Is there a good place to succinctly read about this: “I think cluelessness/Knightian uncertainty arguments defeat most of the cases for longtermism in practice”? I don’t see (what I understand to be cluelessness) as knockdown at all, so I’m wondering if we understand this principle differently, or if perhaps more is resting here on Knightian uncertainity which I’m unfamiliar with.
Unfortunately not that “succinct” :) but I argue here that cluelessness-ish arguments defeat the impartial altruistic case for any intervention, longtermist or not. Tl;dr: our estimates of the sign of our net long-term impact are arbitrary. (Building on Mogensen (2021).)
(It seems maybe defensible to argue something like: “We can at least non-arbitrarily estimate net near-term effects. Whereas we’re clueless about the sign of any particular (non-‘gerrymandered’) long-term effect (or, there’s something qualitatively worse about the reasons for our beliefs about such effects). So we have more reason to do interventions with the best near-term effects.” This post gives the strongest case for that I’m aware of. I’m not personally convinced, but think it’s worth investigating further.)
The argument I’ve seen is the opposite, that considering cluelessness favors longtermism instead of undermining it (“therefore consider donating to LTFF”, Greaves tentatively suggests).
I am however more sympathetic to Michael’s skepticism that it’s often hard for me in practice to tell longtermist interventions apart from PlayPump (other than funding d/acc-flavored fieldbuilding maybe), but maybe JWS’s reasoning is different.
Also “cluelessness” seems underspecified in forum discussions cf. this discussion thread so I wouldn’t be surprised if you and JWS are talking about different things.
Is there a good place to succinctly read about this: “I think cluelessness/Knightian uncertainty arguments defeat most of the cases for longtermism in practice”? I don’t see (what I understand to be cluelessness) as knockdown at all, so I’m wondering if we understand this principle differently, or if perhaps more is resting here on Knightian uncertainity which I’m unfamiliar with.
Unfortunately not that “succinct” :) but I argue here that cluelessness-ish arguments defeat the impartial altruistic case for any intervention, longtermist or not. Tl;dr: our estimates of the sign of our net long-term impact are arbitrary. (Building on Mogensen (2021).)
(It seems maybe defensible to argue something like: “We can at least non-arbitrarily estimate net near-term effects. Whereas we’re clueless about the sign of any particular (non-‘gerrymandered’) long-term effect (or, there’s something qualitatively worse about the reasons for our beliefs about such effects). So we have more reason to do interventions with the best near-term effects.” This post gives the strongest case for that I’m aware of. I’m not personally convinced, but think it’s worth investigating further.)
The argument I’ve seen is the opposite, that considering cluelessness favors longtermism instead of undermining it (“therefore consider donating to LTFF”, Greaves tentatively suggests).
I am however more sympathetic to Michael’s skepticism that it’s often hard for me in practice to tell longtermist interventions apart from PlayPump (other than funding d/acc-flavored fieldbuilding maybe), but maybe JWS’s reasoning is different.
Also “cluelessness” seems underspecified in forum discussions cf. this discussion thread so I wouldn’t be surprised if you and JWS are talking about different things.