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...
TL;DR: Kairos has raised $50 million from Coefficient Giving for two years of funding, one of the largest commitments they’ve made towards AI safety fieldbuilding to date. We’re using this to make an ambitious push for growing Kairos, broadening our portfolio of talent infrastructure projects and incubating new organizations. We’ve doubled in size in the last six mon...
In Debiasing Decisions: Improved Decision Making With A Single Training Intervention they found that a 30-minute video reduced confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, and bias blind spot, by 19%.
The video is super cheesy, and that makes me suspicious.
It should be noted that playing a 60-minute "debiasing" game debiased people more than the video.
The rest of this short form is random thoughts about debiasing.
I tried finding tests for these biases so that I can do it myself, but I didn't find any. This made me worry that we don't have standardized tests for biases, which strikes me as bad. Although I didn't spend too much time looking into it. (More on this here)
I don't think training people to reduce 3 biases a time is a good way to go, since we have 100s of biases. If we use a taxonomy of biases like Arkes (1991) (strategy-based, association-based, and psychophysical errors). maybe we could have three interventions for each type of bias? But it's not clear how you would teach people to avoid say association-based biases by lecturing about it.
You could nudge them in small ways. From Arkes (1991)
In Sedlmeier & Gigerenzer they taught people Bayes by using frequencies rather than probabilities. E,g. Instead of saying (1% of people use drugs and they test positive 80% of the time while non-users 5% of the time), you say From 1000 people, 10 use drugs, 8 drug users test positive, while 50 non-users test positive).
It seems to work.
If it's really hard, we should target really bad, really harmful biases.
From here
Perhaps finding out which are the worst biases, and what are the best interventions for them are would be useful. But increasing the effectiveness of changing beliefs is potentially dangerous, so maybe not.