My name is Brent, and I'm probably insane.
I can perform various experimental tests to verify that I do not perform primate pack-bonding rituals correctly, which is about half of what we mean by "insane". This concerns me simply from a utilitarian perspective (separation from pack makes ego-depletion problems harder; it makes resources harder to come by; and it simply sucks to experience "from the inside"), but these are not the things that concern me most.
The thing that concerns me most is this:
What if the very tools that I use to make decisions are flawed?
I stumbled upon Bayesian techniques as a young child; I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to perform a lot of self-guided artificial intelligence "research" in Junior High and High School, due to growing up in a time and place when computers were utterly mysterious, so no one could really tell me what I was "supposed" to be doing with them - so I started making simple video games, had no opponents to play them against due to the aforementioned failures to correctly perform pack-bonding rituals, decided to create my own, became dissatisfied with the quality of my opponents, and suddenly found myself chewing on Hopfstaedter and Wiener and Minsky.
I'm filling in that bit of detail to explain that I have been attempting to operate as a rational intelligence for quite some time, so I believe that I've become very familiar with the kinds of "bugs" that I will tend to exhibit.
I've spent a very long time attempting to correct for my cognitive biases, edit out tendencies to seek comfortable-but-misleading inputs, and otherwise "force" myself to be rational, and often, the result is that my "will" will crack under the strain. My entire utility-table will suddenly flip on its head, and attempt to maximize my own self-destruction rather than allow me to continue to torture it with endlessly recursive, unsolvable problems that all tend to boil down to "you do not have sufficient social power, and humans are savage and cruel no matter how much you care about them."
Most of my energy is spent attempting to maintain positive, rational, long-term goals in the face of some kind of regedit-hack of my utility table itself, coming from somewhere in my subconscious that I can't seem to gain write-access to.
Clearly, the transhumanist solution would be to identify the underlying physical storage where the bug is occurring, and replace it with a less-malfunctioning piece of hardware.
Hopefully someday someone with more self-control, financial resources, and social resources than I will invent a method to do that, and I can get enough of a partial personectomy to create something viable with the remaining subroutines.
In the meantime, what is someone who wishes to be rational supposed to do, when the underlying hardware simply won't cooperate?
I will use this very post to illustrate!
You just asked, "give three concrete examples from your life."
My first instinct is that this is a challenge, an attempt to set me up as unreliable and "whiny" in front of the pack.
According to this instinct, if I fail to respond to you, you will have "called me out" - and by failing to respond, I will lose face.
Also according to this instinct, if I DO respond to you, no matter how I do so, you will manage to turn it around in such a way that I will appear to be lying or deliberately miscommunicating my experience for the sake of sympathy - and will again lose face.
My natural response to this instinct is to attempt to describe these examples in the most self-deprecatory way possible, but I know that any attempt to do so will cause me to seem contemptuously weak - and I will again lose face.
As I continue to process this dilemma, I attempt to work out the actual probabilities that any given decision I make will lead to a given outcome. However, as I do so, something internally pegs my "lose face" utility to +ERR.OVERFLOW, and the error cascades all the way through my multiplications and completely poisons the [utility*probability] sort.
Eventually, I just say "fuck it" and come clean to you that I'm having trouble answering your question due to an error. My instinct tells me that, in so doing, you will turn this around on me and I will again lose face. I start processing how I can explain to you that I'm having trouble answering your question, building different strategies for explanation and weighing their probable utility payoffs, but then the bug pops up again (or another, similar one) and pegs one or two of the outcome utilities to +ERR.OVERFLOW or -ERR.OVERFLOW (or sometimes even ERR.DIV0), and the whole [utility*probability] sort gets poisoned again.
Am I making any sense?
I guess what I'm trying to say is, your question scares me, and I'm not sure if it's a legitimate query for information or an attempt to "trip me up" socially, and THAT RIGHT THERE is the problem itself.
So here's to honesty, or something.
This response falsifies the hypothesis that you don't perform primate pack-bonding rituals, at least the way I interpreted it. These thoughts are standard human response, plus a habit for going meta.
The rest is just you going too meta, and not being pragmatic enough (use decision theory, specifically, compute value of information and don't assume you have infinite computing power).
Also, I know the feel that you are feeling, or at least I think I do. I sympathize.
As for the correct response to this specific worry, here's the procedure I'd want to use:
Case A: it's a query, shminix is playing at the zeroth level. Best idea: answer the question straight.
Case B: It's a fork, shminux is an adversary playing on higher levels, and LW is that kind of place (notice burdensome details). Now we have to consider what the utility loss of getting forked is, how likely it is you can get out of the fork, and how much computation that will take, and of course what the probability of this even being the situation.
Overall, I'd rate it very unlikely or alternatively very expensive to get out of such a fork. Let him take your knight (answer it straight), and if you're going to worry at all, do it before you get forked, not after. It's a loss, but a small one when compared to the stress and time of trying to escape.
If the intuitive feel for the disutility of losing face is too high (as you claim it is), you need to expose yourself to more lost face to learn intuitively that it's not so bad. Flooding works against aversions. Go make a name for youself on reddit, and then say a lot of stuid stuff, get downvoted to hell, and see if anything ever comes of it (nothing will).