The strongest case for Trump is that the Democrat establishment is systematically deceiving the American people (e.g. via the years-long cover-up of Biden's mental state, strong partisan bias in mainstream media, and extensive censorship campaigns), engaging in lawfare against political opponents (e.g. against Elon and Trump), and generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life (including bureaucracies which do a lot of harm, like the FDA, FTC, EPA etc).

Bureaucracy point seems potentially reasonable to me, although hard to say if that exactly equates to less/more democratic or just worse domestic situation. 

The cover up of bidens mental state is "highly undemocratic"? that would be not in the top 1000 least democratic things trump/republicans have done in the last 8 years. 

Just to be clear a high percentage of them being eaten alive is an update towards their lives being better, not worse. 

very interesting thank you

What do people think about posting urban planning/yimby/ local gov policy thoughts on the forum? 

I find that stuff really interesting and admittedly don't believe it is the most important stuff to work on but is "effective altruism" if you have an extremely local moral circle.

only skimmed your post so not sure if helpful but I wrote this a while ago.  https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zLi3MbMCTtCv9ttyz/formalizing-extinction-risk-reduction-vs-longtermism

Also you might find this helpful 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zuQeTaqrjveSiSMYo/a-proposed-hierarchy-of-longtermist-concepts

Great work - tangential and sort of a philosophical complaint about these happiness studies, but I worry that for some % of the people getting pinged about how they feel right now, they do include a bit of the "life satisfaction" in what number they choose. I wonder if others have this same worry? I think the life satisfaction stuff is a pretty poor measurement because I think it largely just turns into a measurement of envy and jealousy.

Is suffocating or dissolving in acid worse than dying of starvation or disease?

Lots of discussion about people misinterpreting what barely worth living means on the individual utility axis, which I do think could be part of the issue. I also believe that there is a hidden assumption most people make here: that all the lives barely worth living are "similar" (or alternatively: it's easier to imagine 10000 people being similar than 10). I think there is another dimension in population utility functions that most people care about - the diversity of the world. It's easy to imagine the very good lives as a variety of distinct lives and the millions of just barely good lives all being the same sort of potato farmer. If you clarified that all of the barely worth living lives were extremely different, and gave people time to reflect on and believe that it is possible for 1 million lives to be very different, I wonder if many people would feel the conclusion is less repugnant. Whether or not having diversity be an input in your population utility function is a separate question. 

Also, I found your post about utility functions to be helpful, thanks.