Yudkowsky's views are discussed here:

1. https://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/12/16/a-debate-on-animal-consciousness/

2. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KFbGbTEtHiJnXw5sk/i-really-don-t-understand-eliezer-yudkowsky-s-position-on

He's the guy farthest left, next to the panel host. He just looks very different now.

He said he was on a panel at EA Global and mentions PlayPumps, a favourite EA example in this 2015 post. Here's the YouTube video of the EA Global panel discussion. EDIT: He's the guy farthest left, next to the panel host.

I don't think it's true that other things are equal on the intuition of neutrality, after saying there are more deaths in A than B. The lives and deaths of the contingent/future people in A wouldn't count at all on symmetric person-affecting views (narrow or wide). On some asymmetric person-affecting views, they might count, but the bad lives count fully, while the additional good lives only offset (possibly fully offset) but never outweigh the additional bad lives, so the extra lives and deaths need not count on net.

On the intuition of neutrality, there are more deaths that count in B, basically except if you're an antinatalist (about this case).

What person-affecting views satisfying neutrality do you imagine would recommend B/extinction/taking precautions against A here?

For an argument against neutrality that isn't just against antinatalism, I think you want to define B so that it's better than or as good as A for necessary people. For example, the virus in B makes everyone infertile without killing them (but the virus in A kills people). Or, fewer people are killed early on in B, and the rest decide not to have children. Or, the deaths in A (for the necessary people) are painful and extended, but painless in B.

Granted, but this example presents just a binary choice, with none of the added complexity of choosing between three options, so we can't infer much from it.

I can add any number of other options, as long as they respect the premises of your argument and are "unfair" to the necessary number of contingent people. What specific added complexity matters here and why?

I think you'd want to adjust your argument, replacing "present" with something like "the minimum number of contingent people" (and decide how to match counterparts if there are different numbers of contingent people). But this is moving to a less strict interpretation of "ethics being about affecting persons". And then I could make your original complaint here against Dasgupta's approach against the less strict wide interpretation.

Well, there is a necessary number of "contingent people", which seems similar to having necessary (identical) people.

But it's not the same, and we can argue against it on a stricter interpretation. The difference seems significant, too: no specific contingent person is or would be made worse off. They'd have no grounds for complaint. If you can't tell me for whom the outcome is worse, why should I care? (And then I can just deny each reason you give as not in line with my intuitions, e.g. "... so what?")

Stepping back, I'm not saying that wide views are wrong. I'm sympathetic to them. I also have some sympathy for (asymmetric) narrow views for roughly the reasons I just gave. My point is that your argument or the way you argued could prove too much if taken to be a very strong argument. You criticize Dasgupta's view from a stricter interpretation, but we can also criticize wide views from a stricter interpretation.

I could also criticize presentism, necessitarianism and wide necessitarianism for being insensitive to the differences between A+ and Z for persons affected. The choice between A, A+ and Z is not just a choice between A and A+ or between A and Z. Between A+ and Z, the "extra" persons exist in both and are affected, even if A is available.

I think there is a quite straightforward argument why IIA is false. (...)

I think these are okay arguments, but IIA still has independent appeal, and here you need a specific argument for why Z vs A+ depends on the availability of A. If the argument is that we should do what's best for necessary people (or necessary people + necessary number of contingents and resolving how to match counterparts), where the latter is defined relative to the set of available options, including "irrelevant options", then you're close to assuming IIA is false, rather than defending it. Why should we define that relative to the option set?

And there are also other resolutions compatible with IIA. We can revise our intuitions about some of the binary choices, possibly to incomparability, which is what Dasgupta's view does in the first step.

Or we can just accept cycles.^[1]

I don't see why this would be better than doing other comparisons first.

It is constrained by "more objective" impartial facts. Going straight for necessitarianism first seems too partial, and unfair in other ways (prioritarian, egalitarian, most plausible impartial standards). If you totally ignore the differences in welfare for the extra people between A+ and Z (not just outweighed, but taken to be irrelevant) when A is available, it seems you're being infinitely partial to the necessary people.^[2] Impartiality is somewhat more important to me than my person-affecting intuitions here.

I'm not saying this is a decisive argument or that there is any, but it's one that appeals to my intuitions. If your person-affecting intuitions are more important or you don't find necessitarianism or whatever objectionably partial, then you could be more inclined to compare another way.

1. ^{^}

   We'd still have to make choices in practice, though, and a systematic procedure would violate a choice-based version of IIA (whichever we choose in the 3-option case of A, A+, Z would not be chosen in binary choice with one of the available options).

2. ^{^}

   Or rejecting full aggregation, or aggregating in different ways, but we can consider other thought experiments for those possibilities.

Still, I think your argument is in fact an argument for antinatalism, or can be turned into one, based on the features of the problem to which you've been sensitive here so far. If you rejected antinatalism, then your argument proves too much and you should discount it, or you should be more sympathetic to antinatalism (or both).

You say B prevents more deaths, because it will prevent deaths of future people from the virus. But it prevents those future deaths by also preventing those people from existing.

So, for B to be better than A, you're saying it's worse for extra people to exist than not exist, and the reason it's worse is that they will die. Or that the will die early, but early relative to what? There’s no counterfactual in which they live longer, the way you've set the problem up. They die early relative to other people around them or perhaps without achieving major life goals they would have achieved if they didn't die early, I guess.

Similarly, going extinct now prevents more deaths from all causes, including age-related ones, but also everything that causes people to die early, like car accidents, war, diseases in young people, etc.. The effects are essentially the same.

What's special about the virus in this hypothetical vs all other causes of (early) death in humans?

So, we should prevent (early) deaths by going extinct now, or collectively refusing to have children, if the alternative is the status quo with many (early) deaths for a long time. That looks like an principle antinatalist position.

Thanks for providing these external benchmarks and making it easier to compare! Do you mind if I updated the text to include a reference to your comments?

Feel free to!

Oh, I didn't mean for you to define the period explicitly as a fixed interval period. I assume this can vary by catastrophe. Like maybe population declines over 5 years with massive crop failures. Or, an engineered pathogen causes massive population decline in a few months.

I just wasn't sure what exactly you meant. Another intepretation would be that P_f is the total post-catastrophe population, summing over all future generations, and I just wanted to check that you meant the population at a given time, not aggregating over time.

Expected value density of the benefits and cost-effectiveness of saving a life

You're modelling the cost-effectiveness of saving a life conditional on catastrophe here, right? I think it would be best to be more explicit about that, if so. Typically x-risk interventions aim at reducing the risk of catastrophe, not the benefits conditional on catastrophe. Also, it would make it easier to follow.

Denoting the pre- and post-catastrophe population by $P_i$ and $P_f$, I assume

Also, to be clear, this is supposed to be ~immediately pre-catastrophe and ~immediately post-catastrophe, right? (Catastrophes can probably take time, but presumably we can still define pre- and post-catastrophe periods.)