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.
I’m very grateful to the man...
TL;DR: Kairos has raised $50 million from Coefficient Giving for two years of funding, one of the largest commitments they’ve made towards AI safety fieldbuilding to date. We’re using this to make an ambitious push for growing Kairos, broadening our portfolio of talent infrastructure projects and incubating new organizations. We’ve doubled in size in the last six mon...
I enjoyed Cloud Atlas (fiction, both book and movie). It's a movie where relatively normal people did hard things because they were the right thing to do, not because movie morality entailed a just world hypothesis where good things happen to good people, or because the movie's characters were personally and emotionally invested in specific outcomes.
I think this is relatively rare in fiction, which is why I like the movie. I've told several EA friends about the movie and they liked it too.
I also watch movies about ordinary people resisting during World War II (eg, John Rabe for nonfiction and Jojo Rabbit for fiction), especially if it's from the perspective of the Axis.
+1, a lot of David Mitchell's metafiction-y books have EA vibes (huge scope, interwoven characters doing the right thing for unknown future others)