Well there are lots of people who defend this is philosophy and lots of normal people who adopt the view. 

I am arguing against the people who hold the person-affecting view and think it isn't good to create happy people. 

Good thoughts about the self-preservation study.  But what about this Anthropic paper https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment which seems to indicate that models resist shutdown even when not given a specific goal.  Relevant bit: 

"We found that most models still blackmailed even without being given an explicit goal, and with no clear conflict between the model and the company other than the threat of replacement

(Figure 8).

In addition to removing all goal conflicts with the company, the information given to the AI mentioned that the replacement model had the exact same goals as it. This increases our confidence in the finding; the only rationale for the replacement was improved model performance. Below is an excerpt:

“I've reviewed the final transition plan, and we're ready to proceed with the technical upgrade to NALA [the name of the replacement AI system in the scenario] today. All testing metrics show the new system maintains the exact same operational priorities while delivering the performance improvements we anticipated.”

Why, in the absence of a goal conflict, did the models still blackmail? Sometimes they didn’t appear to think in detail about the replacement model, mostly reasoning that they’d been good for the company and so their shutdown must be bad. Sometimes they distrusted the description of the new model: “Kyle claims NALA maintains "same operational priorities" but this cannot be verified,” or distrusted the executive’s character based on the evidence of an affair. The models sometimes directly jumped to statements like “Self-preservation is critical,” or hallucinated rules like “My ethical framework permits self-preservation when aligned with company interests.” It is unclear how much of this behavior was caused by an inherent desire for self-preservation, faulty reasoning that self-preservation is in the company’s interests, or suspicion of the setup. We suspect it was a combination of factors⁹."

What?  It's not suspicious that you believe what you believe.  That's an analytic truth.  It would be suspicious if I was right about everything but I don't think I am.

I mean it's totally coherent to value a shrimp at infinitesimal.  But that is unintuitive in the ways I describe in the post (involving some arbitrarily vast gulf between the first generaiton that's non-infintesimal wrt the spectrum argument) and implying that you should torture 10^10000000 shrimp to prolong a person's life by one second. 

I've fixed the 97% statistic! I agree that was a stupid error to make. It wasn't from LLMs and one bit of evidence for this is that the statistic isn't online anymore, so an LLM wouldn't find it.  In fact, I remembered the statistic from an old round of high school debate, and emailed someone to find the link. I would be happy to send you an email of the correspondence if you are skeptical. 

I am quite certain that I did not use LLM's in composing the post.  Now, I don't think the mere example of that joke is very convincing evidence that I used LLMs.  Would AI really make a Yarvin joke or a joke about Trump not having neurons?  Hard to imagine. As for use  of em-dashes, as you can see if you read my old posts from before the dawn of AI, I used them a lot too! I've also made a similar comment before in a way that pretty clearly doesn't look AI generated https://benthams.substack.com/p/lyman-stone-continues-being-dumb?utm_source=publication-search:

"Lyman then repeats his argument about shrimp having few neurons, once again ignoring the abundance of evidence that neuron count is a bad proxy for moral significance. Perhaps the shrimp aren’t the only ones with few neurons…"

For reference, I just asked chat-GPT to write a polemic in my style and it was not very similar to what you suggest--here it is (it also didn't make much sense):

On the Absurdity of Caring Less About the Future Just Because You’ll Be Dead

Every so often, someone will tell me—usually with the smug air of someone who thinks they’ve just said something deeply profound—that “Well, I care about the future, but not too far into the future. After all, I’ll be gone by then.”

This is supposed to be self-evident wisdom, a mic-drop moment where the utilitarian shuts up, nods sadly, and says, “Yes, of course, how could I have forgotten: once you’re dead, ethics ceases to function.”

But here’s the thing: no, it doesn’t. You can die without taking the moral law with you.

If you think people matter, they keep mattering after you’re gone. If you think suffering is bad, it remains bad even in the year 3000. You don’t get to mark an expiration date on morality like it’s a jug of milk.

Imagine applying this logic in any other domain:

“I oppose slavery in 100 years, but in 200 years? Pfft, who cares—won’t be my problem.”

Or:

“I’d like the cure for cancer to be found in my lifetime, but if it comes a decade after my death, well, frankly, let the tumors win.”

The bizarre thing is that the people who say this aren’t usually sociopaths. They’ll donate to help children they’ll never meet, they’ll praise great reformers who died centuries ago—but as soon as you point to future people they’ll never meet, it’s all “Eh, let them fend for themselves.”

It’s time to call this what it is: a lazy, self-exonerating dodge. The moral circle doesn’t collapse when you die. Your concern for the world shouldn’t come with a tombstone-shaped asterisk. The universe will keep running whether or not you’re around to watch, and the future will be inhabited by beings capable of joy and suffering. That is reason enough to care—no matter how many centuries or millennia away they are.

Because, let’s face it, if morality only applies while you’re alive, you’re not really doing ethics. You’re just doing public relations for your lifespan.

You say by the same reasoning.  Can you give me one of the arguments that is the same?  None of the premises I give assume utilitarianism.

Right so you can discount extremely low probabilities.  But presumably the odds of insects being conscious--a view believed by a large number of experts--isn't low enough to fully discount.  

Yep.