Kuutti Lappalainen

• Kuutti Lappalainen 18 Aug 2026 9:30 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jim Buhler’s comment on: Lex­i­cal Fil­ter­ing: De­cid­ing un­der In­de­ter­mi­nacy with Lex­i­cally Ordered Values

  Thanks, these are good points to clarify.

  First:

  Why is the move to a lower-ranked value like beauty more legitimate than moving to a utilitarianism conditional on ex post neartermism?

  I don’t think empirical neartermism exists separately in a way that you could move onto it from non-neartermism. Doing that requires carving up the empirical space into an ordering which I don’t know how to do (see this open question: How could the intuition “Less arbitrary parts of beliefs could be lexically more important than more arbitrary parts and that could be used for filtering” be made precise and action guiding when arbitrariness is read as being about what the beliefs are based on?). That is also what we are denying to be able to do when we work with an unordered representor.
  
  Taking ex post neartermism as an empirical stance, it lives in the representor. I’d read having an overall (as opposed to being in one probability distribution in the representor) 10% credence in it as: For any options A and B and for any probability distribution in the representor, propositions that are over, say, 100 years away are the same with 10% chance. That is to say that if you believe 10% in ex post neartermism, that is just what utilitarianism is for you. There is no separate empirically non-neartermist utilitarianism to consider before neartermist utilitarianism.

  In contrast, it seems like you are interested in considering those as separate probability distributions in order: take p_non-near and p_near. Then you could do the filtering indexed on those two and get the action guidance from being clueful in the near term. However, this would imply having lexical order between those which is not compatible with having cardinal credence between them: having 10% credence in p_near would imply collapsing those into p_mix=0.1*p_near+0.9*p_non-near and we get the thing I said in the previous paragraph.

  All this is to say that these three are incompatible: (1) the difference is empirical, (2) they are separate (in the sense that you could condition on the other and be clueful) and (3) you have cardinal credence between them. Just having (1) and (2) together is possible but that requires the structure in the empirical space to separate them. Hill’s confidence ranking stuff (see footnote 14) and the open question I mentioned are related to this.

  On normative views being privileged units: Do you mean as privileged over carving up the empirical space into units? If so I’d read that point as “Why use normative views as the units instead of empirical units?”. Again, if we do have a unique way to carve up the empirical space in a meaningful way, I think that is worth doing. Also, the parity between carving the normative space and carving the empirical space doesn’t bite for LF like it might for MNB: Taking the parts of the normative space that have lexicality between them isn’t really carving it into units. Lexicality already carves them and we just use that. If there is no lexicality, we don’t have the units.

  Second:

  I’d think of beauty as a part of a rank that orders options based on just general vibes-based aesthetic stuff. Everything with what I’d consider to be “harder” normative content is above that rank (like welfare, deontology, virtue and even some vibes-based self interest). I also don’t really have anything that would come after the rank involving beauty.

• Kuutti Lappalainen 17 Aug 2026 19:33 UTC

  3 points

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  on: The Clue­less­ness Hori­zon Ar­gu­ment: Limited Ra­tion­al­ity from Im­par­tial Motivations

  (I’m posting this as a separate comment for clarity)

  I think it is important to state just how different CHA is from impartial consequentialism. I read your text as claiming that this is obviously what impartial consequentialism is under constraint (for example based on your “There is no option to avoid making choices, so complaining about having to do it imperfectly would go nowhere.” and “we are not so much given a possibility to be (kind of) rational in our choices as forced to apply the limited degree of rationality that’s available.”) The problem is if (1) that’s still the thing we cared about, (2) if it actually works and (3) if we are actually forced into it.

  1. Limiting impartial consequentialism to a subset is fundamentally different from true impartial consequentialism, not just an imperfect way of doing it. Going from “Increasing welfare on balance” to “increasing welfare in a proper subset while knowing that the effect is indeterminate on balance” is a huge leap to me. I’m sympathetic to the latter one too but that requires independent motivations (like virtue). The whole deal with impartial consequentialism is doing good on balance so losing that is significant.

