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...
It is unusual for a community as small as rationalism to have produced multiple instances of cult-like groups. And while this particular group is technically opposed to mainstream rationalism, they are still knee deep in rationalist epistemology (justifying extreme acts with "timeless decision theory" and so on). Something about the epistemics or community of rationalism is probably making these types of incidences more likely.
As long as EA is associated with rationalism, expect to continue getting second order splashback from these kind of incidences.
I don't think rationalism is that small a subculture in the Bay at this point, and the Bay Area rate of cult creation has historically been pretty high since the 1960s at least. Watching Slimepriestess' interview (linked in the LW thread comments), my impression is that the Zizians' beliefs and actions stemmed from a fusion of rationalist/EA beliefs, far-left anarchist politics, and general Bay Area looniness.