Their evaluation process has been updated (e.g. here), and I'm inclined to wait to see their new evaluations and recommendations before criticizing much, because any criticism based on last year's work may no longer apply. Their new recommendations come out November 12th.

FWIW, I am sympathetic to your criticisms, as applied to last year's evaluations. I previously left some constructive criticism here, too.

A different version of (5), in response to Benign A-Fission, could be a rule that treats Lefty as non-extra and Righty as extra in Split B — maybe for basically the reasons you give for Split B over No Split —, and one of Lefty or Righty as non-extra in Split C. Then you'd choose Split B among the three options.

One incomplete rule that could deliver this result is the following:

If all the splits have non-negative welfare, treat one with the highest welfare as non-extra, and treat the others as extra.

So, No Split gives Anna 80 welfare, Split B, 10+90=100 welfare and Split C, 10+60=70 welfare. Split B is best.

This doesn't say what to do about splits with negative welfare. Two options:

1. Treat them all as non-extra.
2. Treat a worst off one as non-extra, and the rest as extra and ignore them.

We might also consider decreasing marginal value to additional splits beyond the highest positive (and worst negative) welfare one, instead of totally ignoring them. Maybe the highest welfare one gets full weight, the second highest gets weight $r,0<r<1$, the third highest gets $r^2$, ..., the n-th highest gets $r^{n-1}$. This bounds the weighted sum of welfare in the splits by ${\sum }_{n=0}^{\infty }{r}^n=\frac{1}{1-r}$ times the welfare of the best off split. They still count for something, but we could avoid Repugnant Fission.

Repugnant Fission doesn't seem nearly as bad to me as Repugnant Transition under interpretation (6), as someone sympathetic to person-affecting views. Repugnant Fission is not worse for anyone.

Repugnant Fission is basically the same as comparing a modestly long life wonderful at each moment to an extraordinarily long life barely worth living at each moment, for the same person. The extra moments of life play the same role as splits. If the longer life is long enough, under intrapersonal addition of welfare, it would be better. The problem, if any, is with intrapersonal aggregation, not person-affecting views.

And to be clear, the Repugnant Conclusion is not the main reason I'm sympathetic to person-affecting views. I think even just adding one extra person at the cost of the welfare of those who would exist anyway is bad. It doesn't take huge numbers.

What about an article along the lines of "Effective Altruists are trying to reduce insect populations"?

I would not want to ignore higher-order effects, and would rather try to bound their expected values, do sensitivity analysis and consider what we do at the level of portfolios of interventions instead of just interventions in isolation, and hedging.

Hmm, ya, I could buy that more WAW support could help prevent some policies and other work that's bad for wild animal welfare, and perhaps most importantly space colonization with wild animals (or with little regard for their welfare).

I'm skeptical that WAW support would actually lead to actively intervening in the wild for wild animal welfare at a large scale, through things like gene drives, engineering ecosystems or eliminating species or reducing their populations, given the values I expect people to continue to hold. People might do these things in some cases for perceived human benefits, like screwworm eradication and some wild animal vaccines. Or adjust how we treat wild animals we're already dealing with, especially how we manage their populations.

No problems so far! The more such risks we take, the more likely one is to be realized. And PR risk could blow back against all of effective altruism by association and do long-lasting damage to EA and its perception, if the work is not adequately distanced from EA. The downside is not limited to the organization itself.

We might not want these kinds of interventions to be funded by the biggest EA/EAA grantmakers, or at least for these grants to be reported publicly. We might also not want them to give talks or have career booths at EAGs or animal advocacy conferences (but they could still attend and fundraise at them).

Maybe donors could coordinate so that some private donors not too big in EA take on most of the funding.

And all of this leads to worse transparency, which can mean less scrutiny of the work and the rationale behind it, increasing the risk that the work is ineffective or net negative. You can also get into unilateralist curse territory.

I'm not saying it couldn't be worth it anyway, maybe with some mitigating measures. But it's worth keeping all of this in mind.

I might say kidney donation is a moral imperative (or good) if we consider only the effects on your welfare and the effects on the welfare of the beneficiaries. But when you consider indirect effects, things are less clear. There are effects on other people, nonhuman animals (farmed and wild), your productivity and time (which affects your EA work or income and donations), your motivation and your values. For an EA, productivity and time, motivation and values seem most important.

EDIT: And the same goes for veganism.

How soon in the future? :P

Could you share a list of things now, without elaborating?

Also, adding to this, potential donors might be willing to pay more for you, given your experience, but maybe you've accounted for this in "market rates, etc". Presumably this would increase the probability of success of the org, from their POV.

And even bumping up the costs of the whole org 2x through higher salaries still leaves an insecticide charity at least 1/2 as cost-effective as something extraordinarily cost-effective (the same org where the same people work for less), which is still extraordinarily cost-effective!

If the counterfactual is that such a charity isn't started at all, that could be much worse than you running it at higher pay.