(My thanks to the post authors, velutvulpes and juliakarbing, for transcribing and adding a talk to the EA Forum, comments below refer to the contents of the talk).
I gave this a decade review downvote and wanted to set out why.
I think this is on the whole a decent talk that sets out an personal individual’s journey through EA and working out how they can do the most good.
It does however do a little bit of reinventing of the wheel. Now EAs across the board can, I think fairly, be criticised for reinventing the wheel. In fact this survey of 40 EA leaders found that “The biggest concern and a trend that came up again and again was that EAs tend to reinvent the wheel a lot”. In this talk (and other work) the author defines and introduces the idea of “cluelessness”. This serves a purpose but it is done without any mention of the myriad of existing terminologies that essentially mean the same thing, such as “uncertainty” “deep uncertainty” “Knightian uncertainty” “wicked problems” “extreme model uncertainty” “fragile credences” etc. The author then suggests 5 responses to cluelessness without mentioning the decades of research that have gone into the above topics and the existing ways humans deal with these issues.
Ultimately this should not a big deal. We all invent terminology from time to time, or borrow from domains we are familiar with to explain what is on our mind. It is not a big sin and can normally be shrugged off.
Unfortunately this author has had the bad luck that her new terminology stuck. And it stuck pretty hard. There is a “cluelessness” tag on the EA wiki and over 450 pages on the EA Forum that mention “cluelessness”. Reflecting back, and talking to other EAs a year later, I think this [edit: invented] term may have been harmful for EA discourse. I expect it has lead to people being unaware of the troves of academic (and other) work done to date on managing high levels of uncertainty and managing risks to confusion and ongoing wheel reinventing.
Suggested follow up (if any) might be things like replacing the “clulessness” wiki page with another term and for people to stop using the term as much as possible.
My initial review was as follows:
(My thanks to the post authors, velutvulpes and juliakarbing, for transcribing and adding a talk to the EA Forum, comments below refer to the contents of the talk).
I gave this a decade review downvote and wanted to set out why.
I think this is on the whole a decent talk that sets out an personal individual’s journey through EA and working out how they can do the most good.
It does however do a little bit of reinventing of the wheel. Now EAs across the board can, I think fairly, be criticised for reinventing the wheel. In fact this survey of 40 EA leaders found that “The biggest concern and a trend that came up again and again was that EAs tend to reinvent the wheel a lot”.
In this talk (and other work) the author defines and introduces the idea of “cluelessness”. This serves a purpose but it is done without any mention of the myriad of existing terminologies that essentially mean the same thing, such as “uncertainty” “deep uncertainty” “Knightian uncertainty” “wicked problems” “extreme model uncertainty” “fragile credences” etc. The author then suggests 5 responses to cluelessness without mentioning the decades of research that have gone into the above topics and the existing ways humans deal with these issues.
Ultimately this should not a big deal. We all invent terminology from time to time, or borrow from domains we are familiar with to explain what is on our mind. It is not a big sin and can normally be shrugged off.
Unfortunately this author has had the bad luck that her new terminology stuck. And it stuck pretty hard. There is a “cluelessness” tag on the EA wiki and over 450 pages on the EA Forum that mention “cluelessness”. Reflecting back, and talking to other EAs a year later, I think this [edit: invented] term may have been harmful for EA discourse. I expect it has lead to people being unaware of the troves of academic (and other) work done to date on managing high levels of uncertainty and managing risks to confusion and ongoing wheel reinventing.
Suggested follow up (if any) might be things like replacing the “clulessness” wiki page with another term and for people to stop using the term as much as possible.