It reads like an essay arguing X with a tiny disclaimer at the end to cover yourself, but fair enough. I've retracted the downvote.

I voted this down. Why? Because if you're going to post an old argument which has been disputed many times, you should acknowledge the common responses to it and be able to articulate some reason as to why you don't accept them. This post has utterly failed at doing that.

What I said had nothing to do with the specific number 12, except that that's what the original post used. My point was that you can't make a list of a lot of evils (regardless of the exact number) and assign percentages and multiply them together. When asked to assign percentages for unlikely events, people assign them in a logically inconsistent way. The entire argument consists of abusing this inconsistency in order to make the chance of evil look high.

There are lots of conceivable ways one might do enormous evil. Thus, the odds that we’d manage to avoid doing evil in any of those ways are fairly low. If there were just one potential atrocity, it wouldn’t be too hard to avoid it. But when there are many different ones, even if there’s a 90% chance of avoiding any particular one, the odds we’d avoid them all are low.

That depends on the probability you assign to each one. This is just another argument that takes advantage of 1) the fact that people are bad at estimating small probabilities in the first place, and 2) scope insensitivity leading people to not make smaller probability estimates for things that are less likely and more specific. (And the number 90% is ridiculous anyway.)

If you name 12 possible sources of evil, the probability for each one shouldn't sum up to more than the total probability of evil. It should not be possible to get a large total by naming 12 cases, asking for probabilities for each case, and combining them. The fact that you can do this doesn't mean that the probability of evil is high, it means that people are bad with numbers.

Companies that discriminate make less money, but that doesn't mean that the company goes out of business tomorrow. It just means that on the average, the company may not last quite as long as other companies. You still get a steady state where companies keep entering and leaving the market, but each company that enters with bad business practices lasts somewhat less time than the other companies. That will never result in such companies not existing in the market at all. (And woe be you if a company doesn't discriminate, gets huge, and then starts discriminating. Its advantages from being big and entrenched are so big that discrimination won't reduce its survivability by a noticeable amount.)

That also ignores the possibility of multipolar traps where most companies discriminate, and failing to do so gets a company in trouble from all the ones that do. They would be better off if nobody discriminated, but a single company who fails to discriminate would lose.

By your reasoning, Disney and Google would have gone out of business already.

(And I can name a lot of money-losing practices where companies with those practices are still around.)

Noah Smith’s argument that American pop culture is stagnant in part because we’ve mined out some of the creative fields that new tech has unlocked.

Marvel superhero movies used to be reliable hits. This is no longer true. DC has been doing much worse for superhero movies, but still has had some hits. The tech for being able to create them is pretty recent. I don't believe for a moment that there are fewer hits because it's been mined out; the studios are just producing crappy superhero movies.

The big image on his page is the Rise of Skywalker and I don't believe for a moment that Star Wars has been mined out either. There have been some good Star Wars productions; the recent movies just weren't among them.

If you prefer getting the gift instead of money, then you would prefer having the gift instead of having the money, which means that if you receive money you would use the money to buy the equivalent of the gift, not save it. It's contradictory to put the money into savings (prefer the money over the item) but "prefer getting gifts" (prefer the item over the money).

Quantum immortality keeps you alive by some definitions, but not alive and well. The branches where you are badly injured or sick but still alive are more numerous than the branches where you are perfectly fine.

Incidentally, a hypothetical 1080p version of the video encoded at the same bitrate the actual 360p version is using would look even worse

This is impossible. Assuming the content is originally 1080p, 360p is merely a type of lossy compression of the 1080p. The decompression algorithm is "upscale the 360p to 1080p" and the end result is an approximation of the original 1080p video that isn't quite correct because information ws thrown out.

At some scale, if the infrastructure is an effective monopoly and is necessary for life, then the simpler exclusion mechanisms become infeasible

How exactly do they become infeasible? The fact that someone can't live when excluded doesn't prevent you from excluding them. And since the goal takes priority over justice or fairness, you wouldn't care that they can't live.