2) "Nobody has ever experienced a crystal ball like this" Irellevant, as many do act at many points in life as such beliefs are 100% certainty (a plotting killer believing they will get away with it, for an extreme example). Doesn't matter whether they have a "crystal ball" guarantee of outcome X: their thinking making them see the future as having the same outcome X is enough.
As for (3) I sorta agree.
"MacAskill and others are concerned about what the discount rate should be because it is important for the decisions we make about the world—how much should we care about people who have not been born yet? One might be tempted to think that science could resolve this issue, but alas, it cannot."
Of course it cannot. It's an ethical decision, which rests on personal ethics (not totally unlike personal taste), which are influenced by cultural (society's) ethics.
If we want to think "rationally" about it, it would be based on "what kind of outcome we want for those future persons and how we can best achieve it". But even the choice of outcome would rest on ethics and cultural preferences - or something also non-rational like evolutionary urges.