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...