Ultimately the safety of the space domain and safety on earth from space debris are linked by both overlapping technologies for monitoring and mitigation and the overlapping principle that entities ought to take responsibility for what they put into space. And from that perspective it would be pretty hard to lecture foreign universities on why they should spend a few grand on safely deorbiting their Cubesat to mitigate a very small risk of hitting other satellites whilst being the entity that decided to abdicate responsibility for safely deorbiting the ISS to mitigate a very small risk of hitting a densely populated urban area - to save a lot more money but still only about 4 months of ISS budget.

Ultimately they're optimising for technological potential rather than saving lives, and the budget for this is far more closely linked to debates like "but we can't trust the Russians to manage the deorbiting process, can we", "does it have commercialization potential" and "could it be turned into an ASAT weapon" than "would it save more lives than the debris could possibly threaten if we bought $843m worth of medicine instead?"

The ISS itself isn't particularly likely to create space debris (its orbit is already lower than major constellations and anything with thrusters is going to move out the way, and if it breaks up as it hits the upper atmosphere the pieces will rain over earth rather than remain in orbit). But tens of thousands of other satellites being launched this decade have plenty of potential to create space debris, space is a commons and space law is by international treaty with lots of blank spaces (unlike, for example, the heavily-regulated airspace).

If the deorbiting strategy for the ISS is "we decided that to save a third of the annual budget we usually put in, we'd do a reentry with limited control from its onboard thrusters because only a few islands might get hit, and in fact even though we missed the target we didn't hurt anything except an abandoned chicken shed", or "we left it to Roscosmos to figure out"^[1] nobody is going to listen to NASA's guidelines for a safer space (not even Congress). Especially since all the precautions everyone else might need to take will cost them significant money. 

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   there are other political considerations to leaving it to Roscosmos to figure out of course, even though they're hardly likely to target California with it, and tech developed to deorbit the ISS isn't going to be more useful as an antisatellite weapon than dozens of existing civil projects to create tugs for deorbiting and servicing defunct smaller satellites)

Just to clarify on the orbital debris problem: it's not just the risk of the ISS specifically hitting things on the way down (which is non-zero but at the same time not that likely: the ISS is too big to overlook and will move in a reasonably predictable manner so things will generally adjust their orbits in advance to move out the way, and most of them have higher orbits anyway). It's also that when operators of thousands of other satellites^[1]- from Starlink to university cubesats - are being advised/required to have specific end-of-life deorbiting strategies to avoid creating more orbital debris, all of which cost them money in terms of additional man hours and launch mass, and lots of research dollars are being spent on addressing the problem of orbital debris, the world's major space agencies can hardly state their end of life strategy for the ISS is as long as everyone else gets out the way and then when it breaks apart in the upper atmosphere the pieces land somewhere like Australia or the sea it probably won't do any real harm. It's really bad politics to demand everyone else is a responsible citizen whilst shrugging your shoulders about the fate of your flagship. And nearly all the alternatives - especially those discussed in the white paper - would cost more.

And yes, in the scope of the operations of the ISS $843m isn't even that big a number, which I realise may seem obscene in a country where that sum of money would buy the entire population a couple of malaria nets

(FWIW I still think you can [i] make a good case that the project is premature, the wrong approach or poor value for money and [ii] make a good case that SpaceX has done unusually well in turning pork-barrel projects into useful, value-for-money services and may do so again despite the project being premature, the wrong approach and/or poor value for money)

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   most of which were launched in the past few years, which is why history isn't a reliable guide...

Needless to say, NASA does not use EA math in its budgeting ;-)

The world's major space agencies abandoning the biggest thing we ever put into space in an uncontrolled deorbit is a politically untenable option (and the project represnts only around a third of the estimated $3bn annual budget to keep the ISS operational, although there's an argument this spend has more ROI...). That's even more the case against a backdrop of increasing calls for more regulation around everyone else's launches and orbits and deorbits to prevent collisions in space^[1]

The potential risk to human life of uncontrolled ISS reentry therefore isn't the only factor in the decision and probably not even the main one, though I don't think the deorbiting of generally orders of magnitude smaller stuff gives much of a guide to the magnitude of that risk.^[2] (There are of course also other arguments against spending money on this project, such as the desirability of maintaining the ISS, the possibility of raising it to a graveyard orbit for future reuse/recycling instead of destroying it; and other arguments in favour such as the likelihood at least some of SpaceX's R&D can be deployed to more productive projects in future). Space agencies usually aren't especially rigorous in analysing cost effectiveness anyway, but cost-per-life saved is a pretty minor factor in why such contracts are awarded. Space funding is industrial policy targeting notionally large medium term returns from technology, not evidence-based philanthropy trying to find the most cost effective way to remedy problems.

