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...
I downvoted this post, not because I disagree with EA needing to look at reforms more carefully, and take reputational risks more seriously (in fact on the object level, I think we're aligned a fair bit). Instead, I don't think it's the right medium. In its current form this post could have been a shortform, or perhaps the beginnings of a more fleshed-out post about the potential reforms once the dust of the last few days has settled. (Though I do grant your prior post might already have this covered from your perspective.)
I also think the title is quite unkind. It's not clear which 'Senior EAs' you are talking about, what your definition of them is, or why the scandals of the last few days have changed your mind about them. The overwhelming majority of them are likely to have no involvement in Bostrom's decision to publish his letter or Tegmark's actions regarding the FLI/NDF grant. It's also a little bit presumptous to talk about 'we', though I think it would make an interesting survey question to get some reliable data on the community's opinions.
Most importantly, however, those 'Senior EAs' are also people who have sacrificed a lot personally to get the movement to where it is today, and regardless of whether they have or have not made poor decisions as leaders they are probably hurting just as much as you or me, and possibly more so, about where the movement finds itself in January 2023.[1]
This is a completely biased view. I have met people I would consider to be 'Senior EAs' and they are unanimously kind, inspiring people that I care a lot for. Please adjust your opinion of my comment appropriately.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that most EAs will have updated down on how much they trust the decision making of the entire set of senior EAs given that 3 have now caused large amounts of damage to EA's reputation, even though we probably don't expect any other senior EAs to be directly responsible for the Bostrom and Tegmark issues.
I disagree with the title being unkind, I think it's fair to not trust a small number of people with this much power over EA's reputation, even if we are grateful for everything they have put into the movement. They shouldn't even be trusting themselves with this power and I'm sure a decent proportion don't.