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...
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.Â
I’m very grateful to the man...
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.)