Carl Shulman:

I'm surprised. Do you mean you wouldn't trade off a dust speck in your eye (in some post-singularity future where x-risk is settled one way or another) to avert the torture of a billion frogs, or of some noticeable portion of all frogs? If we plotted your attitudes to progressively more intelligent entities, where's the discontinuity or discontinuities?

Common descent means you can only behave as you do due to historical accidents, which may not hold for much longer as technology improves.

There is an unbroken series running from any human, to any other animal (like a chicken), where each two successive individuals are mother and child. It is merely historical happenstance that most of the individuals, except those at the two ends, are dead: and one that will no longer hold in the future if we defeat death.

If you force your moral theory to evaluate all the individuals along that line - who, again, are not hypotheticals, counterfactuals or future possibilities, but actual historical deceased individuals - then it might say one of two things:

1. At some point along the line, the mother has moral value, and the child and its descendants do not (or vice versa). Or, at a special point along the line, one daughter has moral value, and her sister does not. That seems arbitrary and absurd.
2. Moral value gradually changes along the line. People who hold this view differ on whether it ever reaches effectively zero value (in the case of chickens, at least). In this case, you necessarily admit that pre-human individuals (like your ancestor of a few million years ago) have distinctly less-than-human moral value. And you (almost) necessarily admit that, if you extend the line beyond humans into some hypothetical futures, individuals might come to exist who have greater moral value than anyone living today.

The second option flies in the face of your position that:

I think we end up with a much better society if we treat all humans as morally equal

Historically, this merely begs the question: it shifts the argument onto "who is human?" Are blacks? Are women? Are children? Are babies? Are fetuses? Are brain-dead patients? Are mentally or physically crippled individuals? Are factors like (anti-)contraceptives influencing the possibility of future children? Ad infinitum.

So the real value of this statement is merely in the implication that we agree to treat clear non-humans, like chickens, as having no moral value at all. Otherwise we would be forced to admit that some chickens may have more moral value than some proto- or pre-humans.

If you asked me how many chickens I would be willing to kill to save your life, the answer is effectively "all of them"

How many one day old infants would you be willing to kill to save a mentally healthy adult?

I would advise against answering a question of the form "How many of animal X would you trade for one average human," because of the likelihood of rewriting your values by making a verbal (or in this case, written) commitment to an estimate influenced by scope insensitivity, and the greater availability of what goes on in a human's head than in an animal's.

In general, I think trying to weigh secular values against sacred values is a recipe for reducing the amount you care about the former.

[1] Chicken extinction would make life worse for many other people, so I wouldn't actually do that, but not because of the effect on the chickens.

Question: If a person is concerned about the existential risks of species, and a person is concerned with lessening suffering of common species of animals, and a person is concerned with human lives, how does that person make tradeoffs among those?

I was thinking about this, and I realized I had no idea how to resolve the following problem:

Omega says "Hi. I can institute anyone one of these three policies, but only one at a time. Other than locking out the other policies, for each year the policy is in place, none has a downside... except that I will mercilessly dutch book you with policy offers if you're inconsistent with your judgement of the ratios."

Policy A: Save X Common Non-Human Animals capable of feeling pain per year from painful, pointless, executions that will not overall affect the viability of the that Species of Common Non-Human Animals.

Policy B: Save Y rarer species per year from extinction. These can be anything from Monkeys, to Mites, to Moss (So they may not have a nervous system).

Policy C: Save Z Humans capable of feeling pain per year from painful, pointless, executions that will not overall affect the viability of the Human Species.

Every time I attempt to construct some acceptable ratio of X:Y:Z, I seem to think "This doesn't seem correct." Thoughts?

It seems to me that this logic necessarily makes you choose torture over dust specks, since one can construct a nearly continuous sequence of animals between chickens and humans and patch the gaps, if any, with probabilities. But you are probably OK with that, since you write

While I'm uncertain where along there things start getting up to significant levels, I think it's probably somewhere that includes no or almost no animals but nearly all humans.

and this argument breaks down once you start making comparisons like "0.01% odds of one human dying now vs all animals dying now" or "1 day reduction in the life expectancy of one human vs all animals dying now" etc.

There is also a sticky issue regarding the Turing Test. Suppose we agree that any AI that convinces its interlocutor 70% of the time that is human is "effectively human", and has the same rights as a natural human. What happens with an AI that passes 69.9% of the time?

So you treat humans as the only entities that count morally as this is the closest Schelling point?

I think you should recognise you have a finer grained decision tree than this. Think about the difference between swatting a mosquito that could bite you, and harming your neighbour's prize chicken, both animals but different moral statuses.

To abandon the myth of natural rights is not to deny the existence of legal rights. Humans and only humans make laws. No animal, humans included, has a natural right.