Thanks for this post Jack, I found it really useful as I haven’t got round yet to reading the updated paper. This break down in the cluelessness section was a new arrangement to me. Does anyone know if this break down has been used elsewhere? If not this seems like useful progress in better defining the cluelessness objections to longtermism.
Thanks Robert. I’ve never seen this breakdown of cluelessness and it could be a useful way for further research to define the issue.
The Global Priorities Institute raised the modelling of cluelessness in their research agenda and I’m looking forward to further work on this. If interested, see below for the two research questions related to cluelessness in the GPI research agenda. I have a feeling that there is still quite a bit of research that could be conducted in this area.
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Forecasting the long-term effects of our actions often requires us to make difficult comparisons between complex and messy bodies of competing evidence, a situation Greaves (2016) calls “complex cluelessness”. We must also reckon with our own incomplete awareness, that is, the likelihood that the long-run future will be shaped by events we’ve never considered and perhaps can’t fully imagine. What is the appropriate response to this sort of epistemic situation? For instance, does rationality require us to adopt precise subjective probabilities concerning the very-long-run effects of our actions, imprecise probabilities (and if so, how imprecise?), or some other sort of doxastic state entirely?
Faced with the task of comparing actions in terms of expected value, it often seems that the agent is ‘clueless’: that is, that the available empirical and theoretical evidence simply supplies too thin a basis for guiding decisions in any principled way (Lenman 2000; Greaves 2016; Mogensen 2020) (INFORMAL: Tomasik 2013; Askell 2018). How is this situation best modelled, and what is the rational way of making decisions when in this predicament? Does cluelessness systematically favour some types of action over others?
Thanks for this post Jack, I found it really useful as I haven’t got round yet to reading the updated paper. This break down in the cluelessness section was a new arrangement to me. Does anyone know if this break down has been used elsewhere? If not this seems like useful progress in better defining the cluelessness objections to longtermism.
Thanks Robert. I’ve never seen this breakdown of cluelessness and it could be a useful way for further research to define the issue.
The Global Priorities Institute raised the modelling of cluelessness in their research agenda and I’m looking forward to further work on this. If interested, see below for the two research questions related to cluelessness in the GPI research agenda. I have a feeling that there is still quite a bit of research that could be conducted in this area.
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Forecasting the long-term effects of our actions often requires us to make difficult comparisons between complex and messy bodies of competing evidence, a situation Greaves (2016) calls “complex cluelessness”. We must also reckon with our own incomplete awareness, that is, the likelihood that the long-run future will be shaped by events we’ve never considered and perhaps can’t fully imagine. What is the appropriate response to this sort of epistemic situation? For instance, does rationality require us to adopt precise subjective probabilities concerning the very-long-run effects of our actions, imprecise probabilities (and if so, how imprecise?), or some other sort of doxastic state entirely?
Faced with the task of comparing actions in terms of expected value, it often seems that the agent is ‘clueless’: that is, that the available empirical and theoretical evidence simply supplies too thin a basis for guiding decisions in any principled way (Lenman 2000; Greaves 2016; Mogensen 2020) (INFORMAL: Tomasik 2013; Askell 2018). How is this situation best modelled, and what is the rational way of making decisions when in this predicament? Does cluelessness systematically favour some types of action over others?