When this post went up, I wrote virtually the same comment, but never sent it! Glad to see you write it up, as well as your below comments.
I have the impression that in each supposed example of ‘simple cluelessness’ people just aren’t being creative enough to see the ‘complex cluelessness’ factors, as you clarify with chairs in other comment.
My original comment even included saying how Phil’s example of simple cluelessness is false, but it’s false for different reasons than you think:
If you try to conceive a child a day later, this will not in expectancy impact when the child will be born. The impact is actually much stronger than that. It will affect whether you are able to conceive in this cycle at all, since eggs can only be fertilized during a very brief window of time (12-24 hours). If you are too late, no baby.
To be honest I’m not really sure how important there being a distinction between simple and complex cluelessness actually is. The most useful thing I took from Greaves was to realise there seems to be an issue of complex cluelessness in the first place—where we can’t really form precise credences in certain instances where people have traditionally felt like they can, and that these instances are often faced by EAs when they’re trying to do the most good.
Maybe we’re also complexy clueless about what day to conceive a child on, or which chair to sit on, but we don’t really have our “EA hat on” when doing these things. In other words, I’m not having a child to do the most good, I’m doing it because I want to. So I guess in these circumstances I don’t really care about my complex cluelessness. When giving to charity, I very much do care about any complex cluelessness because I’m trying to do the most good and really thinking hard about how to do so.
I’m still not sure if I would class myself as complexly clueless when deciding which chair to sit on (I think from a subjective standpoint I at least feel simplyclueless), but I’m also not sure this particular debate really matters.
I’m also inclined to agree with this. I actually only very recently realized that a similar point had also been made in the literature: in this 2019 ‘discussion note’ by Lok Lam Yim, which is a reply to Greaves’s cluelessness paper:
This distinction between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ cases of cluelessness, though an ingenious one, ultimately fails. Upon heightened scrutiny, a so-called ‘simple’ case often collapses into a ‘complex’ case. Let us consider Greaves’s example of a ‘simple’ case: helping an old lady cross the road. It is possible that this minor act of kindness has some impacts of systematic tendencies of a ‘complex’ nature. For instance, future social science research may show that old ladies often tell their grandchildren benevolent stories they have encountered to encourage their grandchildren to help others. Future psychological research may show that small children who are encouraged to help others are usually more charitable, and these children, upon reaching adulthood, are generally more sympathetic to the effective altruism movement, which Greaves considers a ‘complex’ case. This shows that a so-called ‘simple’ decision (such as whether to help an old lady to cross the road) can systematically lead to consequences of a ‘complex’ nature (such as an increase in the possibility of their grandchildren joining the effective altruism movement), thereby suffering from the same problem of genuine cluelessness as a ‘complex’ case.
Morally important actions are often, if not always, others-affecting. With the advancement of social science and psychological research, we are likely to discover that most others-concerning actions have some systematic impacts on others. These systematic impacts may lead to another chain of systematic impacts, and so on. Along the chain of systematic impacts, it is likely that at least one of them is of a ‘complex’ nature.
Interesting—that’s fairly similar to the counterarguments I gave for the same case here:
I think all of [the three key criteria Greaves proposes for a case to involve complex cluelessness] actually appl[y] to the old lady case, just very speculatively. One reason to think [the first criterion applies] is that the old lady and/or anyone witnessing your kind act and/or anyone who’s told about it could see altruism, kindness, community spirit, etc. as more of the norm than they previously did, and be inspired to act similarly themselves. When they act similarly themselves, this further spreads that norm. We could tell a story about how that ripples out further and further and creates huge amount of additional value over time.
Importantly, there isn’t a “precise counterpart, precisely as plausible as the original”, for this story. That’d have to be something like people seeing this act therefore thinking unkindness, bullying, etc. are more the norm that they previously thought they were, which is clearly less plausible.
One reason to think [the second criterion applies] for the old lady case could jump off from that story; maybe your actions sparks ripples of kindness, altruism, etc., which leads to more people donating to GiveWell type charities, which (perhaps) leads to increased population (via reduced mortality), which (perhaps) leads to increased x-risk (e.g., via climate change or more rapid technological development), which eventually causes huge amounts of disvalue.
When this post went up, I wrote virtually the same comment, but never sent it! Glad to see you write it up, as well as your below comments. I have the impression that in each supposed example of ‘simple cluelessness’ people just aren’t being creative enough to see the ‘complex cluelessness’ factors, as you clarify with chairs in other comment.
My original comment even included saying how Phil’s example of simple cluelessness is false, but it’s false for different reasons than you think: If you try to conceive a child a day later, this will not in expectancy impact when the child will be born. The impact is actually much stronger than that. It will affect whether you are able to conceive in this cycle at all, since eggs can only be fertilized during a very brief window of time (12-24 hours). If you are too late, no baby.
To be honest I’m not really sure how important there being a distinction between simple and complex cluelessness actually is. The most useful thing I took from Greaves was to realise there seems to be an issue of complex cluelessness in the first place—where we can’t really form precise credences in certain instances where people have traditionally felt like they can, and that these instances are often faced by EAs when they’re trying to do the most good.
Maybe we’re also complexy clueless about what day to conceive a child on, or which chair to sit on, but we don’t really have our “EA hat on” when doing these things. In other words, I’m not having a child to do the most good, I’m doing it because I want to. So I guess in these circumstances I don’t really care about my complex cluelessness. When giving to charity, I very much do care about any complex cluelessness because I’m trying to do the most good and really thinking hard about how to do so.
I’m still not sure if I would class myself as complexly clueless when deciding which chair to sit on (I think from a subjective standpoint I at least feel simply clueless), but I’m also not sure this particular debate really matters.
I’m also inclined to agree with this. I actually only very recently realized that a similar point had also been made in the literature: in this 2019 ‘discussion note’ by Lok Lam Yim, which is a reply to Greaves’s cluelessness paper:
Interesting—that’s fairly similar to the counterarguments I gave for the same case here: