To best improve my guesswork, I should allocate my thinking time to uncertainties which have the highest yield—loosely, a multiple of their ‘scale’ (how big an influence they play on the total value) and ‘tractability’ (how much I can improve my guess per unit effort).
I do like this way of thinking, but in practice I wonder if it’s actually worth trying to deal with potentially tractable complex cluelessness when we can instead identify interventions that we are considerably less clueless about, and just do them. This is what I understand to be Hilary Greaves’ preferred approach when she says “go longtermist”.
I guess a counterargument to this might be to claim that there are certain interventions that we are complexly clueless about, but that could plausibly be the absolute best interventions, so we should reduce our cluelessness of them to potentially uncover the goldmine. And maybe boosting economic growth in developing countries is an example of this.
All things considered though I think determining if boosting economic growth in low-income countries is one of the best things we can do is probably sufficiently intractable (at the moment) as to justify us relying on longtermist interventions we are less clueless about, such as working on AI alignment or spreading positive values etc. Maybe when we’ve got a superintelligent aligned AI, and got x-risk permanently really low, then the AI can sort out all of our complex cluelessness for us with far more ease than we would do now.
By the way I’m still very confused about all this (let’s say I’m complexly clueless about complex cluelessness) and what I’ve just written may not make much sense, but I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts.
I do like this way of thinking, but in practice I wonder if it’s actually worth trying to deal with potentially tractable complex cluelessness when we can instead identify interventions that we are considerably less clueless about, and just do them. This is what I understand to be Hilary Greaves’ preferred approach when she says “go longtermist”.
I guess a counterargument to this might be to claim that there are certain interventions that we are complexly clueless about, but that could plausibly be the absolute best interventions, so we should reduce our cluelessness of them to potentially uncover the goldmine. And maybe boosting economic growth in developing countries is an example of this.
All things considered though I think determining if boosting economic growth in low-income countries is one of the best things we can do is probably sufficiently intractable (at the moment) as to justify us relying on longtermist interventions we are less clueless about, such as working on AI alignment or spreading positive values etc. Maybe when we’ve got a superintelligent aligned AI, and got x-risk permanently really low, then the AI can sort out all of our complex cluelessness for us with far more ease than we would do now.
By the way I’m still very confused about all this (let’s say I’m complexly clueless about complex cluelessness) and what I’ve just written may not make much sense, but I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts.