It might be worthwhile reading about historical attempts to semi-privatize social security, which would have essentially created an opt-in version of your proposal, since individual people could then choose whether to have their share of the pot in bonds or stocks.

Shakeel provides a helpful list of all the people who have recently quit / been purged:

1. Ilya Sutskever 

2. Jan Leike 

3. Leopold Aschenbrenner 

4. Pavel Izmailov 

5. William Saunders 

6. Daniel Kokotajlo 

7. Cullen O'Keefe

https://twitter.com/ShakeelHashim/status/1790685752134656371

Providing child benefits (which can even have a negative impact): -$41,977 to $18,411

If I look in your spreadsheet the negative impact appears to come from limiting the benefit, i.e. reducing it (quote below). So providing it was presumably positive?

Family benefit cap which reduced generosity for families with 3+ kids

I think 'elitism' is not a helpful frame for understanding things here. 

I am just wondering about mid-career professionals: Could one not easily abandon the focus on elite universities for this group?

The focus on top universities is to access the people there. Mid-career people (outside of researchers) are no longer at university, so they are not primarily accessed through university groups. I don't think anyone is applying a harsh undergrad filter to people with strong track records in their field (at least, I'd expect most EAs to be less credentialist that is the norm for e.g. government hiring), and I'm confused why you would think this was the case.

Another idea: force each tier of votes to have at least say 10 members. So even when the highest karma person breaches a new threshold, they don't get the extra firepower until there are at least nine other great powers to join them.

Presumably NDA + forbidden to talk about the NDA (hence forbidden to talk about being forbidden to talk about ... )

Are you sure this is right?

The founder, Kevin Esvelt, who was not present with us, has a PhD in international relations with a focus on foreign policy-making. Before founding SecureBio, he was concerned about the lack of preparedness for existential risks from AI.

If you click the link it says he has a biochemistry PhD, and my impression is he has always been more of a bio guy (arguably the bio guy):

Kevin M. Esvelt is an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Sculpting Evolution Group in advancing biotechnology safely.

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University for inventing a synthetic microbial ecosystem to rapidly evolve useful biomolecules, and subsequently helped pioneer the development of CRISPR, a powerful new method of genome engineering.

Surely part of it is the fact that public health authorities were given a lot of power during COVID and are widely perceived as having frequently abused it, which discredited them in the eyes of many people and make them disinclined to give them more power.

You have some good hypothesis. One other: a lot of left wing activist types (who are disproportionately noisy) have very strong ideological purity preferences, so a person with mainly left wing views but some right wing views can be condemned for the latter, and likewise a movement with mainly left wing people but a few right wing people can be condemned. Any sufficiently public person or movement, unless they are very homogeneous or very PR-conscious, will eventually reveal they have some diversity of views and hence be subject to potential censure.