(personal views only) In brief, yes, I still basically believe both of these things; and no, I don't think I know of any other type or action that I'd consider 'robustly positive', at least from a strictly consequentialist perspective.

​To be clear, my belief regarding (i) and (ii) is closer to "there exist actions of these types that are robustly positive", as opposed to "any action that purports to be of one these types is robustly positive". E.g., it's certainly possible to try to reduce the risk of human extinction but for that attempt to be ineffective or even counterproductive (i.e., to on net increase the risk of extinction, or to otherwise cause significant harms such that I'd consider the action impermissible), it's possible for resources that were acquired for impartial welfarist purposes to eventually be misused, etc.,

I made some nuanced updates about "acquiring resources for longtermist goals", but they are mostly things like me having become more or less excited about particular examples/substrategies, me having somewhat richer views on some pitfalls of that strategy (though I don't think I became aware of qualitatively 'new' pitfalls), etc., as opposed to sweeping updates about that whole class of actions and whether they can be robustly positive.

I don't remember I'm afraid. I don't recall having seen the article you link to, so I doubt it was that. Maybe it was this one.

Thanks, appreciate it!

Do you have any data you can share on how the population responding to the FTX section/survey differs from the full EAS survey population? E.g. along dimensions like EA engagement, demographics, ... – Or anything else that could shed light on the potential selection effect at this stage? (Sorry if you say this somewhere and I missed it.) Thanks for all your work on this!

This isn't quite what you're looking for because it's more a partial analogy of the phenomenon you point to rather than a realistic depiction, but FWIW I found this old short story by Eliezer Yudkowsky quite memorable.

In the short-term (the next ten years), WAW interventions we could pursue to help wild animals now seem less cost-effective than farmed animal interventions.

Out of curiosity: When making claims like this, are you referring to the cost-effectiveness of farmed animal interventions when only considering the impacts on farmed animals? Or do you think this claim still holds if you also consider the indirect effects of farmed animal interventions on wild animals?

(Sorry if you say this somewhere and I missed it.)

I like this idea! Quick question: Have you considered whether, for a version of this that uses past data/conjectures, one could use existing data compiled by AI Impacts rather than the Wikipedia article from 2015 (as you suggest)?

(Though I guess if you go back in time sufficiently far, it arguably becomes less clear whether Laplace's rule is a plausible model. E.g., did mathematicians in any sense 'try' to square the circle in every year between Antiquity and 1882?)

Tail-effects in education: Since interventions have to scale, they end up being mediocre to "what could be possible."

Related: Bloom's two-sigma problem:

Bloom found that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment with one teacher to 30 students

(haven't vetted the Wikipedia article or underlying research at all)

"Moral realism" usually just means that moral beliefs can be true or false. That leaves lots options for explaining what the truth conditions of these beliefs are.

Moral realism is often (though not always) taken to, by definition, also include the claim that at least some moral beliefs are true – e.g. here in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A less ambiguous way to refer to just the view that moral beliefs can be true or false is 'moral cognitivism', as also mentioned here.

This is to exclude from moral realism the view known as 'error theory', which says that moral beliefs are the sorts of things that can have truth values but that all of them are false.

[I'm using "belief" in a loose sense in this comment, on which it is not just true by definition that a belief can be true or false. People using 'belief' in the latter sense would describe the noncognitivist view as saying that those things that appear to be moral beliefs in fact aren't beliefs at all.]

Parfit here is making a reference to Sidgwick's "Government House utilitarianism," which seemed to suggest only people in power should believe utilitarianism but not spread it.

This may be clear to you, and isn't important for the main point of your comment, but I think that 'Government House utilitarianism' is a term coined by Bernard Williams in order to refer to this aspect of Sidgwick's thought while also alluding to what Williams viewed as an objectionable feature of it.

Sigdwick himself, in The Methods of Ethics, referred to the issue as esoteric morality  (pp. 489–490, emphasis mine):

the Utilitarian should consider carefully the extent to which his advice or example are likely to influence persons to whom they would be dangerous: and it is evident that the result of this consideration may depend largely on the degree of publicity which he gives to either advice or example. Thus, on Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to do in the face of the world; and even, if perfect secrecy can be reasonably expected, what it would be wrong to recommend by private advice or example. These conclusions are all of a paradoxical character:^[372] there is no doubt that the moral consciousness of a plain man broadly repudiates the general notion of an esoteric morality, differing from that popularly taught; and it would be commonly agreed that an action which would be bad if done openly is not rendered good by secrecy. We may observe, however, that there are strong utilitarian reasons for maintaining generally this latter common opinion [...]. Thus the Utilitarian conclusion, carefully stated, would seem to be this; that the opinion that secrecy may render an action right which would not otherwise be so should itself be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems expedient that the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric. Or if this concealment be difficult to maintain, it may be desirable that Common Sense should repudiate the doctrines which it is expedient to confine to an enlightened few. And thus a Utilitarian may reasonably desire, on Utilitarian principles, that some of his conclusions should be rejected by mankind generally; or even that the vulgar should keep aloof from his system as a whole, in so far as the inevitable indefiniteness and complexity of its calculations render it likely to lead to bad results in their hands.

In his Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture on 18 February 1982 (or rather the version of it included in Williams's posthumously published essay collection The Sense of the Past), after quoting roughly the above passage from Sidgwick, Williams says:

On this kind of account, Utilitarianism emerges as the morality of an élite, and the distinction between theory and practice determines a class of theorists distinct from other persons, theorists in whose hands the truth of the Utilitarian justification of non-Utilitarian dispositions will be responsibly deployed. This outlook accords well enough with the important colonial origins of Utilitarianism. This version may be called ‘Government House Utilitarianism’. It only partly deals with the problem, since it is not generally true, and it was not indeed true of Sidgwick, that Utilitarians of this type, even though they are theorists, are prepared themselves to do without the useful dispositions altogether. So they still have some problem of reconciling the two consciousnesses in their own persons—even though the vulgar are relieved of that problem, since they are not burdened with the full consciousness of the Utilitarian justification. Moreover, Government House Utilitarianism is unlikely, at least in any very overt form, to commend itself today.

There has since been the occasional paper mentioning or commenting on the issue, including a defense of esoteric morality by Katarzyna De Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer (2010).