Interventions which cost-effectively increase the welfare of vertebrates will change land use much more than inaction, and a greater change in land use increases the probability of causing lots of suffering?

It might cause lots of suffering, but it could also prevent lots of suffering, too. I think you're thinking in terms of difference-making, but "Avoiding the worst" risk aversion is not difference-making. Rather than thinking about what you cause, you should just look at both (distributions of) outcomes and ask which has more suffering in it, without privileging the results of inaction. 

Unless you believe the expected amount of wild animal suffering is higher all-things-considered than with inaction, you shouldn't really expect it to do worse according to "Avoiding the worst" risk aversion (as a heuristic; there could be exceptions).

I don't think welfare interventions targeting vertebrates will necessarily look worse than doing nothing on "Avoiding the worst" views, because they don't specifically, AFAIK, increase the risks of worse cases than inaction. I think things that reduce land use for agriculture, including a lot of alt protein and veg advocacy work, plausibly do look bad in the near-term on "Avoiding the worst" views, because the near-term worst cases are where invertebrates have bad lives, modest/high moral weights and larger populations.

But I do think on many difference-making views that compare to some default option like inaction and weigh downsides at least linearly and more than upsides, most interventions will look worse than the default.

I also have a similar comment here and a piece critiquing and exploring different versions of difference-making more generally here. A version of difference-making that wouldn't let invertebrates dominate would be one that discounts both more extreme upsides and more extreme downsides (especially symmetrically) relative to a comparison option (more).

I agree with Craig here. I've written about problems with most conceptions of utility people use and describe alternatives that I think better match what Craig is saying in this sequence.

Hmm, the view in my sequence Radical empathy is consequentialist-compatible and judgemental, but is designed to judge exactly as others judge, on their behalf.

Where bliss or joy shout “more please,” equanimity has a subtle draw that made me go on retreat a second time but didn’t have me cling to it. 

Interestingly, I think the "more please" or craving is dissociable from pleasure, even if not in typical cases. From my piece Pleasure and suffering are not conceptual opposites:

Pleasure and unpleasantness need not involve desire, at least conceptually, and it seems pleasure at least does not require desire in humans. Desire, as motivational salience, depends on brain mechanisms in animals distinct from those for pleasure, and which can be separately manipulated (Berridge, 2018, Nguyen et al., 2021, Berridge & Dayan, 2021), including by reducing desire (incentive salience) without also reducing drug-induced euphoria (Leyton et al., 2007, Brauer & H De Wit, 1997). Berridge and Kringelbach (2015) summarize the last two studies as follows:

human subjective ratings of drug pleasure (e.g., cocaine) are not reduced by pharmacological disruption of dopamine systems, even when dopamine suppression does reduce wanting ratings (Brauer and De Wit, 1997, Leyton et al., 2007)

On the other hand, in humans and other animals, the aversive salience of physical pain may not be empirically separable from its unpleasantness (Shriver, 2014), but as far as I can tell, the issue is not settled.

The first group of people are wrong because the probability that you personally avert AI catastrophe isn’t that small.

What do you estimate it to be, given all of the other actors in the space focused on this binary outcome?

Also, how high should the probability difference be for you to think devoting your career to it makes sense, rather than taking minimal precautions with low opportunity costs, like how we think about seatbelts and insurance against very unlikely events?

I'm more inclined towards functionalist interpretations of welfare, on which something like relative functional significance determines welfare levels. E.g. something's attention-grabbing capacity helps to determine its welfare significance. In that case, you might be deeply skeptical that small animals have the right functional role at all, but once you grant they do, it is much more plausible that welfare ranges are similar to humans.

One possibility for attention-grabbing: beings' welfare ranges may be proportional to how much attention they have to grab, and beings with richer/more detailed experiences could have more units of attention to be grabbed, with an analogy between the number of details in a visual field like the number of pixels in a computer screen. That being said, I'm not sure it's any less valid for it to be independent of the number of possible separate elements in conscious attention at a time, and I suspect it's just a matter of normative interpretation, not a matter of empirical fact.

I also think there are degrees to which something is an attentional mechanism at all or has a given functional role, that could have normative significance, and it's unlikely that there's an objective fact of the matter about how we should weigh these degrees. See my piece Gradations of moral weight, basically another two envelopes problem.

I think not, due to gradations and multiple reference points (even within hedonic scales only).

Some thoughts about using the "random option" as the default:

1. Under increasing model ambiguity, evenly allocating your portfolio maximizes the minimum expected value. Now, a random option is not a deterministic even allocation across the options. But if our resoucres (money, time, attention/motivation) are divisible, then randomly assiging each minimum unit will tend to approximate the even allocation, and increasingly so the more we divide the units, by the law of large numbers.^[1]
2. If the random option is taken to be a random micro-action, e.g. a small muscle contraction, a fraction of a second of thought, then almost all of the random options are basically just noise, sequentially uncoordinated, and achieve nothing. In practice, the random option would be functionally equivalent to "Do nothing".

1. ^{^}

   Obviously dividing your time totally randomly into tiny non-contiguous units is horrible for actually achieving anything. Maybe we just combine them into bigger contiguous blocks by assumption. Or we allow some kind of cooperation or positive-sum trades that will often in practice lead to contiguous blocks of time.

Do you (Michael) see your views about precise and imprecise credences significantly affecting what you would actually do in the real world in a scenario where you had to blame Jones or Smith?

Probably not. I see it as more illustrative of important cases. Imagine instead it's between supporting an intervention or not, and it has similar complexity and considerations going in each direction.

More relevant examples to us could be: crops vs nature for wild animals, climate change on wild animals, fishing on wild animals, the far future effects of our actions, the acausal influence of our actions. These are all things I feel clueless enough about to mostly bracket away and ignore when they are side effects of direct interventions I'm interested in supporting. I'm not ignoring them because I think they're small. I think they are likely much larger than the effects I'm not ignoring.

I may also want to further study some of them, but I'm often not that optimistic about making much progress (especially for far future effrcts and acausal influence) and for that progress to be used in a way that isn't net negative overall by my lights.