In practice people aren't able to figure out the the nuances a person's net wealth and income and expenses are and how much of a sacrifice giving 10k really means to them. So they're forced to make a judgement quickly based on limited information.

Being vegan is a less noisy signal of personal commitment than giving 10k to charity, so people will take this more seriously, whether that's fair or not.

I intentionally said "similar", not "the same".

It's slightly easier for Gates to be vegan than me but much much easier for him to give $10k than me

I think you're spot on with the importance of signalling. Personal sacrifice is a strong signal that you believe in something and are serious about it. This is more inspiring and influential to others.

Donating $10,000 to an animal welfare charity is not good proof of personal sacrifice because $10,000 might be basically nothing for a very rich person. Unless people know how rich you are they can't interpret much from this.

Going vegan, however, is a similar level of inconvenience across most wealth levels. Whether you're on Struggle St or you're Bill Gates, giving up eggs and cheese sucks to a similar degree. So when people see that you're vegan they see personal sacrifice and serious commitment.

utilitarianism isn't taken to have a concept of 'permissible'

Don't understand this point. OP is comparing giving $10,000 while killing 2 people to doing neither. Or being vegan to not being vegan while giving $$$ to animal welfare. Clearly by "permissible" they mean "higher utility than the alternative"

Depopulation is Bad

When parents have fewer children it means their attention and resources are stretched across fewer kids. I think this is, on average, gives these kids better opportunities.
Also generationally, wealth will accumulate among a few descendants rather than being diluted.
I think the concerns about lower workforce aren't a big deal because of increased mechanisation and the huge numbers of people in the world that don't currently have the opportunities to work productively.
I think the concerns about fewer people meaning less innovation/lower chance of geniuses emerging neglects that currently 90% of the world is locked out of these opportunities anyway because of poverty.

Here are some people who are currently particularly inspiring to me:

• Nicolas Laing who has worked in Uganda as a doctor for more than a decade and co-founded OneDay Health, which sets up health clinics in under-served parts of Uganda.
• Cherry Rainflower and Adam Semple who run Fluffy Torpedo, an ice cream shop in Melbourne that donates 50% of proceeds to effective charities.
• Keyur Doolabh, an ED doctor who recently co-founded Healthy Futures Global which is trying to eliminate mother to baby syphilis transmission in the Phillipines.
• Akhil Bansil who founded High Impact Medicine and is training to become an infectious diseases specialist with interest in antibiotic resistance.
• Kat Dekkar, Calvin Baker and Jeremy Chirpaz, who founded Give Industries, an electrical contracting business in Brisbane/Melbourne that gives 100% of profits to effective charities ($581,000 given so far).
• Those guys that founded Humanitix.

A Pascal's mugging by nematodes? Nematodes as utility monsters?

@tobycrisford 🔸 's points about conclusions that are extremely sensitivity to small changes in highly uncertain values is very important and this post (which I don't think is parody based on the author's previous posts) is a great demonstration of the pitfalls.

I've commented before that these sorts of calculations that show astronomical but uncertain numbers for shrimp welfare or insect welfare or wild animal welfare could also lead down this nematode welfare route. It's not obvious to me why someone who concludes that that shrimps are hugely morally significant would not also conclude that black soldier fly maggots are hugely morally significant, and then that nematodes are hugely morally significant.
 

(the organism on the far right is Giardia)
 

Interested to hear from Insect Welfare and Wild Animal Welfare advocates why they disagree that nematodes are the primary moral concern of planet Earth.

Lowering energy costs might have bipartisan support but the approaches to achieve them don't.

Energy prices is a well-treaded political issue that comes out at most elections. Everyone wants cheaper electricity but conservatives lean anti-wind and anti-solar and liberals lean anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel so there's a bit of an impasse.

Saying "lower energy costs has bipartisan support" is like saying "improving education outcomes" or "fixing healthcare" has bipartisan support. The disagreements and intractability are in the details.

Do you have a more specific idea for how you would use $1M to lower energy costs in way that would have bipartisan support?

Expressing uncomfortable truths is important when it's useful, but these calculations are so riddled with uncertainty and so lacking in actionable conclusions that this post and posts like it are probably net harmful.

I think it's reasonable to say that loudly pondering uncomfortable ideas is not useful if it returns an answer with error bars so wide that you might as well have not written the post at all.

Appeal to absurdity is a reasonable objection and shouldn't be discouraged. We need to be able to say clearly why idea X doesn't also imply some similar absurd idea Y.