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...
This announcement of a World Economic Forum meeting on "The Great Reset"
https://www.weforum.org/great-reset/?fbclid=IwAR2RAlV4cUx6-p_uAJ-uSjliuQYxyqLPh3PFH0ykpfBWXAFWmRed9anA7HQ
sounds very intriguing, and possibly hopeful, but it was hard for me to get a clear sense of whether this is going to mitigate x-risks from e.g. climate change all that much, or whether it's mostly just about providing more robust safety nets against major disasters. It wasn't clear to me from reading this whether it's (significantly) net-positive in terms of mitigating x-risk, and I was wondering what people's views were. I'm also somewhat worried that it's going to be highly politically polarising.