in my personal experience people who care about animals and want to help them but eat animal products often show a lot of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning

This sounds plausible to me, though fwiw I also think that this stereotype is another that makes it hard for omnivores to feel fine in animal welfare spaces. I kind of hate people assuming simply from my diet that probably I'm making epistemic mistakes that I refuse to acknowledge, or that I'm pretending to care about animals when I actually don't. 
Obv I agree there's a strong desire not to turn to the cruelty of your own diet. I think figuring out how to allow ourselves and help each other to live with the terrible suffering in the world we're not doing things about is one of the big challenges of effective altruism. 

What a great video! Really moving.

Thank you!

How does someone join the Whatsapp community?

This has made me realise I'm not sure what has caused me to be invited to the things I'm invited to, because I don't get invites to all the things on the events calendar (which works great for me!). I wonder if it's worth setting up something that's easy to join that just tells people about the significant things @Joseph Miller ?

Thanks for flagging!

You're quite right, thank you!

Fwiw, I think wild animal suffering and s-risks were reasonably widely discussed amongst longtermists earlier than 2015. 

It would seem reasonably surprising to me if when we collonised the galaxies we spread wild animal suffering as it is on earth, so that doesn't feel like a strong reason to try to avoid human extinction to me (even aside from the reason you point to). 

S-risks do seem like a stronger reason to care less about extinction. On the other hand, the strongest arguments for the plausibility of s-risks seem to do with AI alignment to me, rather than with humans holding power. So increased emphasis on s-risks doesn't seem to me like it would explain the trend I'm pointing to. 

That does seem like a more plausible lock in event than many. But I'd have tentatively expected that we'd send off space probes reasonably early, such that as technology gets better we can overtake the original ones. I guess a significant speed up of technological development would make a difference here though. Interested in how this affects your thinking?

Interesting, I don't think I noticed that trend between 10 years ago and 2 years ago. 

Cool!

I agree that in deciding how much to prioritise averting extinction vs improving worlds in which we persist, it's important to think about the difference in value between (non-existence)(default survival)(actual utopia). But that argument has been around a long while. I think Ben Garfinkel was advancing the idea that (actual utopia) - (default survival) might be much larger than (default survival) - (non-existence) in the late 2010s. I'm interested in what's changed that's affected discourse. It's possible the answer is 'more people have read arguments of this form'. But in that case people who had already read those arguments should update less than if the change is eg us getting more info about how difficult alignment is.