Regarding fun, I should note that I treat these topics as dead serious, in the same way that topics like child abuse and torture are dead serious. I think our inclination to see these topics as fun (due to strong cultural pressures and precedents) is a major hurdle to treating them with the seriousness they deserve.
For example, the possibility of multiplying all the suffering that has occurred throughout the history of Earth by thousands or millions (of similar life histories) even within our cosmological horizon is in my view the ultimate anti-fun.
Of course, I realize this was simply meant as a supportive sentiment, and I appreciate it, but I still wanted to share this, since I think the framing matters more than it might seem.

Thank you for asking, Jim. CRS has provided funding for this month out, and beyond that I'm planning to mostly rely on savings.

Thank you for your kind words, David :) I'm very glad to hear that you find value in the book.

Thanks a lot for creating an audio version, I'll add a link to my book page! 🙏

Thank you for your kind words, Adrian :)

To clarify, the general approach outlined here doesn't rest on the use of discount rates — that's just a simple and illustrative example of scope-restriction.

To clarify, the context of the quoted remark was that, just as we can care for those we love in the face of cluelessness, we can likewise care for and benefit strangers.

Specifically in relation to this:

we still have reason to respect other values we hold dear — those that were never grounded purely in the impartial good in the first place. Integrity, care for those we love, and generally not being a jerk, for starters. Beyond that, my honest answer is: I don’t know.

I think the "other values we hold dear" can and should also include a strong focus on helping strangers as well, even if challenges from cluelessness and the like were to prove devastating to standard versions of consequentialism. I mostly responded to what I saw as an overly exclusive focus on those we love versus others.

I was simply erring on the side of being generous to the non-clueless view

Right, I suspected that — hence the remark about infinite ethics considerations counting as an additional problem to what's addressed here. My point was that the non-clueless view addressed here (finite case) already implicitly entails scope limitations, so if one embraces that view, the question seems to be what the limitation (or discounting) in scope is, not whether there is one.

To clarify, what I object to here is not a claim like "very strong consequence-focused impartiality is most plausible all things considered", or "alternative views also have serious problems". What I push back against is what I see as an implied brittleness of the general project of effective altruism (broadly construed), along the lines of "it's either very strong consequence-focused impartiality or total bust" when it comes to working on EA causes/pursuing impartial altruism in some form.

On the first point, you're right, I should have phrased this differently: it's not that those passages imply that impartiality entails consequentialism ("an act is right iff it brings about the best consequences"). What I should have said is that they seem to imply that impartiality at a minimum entails strong forms of consequence-focused impartiality, i.e. the impartiality component of (certain forms of) consequentialism ("impartiality entails that we account for all moral patients, and all the most significant impacts"). My point was that that's not the case; there are forms of impartiality that don't — both weaker consequence-focused notions of impartiality as well as more rule-based notions of impartiality (etc), and these can be relevant to, and potentially help guide, ethics in general and altruism in particular.

Can you say more why you think it's very strong?

I think it's an extremely strong claim both because there's a broad set of alternative views that could potentially justify varieties of impartial altruism and work on EA causes — other than very strong forms of consequence-focused impartiality that require us to account for ~all consequences till the end of time. And the claim isn't just that all those alternative views are somewhat implausible, but that they are all wholly implausible (as seems implied by their exclusion and dismissal in passages like "impartial altruism would lose action-guiding force").

One could perhaps make a strong case for that claim, and maybe most readers on the EA Forum endorse that strong claim. But I think it's an extremely strong claim nevertheless.