Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
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...
It's OK to ask "Who can DM me a quick review of [EA-run service]?"
Problem: It's costly for EAs to find out which EA-run services will actually help them.
Proposed partial solution: Normalise asking for private reviews of each other's services.
Thanks to Jennifer Waldmann and Ozzie Gooen for helping me think this through.
Strong upvote from us.
Two natural places to ask are Bountied Rationality and the EA twitter group.
Following my own advice: I will not be offended if I see someone asking "Has anyone used Pineapple Operations who can send me a quick review in DM?" on the Forum or on Slack etc (although I think we're pretty low-cost to use at the moment, so maybe not the best example).