Thank you. I agree that it seems very plausible that the consequences of any capacity-building strategy will include large off-target effects, and I agree that any such strategy will in a sense be highly non-robust. So in those respects I don’t think otherwise. But I don’t think any of that implies that one option can’t still be meaningfully better than another in expectation, or have a higher degree of ex ante betterness. The latter seems a much weaker standard.
Per the above, even if a strategy might enable us to act on considerations we aren’t yet aware of, this doesn’t help us with cluelessness if the strategy’s impact is still very plausibly dominated by off-target effects.
This seems to require something like the following premise:
“strategy A’s impact is very plausibly dominated by off-target effects that we can only estimate very coarsely” ⇒ “we cannot make any justified comparative verdicts about the c-betterness of strategy A compared to any other strategy”
That seems like a big leap to me, and I don’t see how it follows or what justifies it. Perhaps that step is defensible under maximality. (Although even there it doesn’t seem obvious: a strategy could in principle be maximality-preferred even if its impact is very plausibly dominated by off-target effects, provided that it still has higher EV than the alternative across all admissible probability functions.) But under a graded approach, or other more discerning approaches, I don’t see why large and highly uncertain off-target effects should preclude any meaningful comparative judgments, rather than simply weaken the degree of justification for them.
That seems like a big leap to me, and I don’t see how it follows or what justifies it
The sequence gives general arguments for this, especially sections 2.3, 3.2, and 4.1. I’m not exactly sure what you find uncompelling about them. The worry is that severe coarseness makes the degree of justification so severely vague that we have all the same qualitative problems as under the maximality analysis.
Of course, the claim is defeasible by arguments to the contrary for some specific A vs. B. But the burden of proof seems quite high to me.
Thank you. I agree that it seems very plausible that the consequences of any capacity-building strategy will include large off-target effects, and I agree that any such strategy will in a sense be highly non-robust. So in those respects I don’t think otherwise. But I don’t think any of that implies that one option can’t still be meaningfully better than another in expectation, or have a higher degree of ex ante betterness. The latter seems a much weaker standard.
This seems to require something like the following premise:
“strategy A’s impact is very plausibly dominated by off-target effects that we can only estimate very coarsely” ⇒ “we cannot make any justified comparative verdicts about the c-betterness of strategy A compared to any other strategy”
That seems like a big leap to me, and I don’t see how it follows or what justifies it. Perhaps that step is defensible under maximality. (Although even there it doesn’t seem obvious: a strategy could in principle be maximality-preferred even if its impact is very plausibly dominated by off-target effects, provided that it still has higher EV than the alternative across all admissible probability functions.) But under a graded approach, or other more discerning approaches, I don’t see why large and highly uncertain off-target effects should preclude any meaningful comparative judgments, rather than simply weaken the degree of justification for them.
The sequence gives general arguments for this, especially sections 2.3, 3.2, and 4.1. I’m not exactly sure what you find uncompelling about them. The worry is that severe coarseness makes the degree of justification so severely vague that we have all the same qualitative problems as under the maximality analysis.
Of course, the claim is defeasible by arguments to the contrary for some specific A vs. B. But the burden of proof seems quite high to me.