If you prefer getting the gift instead of money, then you would prefer having the gift instead of having the money, which means that if you receive money you would use the money to buy the equivalent of the gift, not save it. It's contradictory to put the money into savings (prefer the money over the item) but "prefer getting gifts" (prefer the item over the money).

Quantum immortality keeps you alive by some definitions, but not alive and well. The branches where you are badly injured or sick but still alive are more numerous than the branches where you are perfectly fine.

Incidentally, a hypothetical 1080p version of the video encoded at the same bitrate the actual 360p version is using would look even worse

This is impossible. Assuming the content is originally 1080p, 360p is merely a type of lossy compression of the 1080p. The decompression algorithm is "upscale the 360p to 1080p" and the end result is an approximation of the original 1080p video that isn't quite correct because information ws thrown out.

At some scale, if the infrastructure is an effective monopoly and is necessary for life, then the simpler exclusion mechanisms become infeasible

How exactly do they become infeasible? The fact that someone can't live when excluded doesn't prevent you from excluding them. And since the goal takes priority over justice or fairness, you wouldn't care that they can't live.

Lemme try (tell me if I summarized it wrong)

Scott: Kidney donation actually isn’t that financially costly

• Scott's recovery period of ten days seems unusually short
• Given a reasonable income, even ten days is costly enough to not be worth it
• The fact that people don't like surgery itself is a cost, which Scott didn't consider.

Scott: Federal Government dialysis costs

• The government spends a lot on wasteful or counterproductive things. Saving the Federal government a million dollars of dialysis costs doesn't produce a million dollars of utility.

Scott: Is it fair to convert foregone money to foregone lives?

• Scott can't make this argument while keeping to EA principles.

Scott wouldn’t have given the money to charity anyway

• Giving money is a choice. Scott could give money instead of making a donation; he just won't.

Scott: On building libraries

• nicholashalden doesn't agree with EA and thinks you have more duties to your community than to others (I don't think this is an argument against Scott, it's explaining a disagrement)

Scott: On rule utilitarianism

• Scott seems to be doing deontology here even though he denies it.
• And EA's attempts to avoid deontology produce bizarre results.

These can shade into each other or be indistinguishable. Suppose you're trying to signal that you're smart. Is this #1 or #2, depending on how smart you are? If you think you're smart and you really aren't, and you're intending #2, does that still count as #2 or is it #1 instead?

You need to compare opportunity costs. It's easy to name some thing you want to do, whether learn sign language or anything else, and list the ways you could benefit if you did it. But those benefits could be rare and weak to the point where just about any other use of your time would serve you better. How often have you had problems communicating a bill in a noisy restaurant, and how much time did you lose by having to settle it without using sign language?

(Also, if those things are really problems, have you considered text messaging? If they're not big enough problems for you to fix by using text messaging now, why do you consider them big enough problems that you should learn sign language to fix them?)

If so, it's a very noncentral example. The explanation for process crimes is that they are much easier to prove than the regular crimes they lead to. But the whole reason that people use trumped-up process is that proving that someone trumped up the process is difficult.

(Responding to old post here.)

I think this is typical-minding. For a child who isn't a weird geek of the type who will grow up to post on LW, the adult knows more than the child and is a lot closer to correct than the child is about most of your points (maybe not the third one, although I don't think that quite describes what's going on). When a non-geek child disagrees with the teacher about whether the math skills are useful later in life or whether they are for the child's own good, my bet would be on the teacher. The child probably doesn't care much about either of those things and certainly didn't conclude that math is useless based on good reasoning, and the teacher is probably a lot more knowledgeable than the child on pretty much any subject. And a non-geek child who's disruptive or inattentive probably is at fault; he's supposed to be learning the math whether it's interesting or not and non-geeks really do need to be learning at this point.

If the child is an A+ student who understands the math after a week and finds it useless to go through of months of lessons teaching the same thing repeatedly, sure, the teacher is wrong. Maybe you were one of those. Most kids are not.

Is your point here that you didn’t literally switch to arguing in favor of the proposition Y, but rather switched to asking what led to Y being the case? This is a nitpick—a distinction without a difference

Here you seem to be saying that someone might not be literally arguing for something, but he might in effect be doing so anyway.

Yet your original post seems to reject that concept. Here you claim that Zack is wrong because he did not take someone's words literally, and instead did interpret those words to be in effect saying something:

“But if I take your specific word choice and imagine a whole epistemological stance that produced that word choice, I disagree with that epistemological stance because of such-and-such.”