(Not a solution, but a general observation about people who engage in bashing EA.)

The "dot connectors" will always connect the dots, infer or invent nefarious motivations, and try to bucket you as they like. The problem is that you can't neatly map EAs onto the political spectrum -- yes, there are dominant trends, but the variance in views is sufficiently high that commentators have genuinely no clue where EAs belong. This makes sense because most major movements in history have been political ones, so when assessing EA, most people pull out their internal political philosophy detector and you end up with a mess like the chart below! 

But EA is a moral philosophy movement, and the chain of thinking is genuinely different. Instead of thinking how to organize society and labor, EAs unanimously agree on beneficentrism and deal with questions like, "What morally matters? To what degree? Which interventions are most effective? How do you even assess what is most effective?" When you organize a movement around these set of questions, you end up with:

• Some people who want to automate software engineering, some who want to pause it entirely, and others who think we should defensively accelerate progress
• At least two frontier AI labs: let's not forget OpenAI received $30 million in philanthropic money during its inception!
• Some EAs who think that AI will be a big deal for {their cause area}, others who are skeptical of the whole AI bundle
• Some EAs passionately dislike AI writing, some are fine with methodical use of AI in writing, and some are even more liberal about it
• One particular EA who is the loudest voice combatting the data center water usage myth
• (At least) one person from the EA-sphere who has large holdings in AI infrastructure
• And conservative AI Safetyists like you and liberal long timeline accelerationists like me

I don't know what the best solution for combatting EA bashing is, but spreading the idea that EA is more politically and intellectually diverse than people think should help. 

... other brain regions (accessory lobes) have shown to compensate these integrative processes in this taxon, which has not yet been demonstrated for Penaeidae. It's thus still a low rating for lack of data, not for proof of failing this criterion.

This reminds me of two things:

• I am forgetting the precise terms here, but for a while in the 1800s through most of the 1900s, researchers thought that birds weren't intelligent because they were essentially comparing human and avian brains 1:1, but later, others found that while birds lacked that specific component (neocortex?), some other regions of their brain were functionally similar and that birds were indeed smart rather than instinct-driven biological machines.
• I recall watching Dustin Crummett's presentation on insect sentience a while back, and when talking about lack of evidence of sentience in certain insects, he emphasized that the besides black soldier fly and honeybees, most insects aren't that well-studied.

I am a little surprised that evidence for integrative brain regions is very high for all but the Penaeidae. Do we know to what extent this is the case because direct/proxy studies on Penaeidae sentience haven't been performed vs. studies were performed but results showed low evidence of sentience?

And answering some of your questions:

• Which criterions do you think are the most convincing to update your confidence?
  • Criteria 2 ≈ 3 > 4 ≈ 5
• Do you have other types of evidence that better influence your confidence?
  • Not evidence, but a heuristic I use when thinking about sentience is that any organism that performs reinforcement learning, i.e., making on-the-fly decisions informed by environmental stimuli is most likely sentient.

I lean towards a yes but I am uncertain because I don't know how the stimuli is fed and I would imagine that the simulated brain, unlike an embodied fruit fly, isn't perpetually processing information and taking actions. If the latter is true and if it replaces the need for ... processing ... billions of life fruit flies in labs worldwide, seems like a huge animal welfare win to me.

EDIT: Eon, the company behind this development published a blog post explaining their research, and after reading it, I am much less confident in my lean. This doesn't seem to be a whole fly brain emulation / a full copy:

First, the Shiu et al. model is a simplified neuron model. It uses leaky integrate-and-fire dynamics rather than morphologically detailed multicompartment neurons, and it relies on inferred neurotransmitter identity and simplified synapse models. This means that dendritic nonlinearities, biophysical channel diversity, and many specific dynamics are not represented. This is enough to recover some sensorimotor transformations, but clearly does not capture the full range of neural activity. Further, internal state, plasticity, learning, hormonal changes are largely missing. Biological flies do not respond to the same sensory input the same way in all contexts. Hunger, satiety, arousal, mating state, egg-laying state, recent sensory history, neuromodulators, and learning all reshape sensorimotor transformations.

Source: How the Eon Team Produced a Virtual Embodied Fly

Is this primarily meant for people who are already veg*n/sympathetic or a wider audience?

If the latter, it is worth rethinking if the word "vegan" should be used at all, as there are a bunch of studies that show that the public is negatively biased towards the term and alternate terms are received more positively (see this, for instance).

I just emailed him, close to zero chance he will see it but if he does 🤞

but its very possible that many fish that we kill after catching (yes with a bad death) have net positive lives.

Doesn't this imply that even a theoretical painless death of a fish is really really bad because your taking away all the good moments trillions of fish could have experienced? You could argue that the utility experienced by those who consume the fish is higher, but it probably doesn't compare to the utility those unimaginably large amount of creatures could have experienced had they continued their natural lives. 

(I agree with the more important point that non-adversarial messaging matters and these sorts of comparisons are practically useless.)

Some of the proposed interventions neatly align with practices followed by cities that have "dark sky laws." Uncertain, but maybe there is a feed two birds with one scone solution here.

1. "Problem is that rarely in the world of public engagement, media and comms does everything go right."
2. "But if you’re going to go ahead, be VERY sure you’re doing it right."

Doesn't statement 1 imply that statement 2 is an impossibly high standard to reach?

There are clearly mistakes here which could have been avoided, but it is really hard to predict the counterfactual; it is possible that even if those steps were taken, the level of infighting or the amount of clickbait journalism would have been about the same. Maybe not, but who knows! 

I was annoyed with all the clickbait-y articles and my fellow EAs are far too deferential and being against diet change is currently the trendy view within the movement. At the same time, I think it would be healthy for the broader animal movement to build a stronger culture of cooperation and that involves a higher degree of charitability and a lower bar of what's acceptable when trying something new.

Posting this here for a wider reach: I'm looking for roommates in SF! Interested in leases that begin in January.

Right now, I know three others who are interested and we have a low-key signal group chat. If you are interested, direct message me here or on one my linked socials and we will hop on a 15-minute call to determine if we would be a good match!