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...
In some discussions I had with people at EAG it was interesting to discover that there might be a significant lack of EA-aligned people in the hardware-space of AI, which seems to translate towards difficulties in getting industry contacts for co-development of hardware-level AI safety measures. To the degree to which there are EA members in these companies, it might make sense to create some kind of communication space to exchange ideas between people working on hardware AI safety with people at hardware-relevant companies (think Broadcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, GloFo, Tsmc etc). Unfortunately I feel that culturally these spaces (EEng/CE) are not very transmissible to EA-ideas and the boom in ML/AI has caused significant self-selection of people towards hotter topics.
I believe there might be significant benefit for accelerating realistic safety designs, if discussions can be moved into industry as fast as possible.
I'd be pretty excited about 80k trying to do something useful here; unsure if it'd work, but I think we could be well-placed. Would you be up for talking with me about it? Seems like you have relevant context about these folks. Please email me if so at [email protected] :D
Unfortunately I feel that culturally these spaces (EEng/CE) are not very transmissible to EA-ideas and the boom in ML/AI has caused significant self-selection of people towards hotter topics.
Fwiw I have some EEE background from undergrad and I spend some time doing fieldbuilding with this crowd and I think a lack of effort on outreach is more predictive of the lack of relevant people at say EAGs as opposed to AI risk messaging not landing well with this crowd.