I disagree with you about wild animal welfare--I think it's clearly negative.  I agree though that we should be cautious and give to the wild animal institute.  But even if they have positive lives, if they'll still die eventually, this just pushes them back to have another more painful death.  

Do you think paying for more human pesticides is more effective than SWP?  And is there a charity doing that? 

I mean, the alternative is the mosquitos dying later.  Do we have reason to expect their later deaths to be any better?  Given that mosquitos are R-strategists, it might be good to kill them if we think they live negative lives (which I do--I know you're less certain).

Hmm, I guess none of those happening seems decently likely to me--around 50% probability. 

Yeah sure!  Thanks so much! 

Checking it out now.

Things with a 50% chance of being very good aren't pascal's muggings!  Your decision theory can't be "Pascal's muggin means I ignore everything with probability less than .5 of being good."

But those guys almost definitely aren't conscious.  There's a difference between how you reason about absurdly low probabilities and decent probabilities.  

(I also think that we shouldn't a priori rule out that the world might be messy such that we're constnatly inadvertently harming huge numbers of conscious creatures).

I do not think a joking throwaway reference to a statement from the upcoming vice president is offensive.

I was assuming both buttons are available.  Specifically, suppose Bob exists:

1. Bob getting an extra 1 util and Todd being created with a util is better than that not happening.  
2. Todd being created with 3 utils is better than the scenario in 1.  

//This isn't true. I can just deny the independence of irrelevant alternatives instead.//

That doesn't help.  The world where only button 1 is pressed is better than the world where neither is pressed, the world where both are pressed is better than the world where only button 1 is pressed, so by transitivity, an extra happy person is good.  

You can always deny any intuition, but I'd hope this would convince people without fairly extreme views.