The relative difference you cited between most painful and second most painful experience is interesting. Personally, I can't even name my second most painful experience, but will probably never forget my most painful experience. 

Even given the intensity of my most painful experience, I would rather do that again compared to facing a year of chronic pain because chronic pain seems so debilitating. 

One thing I'm wondering about with respect to pain in animals is how they process memories, and how closely their memories alter their experience. I think that would matter because a memory of intense pain might cause ongoing psychological suffering, but I'm not sure if or which animals could have that type of experience.

I'm not convinced about tractability, relative to other interventions. 

You write: 

“Government is just by its nature slow, efficient, bureaucratic, complex, convoluted, <insert additional adjectives> and working to change that is just the nature of the game.”

But my actual objection is something you addressed earlier, namely that 

“The complexity and incoherence of our government often make it difficult for us to understand just what that government is doing, and among the practices it most frequently hides from view is the growing tendency of public policy to redistribute resources upward to the wealthy and the organized at the expense of the poorer and less organized.”

and

What then is actually the point, besides providing lucrative consulting contracts?

I think increasing state capacity in California is hard because the types of state capacity that I think you (and I) would want involve defeating groups of people in law and in bureaucracy who are motivated by both values and economics. They stand to lose a lot of money and the kind of life that they want to live if certain reforms are passed, and would be very motivated to stop what in your view is increased state capacity.

I think you could convince me that the problem is tractable if you showed how you could actually win legislative or bureaucratic victories here, and right now I don't think you could do that.

How much do these roles pay? If they do not pay salaries at the same level that someone with those skills could make elsewhere, that means that top talent might not go to these roles unless they happen to be effective altruists, which seems unlikely. I've read a lot about how EA is no longer money constrained, so if these roles do not pay very well, is that actually true?

How did you make that graph? A Python library? It looks really nice!