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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
Offering a (mutually counterfactual) donation match to GiveDirectly 💖
I'm offering a mutually counterfactual donation match to GiveDirectly, for anyone who wants to extend beyond their usual donation budget to take advantage of this!
https://twitter.com/catherineols/status/1602770363204583424
(That is: If you donate $ that you would not otherwise have donated anywhere, reply with screenshot and I'll 1:1 match with money I likewise would've kept for personal spending (above my usual 10%/yr); will close on Friday evening at 6pm PT or after I pay out $10k, whichever is first.)
I'm doing this in honor of the work Nathan Young and Émile Torres are doing to mutually improve discourse around criticism of longtermism and EA. These two ideological adversaries have set up this joint fundraiser. Emile is a critic of longtermism and of EA leadership; I find their writing/epistemics at times inflammatory and misleading, but there's central aspects of their critiques I find good/worthy.
I have a sense that Emile's dialog with Nathan has been visibly raising the bar on twitter discourse; making criticisms more specific, and the general tone of the discussion more targeted and constructive, with fewer exaggerated blanket statements. I love this deeply.
GiveDirectly is also a very worthy cause, particularly by being so incredibly straightforward, reasonable, and palatable to people from very different ideological backgrounds.
Feel free to post receipt screenshots in comments here instead of on twitter!
https://twitter.com/catherineols/status/1602770363204583424