Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸 comments on 1. The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance: Introduction

[Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸]

Thanks Toby, I’m glad you find this valuable. :)

On how this differs from complex cluelessness, copying a comment from LW:

I think unawareness is a (major) source of what Greaves called complex cluelessness, which is a situation where:

(CC1) We have some reasons to think that the unforeseeable consequences of A1 would
systematically tend to be substantially better than those of A2;
(CC2) We have some reasons to think that the unforeseeable consequences of A2 would
systematically tend to be substantially better than those of A1;
(CC3) It is unclear how to weigh up these reasons against one another.

(It’s a bit unclear how “unforeseeable” is defined. In context /​ in the usual ways people tend to talk about complex cluelessness, I think it’s meant to encompass cases where the problem isn’t unawareness but rather other obstacles to setting precise credences.)

But unawareness itself means “many possible consequences of our actions haven’t even occurred to us in much detail, if at all” (as unpacked in the introduction section). ETA: I think it’s important to conceptually separate this from complex cluelessness, because you might think unawareness is a challenge that demands a response beyond straightforward Bayesianism, even if you disagree that it implies complex cluelessness.

I think of crucial considerations as one important class of things we may be unaware of. But we can also be unaware/​coarsely aware of possible causal pathways unfolding from our actions, even conditional on us having figured out all the CCs per se. These pathways could collectively dominate our impact. (That’s what I was gesturing at with the ending of the block-”quote” in the sequence introduction.)