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Hopefully you can post a summary at some point!
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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...
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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...
Recent opportunities to take action
This is a good survey. As you said, you focused on US and UK. But was it your intent to try to extrapolate that as a global value so we can show how cost-effective global poverty interventions are? Then if you do the same surveys about how much more poor workers would demand to be paid because of a risky occupation, the value of statistical life would be much smaller. So I ended up doing a broad distribution for the global value here. Note that I sidestepped the discounting issue by saying that the value of statistical life is growing, so we should not have to discount the current values.