EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)9 Okt

“Is mild lifelong acne really worse than stunted growth?” by Kasey Markel

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-of-envelope, ~100 hours invested in an area well outside my expertise. I have moderate-to-low confidence in any single point estimate, but high confidence that the standard literature value of 0.23 DALYs greatly underestimates the lifetime burden of stunting. I’m posting this to be red-teamed. If you have a better method, or know of data I’m missing, please let me know.

AI use

I’ve had many conversations with Claude about this topic, and used Claude to develop the ideas, find references, and help generate the accompanying model. I’ve also previously discussed the topic with Grok, Gemini, and ChatGPT, all in their respective research / long-answer modes. The text of this post is all mine.

Conflict of interest

This post is written in my professional capacity at Semilla Nueva, an organization that makes more nutritious corn. [...]

The original text contained 28 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 27th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3zdsJsgJtpnvmfi7L/is-mild-lifelong-acne-really-worse-than-stunted-growth

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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