There is a third option: consuming rationalist-branded content for entertainment value and interest.
the minimum distance between a compact and a connected set is achieved by some pair of points in the sets
I don't think this is true. For a counterexample in the plane, let A be the set consisting of the point (2,0) and let B be the open unit disk centered at the origin. A is compact, B is connected, and the infimum of {distance from x to y where x is in A and y is in B} is 1. But the distance from A to any point in B is strictly greater than 1.
The manufacturer of Ezekiel bread claims that it has a glycemic index of 36. It’s fair to say that the exact details don’t matter, but that’s almost a factor of 2 off from your table. And qualitatively it puts Ezekiel bread firmly in the range of medieval breads on your table.
a density matrix whose off-diagonal elements are all zero is "decohered", and can be considered the classical limit of this. A decohered density matrix behaves exactly like a classical distribution, and follows classic Markovian dynamics;
I don't think this bullet point is accurate. Any pure state will have all its off-diagonal elements be zero in a basis where that state is one of the basis vectors, but it's not fair to say that any pure state "behaves exactly like a classical distribution". I suppose it would be more accurate to say that a state whose off-diagonal entries are all zero in some basis will look classical with respect to dynamics and measurements in that basis, but that concept is hard to explain unless the idea of observables corresponding to Hermitian operators has already been explained.
The reasoning of this post makes Ezekiel bread look like a good option — it’s a combination of whole grains and legumes based on a biblical description of what Israelites might eat while in a besieged city. It has 6 grams of protein per slice.
(The recipe in the Bible also specified it be cooked using human feces or cow dung as fuel, but I don’t think the industrially produced good today follows this part of the recipe. (It also has added wheat gluten and uses soybeans as a type of beans where the Bible doesn’t specify a variety.))
Death is regarded as tragic, and once someone has a serious condition, people invest in fighting. Up close, people try to delay death.
This oversimplifies the diversity of human values around death. For a lot of people, deaths are divided into "bad deaths / premature deaths" and "good deaths / appropriate deaths / timely deaths". Hence why few people experience significant sadness when hearing about the death of a nonagenarian, and why many elderly people adopt a relaxed attitude toward their impending demise.
It's possible that these people feel this way only because they cannot imagine living a very long time without severe disability, and/or to prioritize a limited "grief budget" towards the saddest deaths, and that properly contemplating the possibility of defeating death altogether would disabuse them of their notion that some deaths are basically fine.
But predicting how human values generalize out of distribution when technology enables new possibilities is a hard problem, so why should we assume that people's "true" values around death are that it is always tragic and worth preventing?
Which airlines make you pay when they force you to check your bag due to running out of overhead bin space? I frequently have to check my bag intended for the overhead bin due to being among the last to board, and I’ve never been charged a fee for this.
1Perhaps hobbies/careers that involve crafting a physical object have some built-in psychological advantage in generating feelings of fulfillment compared to other hobbies/careers?
Do you view moral agency as something binary, or do you think entities can exist on a continuous spectrum of how agentic they are? From this post and the preceding one, I’m not sure whether you have any category for “more agentic than a cat but less agentic than myself”.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that there were exactly three options. Rather, I meant to say there’s at least one additional option outside of the dichotomy you set up in your original short form. Though perhaps I misinterpreted what you said when I read it as dichotomous.