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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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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...
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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...
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I would add the extended episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast with David Chalmers. To my knowledge, some of the views he expresses there—e.g. that phenomenal consciousness is morally valuable even if not hedonically valenced—have not been explicitly discussed in either the EA or the philosophical literature.
Many utilitarian EAs have independently gravitated towards the view that the intrinsic value of pleasure and pain can be known by introspection or "direct acquaintance". Surprisingly, as far as I know no statement of this view exists in the EA literature, though some may be found in the philosophical literature (including publications by philosophers sympathetic to EA):
I also noticed this when I started planning a blogpost on this topic!
De Lazari-Radek and Singer's The Point of View of the Universe has a chapter on hedonism, but I think the argument is less developed than in the two links you give. (BTW, if you have a copy of the paper by Adam Lerner and think it's okay to share it with me, I'd be very interested!)
It's interesting to note that Sinhababu's epistemic argument for hedonism explicitly relies on the premise "moral realism is true." Without that premise, the argument would be less forceful (what remains would be the comparison that pleasure's goodness is similar to the brigthness of the color "lemon yellow" – but that doesn't seem to support the strong version of the claim "pleasure is good.")