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...
Curious if there is any addictiveness benchmark for new technologies.
* How would it be measured, would it be similar to training a preference model on rankings of multiple responses?
* I am aware many people are aware how technology can be addictive. I seen people say the best way to avoid it is to not use it or it is the person who is addicted fault. How about instead of people completely avoiding certain technologies like social media is there any effort to make these technologies at the very least less addictive
*I feel this can also be effective with since we do not want to cause a future of simply looking at screens in the future like the wally movie humans
Is there anyone working on making to making less addictive alternatives to technologies or tools to reduce addiction?