See, the issue is that you think the downvotes were because of your views. I can't speak for other people, but I downvoted you because you were engaging in behaviors I prefer to discourage; namely, ignoring the substantive thrust of a post to nitpick at a relatively insignificant comment made in the middle whose absence wouldn't affect the post as a whole. And, as we see here, you made that comment not because it was substantive or seriously detracted from the post, but because it was an ideological matter with which you disagreed with the author. Hence my comment to you: "I found it concern-trolling at worst, and irrelevant at best".
Because, as Dagon pointed out, using your criteria, the progress is -still- a positive thing. That's the point of this post. Taking it as an opportunity to try to start an ideological fight is just bad manners.
See, downvotes here don't mean Less Wrong disagrees with you (although that's how some people use it, it's not the cultural standard). Downvotes mean people want to see less of the kind of post/comment that was downvoted.
I honestly don't give a tinker's cuss about the intra-movement arguments within EA, and if this is how EA behaves, I'd like to see less of it as a whole. You're not representing your movement very well.
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At least some of them will tell you they had rather not been born. But maybe you'll want to equip these orcs with an even stronger drive for existence, so they never choose death over life even if you torture them; would that make it more ok? I suspect not, so something with the "Do they complain to having been created?" approach seems flawed imo. Creating beings with a strong preference for existence would make it too easy to legitimize doing with them whatever you want.
How about imagining beings who at any moment are intrinsically indifferent to whether they exist or not? They only won't complain as long as they don't suffer. Perhaps that's too extreme as well, but if it's only simple/elegant rules you're looking for, this one seems more acceptable to me than the torture-bots above.