I asked a ton of questions about effective altruism and SBF's giving, such as:
Why he created a new EA philanthropic org instead of just donating to Open Philanthropy.
How he deals with adverse selection in the projects he gets proposed?
What would be the scenario in which he feels Future Fund didn't live up to its potential?
When is it best to donate directly and when is it better to influence the government to make something happen?
Are EA causes multiplicative?
How does he hedge against the possibility that utilitarianism is wrong in his giving?
Should we think of his charitable giving as a yearly contribution of a billion dollars or as a 30 billion hedge against the possibility that there's going to be some existential risk that requires a large pool of liquid wealth?
I also asked a bunch of questions about crypto, FTX, leadership, hiring, and scaling.
Hope you enjoy it! If so, please share it with your friends and on social media! Here is the announcement tweet. Thanks!
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 enjoyed this. You got Sam to say that's a really good question several questions in a row!