I further motivate views along the lines in this post in this sequence.

I further motivate views along the lines in this post in this sequence.

The clearest evidence of discontent is the unprecedented fertility decline across developed nations. Humans are increasingly choosing not to reproduce at replacement rate when given modern conditions.

Why is this clear evidence of discontent? Aren't there many other plausible explanations for the decline in fertility rates, like changes in values and life goals, like ideal family size, prioritization of careers and other interests?

Nearly no one wants to torture broiler chickens at massive and increasing scale. If we're doing that, this suggests our interlocking coordination systems are already producing outcomes severely misaligned from individual human values and preferences.

I agree with the first sentence, but I'm not sure about the second. I think a primary reason is that it's not usually a political priority, because it's not actually important to the average voter. If it's not that important, the outcomes are not severely misaligned from individual human values and preferences.

But it can be made a priority through political advocacy. The outcomes of ballot measures seem like pretty good evidence of what people prefer.
 

Either we restore human agency

I doubt we have ever really had more human agency in the past than now.

Either we restore human agency enough to avoid relying on distasteful and repugnant systems like the worst aspects of factory farming (...) Only the first path offers hope of addressing animal welfare systematically.

This seems wrong to me. While factory farming is increasing, it's primarily because of increasing populations and incomes, and there are effective targeted ways to systematically reduce and mitigate factory farming that don't require increasing human agency as a whole. Basically what the animal welfare side of EA does.

The decision calculus would be substantially different if we were near the end rather than the beginning of expansion through the universe, just as one should usually focus more on improving one's own capacities earlier in life and on contributing to others' development later on.

Possibly! But I'd like to see actual intervention proposals and estimates of their effects and cost-effectiveness. If the decision calculus is so obvious, you should be able to easily give a lower bound on the cost-effectiveness that drastically beats targeted animal welfare work (and being fair, should consider long-term effects of animal welfare work).

we focus intense moral concern on animals successfully bred to tolerate their conditions

What do you mean?

I don't think factory farmed animals tolerate their conditions well at all, because they suffer a lot. I'd recommend Welfare Footprint Project's research on egg-laying hens and meat chickens, and RP's similar research on shrimp to get an idea of what factory farmed animals' lives are often like. In particular, egg-laying hens live with chronic frustration and meat chickens often with disabling chronic pain. And they don't have ways to effectively relieve these.

If factory farming seems like a bad thing, you should do something about the version happening to you first. The domestication of humans is particularly urgent precisely because, unlike selectively bred farm animals, humans are increasingly expressing their discontent with these conditions

Why do you believe discontent (or its expression) is increasing? On what time scale? And do you expect this trend to continue for long?

Plus, factory farming is also increasing, especially in developing countries and for farmed insects.

Your response to 2 in general seems totally insensitive to the relative numbers involved wrt farmed animals and humans, and our potential impacts on each group. Shouldn't there be a point where you'd prioritize farmed animals?

FWIW, it seems a bit too buried in text. I think this would be something to say upfront, e.g. in the summary, if you're critiquing an org, because readers will often just skim, like I did.

I would probably think of donating to FWI as supporting them to develop a more cost-effective program. Most of their budget is spent on R&D, IIRC.

Thanks, fixed!

Assume your utility function $u$ is unbounded from above. Pick outcomes $x_1,x_2,...$ such that $u\left(x_n\right)\ge 2^n$. Let your lottery $X$ be $x_n$ with probability $1/2^n$. Note that ${\sum }_{n=1}^{\infty }1/2^n=1$, so the probabilities sum to 1.

Then this lottery has infinite expected utility:

Now, consider any two other lotteries $A$ and $B$ with finite expected utility, such that $A\prec B\prec X$.  There's no way to mix $A$ and $X$ probabilistically to be equivalent to $B$, because

whenever $p<1$. For $p=1$,  $E[pA+(1-p\left)X\right]=E\left[u\right(A\left)\right]<E\left[u\right(B\left)\right]$.

So Continuity is violated.

In practice, I think the effects of one's actions decay to practically 0 after 100 years or so. In principle, I am open one's actions having effects which are arbitrarily large, but not infinite, and continuity does not rule out arbitrarily large effects.

If you allow arbitrarily large values and prospects with infinitely many different possible outcomes, then you can construct St Petersburg-like prospects, which have infinite expected value but only take finite value in every outcome. These violate Continuity (if it's meant to apply to all prospects, including ones with infinitely many possible outcomes). So from arbitrary large values, we violate Continuity.

We've also discussed this a bit before, and I don't expect to change your mind now, but I think actually infinite effects are quite plausible (mostly through acausal influence in a possibly spatially infinite universe), and I think it's unwarranted to assign them probability 0.

Reality forces us to compare outcomes, at least implicitly.

There are decision rules that are consistent with violations of Completeness. I'm guessing you want to treat incomparable prospects/lotteries as equivalent or that whenever you pick one prospect over another, the one you pick is at least as good as the latter, but this would force other constraints on how you compare prospects/lotteries that these decision rules for incomplete preferences don't.

I just do not see how adding the same possibility to each of 2 lotteries can change my assessment of these.

You could read more about the relevant accounts of risk aversion and difference-making risk aversion, e.g. discussed here and here. Their motivations would explain why and how Independence is violated. To be clear, I'm not personally sold on them.