Sure, “cluelessness” is a long standing philosophical term that is “an argument against ethical frameworks themselves, including consequentialism”. Very happy to accept that.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case here in this talk. Hilary says “how confident should we be really that the cost-effectiveness analysis we’ve got is any decent guide at all to how we should be spending our money? That’s the worry that I call ‘cluelessness’”. This seems to be a practical decision making problem.
Which is why it looks like to me that a term has been borrowed from philosophy, and used in another context. (And even if it was never the intent to do so it seems to me that people in EA took the term to be used as pointing to the practical decision making challenges of making decisions under uncertainty.)
Borrowing terms happens all the time but unfortunately in this case it appears to have caused some confusion along the way. It would have been simpler to use the keep the philosophy term in the philosophy box to talk about topics such as the limits of knowledge and so on, and to use one of the terms from decision making (like “deep uncertainty”) to talk about practical issues like making decisions about where to donate given the things we don’t know, and kept everything nice and simple.
But also it is not really a big deal. Kind of confusing / pet peeve level, but no-one uses the right words all the time, I certainly don’t. (If there is a thing this post does badly it is the reinventing the wheel point, see my response to Pablo above, and the word choice is a part of that broader confusion about how to approach uncertainty).
Hi Jack, lovely to get your input.
Sure, “cluelessness” is a long standing philosophical term that is “an argument against ethical frameworks themselves, including consequentialism”. Very happy to accept that.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case here in this talk. Hilary says “how confident should we be really that the cost-effectiveness analysis we’ve got is any decent guide at all to how we should be spending our money? That’s the worry that I call ‘cluelessness’”. This seems to be a practical decision making problem.
Which is why it looks like to me that a term has been borrowed from philosophy, and used in another context. (And even if it was never the intent to do so it seems to me that people in EA took the term to be used as pointing to the practical decision making challenges of making decisions under uncertainty.)
Borrowing terms happens all the time but unfortunately in this case it appears to have caused some confusion along the way. It would have been simpler to use the keep the philosophy term in the philosophy box to talk about topics such as the limits of knowledge and so on, and to use one of the terms from decision making (like “deep uncertainty”) to talk about practical issues like making decisions about where to donate given the things we don’t know, and kept everything nice and simple.
But also it is not really a big deal. Kind of confusing / pet peeve level, but no-one uses the right words all the time, I certainly don’t. (If there is a thing this post does badly it is the reinventing the wheel point, see my response to Pablo above, and the word choice is a part of that broader confusion about how to approach uncertainty).