Tax isn't "wasted" by making money vanish from the economy though (except for the deadweight loss) it's just redistributed to other people via payouts, jobs, loans or indirectly via goods purchases. Statistically, some of these beneficiaries will enjoy longer lives through the same indirect income-mortality relationship you invoke to associate taxes with death. This is true even of public spending which is - relative to others - extremely wasteful and not evaluated as lifesaving even by its proponents.^[1] 

Which is why I'd argue it makes far more sense to focus cost-benefit analysis on deadweight losses and [counterfactual alternative] uses of public funds. Because regardless of whether the tax is focused on creating "good things" or not, the net result of the transfer probably isn't killing people..

In a developed country with a progressive tax system, the demographics paying most of the tax are unlikely to typically need the income to survive more than state employees or other [indirect] recipients the resulting public expenditure benefits, even for ridiculous ideas like paying millions of dancers to create synchronised tributes to the president. So ignoring extremely indirect and difficult to quantify transfer effects (or explicitly treating them as netting out to zero) in favour of focusing on direct effects and deadweight loss in cost-benefit analysis probably if anything is biased against tax and spend. Empirically, tax burden is positively correlated with longevity, even amongst US states.

1. ^{^}

   paying superfluous bureaucrats may be an inefficient way of saving lives, but in exactly the same way as taxing people is a very inefficient way of killing, especially where the tax is progressive above affordability thresholds and targeted benefits/rebates exist

I didn't vote, but it is an article about the "mortality cost of taxation" which imputes significant mortality whilst completely disregarding the expected mortality reduction of the tax money being spent back into the economy, and the likelihood that the redistribution is net positive. It appears the author acknowledged that bit after getting the negative response. (I also think the estimation methodology is flawed, which is very well explained by Soemano Zeijlmans' comment)^[1] 

Sure, it's not in dispute that taxation, like giving to overseas charity, can result in economic deadweight loss, and ceteris paribus economic deadweight loss can lead to lower life expectancy. A really interesting paper might even have explored this (most likely coming to the conclusion that the benefits of redistribution to people on very low incomes and funding health and education vastly exceeded deadweight loss in modern welfare states, but it would be wise to ensure that very little of the tax burden fell on the poor and to minimise government waste).  But if you write an article which is the equivalent of "the mortality cost of overseas aid" which skips the bit where actually overseas aid is pretty good at reducing mortality it's probably going to get some pushback, especially here.   

I don't think it's "significant bias" talking, because I suspect an article about the "mortality cost of markets" which focused on the role of markets in depriving people of stuff and disregarded their role in getting stuff produced altogether would accumulate disagree votes here too.

1. ^{^}

   though tbf I've seen other flawed methodologies estimate significantly higher mortality cost

Aside from these complications I also don't see much if any benefit to regular founders of this "give away equity early" arrangement outside the scope of support from an AIM or a similar social enterprise organization that actually aims to help their business.

Founder's Pledge pitch to founders (and other HNW individuals)  is straightforward: pledge to give away part of your wealth when you think it's optimal from the perspective of value maximization, donation opportunities, exit strategy, tax efficiency and they'll present donation opportunities which align with your priorities and approach to evidence. 

Whereas this proposal seems to be "give us some of your equity and we'll decide if, when and what we donate it to". If founders want a fund to do the allocations for them they'll find funds that will accept their equity as soon as it becomes liquid anyway, and those funds will be able to make decisions on cashing out and disbursal without the admin costs of being small shareholders in many pre-profit or never to be profitable startups so they'll probably be more efficient at doing so.

I think there's probably room for more variations on the Founder's Pledge model, but I don't see this proposal being it in its current form.

0.864 s (= 24*60^2/(100*10^3)) of excruciating pain in humans neutralises 1 day of fully healthy life in humans. Do you think this is "unconventional and extremely skewed

Yes. I can't think of any pain in which I would prefer to die than suffer for 0.864 seconds per day, particularly not if the remaining aspects of my life were "practically maximally happy".^[1]

I find it even harder to imagine that an insect can distinguish between painful sensations to the degree that a pain scale with at least 100k points on it would be appropriate to approximate their welfare on,^[2] still less that an appropriate use of such a scale is to multiply a human/insect welfare ratio to conclude that the complete cessation of function of that simple insect nervous system is a few orders of magnitude more intense conscious experience than the "practically maximally happy" (or even average) utility of a human.

