Comments
More from the author
Curated and popular this week
66
TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
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...
86
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...
Recent opportunities to take action
Millett and Snyder-Beattie's (2017) 'Existential Risk and Cost-Effective Biosecurity' is good for back of the envelope calculations on GCBRs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5576214/
I can't be sure this is the paper I'm remembering but it looks pretty good - Bernstein et al. (2022) find that activities to prevent zoonotic pandemics save lives for a cost roughly comparable to top Givewell charities (I get this from their claim of saving lives at less than 1/20th of the low-end of the value of a statistical life, which they say is ~$107,000 - though beware unequal application of rigour). This estimate does not include economic losses due to a pandemic. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abl4183
And more indirectly, if you wanted to make your own back-of-the-envelopes, Marani et al. (2021) provide a well grounded probability estimate to work with (though the historical record would not be reliable for emerging risks from biotechnology): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2105482118
Thanks for the sources, Ben! I have used them in this post I have just published:
Thanks Ben!
No worries! Although these were just ones I remembered off the cuff - I'm sure there's other good ones you could find