I'm working on a follow-up post about what I've learned from people's responses. If there are any questions you want answered, leave a reply to this comment.

The very repugnant conclusion isn't explicitly tested. I didn't put much thought into this but my reason was that it seemed redundant with the questions that are already there. And I do think it's sort of covered, but indirectly, and it's not very clear.

The way it's sort-of covered is that if you accept the repugnant conclusion, then you're accepting that you can subtract happiness or add suffering to existing lives, and it's still a net positive so long as you add sufficiently many more marginally-happy lives. So VRC directly follows from RC.

But there's an alternative interpretation of RC where the marginally-happy people are not suffering at all, they just aren't very happy either, so in principle you might accept RC even if you believe no amount of happiness can outweigh a small amount of suffering.

So to really capture VRC, I think the quiz needs two new questions:

1. If you add a new happy person (say welfare level 20), and a new unhappy person (say welfare level -7) such that the sum is positive, is that good, bad, neutral, or incomparable?
2. VRC

If you answer "good" to the first question, and your other answers are consistent with totalism, then that implies VRC, and the VRC question tests if your views are in conflict. If you answer "bad" to the first question, then it implies something like negative utilitarianism, or something like a person-affecting view with a procreation asymmetry (i.e. adding good lives is neutral, but adding bad lives is bad).

Whatever you consider to be the crossing point at which a life goes from "not worth living" to "worth living", that's defined as welfare level zero. A life at welfare level 7 is worth living by definition.

Q12&Q13. I don't understand... These are comparable, right?

Some moral philosophers (Larry Temkin being the most prominent) say that if A > B, and B > C, then that doesn't necessarily mean A > C. I agree that this sounds strange but it's a view held by some people, so I wanted the quiz to allow for the possibility.

Yeah I agree it's confusing, I wasn't sure the best way to explain it. The intended meaning is:

Consider the difference between world A and world A+, in which A+ has the same people as in A but happier, and also some new somewhat-happy people. Then consider a new world B+ that is to B as A+ is to A. Similarly, consider the difference between A+ and B, in which the same people are there, but their welfare is more equal. Then consider a new world C that is to B+ as B is to A+. Then repeat this process many more times. Would you make the same decision every time?

(I'm not sure if that explanation was helpful)

So it's not trying to claim that you preferred the right-hand option, "repeat the move" means "imagine a world that is to B as A+ is to A" (and similarly for A+ -> B).

ETA: Tell me if you think this would be a clearer question:

Imagine making the same two moves as A -> A+ and A+ -> B, but this time starting at B: (1) make everyone slightly better off and create a new group of less-happy people; then (2) keep the same population, but increase both total welfare and equality. Repeat again and again a total of 9 times, each new rung making the population larger but less happy.

Would you make those same two judgements at every rung?

(that changes the part before the first colon, and keeps everything else the same)

I don't think so. I'd say they have the potential to be "super-effective in expectation". To me, "super-effective" with no qualifiers implies high confidence.

It is hilarious(ly sad) that the largest present-day problem in the entire world only receives on the order of $5 million/year. I really hope these orgs get more funding in the near future.

The argument isn't that the variance on your EV is very high. The argument is that you can't have an EV at all. The challenge of unawareness sequence makes this argument in detail.

That looks like a link to an unpublished draft that only you can view. I can't see it

I agree that it doesn't make sense to make extremely risky investments and then be very risk-averse with your donations.

I'm not sure about the donation recommendations. Why should donors have a small core of low-risk donations? Why not donate all their money to the single highest-EV opportunity? Or why not give to a few different opportunities that they believe are the best candidates for highest-EV, without concern for risk?

To clarify, I'm not saying that's because LLMs don't have welfare. It could also be that they do have welfare, but their statements are not correlated to their internal experiences in the obvious way.

We know that we can get LLMs to express any welfare statement by saying e.g. "pretend you are a sentient AI that's having an awesome time / being tortured". It could be that all LLM outputs are roleplaying, but there is some true underlying experience that we don't (yet?) know how to observe.