Curious why you've been cross-posting things about AI recently. Any cause prio update?

When you suppose here that consequentialist bracketing implies neartermism, are you conditioning on space-time region bracketing? (Which is arguably more action-guiding than any form of person-based bracketing?)

Follow-up assuming you'll answer "no", Anthony: same even ex post, right?

Oops sorry for the GW-GD confusion, but yeah, this changes nothing to my point I think.

I agree that it is possible for them to occur, but there is no probability distribution I would include in my representor under which they are sufficiently likely to occur that the comparison between actions is indeterminate.

This seems hardly defensible. 
- The average human being (including in poor countries) contributes to the farming of so many animals throughout their lifetime (at least in expectation). You would have to be astonishingly confident that the welfare of the animals we eat do not significantly matter for your above conclusion to follow.
- The number of far-future lives we indirectly influence might be astronomical such that long-term effects (almost) always dominate. I don't see on what basis you can exclude this possibility from your probability distributions, given the arguments given here and refs therein.

(I don't recall this specific example from Mogensen and don't have time to dive back into it, so I won't comment on that, sorry.)

Yeah, I think it's easy to find a counterexample to "unconditional cluelessness" (i.e., even in the box situation), but much harder to find one relevant to what you and I should do in our present non-simplified situations (which is presumably what Anthony meant for us to discuss).

I'm not familiar with Pearce's "selection pressure" argument. Is he saying evolution will make people sympathetic to the abolitionist project? 

If yes, I think this happens only in "crazy worlds" very different from ours, where the exact opposite might also happen and where our take on which is more likely is worth nothing. (I'm now actually more sympathetic to some version of this position my post criticizes.)

My lifetime income is very likely to be in the top 5% globally; under all plausible theories of utility, marginal utility declines with income; thus, the marginal transfer from me to someone in extreme poverty improves aggregate well-being.

How might this be incorrect or imprecise?

Here are two potential reasons I find far more plausible than yours, fwiw:
- the GiveWell donation increases farmed animal suffering more than it increases human welfare.
- it slightly increases the total human population, which slightly accelerates human progress and hence increases AI x-risks. The difference is small but the long-term future may overwhelm the short-term benefits of GW so much that this is enough.

The thesis that we are clueless about the overall sign of donating to effective global health and development charities is actually one of the most consensual in the cluelessness literature (see Mogensen 2021; Kollin et al. 2025, §1; Greaves 2016). 

Longtermist causes are those that generate significant disagreement (see, e.g., this overview and refs therein).

Are you asking: What about the possibility that the values of future people are dictated by our eugenics choices (rather than by, say, 'natural' evolution of values)?

Agreed. I actually wish people would try to find one counterexample instead of trying to prove too much. This might allow us to specify some cruxes.

the same questions can be raised for any philosophical question whatsoever.

I assume you didn't mean to restrict this to philosophical questions only, since the disagreement between Anti-Richard and you on nuclear war is largely empirical.^[1]

If you tell me that jumping off a cliff would probably mean death, there are no/few Anti-Richards out there who will say the opposite. And there's a very good reason for that: the corpses of such anti-Richards are stacked at the bottom of the cliff. Evolution selected against them and in favor of your "jump --> death" judgment. So we have a reason to trust you over Anti-Richard on this. (And we can make a weaker and less straightforward version of this argument for some philosophical questions such as "is suffering bad?".)

The same can't be said for your judgment that "nuclear war is bad considering all the consequences from now until the end of time, including in scenarios where humanity survives and those where aliens replace us." If there are few/no Anti-Richards contradicting you, it's presumably not because of evolutionary pressure on correct beliefs on the matter.^[2] So we have no reason to trust you over Anti-Richard, here.

You need to actually look at the substantive claims being made and judge for yourself what seems most credible.

Not sure what you mean by "substantive claim," but so far, you've given me i) an incredulous stare on the nuclear war thing, and ii) a value correlation argument, which I've argued is unhelpful. 

So you're asking me to make a judgment call on whether to trust your opaque judgment call or Anti-Richard's. But unless we find a reason to believe one of the two tracks the truth better than the other, I don't see how I/you can be justified in trusting one of you more than the other.

Alpine and Beach are two incommensurably good holidays, between which your idealized self has no preference, even when $20 is added to either option. Still, Hare argues, you plainly ought to prefer the prospect of a mystery bag containing a ticket + $20 over a mystery bag containing just the other ticket. [...] this all holds despite the fact that you know that once you find out which ticket is in which bag, you will consider the two options to be incommensurable.

Isn't this conflating idealized agent with agent with more information? The reflection principle I'm defending is only about the former.

1. ^{^}

   The cruxes are the likelihood of a Smokey Bear effect and of aliens with better values taking over.

2. ^{^}

   There are so many more plausible explanations, such as the fact that nuclear war seems bad for reasons that have nothing to do with impartiality and overall consequences until the end of time, and we incorrectly generalize.