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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...
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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...
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I find it disappointing they reference nuclear winter without qualifying that it is quite unlikely given today's arsenals. I would reccomend against sharing it in it's current state.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pMsnCieusmYqGW26W/how-bad-would-nuclear-winter-caused-by-a-us-russia-nuclear
But that analysis by Luisa Rodriguez still predicts a fairly bad nuclear autumn that could kill roughly 30 to 90% of humanity.
Agreed - I do not mean to imply nuclear holocaust would not be horrible.
I do not think the FLI should cherry pick extraordinarily high numbers to make that case though, and them doing so/us sharing them doing so eats away at our epistemic commons.
I'd really rather not show that video to a well informed friend as they'd go "Wait, but I know that's wrong" and then discount other things I say about X-Risk.
Fair point. I guess the key problem is the lamentable lack of research on nuclear winter compared to other possible forms of climate change.
Google Scholar for example shows only 14,900 entries for "nuclear winter", versus 2.6 million for 'global warming', and 3 million for 'climate change'.
So, we've got roughly 375 times as much research on global warming as on nuclear winter.