Yeah I see your point. I think I personally have a stronger aversion to illegal requests from employers as a matter of a principle, even if the employee does that sort of thing anyway. But I can see how other people might view that differently.

That said, in this particular case, it doesn't seem like Chloe would otherwise be illegally buying weed?

You make a fair point about the risk of admitting to such activities in a public setting. Although, if the statement is not true, there would be no risk in denying it, right? I'm hesitant to assume something is true in the absence of a denial, but I wanted to at least give Nonlinear an opportunity to deny it.

This will vary between readers, but I personally find this more cruxy than perhaps you do. In my opinion: asking an employee to commit illegal acts, even with minimal social pressure, especially in a foreign country, especially if it happened multiple times, is a very serious concern. I can imagine extreme instances where it could be justified, but it doesn't seem like that applies to this situation.

I am also hoping that the accuracy of the weed allegation is much less ambiguous than some of the harder-to-pin down abuse claims (even if those might be worse in sum total if they were all true).

Thank you for taking the time to write up all of this evidence, and I can only imagine how time-consuming and challenging this must have been.

Apologies if I missed this, but I didn't see a response to Chloe's statement here that one of her tasks was to buy weed for Kat in countries where weed is illegal. This statement wasn't in Ben's original post, so I can see how you might have missed it in your response. But I would appreciate clarification on whether it is true that one of Chloe's tasks was to buy weed in countries where weed is illegal.

I really like this post. I totally agree that if x-risk mitigation gets credit for long-term effects, other areas should as well, and that global health & development likely has significantly positive long-term effects. In addition to the compounding total utility from compounding population growth, those people could also work on x-risk! Or they could work on GH&D, enabling even more people to work on x-risk or GH&D (or any other cause), and so on. 

One light critique: I didn't find the theoretical infinity-related arguments convincing. There are a lot of mathematical tools for dealing with infinities and infinite sums that can sidestep these issues. For example, since ${\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }f\left(t\right)$ is typically shorthand for ${lim}_{t\to \infty }{\sum }_{x=1}^{t}f\left(x\right)$, we can often compare two infinite sums by looking at the limit of the sum of differences, e.g., ${\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }f\left(t\right)-{\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }g\left(t\right)={lim}_{t\to \infty }{\sum }_{x=1}^t\left(f\right(x)-g(x\left)\right)$. Suppose $f\left(t\right),g\left(t\right)$ denote the total utility at time $t$ given actions 1 and 2, respectively, and $f\left(t\right)=2g\left(t\right)$. Then even though ${\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }f\left(t\right)={\sum }_{t=1}^{\infty }g\left(t\right)=\infty$, we can still conclude that action 1 is better because ${lim}_{t\to \infty }{\sum }_{x=1}^t\left(f\right(x)-g(x\left)\right)={lim}_{t\to \infty }{\sum }_{x=1}^{t}g\left(t\right)=\infty$.

This is a simplified example, but my main point is that you can always look at an infinite sum as the limit of well-defined finite sums. So I'm personally not too worried about the theoretical implications of infinite sums that produce "infinite utility".

P.S. I realize this comment is 1.5 years late lol but I just found this post!