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...
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...
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...
Could you elaborate further what you have in mind with a moral cluelessness response?
Personally, I’ll say that most of those supposed anti-consequentialist thought experiments are helpful for illustrating why you need to be thoughtful when applying consequentialism (as is the case with every moral framework), but they do nothing to refute consequentialism. For example, there are many perfectly good utilitarian reasons to not conduct organ harvesting, such as threatening trust in institutions, risking your ability to do good in the future, the fact that you are considering that option suggests you might be suffering from delusion or some other problem which impairs your ability to assess the likelihood of being discovered or the benefits of harvesting the organs, etc.