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TheOtherDave comments on Alan Carter on the Complexity of Value - Less Wrong
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Sure. OTOH, if we give hypothetical entities no weight at all, it seems to follow naturally that any project that won't see benefits within a century or so is not worth doing, since no actual people will benefit from it, merely hypothetical people who haven't yet been born.
Personally, I conclude that when planning for the future, I should plan based on the expected value of that future, which includes the value of entities I expect to exist in that future. Whether those entities exist right now or not -- that is, whether they are actual or hypothetical -- doesn't really matter.
I'm realizing I made some overly sweeping generalizations about "hypothetical people" there. Whoops.
This, I don't disagree with. Optimizing for the people we expect to exist seems fine to me; it's the normative leap from that to "we should produce more people" that throws me off.
The distinction between those two things gets a little tricky for me to hold on to when one of the things that significantly contributes to my expectations about the existence of someone is precisely how much I value them existing... or, more precisely, how much I expect my future self to value them if and when the opportunity to create them presents itself. E.g., if I really don't want a child, my expectation of a child of mine existing in the future should be lower than if I really want one.
Conversely, if I expect an entity X to exist a year from now if things remain as they are now, and I judge that X would, if actual, make the world worse, it seems to follow that I should take steps to prevent X from becoming actual.
It seems moderately clear to me that, while I value more people rather than fewer all else being equal, that's not a particularly important value; there are lots of things that I'll trade it for.