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...
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...
Why isn't anyone talking about the Israel-Gaza situation much on the EA Forum? I know it's a big time for AI, but I just read that number of Palestinian deaths, the vast majority of whom are innocent people, and 65% are women and children, is approaching the level of civilians killed in Ukraine since the Russian invasion 21 months ago; just in the last 3-4 weeks.
The Israel-Gaza situation doesn't strike me as very neglected or tractable. The eyes of much of the world are on that situation, and it's not clear to me that EA actors have much to add to the broader conversation. It's also not clear to me why we would expect that actions that EA actors could take would be expected to have a significant impact on the situation.
This is a non-comprehensive and lightly held view -- for example, it focuses on intellectual and financial contributions. I'd be interested in hearing why you think the Israel-Gaza situation is more neglected and tractable than I tentatively think it is.
Hm what would you expect/hope people discuss about it here? As far as I remember, people didn't talk much about the Ukraine-Russia war either. Probably because there's not much that most EAs (or people in general) can do about it (not tractable) + not something that people aren't discussing enough (not neglected).