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Curated and popular this week
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...
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