Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
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...
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...
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing; I'd likely never have seen this otherwise.
I see that the author gave away $40,000 in total to 26 people out of four thousand applicants. The EV of creating an application was ten dollars. I don't know how in-depth that process was, but I wonder whether this kind of process risks eating up more value in time than it provides through actual funding? Should the author have tried to provide more warnings to discourage applicants who weren't likely to succeed?
(Of course, every applicant was a volunteer who chose to do this work, but I still think we sometimes undervalue the importance of "microtime", the small units of time that eat into our days when we burn them on things like paperwork.)