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)?

I've now brought back and lightly edited this paragraph that gives a helpful example. I think all the rest had low relevance, was misleading, or outright false.

Many objections/reactions to DiGiovanni's argument would be worth discussing, but I'm worried about transforming this tag page into a long paper. So a lot of work is done by:

DiGiovanni offers a comprehensive list of potential objections to his argument, and their rebuttals

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.