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...
Not sure if this is the best forum for feedback, so please direct me elsewhere and happy to delete my comment if not.
A few suggestions on the explanation of EV. While the examples are clear, I found the definition of expected value confusing.
It is written as "expected value = likelihood of option x value of option", and "The expected value is the probability multiplied by the value of each outcome".
I read this as: E[X]=xP(x), which doesn't capture the need to sum across outcomes.
Pitched at the same level of technicality, I think a clearer definition is: "The expected value of an uncertain decision is the sum across all outcomes of the value of each outcome multiplied by its probability."
Or some other wording that captures that this is a weighted average. This properly implies the necessary summation across outcomes: E[X]=∑xP(x).
It might also be worth:
Hi John, your revised version of definition helps me greatly.