I think it's more likely than not that simulating a world like our own would be regarded as ethically impermissible. Creating a simulated universe which contains things like, for example, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, seems like the sort of thing that would be likely to be forbidden by general consensus if we still had any sort of self-governance at the point where it became a possibility.

Plus, while I've encountered plenty of people who suggest that somebody would want to create such a simulation, I haven't yet known anyone to assert that they would want to make such a simulation.

I don't understand why you're leaping from "simulators are not our descendants" to "simulators do not resemble us closely enough to meaningfully call them 'people.'" If I were in the position to create universe simulations, rather than simulating my ancestors, I would be much more interested in simulating people in what, from our perspective, is a wholly invented world (although, as I said before, I would not regard creating a world with as much suffering as we observe as ethically permissible.) I would assign a far higher probability to simulators simulating a world with beings which are relatable to them than a world with beings unrelatable to them, provided they simulate a world with beings in it at all, but their own ancestors are only a tiny fraction of relatable being space.

I don't think that the likelihood of our descendants simulating us at all is particularly high; my predicted number of ancestor simulations should such a thing turn out to be possible is zero, which is one reason I've never found it a particularly compelling anthropic argument in the first place.

But, if people living in universes capable of running simulations tend to do run simulations, then it's probable that most people will be living in simulations, regardless of whether anyone ever chooses to run an ancestor simulation.

I don't see anything contradictory about it. There's no reason that a simulation that's not of the simulators' past need only contain people incidentally. We can be a simulation without being a simulation created by our descendants.

Personally, if I had the capacity to simulate universes, simulating my ancestors would probably be somewhere down around the twentieth spot on my priorities list, but most of the things I'd be interested in simulating would contain people.

I don't think I would regard simulating the universe as we observe it as ethically acceptable though, and if I were in a position to do so, I would at the very least lodge a protest against anyone who tried.

Well, unfortunately, what's possible for kids today and what kids today are regularly exposed to are very different things.

If we make the right choice as or more difficult to live with than wrong ones, we're not doing a very good job incentivizing people to take it.

I think no, and I think that if you'd say yes, you also ought to have the nerve to explain to victims like those quoted above how you think that their fate was better than the entirely counterfactual alternative.

Regardless of whether or not I agree with his position here, I think this is an unfair standard to set.

If you chose a 90% chance of saving 500 people over a 100% chance of saving 400, got unlucky, and those 500 died, how forgiving do you think their families would be? Do you think it would be easy to face them?

I don't think this sort of moral lever is very useful for separating good choices from bad ones.

Even if she were vain enough to launch status attacks on other members to elevate her own status, which I don't think she is, attacking other female members to lower their relative status sounds like the opposite of her track record.

In general, I think that if you're on the top all-time contributors sidebar, other people are going to see you as above medium status.

I don't think this is a productive avenue for this discussion to go down.

I'll point out here that even in America, many theists accept evolution, but most believe in guided evolution, where the deity set the process in motion and then directed the course of evolution to the desired result. This doesn't offer predictions that deviate nearly as much from our observations as the predictions of creationism, but our observations still contain a suspicious number of evolutionary dead ends, do-overs, and failures to use the best available evolutionary mechanisms (why couldn't our evolutionary guide have given us eyes more like squid eyes?)