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...
Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: It’s a major warning shot, and might be the last one we get
This week, METR and Redwood Research published the report on...
I, like probably most reading this, am someone who strongly values reason and believes that helping others is a good thing.
This is why many people choose to 'join' EA: They find EA somewhere, think that the ideas make sense and seem true, presumably because it aligns well with their values and consider it right. The reason-based approach makes sense to them.
But isn't the procedure similar for following any community? Imagine I am looking for meaning, so when I stumble upon a guru which aligns with (some of) my values, I integrate myself into that community. Similarly so for political parties, a football club, a weekly art gathering, etc.
I might as well have different beliefs and values. So these questions follow:
Does EA seem like the right movement to me because there is something inherently right about EA, or just because EA fits my initial values and beliefs? In other words, is EA just built on the belief in potentially arbitrary assumptions (e.g helping others is good), or is there actual substantiation for these assumptions?
I'm curious to hear thoughts about this, I might dig much deeper into this and potentially create a post for the Red Teaming Contest. There seems to be a lot more to be said and I've already got some ideas, but I wanted to find out whether this would be fruitful.