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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...
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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...
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Cool angle and thought experiment, makes this all a bit more concete. My timelines for transformative AI already were close to what you're handwaving at, but I'm really happy to see more thought in this direction and hope that this inspires more people to take soon-ish tansformative AI even more seriously.
From my inside view it feels pretty unsettling to think about the changes I expect to happen in the coming decade or two. I wonder if you think the EA community is too slow to update their strategies here. It feels like what is coming is easily among the most difficult things humanity ever has to get right and we could be doing much more if we all took current TAI forecasts more into account.
You guessed it -- I believe that most of EA's best and brightest will end up having approximately zero impact (compared to what they could have had) because they are planning for business-as-usual. The twenties are going to take a lot of people by surprise, I think. Hopefully EAs working their way up the academic hierarchy will at least be able to redirect prestige/status towards those who have been building up expertise in AI safety and AI governance, when the time comes.