Anyone else getting "ask your doctor if Photoshop™ is right for you" vibes from some of those before & after photos?

...the fact that the average life in New Zealand is much, much better than the average life in the Democratic Republic of Congo...

I think you may be in danger of overloading "better" in statements like this, and more implicitly throughout your argument. (Similarly "good" in statements like "It’s absurd to... believe[] a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is just as good as life for a woman in some other country with similarly high per capita income".)

Consider if I said something like this: "We are constantly told that it would be better for us if we ate fewer calories. But this ignores the quality of those calories. Everybody who has tasted both knows that calorie for calorie, chocolate eclairs are better than lima beans. So it only makes sense that it would be better to reduce the better calories last."

It might help if you explicitly stated better how (and maybe for whom) throughout, or use more precise adjectives than the generic good or better.

You also seem to me to be making an implicit "the goal of EA ought not to be to relieve existing suffering but to maximize future hedons" argument that maybe should be made explicit instead.

If UBI is implemented as a form of wealth redistribution -- in other words if a progressive tax fully funds the UBI payouts -- then the money supply inflation problem goes away, no? At least on the economy-wide scale.

I guess there is still the problem that at the bottom of the income scale there is now more money chasing e.g. a stickily-fixed supply of low-income housing, so the prices of such goods are likely to rise. But might some of the people who used to compete for that stock of housing also now be UBI-boosted into setting their sights on higher-quality housing and no longer be part of that competitive pool? Maybe it evens out.

See also: Notes on Empathy for more suggestions and some of the research / theory behind them.

What I don't see in your outline, and what I think would make your proposed manifesto stronger, would be a chapter along the lines of "this is the steelmanned case for why continuing progress in technology is problematic and dangerous and for how humanity could prosper or avoid disaster by putting the brakes on it."

Otherwise it does look like a preaching to the choir thing. Manifestos are often that sort of preaching, so maybe that's okay for what you're after, but for all the usual LW-communications-ethos reasons, I hope you decide on something better.

I've seen dukkha translated as something more like "unsatisfactoriness" which puts a kind of Stoic spin on it. You look at the cards you've been dealt, and instead of playing them, you find them inadequate and get upset about it. The Stoics (and the Buddhists, in this interpretation) would recommend that you instead just play the cards you're dealt. They may not be great cards, but you won't make them any better by complaining about them. Dunno if this is authentic to Buddhism or is more the result of Westerners trying to find something familiar in Buddhism, though.

My point is that in English "experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain" would be considered an uncontroversial example of "suffering", not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there's a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.

I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker "Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again" they would assume you were claiming that this would include "never experiencing such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain." If this is not the case, I think they would be justified to feel they'd been played with a bit of a bait-and-switch dharma-wise.

There can be pain without suffering. If pain is experienced without attachment and aversion, there is no resulting suffering. If the Buddha were to stub his toe, there would be pain, but he would not suffer as a result.

I wonder whether "suffering" is an adequate translation. I get the feeling that the Buddhist sutras and our common vulgate are talking past each other. See for example MN144, in which Channa slits his wrists to end his pain, and the Buddha says he was sufficiently enlightened that he will not be reborn. Channa complains: “Reverend Sāriputta, I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. The winds piercing my head are so severe, it feels like a strong man drilling into my head with a sharp point. The pain in my head is so severe, it feels like a strong man tightening a tough leather strap around my head. The winds slicing my belly are so severe, like a deft butcher or their apprentice were slicing open a cows’s belly with a meat cleaver. The burning in my body is so severe, it feels like two strong men grabbing a weaker man by the arms to burn and scorch him on a pit of glowing coals. I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. Reverend Sāriputta, I will slit my wrists. I don’t wish to live.” If that's "not suffering" then "not suffering" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Anselm: I have discovered a truly marvelous proof for the existence of God, which this tweet is too small to contain. 🙏😇