Disclaimer: Written on low sleep, and again reporting only independent impressions (i.e., what Iâd believe before updating on the fact that various smart people donât share my views on this). I also shared related thoughts in this comment thread.
I agree that one way someone could respond to my points is indeed by saying that everything/âalmost everything involves complex cluelessness, rather than that complex cluelessness isnât a useful concept.
But if Greaves introduces complex cluelessness by juxtaposing it with simple cluelessness, yet the examples of simple cluelessness actually meet their definition of complex cluelessness (which I think Iâve shown), I think this provides reason to pause and re-evaluate the claims.
And then I think we might notice that Greaves suggests a sharp distinction between simple and complex cluelessness. And also that she (if I recall correctly) arguably suggests homogeneity within each type of cluelessnessâi.e., suggesting all cases of simple cluelessness can be dealt with by just ignoring the possible flow-through effects that seem symmetrical, while we should search for a type of approach to handle all cases of complex cluelessness. (But this latter point is probably debatable.)
And we might also notice that the term âcluelessnessâ seems to suggest we know literally nothing about how to compare the outcomes. Whereas Iâve argued that in all cases weâll have some information relevant to that, and the various bits of information will vary in their importance and degree of uncertainty.
So altogether, it would just seem more natural to me to say:
weâre always at least a little uncertain, and often extremely uncertain, and often somewhere in between
in theory, the âcorrectâ way to reason is basically expected value theory, using all the scraps of evidence at our disposal, and keeping track of how high or low the resilience of our credences are
in practice, we should do something sort of like that, but with a lot of caution and heuristics (given that weâre dealing with limited data, computational constraints, biases, etc.).
I do think there are many important questions to be investigated with regards to how best to make decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty, and that this becomes especially relevant for people who want to have a positive impact on the long-term future. But it doesnât seem to me that the idea of complex cluelessness is necessary or useful in posing or investigating those questions.
Disclaimer: Written on low sleep, and again reporting only independent impressions (i.e., what Iâd believe before updating on the fact that various smart people donât share my views on this). I also shared related thoughts in this comment thread.
I agree that one way someone could respond to my points is indeed by saying that everything/âalmost everything involves complex cluelessness, rather than that complex cluelessness isnât a useful concept.
But if Greaves introduces complex cluelessness by juxtaposing it with simple cluelessness, yet the examples of simple cluelessness actually meet their definition of complex cluelessness (which I think Iâve shown), I think this provides reason to pause and re-evaluate the claims.
And then I think we might notice that Greaves suggests a sharp distinction between simple and complex cluelessness. And also that she (if I recall correctly) arguably suggests homogeneity within each type of cluelessnessâi.e., suggesting all cases of simple cluelessness can be dealt with by just ignoring the possible flow-through effects that seem symmetrical, while we should search for a type of approach to handle all cases of complex cluelessness. (But this latter point is probably debatable.)
And we might also notice that the term âcluelessnessâ seems to suggest we know literally nothing about how to compare the outcomes. Whereas Iâve argued that in all cases weâll have some information relevant to that, and the various bits of information will vary in their importance and degree of uncertainty.
So altogether, it would just seem more natural to me to say:
weâre always at least a little uncertain, and often extremely uncertain, and often somewhere in between
in theory, the âcorrectâ way to reason is basically expected value theory, using all the scraps of evidence at our disposal, and keeping track of how high or low the resilience of our credences are
in practice, we should do something sort of like that, but with a lot of caution and heuristics (given that weâre dealing with limited data, computational constraints, biases, etc.).
I do think there are many important questions to be investigated with regards to how best to make decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty, and that this becomes especially relevant for people who want to have a positive impact on the long-term future. But it doesnât seem to me that the idea of complex cluelessness is necessary or useful in posing or investigating those questions.