I take your point, and you’ve convinced me that determinative unawareness lies at a deeper level than the cluelessness my essay addresses, blocking any strong global justification for discovery’s net goodness.
Still, the local value of certain activities—surviving, cooperating, preserving options, and discovering—seems hard to ignore. If one continues to think the long term warrants attention and effort, even without clear awareness of how to help, discovery remains a prudent direction.
In that sense, I see your essay as defining the upper bound of what we can justifiably claim to know, and mine as exploring what orientation remains coherent within that bound. Any such orientation can only ever be conditionally coherent, but refining our map is still a principled way to reduce arbitrariness and local cluelessness, even if we can never know absolutely whether mapping is a net good.
I take your point, and you’ve convinced me that determinative unawareness lies at a deeper level than the cluelessness my essay addresses, blocking any strong global justification for discovery’s net goodness.
Still, the local value of certain activities—surviving, cooperating, preserving options, and discovering—seems hard to ignore. If one continues to think the long term warrants attention and effort, even without clear awareness of how to help, discovery remains a prudent direction.
In that sense, I see your essay as defining the upper bound of what we can justifiably claim to know, and mine as exploring what orientation remains coherent within that bound. Any such orientation can only ever be conditionally coherent, but refining our map is still a principled way to reduce arbitrariness and local cluelessness, even if we can never know absolutely whether mapping is a net good.