1. ^{^}

   If I did think [potential] sub second pain was as significant as an entire day's welfare, I would probably not endorse electrical stunning...

2. ^{^}

   I mean, they've only got 200k neurons to divide between all their functions. (This isn't an argument for neuron count being a good proxy for moral weights overall, merely an observation of how extreme the pain scale looks in the context of how simple the insect's system for parsing stimuli appears to be)

For my guess that excruciating pain is 100 k (= 10*10^3/0.1) times as intense as fully healthy life, the 119 mosquito-seconds of excruciating pain per mosquito killed by ITNs neutralise 138 mosquito-days (= 119/60^2/24*100*10^3) of fully healthy life, or 1.79 human-days (= 138*0.013) of fully healthy life based on RP's median welfare range of black soldier flies.

Thanks for that clarification. So essentially your claims rest on the utility value of over a day and a half of human life being lower than that of two minutes of a dying insect.

Two comments here: 

1. this, like some of your other estimates relies rather heavily on an unconventional and extremely skewed pain scale, whereby a certain degree of pain is worth many times more than maximal pleasure^[1], as well as confidently attributing that maximal degree of pain that vastly exceeds the pleasure experienced by more complicated creatures to a particular scenario
2. I 'm not sure this is actually how RP intend their welfare ranges to be used. My understanding (and I welcome clarification/correction from RP on this point) is that when their researchers estimate that $creature's welfare range is 1.3% that of humans, they intend that to be interpreted as "$creature's pain sensations are at most 1.3% as intense as human experience", not "to establish how intensely $creature feels pain, multiply 1.3% by a pain scale which may contain an arbitrarily large number of digits, to reach the conclusion that this creature's pain is potentially thousands of times as intense as human pleasure."

I'd also point out that even with those pain scales and welfare ranges, the calculation looks completely different if one also factors in potentially intense human pain from [nonfatal] malaria infections multiple times per year and experienced over several days, with [rare] neurological systems which may persist for the rest of a natural human life. Again, I'm not sure exactly what a pain scale for celebral malaria should look like but I'm unconvinced there are reasons for regarding it as so much less intense than mosquito pain it can be disregarded when comparing between species.

1. ^{^}

   I recognise that extremely wide-ranging and asymmetric pain scales are convenient to pure hedonic utilitarians who might otherwise be troubled by philosophical problems like utility monsters or trading off a single torture for a speck of dust in my eye: I just think they're unusual positions not well supported by evidence. 

Which 2 min of pain in mosquitoes are you referring to?

The 2 minutes corresponds to the estimated 119 seconds of estimated excruciating pain per mosquito death in the aggregate estimate in your spreadsheet, comprising nearly all the estimated utility loss.

I do not kill mosquitoes or other insects inside my house, but I guess quickly crushing insects causes them much less pain than ITNs.

It was less about your personal footprint and more about the spiders.  I once lived in a place by a river an enormous quantity of insects were attracted by any sort of light bulb, which was where the spiders liked to dine out (unless they were deterred with peppermint spray or their cobwebs repeatedly swept away). A web full of wriggling flies wasn't a particularly attractive sight, but I'm disinclined to believe that web was experiencing utility loss far more significant than anything going on in my life^[1] But since you are arguing a few minutes of a single insect ingesting a neurotoxin may be of extremely high negative value, keeping spiders away from insects using cheap peppermint spray seems like an highly net positive form of harm reduction worth considering?

My assumption was somewhat informed by a trip I did to Moshi (Tanzania) in early 2020. There were certainly more than 1 mosquito bitting me per hour during dust, and I was using repellent if I recall correctly

Outdoors at dusk is peak mosquito time though, and 2-3 mosquitos are capable of a lot of bites. I would imagine you had access to some sort of treated nets, and didn't have have to clean 20 or 30 dead mosquitos off the floor every day? 

