Fair point that the sequences do not strongly default towards inaction. I think the evidence gains from action mean that it ‘is’ favored, but this is an empirical prediction about the world, which I think you disagree with.
If increased information reduces our unawareness, that decreases the relevance of cluelessness arguments, no? In particular, the set of actions with overlapping credal sets would be reduced, and so there would be more dominated actions we could rule out for consideration. Unless you’re making an argument that the information learned is too small to meaningfully constrain our predictions in expectation. In which case sure, that’s an empirical claim I disagree with, but it is logically consistent.
I think most importantly we have an empirical disagreement about both how clueless we are of the longterm impacts of our actions, and how difficult it is to reduce that cluelessness. I’m trying to think about cruxes that might resolve that.
I think you disagree that increased predictive capability in shorter time horizons generalizes to long-time horizons [1]. For me, seeing bad short & medium term predictions ‘would’ cause me to give more credence to unawareness arguments. But you seem to have prevented the opposite evidence from swaying you in the other direction (unless I’m misunderstanding).
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Anthony.
Fair point that the sequences do not strongly default towards inaction. I think the evidence gains from action mean that it ‘is’ favored, but this is an empirical prediction about the world, which I think you disagree with.
If increased information reduces our unawareness, that decreases the relevance of cluelessness arguments, no? In particular, the set of actions with overlapping credal sets would be reduced, and so there would be more dominated actions we could rule out for consideration. Unless you’re making an argument that the information learned is too small to meaningfully constrain our predictions in expectation. In which case sure, that’s an empirical claim I disagree with, but it is logically consistent.
I think most importantly we have an empirical disagreement about both how clueless we are of the longterm impacts of our actions, and how difficult it is to reduce that cluelessness. I’m trying to think about cruxes that might resolve that.
I think you disagree that increased predictive capability in shorter time horizons generalizes to long-time horizons [1]. For me, seeing bad short & medium term predictions ‘would’ cause me to give more credence to unawareness arguments. But you seem to have prevented the opposite evidence from swaying you in the other direction (unless I’m misunderstanding).
Like, what is something you could see happen tomorrow that would make you say ‘whoa, we actually can know the long-term consequences of our actions’? Would it take something as extreme as https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​6FmqiAgS8h4EJm86s/​​how-to-convince-me-that-2-2-3?
[1] https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​ZTz9BKxCys5DgaHQJ/​​ama-anthony-digiovanni-author-of-the-challenge-of?commentId=bcaWd275R3PXgivma)