Isn't whether a project is "worth funding" depend on whether you think it's proposed output is an actually valuable public good? If it is, then you shouldn't mind not getting a refund that much. If it isn't, there are other places to look for arbitrage.
I'm pretty sure there are limits to the pre-tax income you can put in an index fund (like a 401K).
The consideration war tax resisters have is that it's bad for the government to get tax money it can spend on wars. Thus refusing to pay what one owes and not owing are equivalent in their effects.
For instance, maybe you think our current tax rules are bad, but perhaps you'd like the ability to have and enforce any tax rules at all, even when some of your fellow citizens disagree with you about what rules are ideal.
I think income taxes are dumb. Instead I think taxation should begin with Pigovian taxes on negative externalities, then if more money is needed Georgist taxes on supply-inelastic factors, and then finally if the government somehow needs even MORE money it should resort to consumption taxes like VATs and stop there. Does this method inhibit the ability to collect those?
Pregnancy is certainly costly (and the abnormally high miscarriage rate appears to be an attempt to save on such costs in case anything has gone wrong), but it's not that fatal (for the mother). A German midwife recorded one maternal death out of 350 births.
Forager societies didn't have below-replacement fertilities, which are now common for post-industrial societies.
Having children wasn't a paying venture, but people had kids anyway for the same reason other species expend energy on offspring.
The distinction between "somatic" and "germ" cells only exists for sexually reproducing species.
There is a remaining mystery about Epstein: where his money came from. He claimed to be a financier, but didn't seem to do any trading. Hence Eric Weinstein (who actually met him), concluding he was a "construct" whose supposed finance work was merely a cover story.
The Yanomamo maximize the number of females in their tribes by kidnapping them from other tribes sucker enough to feed & raise females rather than males (which they could have used to raid females from other tribes).
Less Wrong had a Prisoner's Dilemma contest some time back, whose results I've forgotten. Perhaps it should be rerun with William H. Press & Freeman Dyson's proposed extortionate strategies.
I hope Pinker gives a response at Edge.org, since P.D played a significant role his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" as a source of morality embedded in the nature of logic/reality.
Hat-tip to Marginal Revolution.
Tyler regularly disagrees with his colleagues. If he were one of them he might think to himself "Alex is the best truth-tracker, so I should check what he thinks on the issue", but Tyler doesn't regard truth as something to optimize for.