Finally, I’m struggling to see how and where this is decision relevant for people or organizations—but that’s an entirely different set of complaints about how to do analyses.
One way in which it’s decision relevant for people considering how much to prioritize extinction risk mitigation. Arguments for extinction risk mitigation being overwhelmingly important often rely on the assumption that the expected value of the future is positive (and astronomically large). A seemingly sensible way to get evidence on whether the future is likely to be good is to look at whether the present is good and whether the trend is positive. I think this is why multiple people have tried to look into those questions (see Holden Karnovsky’s blog, which is linked already in the main post, and Chapter 9 of What We Owe the Future).
In fact, in WWOTF, Macaskill does almost the same exercise as the one in this post, except he uses neuron counts as measures of moral weight instead of rethink priorities’ weights. My memory is that he comes to the conclusion that the welfare of animals hardly makes an impact on total welfare. I think this post makes a very nice contribution in showing that Macaskill’s conclusion isn’t robust to using alternative (and plausible) moral weights.
Note: there could be plenty of other arguments for X-risk being overwhelmingly important that don’t rely on the claim that the expected value of the future is positive.
As a non-expert, this is surprising to me. And I’m not sure that this applies to the US context. I think it’s useful to distinguish between party polarization (democrats vs republicans) and ideological polarization (liberals vs conservatives). Almost any reform passed in the 1950s-1970s probably had bipartisan support, since the two parties were hardly ideologically polarized at that time. But many of these reforms were absolutely politicized on ideological grounds (liberals typically were in favor of civil rights and environmental reforms. Conservatives were not). I think the anti-slavery movement fits this description as well. Until the last few years before the civil war, the two major political parties (democrats and whigs) both contained large groups of pro-slavery and anti-slavery politicians. So opposition to slavery was bipartisan even though it was clearly polarized on ideological and geographical grounds. Only in the few years before the civil war did the major parties become polarized on the slavery issue.
In recent decades, since the two major parties have become more ideologically polarized, it seems like major reforms were politicized on both party and ideological lines (LGBTQ rights and climate change come to mind).
So, my guess is that most major social reforms in US history were highly politicized on ideological lines, but not necessarily on party lines. I could be wrong though. This is mostly based on reading wikipedia pages.