1. ^{^}

   I'd have a particularly hard time believing insects had evolved a complex and intense appreciation of neurological pain whilst far more useful traits like navigation were as simplistic and mechanistic as repeatedly flying into a light source... 

If I'm understanding your calculations correctly, the underlying assumption is that the pain you estimate a mosquito to experience for two minutes has the same weight as an entire afternoon of incomparably blissful human existence even taking into account the cognitive differences between a human and a mosquito? There doesn't appear to be an obviously correct way to weight the relative intensity of experience of a human and a mosquito, but this one seems like an outlier; typically arguments for considering insect suffering depend on them being more numerous rather than their individual suffering being orders of magnitude more intense than human enjoyment. In all seriousness, if you do attach such high weights to the possible suffering of individual insects, I highly recommend nontoxic spider repellent, especially around your light fittings as an extremely cost effective intervention.

Some of your more quantifiable estimates also seem selected to be particularly unfavourable to humans. For example, the robustly established fact that humans experience days of pain from malaria infections, (including the vast majority of malaria infections which are nonfatal) is disregarded. Medical literature evaluating anti-malaria interventions often focuses on mortality rather than morbidity too, but it's not weighing up human DALYs against a few minutes of mosquito morbidity! Likewise, the assumption that a typical ITN is killing an average of 24 mosquitos per day seems to depend on an inflated number mosquitos per dwelling, even before the mild repellent effect and low killing efficiency of fleeting contact with the nets is considered.

Agree that I don't think anticapitalism is tractable for anticapitalism's sake, never mind as a solution to specific AI companies' behaviour. 

I also agree that it's worth understanding why various anticapitalist regimes - most obviously Marxist-Leninism -  failed^[1]. Perhaps the biggest cautionary tale is that self-styled "revolutionary" Marxist-Leninist regimes ultimately evolved from extrapolating trends into a theory of a big, happy future after radical change. But two of the biggest reasons Marxist-Leninism failed, corruption and authoritarianism, are not unique to socialism, and the most distinct reason (centrally planned economies didn't allocate enough resources to serving consumer demand and rewarding work ethic and ingenuity) lose significance  in a hypothetical long term future in which resources aren't particularly scarce, human work ethic isn't a constraint and maybe the "ingenuity" comes from computer-based processes you probably don't want to restrict to capital owners. If you think an era of AI-driven growth taking us close to post-scarcity is near,^[2] it probably doesn't make much sense to worry about preserving the twentieth century growth model. But at the same time, also too early to experiment with putative replacements.

1. ^{^}

   though I'd probably choose somewhere other than the IEA to start that research process...

2. ^{^}

   personally I think we're a long way from that, but many longtermists evidently feel differently.

I'd add that to the extent conscious experience can be considered "self evident" only one's own experience of pain and pleasure can be "self evident" via conscious experience. 

If Nunik's contention is that only things which achieve that experiential level of validation can be assigned intrinsic value with intuitions carrying zero evidential weight, it seems we would have to disregard our intuitions that other people or creatures might have similar experiences, and attach zero value  to their possible pain/pleasure.

I mean, hedonic egoism is a philosophical position, but perhaps not a well-regarded one on a forum for people trying to be altruistic...

Feels unlikely either that it would create an actually valid natural experiment (as you acknowledge, it's not a huge proportion of aid, and there are a lot of other factors that affect a country) or persuade people to do aid differently.

Particularly when EA's GHD programmes tend to be already focused on stuff which is well-evidenced at a granular level (malaria cures and vitamin supplementation) and targeted at specific countries with those problems (not all developing countries have malaria), by organizations that are not necessarily themselves EA, and a lot of non-EA funders are also trying to solve those problems in similar or identical ways.

Also feels like it would be a poor decision for, say, a Charity Entrepreneurship founder trying to solve a problem she identified as one she could make a major difference with based on her extensive knowledge of poverty in India deciding to try the programme in a potentially different Guinean context she doesn't have the same background understanding of simply because other EAs happened to have diverted funding to Guinea for signalling purposes.