Your brain has a bunch of overlapping subsystems that are each conscious, according to many plausible criteria for consciousness you could use. You could say they're all minds. I'm not sure I'd say they're different minds, because if two overlap enough, they should be treated like the same one.

See also the problem of the many on SEP:

As anyone who has flown out of a cloud knows, the boundaries of a cloud are a lot less sharp up close than they can appear on the ground. Even when it seems clearly true that there is one, sharply bounded, cloud up there, really there are thousands of water droplets that are neither determinately part of the cloud, nor determinately outside it. Consider any object that consists of the core of the cloud, plus an arbitrary selection of these droplets. It will look like a cloud, and circumstances permitting rain like a cloud, and generally has as good a claim to be a cloud as any other object in that part of the sky. But we cannot say every such object is a cloud, else there would be millions of clouds where it seemed like there was one. And what holds for clouds holds for anything whose boundaries look less clear the closer you look at it. And that includes just about every kind of object we normally think about, including humans.

(Not speaking for my co-authors or RP.)

I think your brain-Fred is conscious, but overlaps so much with your whole brain that counting them both as separate moral patients would mean double counting.

We illustrated with systems that don't overlap much or at all. There are also of course more intermediate levels of overlap. See my comment here on some ideas for how to handle overlap:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vbhoFsyQmrntru6Kw/do-brains-contain-many-conscious-subsystems-if-so-should-we?commentId=pAZtCqpXuGk6H2FgF

EAGxVirtual is cheap to attend. I don't really see much downside to only attending one day. And you can still make connections and meet people after the conference is over. 

Thanks for sharing! And I'm happy to see cost-effectiveness models in your reviews again!

By the way, I don't see the Aquatic Life Institute's or the Good Food Fund's 2024 comprehensive reviews on their review pages. They only show archived reviews.

It seems to me that your account of desire as requiring affect misses a lot of what we would recognize as our own desires (or preferences) and which p-Vulcans (and Phenumb (Carruthers, 1999)) are capable of: beliefs that something would be good or bad, or better or worse, or worthy of pursuit or avoidance. This can include judgements about what's best for you, life satisfaction judgements, our goals, and (reasoned and) emotionally detached moral judgements. I discuss this more here. 

And another kind of desire is based primarily on motivational salience, the involuntary pull of attention to that which we desire (or are averse to) or things associated with it. This is dissociable from positive and negative affect. I discuss this more here.

My piece here from which I linked the sections above may be of more general interest, too.

Their evaluation process has been updated (e.g. here), and I'm inclined to wait to see their new evaluations and recommendations before criticizing much, because any criticism based on last year's work may no longer apply. Their new recommendations come out November 12th.

FWIW, I am sympathetic to your criticisms, as applied to last year's evaluations. I previously left some constructive criticism here, too.

A different version of (5), in response to Benign A-Fission, could be a rule that treats Lefty as non-extra and Righty as extra in Split B — maybe for basically the reasons you give for Split B over No Split —, and one of Lefty or Righty as non-extra in Split C. Then you'd choose Split B among the three options.

One incomplete rule that could deliver this result is the following:

If all the splits have non-negative welfare, treat one with the highest welfare as non-extra, and treat the others as extra.

So, No Split gives Anna 80 welfare, Split B, 10+90=100 welfare and Split C, 10+60=70 welfare. Split B is best.

This doesn't say what to do about splits with negative welfare. Two options:

1. Treat them all as non-extra.
2. Treat a worst off one as non-extra, and the rest as extra and ignore them.

We might also consider decreasing marginal value to additional splits beyond the highest positive (and worst negative) welfare one, instead of totally ignoring them. Maybe the highest welfare one gets full weight, the second highest gets weight $r,0<r<1$, the third highest gets $r^2$, ..., the n-th highest gets $r^{n-1}$. This bounds the weighted sum of welfare in the splits by ${\sum }_{n=0}^{\infty }{r}^n=\frac{1}{1-r}$ times the welfare of the best off split. They still count for something, but we could avoid Repugnant Fission.

Repugnant Fission doesn't seem nearly as bad to me as Repugnant Transition under interpretation (6), as someone sympathetic to person-affecting views. Repugnant Fission is not worse for anyone.

Repugnant Fission is basically the same as comparing a modestly long life wonderful at each moment to an extraordinarily long life barely worth living at each moment, for the same person. The extra moments of life play the same role as splits. If the longer life is long enough, under intrapersonal addition of welfare, it would be better. The problem, if any, is with intrapersonal aggregation, not person-affecting views.

And to be clear, the Repugnant Conclusion is not the main reason I'm sympathetic to person-affecting views. I think even just adding one extra person at the cost of the welfare of those who would exist anyway is bad. It doesn't take huge numbers.

What about an article along the lines of "Effective Altruists are trying to reduce insect populations"?

I would not want to ignore higher-order effects, and would rather try to bound their expected values, do sensitivity analysis and consider what we do at the level of portfolios of interventions instead of just interventions in isolation, and hedging.