Thanks for sharing this!

Your last blog post reminded me of this blog post from Robin, where he argued

Imagine that we made just as many cars, houses, clothes, meals, furniture, etc., each one just as big with just as high quality materials and craftsmanship. But instead of the making these in the stupefying variety that we do today, imagine that we made only a few standard variations, and didn’t update those variations as often. A few standard cars, standard clothes, standard meals, etc. Enough variety to handle different climates, body sizes, and food allergies, but not remotely enough to let each person look unique. (An exception might be made for variety in music, books, movies, etc., since these are such a tiny fraction of total costs.)

I’d guess that this alternative could plausibly cost three to ten times or more less than what we pay now. Let me explain.

Interesting idea! I recommend sharing a bit more detail - or the whole post - on the forum directly.

Having thought about it a bit more, I realize you're making an important equivocation here:

This argument relies on a pure first-order utilitarian outlook

Ethics should not be reduced to a transactional system where only those with resources can be “good people.”

Pure first-order utilitarian systems do not have a native conception of 'good people'. It just says, for each person, what they should do. There is no direct comparison between the goodness of different people. It can answer related questions - like if two people are stuck in a burning building, which should you save - but moral offsetting doesn't make sense without a threshold of moral acceptability, which pure utilitarianism doesn't have. And if you're supplementing your utilitarianism with aspects from some other moral theory, why not supplement it with side constraints that say no murdering people?

My criticism is not specific to the forum at all; the claim is false and pointlessly alienating no matter where it is posted. Also, I don't think we should allow people to 'sneak' poor behaviour into the forum via a backdoor. 

It's been a long time since I read the sequences, but religion seems much more relevant to rationality - and especially to the historical process that lead to it - than Trump's cranial contents are to bee welfare. Thinking about analogies from the sequences, this post seems much more apt.

They are far more cognitively sophisticated than most other insects, having about a million neurons—far more than our current president.

This is false - humans have billions of neurons - and also seems completely pointless, achieving nothing except unnecessarily alienating some readers.

"permissible" and "higher utility than the alternative" are two very different things. Shooting one person at a bus stop is higher utility than shooting four, but that doesn't make it permissible, because you should shoot zero people. Pure utilitarianism says you should always do the best thing, and that means higher utility than all alternatives, not just some alternatives.

I’ve noticed a recurring argument in EA spaces around veganism: “If I donate enough money to effective animal charities, I’ll save more animals than I would by going vegan. So, I don’t need to personally stop consuming animal products.”

You put this argument in double quotation markets, suggesting it is a verbatim quote - did someone make precisely this argument? The reason I ask is because I think you are presenting something of a strawman, and the typical argument presented - namely that our charity is finite, and both we and animals would prefer donations over abstinence - is much more plausible.

This argument relies on a pure first-order utilitarian outlook, where harm is permissible as long as it’s “offset” by a greater good. Taken to its logical extreme, this reasoning leads to absurd conclusions: “If I donate $10,000 to save two lives, I’m morally justified in taking one life because it’s convenient or enjoyable.”

This seems wrong to me. Typically 'pure' utilitarianism isn't taken to have a concept of 'permissible' - you should do the thing that causes the most good. Permissibility and supererogation are weakening of utilitarianism to incorporate other moral intuitions.

Some people believe that, while depopulation is bad, we're not at crunch time yet, so we can reverse it later. I worry that this under-estimates the extent of positive feedback loops. It seems to me that, as birth rates have fallen, policy and culture have become less supportive of parenting, which in turn makes parenthood less attractive. I worry that voters are not forward looking enough to recognize that, even though they may not have children at the moment, it is nonetheless good for the future for parenthood to be supported.

Some examples of anti-parenthood policies and cultural memes:

• Large transfers from young to old (e.g. unfunded state pensions).
• NIMBYism increasing the cost of additional bedrooms.
• Couples are the decision maker for reproductive choice, bear most of the costs of having children (both financial and opportunity cost) but few of the benefits (most go to the child or to the taxpayer).
• High prestige given to education and career success, low or negative given to parenthood.
• High risk aversion about children (CPS, car seats, stranger danger, etc.)
• Age stratification, media representation and fewer cousins reducing social salience of babies for young couples.
• Sex education and family planning focused on avoiding pregnancy, not on actually having families.
• Exclusion of families from recreational activities.
• Lack of support for young parents in education.

In general I expect falling birth rates to make most of these factors worse through de-normalisation of parenthood and reducing the young parent influence base, further reducing birth rates, absent some major change.

This means that this isn’t a purely theoretical debate for everyone. 

Most forum readers are continually surrounded by factory farmed meat. Some will live in areas with Malaria or other problems associated with global poverty, some will experience the debilitating pain of severe headaches and other conditions. All readers live in a world facing the risks of nuclear war, global pandemics, and the rise of unaligned artificial intelligence. Most debates we have here are not purely theoretical for everyone! That doesn't mean we can't approach them logically.