Fair! I interpret them as probably happy free-range sheep being raised for wool, an existence I'm happy about and in particular prefer to vegetablehood, but a) that seems uncertain, and b) ymmv regarding the value of unfree sheep lives being used as a means to an end etc. 

The seals share the reference class "seals" but are different, notably one is way bigger than the others. So if you wanted to predict something about the big seal, there is a discussion to be had about what to make of the seal reference class, or other possible reference classes e.g. "things that weigh half a ton"

Assuming your preferences don't involve other people or the world

Not sure about this, but to the extent it was so, often they were right that a lot of things they liked would be gone soon, and that that was sad. (Not necessarily on net, though maybe even on net for them and people like them.)

Seems like there are a lot of possibilities, some of them good, and I have little time to think about them. It just feels like a red flag for everything in your life to be swapped for other things by very powerful processes beyond your control while you are focused on not dying. Like, if lesser changes were upcoming in people's lives such that they landed in near mode, I think they would be way less sanguine—e.g. being forced to move to New York City.

Do you mean that the half-day projects have to be in sequence relative to the other half-day projects, or within a particular half-day project, its contents have to be in sequence (so you can't for instance miss the first step then give up and skip to the second step)?

In general if things have to be done in sequence, often I make the tasks non-specific, e.g. lets say i want to read a set of chapters in order, then i might make the tasks 'read a chapter' rather than 'read the first chapter' etc. Then if I were to fail at the first one, I would keep reading the first chapter to grab the second item, then when I eventually rescued what would have been the first chapter, I would collect it by reading whatever chapter I was up to. (This is all hypothetical—I never read chapters that fast.)

Second sentence: 

• People say very different things depending on framing, so responses to any particularly-framed question are presumably not accurate, though I'd still take them as some evidence.
• People say very different things from one another, so any particular person is highly unlikely to be accurate.  An aggregate might still be good, but e.g. if people say such different things that three-quarters of them have to be totally wrong, then I don't think it's that much more likely that the last quarter is about right than that the answer is something almost nobody said.

First sentence: 

• In spite of the above, and the prior low probability of this being a reliable guide to AGI timelines, our paper was the 16th most discussed paper in the world. On the other hand, something like Ajeya's timelines report (or even AI Impacts' cruder timelines botec earlier) seem more informative, and to get way less attention. (I didn't mean 'within the class of surveys, interest doesn't track informativeness much' though that might be true, I meant 'people seem to have substantial interest in surveys beyond what is explained by them being informative about e.g. AI timelines'
• ) 

We didn't do rounding though, right? Like, these people actually said 0?