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Bakkot comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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One or two, but for me deciding which move to make is practically instinct, less lookahead. Also I'm not entirely sure how this is relevant.
We seem to be arguing from different axioms. For me, it seems that if you're confident that having more people in the world is a net positive, then as a necessary conclusion the moral thing to do is to try to have as many children as possible. If you're not sure of this, I don't undersand how you can conclude it's a moral wrong to destroy something which is not yet a person but merely has the potential to become one. For what reason is this latter situation immoral?
What role should the future play in decision-making?
It is not clear to me that prohibiting murder derives from that position or mandates birth.
By quantification of "merely." If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 90% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems almost as bad to end them as it would be to end them once they were awake. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 5% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems not nearly as bad to end them. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 1e-6 chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems that ending them has little moral cost.
If infants are nearly guaranteed to become people, then failing to protect them because we are impatient does not strike me as wisdom.
Expected values are important. Obviously. Couldn't you have asked that, instead of bandying about with discount rates and chess?
I don't think prohibiting murder is the thing to do because having more people in the world is a net positive. I think it's the thing to do because prohibiting murder is a net positive, for reasons I've gone in to elsewhere and will happily repeat for you if you'd like. But I don't see that prohibiting infanticide has the same positives. If the reason you're against infanticide is that you think increasing the number of people in the world is gives a positive expected value, that's fine - but then shouldn't you be having as many children as possible? If not, I'm having trouble seeing what relevance it is that a fetus is going to be a person.
I believe this addresses the rest of your post, also.