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Curated and popular this week
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TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
A preliminary estimate, and a request for better ones.
Summary
I believe the standard literature estimates for the number of DALYs attributable to a case of stunting are too low, largely because they don’t account for the long term effects. This means that childhood nutritional interventions that reduce the prevalence of stunting may be substantially more cost-effective than previously believed.
Epistemic status
Exploratory and back-o...
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I’ve been feeling pretty shaken since the METR report about the Hugging Face incident came out last week. Over the weekend, I wrote up some thoughts on how lonely the AI situation sometimes feels to me. It’s more personal than what I’d usually share publicly, but I thought I’d post it here in case it resonates with anyone else.
I’m very grateful to the man...
Recent opportunities to take action
This seems very likely to be a coincidence. This appears to be a freshers fair, where different university societies try to recruit new students at the university. Freshers fairs in the UK (and I would imagine it may be similar in New Zealand) generally have lots of different societies trying to appeal to new students. Societies that have nothing to do with each other often have these stalls set up next to each other, and in this case I think it's very likely that the Palestinian society and the Effective Altruism society stalls were coincidentally next to each other.