Opinionated future imaginer. Science, philosophy, politics, storytelling /
Fiction MFA @ UC Irvine, plus some science degrees
James Yamada
Karma: 9
Thanks, this has been genuinely clarifying for me. I agree that Ontological Longtermism doesn’t resolve determinative unawareness. My claim is narrower: that we should treat unawareness itself as a first-order moral target. If cluelessness is the decision-level face of unawareness, then discovery—pursued humbly—still seems preferable to deliberate ignorance.
While I also agree that historical extrapolation can’t show that discovery reduces unawareness in any final sense—it often just moves our uncertainty to a deeper level—it’s still the only process that has ever changed what we’re unaware of. It could eventually make possible the kind of insight you describe (e.g. discovering a selection pressure that would flip X-risk reduction from undefined to positive).
Even if the overall unawareness remains large, discovery has at least made parts of it structured, which is what makes future moral progress possible at all. In that limited sense, I lean toward continued investigation over suspension.
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.