  2. I don’t think it works as cleanly as you state it. See my other comment on bracketing.

  3. There definitely are places to go besides nowhere (that is to say that we are not forced into CHA to get action guidance): other normative views and limited versions of impartial consequentialism motivated by reasons besides “nowhere else to go”. See TDB (very similar concept to CHA but in the overview Clifton is clear that it is a distinct theory from consequentialism as opposed to just obviously what clueless consequentialists are supposed to do), MNB, LF and possibly some other entries in the competition.

• Kuutti Lappalainen 17 Aug 2026 15:14 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The Clue­less­ness Hori­zon Ar­gu­ment: Limited Ra­tion­al­ity from Im­par­tial Motivations

  Option 3 has been made precise with bracketing: overview and paper. I think this shows why it is not clear how “some subset” is defined even when we have a clear idea of what we want it to track (for top-down bracketing: the effects we’re not clueless about taken as widely as possible).

  The problem with carving up effects is with choosing which locations of value to discount when they have determinate sign on their own (so not clueless) but not in aggregate (so clueless). Clifton gives a clear example in the overview post and this seems to apply to your CHA: an intervention reducing animal product consumption has positive EV for farmed animals, negative for wild animals, and indeterminate in aggregate. I do not think that the test you propose resolves this conflict since both groupings pass it (each has determinate sign on its own). So there may be multiple conflicting ways to draw the cluelessness horizon and picking some privileged way to draw them requires justifying it over all the others. (Note on footnote 11: I don’t think this is waivable with anit-scepticism since these are genuinely different ways to draw the line and not just our inability to draw.)

Lex­i­cal Fil­ter­ing: De­cid­ing un­der In­de­ter­mi­nacy with Lex­i­cally Ordered Values

• Kuutti Lappalainen 13 Oct 2025 14:37 UTC

  28 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Utili­tar­i­ans Should Ac­cept that Some Suffer­ing Can­not be “Offset”

  Thanks for this post Aaron! I especially value the part about asymptotic structure instead of the sharp thresholds.

  I think it’s useful for those interested in the topic to highlight the connection of your post to existing EA discussion and academic literature on ethics and decision theory. Here are some of the things I’m aware of:

  • As @Robi Rahman🔸 points out, the post is arguing for an established view: lexical (negative) utilitarianism. I think The Center on Reducing Suffering’s critique of Toby Ord’s blog post “Why I’m not a negative utilitarian” is a relevant discussion of negative utilitarianism that also touches on lexicality and can work as a “common misconceptions to avoid” for people new to the idea.

  • Like you, Academian takes a critical look at the vNM axioms and argues against continuity being required in a LessWrong post. They highlight the original lexicality paper: Melvin Hausner’s 1954 “Multidimensional utilities” that weakens the continuity axiom of vNM, producing lexicality.

  • Teo Ajantaival has an entire chapter in his book/​sequence “Minimalist Axiologies” on “Doesn’t this endorse destroying the world?”.

  • On a more general note, vNM hasn’t been the favored framework in normative decision theory for a while. The frameworks of Savage and then Jeffrey-Bolker have provided increasingly realistic/​reasonable setups while keeping the utilities and most of the properties of the axioms. I think Richard Bradley’s 2017 book “Decision Theory with a Human Face” provides the canonical background for current normative decision theory.

  • In contrast to what you argue in footnote 21, completeness and transitivity have both been challenged (I think successfully). Especially Suzumura consistency and representor models (more on incompleteness in belief in Anthony DiGiovanni’s comment) are attractive alternatives as they are more appropriate for real agents like us and still invulnerable to value pumps.

  Also, I think that in a precise baysian framework, the strongest argument against lexicality is that it is irrelevant because the EV of two options will almost never be exactly the same. This changes if we incorporate imprecision because then it is quite possible that the primary utility doesn’t provide a preference over two options and instead gives comparative indeterminacy which one could consider similar to indifference for the purpose of lexicality. That is to say, I think lexicality is more action-guidance relevant and conceptually attractive in an, arguably better, imprecise framework.