copy was imperfect.

You're speculating on a topic on which we have no way to collect evidence. We can't measure qualia or experience - we have only self-reported information about identity, and none of it includes copying.

Now we have two Rogers—R1 and R2. And it seems obvious that they do not share one and the same consciousness: they are two different consciousnesses of identical personalities.

(If this isn’t obvious to you, I’d genuinely like to hear how two brains, isolated from each other, could share a single consciousness. Obviously, I’m a physicalist.)

It's unclear whether you think there is an instantaneous experience, or if all experience is over time (reminder: we have no measurements that would provide evidence here).   It seems obvious to me that R1 and R2 at that point in time share all memories and experiences-in-progress up to and including the point of copy.   And for some number of milliseconds afterward, there won't be time for new inputs or environmental changes to have any impact, so they remain identical.

Of course, they begin to diverge as the different environments come into play.  However, they diverge about as much from each other as each does from their shared past.  You're not the same person you were 10 minutes ago, and they're not the same person as each other.

I often go the other way when discussing this topic - humans are as natural as anything else. Parking lots are natural things, arranged by natural animals (humans). Butylated Hydroxytoluene is absolutely natural - there's no way to make the underlying atoms without nature, and the arrangement of them follows every natural law.

Everything real is natural - nature is simply "what is".

Of course, I like this because I recognize it's a discussion about words, with arbitrary meanings that each of us gets to use however we want, and I enjoy pointing that out more than I enjoy trying to get people to conform to my preferred definitions.