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   this potentially compounds, with each debris impact creating more orbital debris, with the theoretical possibility of rendering some orbits unusable in future. Avoiding this scenario might still seem wasteful from the point of view of a Ugandan farmer whose neighbourhood could be fed for years on the research budgets being devoted to maintaining congestion-free orbits, but rather a lot of the developed world depends on access to satellite technology and I suspect even some NGOs in Uganda make some use of GPS and satcomms.

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   but that risk is probably still low, assuming even with it rentering via gradual orbital decay, operators would still have sufficient ability to control reentry using onboard thrusters to direct it to scatter it's debris over thousands of kms that's mostly ocean or sparsely populated, as with Skylab...

The point of credentialism is that the ideal circumstances for an individual to evaluate ideas don't exist very often. Medical practitioners aren't always right, and homeopaths or opinion bloggers aren't always wrong, but bearing in mind that I'm seldom well enough versed in the background literature to make my own mind up, trusting the person with the solid credentials over the person with zero or quack credentials is likely to be the best heuristic in the absence of any solid information to the contrary

And yes, of course sometimes it isn't, and sometimes the bar is completely arbitrary (the successful applicant will have some sort of degree from some sort of top 20 university) or the level of distinction irrelevant (his alma mater is more reputable than hers) and sometimes the credentials themselves are suspect 

I'd add that the transitional effects of climate change look like they would have particularly negative effects on poor crop farmers in places like the Indian subcontinent who are unlikely to source much/any of their diet from factory farms, and relatively little effect on wealthy Western consumers who eat particularly large quantities of factory farmed meat (it's even conceivable that price pressures resulting from shortages of some staple crops in some countries could benefit Western factory farms' profitability...), so it's really difficult to see the negative animal welfare impact of slowing climate change down a bit

For the record, I agree that evolutionary mechanisms need not hold any moral force over us, and lean personally towards considering acts to save human lives of being approximately equal value irrespective of distance and whether anyone actually notices or not. But I still think it's a fairly strong counterargument to point out that the vast majority of humanity does attach moral weight to proximity and community links, as do the institutions they design to do good, and for reasons.

This argument is understandably unpopular because it's inconsistent with core principles of EA. 

But the principle of reciprocity (and adjacent kin selection arguments) absolutely is the most plausible argument for why the human species evolved to behave in an apparently altruistic^[1] manner and value it in others in the first place, long before we started on abstract value systems like utilitarianism, and in many cases people still value or practice some behaviours that appear altruistic despite indifference to or active disavowal of utilitarian or deontological arguments for improving others' welfare.

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   there's an entire literature on "reciprocal altruism"

I think there's plenty of place for argument in moral reflection, but part of that argument includes accepting that things aren't necessarily "obvious" or "irrefutable" because they're intuitively appealing. Personally I think the drowning child experiment is pretty useful as thought experiments go, but human morality in practice is so complicated that even Peter Singer doesn't act consistently with it, and I don't think it's because he doesn't care.

If being thoughtful, sincere and selfless is a core value, it seems like it would be more of a problem if influential people in the community felt they had to embrace the label even if they didn't think it was valuable or accurate

I suspect a lot of the 'EA adjacent' description comes from question marks about particular characteristics EA stances or image rather than doubting some of their friends could benefit from participating in the community, and that part of that is less a rejection of EA altogether and more an acknowledgement they often find themselves at least as closely aligned with people doing great work outside the community.

(Fwiw I technically fit into the "adjacent" bracket from the other side: never been significantly active in the community, like some of its ideas and values - many of which I believed in before 'EA' was a thing - and don't identify with or disagree with other ideas commonly associated with EA, so it wouldn't really make much sense to call myself an EA)