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...
My apologies if I messed something  up, just wanted to make sure I'd get it up in time.
I would also like to note that I was following this counter for the PST 12 deadline:
https://time.is/PST
But I realize now it might be off because of daylight savings? But I truly hope you will still consider it a valid entry. I really poured a lot of effort (plus a tiring all-nighter) to pull it off despite having found out about the contest just a few days ago!
There may be some typos and formatting issues given the last minute rush, but I won't edit it any further unless given permission to.Â
New Forum users need to be approved by a moderator before their posts are published. This post was approved, along with a few others, just after the deadline, when I did my final sweep to look for submissions from new authors. I've edited the publication time for this and those other posts to reflect when they were actually submitted. So you're fine!