unsharp

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unsharp 2 Sep 2026 14:14 UTC
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in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸’s comment on: Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification
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.

unsharp 1 Sep 2026 13:37 UTC
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in reply to: Carlosz’s comment on: Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification
I agree that there’s an interesting tension between potentially greater value from “saving”/capacity-building due to increased info and productivity over time, and potentially greater value from spending sooner on targeted interventions/opportunities that may not be available later. It seems to me that deep uncertainty about how to use such opportunities, and what exactly those opportunities are, tentatively favors efforts to improve our estimates and build flexible resources (so that we have a better chance of making a beneficial use of our opportunities; outsized opportunities don’t seem that valuable without a decent sense of how to use them).
Also, contrary to the opposing framing, it could in principle be that the greatest and most time-sensitive opportunity we now have is a form of capacity-building. For example, we might now have openings for high-impact capacity-building that won’t be available later.

unsharp 1 Sep 2026 12:28 UTC
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in reply to: Kuutti Lappalainen’s comment on: Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification
Thank you.
I think identifying degrees of justification is very compelling. However, I’m sceptical of this being possible to do the way it is done in this post.
I’m unsure what “the way it is done” refers to here: is it the general approach loosely illustrated in the first couple of figures, which covers a very broad range of possible graded accounts, or the specific (not firmly endorsed) example indices D or CD?
I understood this post as working on the assumption that there is something meaningful to be extracted from the representor besides unanimity.
I’d put it differently: Rather than assuming this, I think it’s worth openly exploring the possibility. In particular, I think it’s worth questioning the claim that maximality is the only or most plausible decision rule in this context. I don’t think that’s been established, and I think there are strong arguments and considerations against it (such as those I raise and those raised by others, including Levi (2000, sec. 4), Schervish et al. (2003, sec. 2), and Bradley (2015, sec. 4.1)).
Each probability function carries no information beyond being one admissible way to represent the information we carry.
That’s another premise I would question, or at least I’d question the notion that this is all we can say. As noted in footnote 36: “That we can distinguish plausible probability functions from implausible ones suggests that some level of plausibility-discernment is possible, and it would be surprising if this capacity were restricted to exactly the binary ordering of plausible versus implausible.” Why assume a sharply binary picture?
Some related literature on this includes Gärdenfors & Sahlin (1982), Chateauneuf & Faro (2009), Hill (2013), and Hill (2019).
This does not claim to be an “exhaustive criterion of comparative justification” as you say.
To clarify, what I mean by this in the context of this essay is “an exhaustive criterion for outcome-based choice”, specifically impartial outcome-based choice. That is, my essay is exclusively concerned with c-preference or c-betterness, and I’m arguing that maximality is not an exhaustive criterion of justification in this regard. That we can justify actions in other ways is a point I strongly agree with.
What is the meaningful thing you want to extract from the representor? What information does magnitude or being an outlier carry?
I think the non-sharpness/vagueness of the range of plausible probabilities (as endorsed by Clifton and DiGiovanni) gives a strong clue: this vagueness suggests that there indeed isn’t a clear and sharp cutoff point between plausible and implausible (or admissible and inadmissible) probability functions. There is no sharp cliff between these categories but rather a smooth gradient, or so I’d argue.
This is relevant for outliers in the following sense: extremal outlier distributions are those that are most vulnerable to alternative precisifications, and thus their inclusion or exclusion can depend on arbitrary precisifications (if we insist on the binary picture). This is an additional reason why maximality’s verdict in the torture cases seems highly implausible: if we just drew the boundary of P slightly differently for arbitrary reasons, maximality could make its categorical jump from complete indeterminacy to full preference.
This also gives a further reason to prefer rules whose verdicts vary continuously, or at least less abruptly, as the boundary of P changes. Midpoint ordering is one simple candidate (although this consideration does not uniquely privilege it): a small shift in where we draw the boundary shifts the midpoint slightly, whereas it can flip maximality’s verdict categorically. If we must build on vague foundations, it seems more plausible to use a rule whose outputs vary continuously with them.

unsharp 28 Aug 2026 21:46 UTC
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in reply to: K. Kirdan’s comment on: Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification
Thank you. I think that’s a fair summary. To be precise, rather than claiming that the maximality rule is generally too sensitive to small changes, my critique is that it’s generally too insensitive to small changes, as virtually all updates that would be registered by a graded approach make no difference at all. As a consequence of this insensitivity, maximality implies isolated points of extreme sensitivity where some tiny change can result in a categorical jump. So yes, I think it’s too sensitive to small changes in the sense that it packs all its sensitivity into those sharp points where dominance is achieved.

unsharp 28 Aug 2026 21:10 UTC
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in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸’s comment on: Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification
Thank you for these useful comments.
I agree that indeterminacy can still obtain under a graded approach. However, it’s worth noting that the band in which indeterminacy obtains under a graded approach will generally be much narrower than under maximality. So moving from maximality to a graded approach is a big change.
When I try to weigh up the reasons in favor of any A vs. B w.r.t. their total consequences, fully accounting for unawareness, I really don’t see why I should consider the “upper endpoint” larger or smaller in absolute value than the “lower endpoint”.
I gather we see this differently, but to very briefly explain why it seems warranted to me: Because of the evidence and arguments favoring the most plausible strategies, and the lack of similarly strong evidence and arguments against them. In particular, I don’t think the arguments against the capacity-building strategies I discuss are as strong as those in their favor. Moreover, much of the value of building capacity is the value of being able to act on considerations we aren’t yet aware of. So, in my view, unawareness bears asymmetrically on these strategies rather than neutrally (I realize this latter point is stated very briefly and needs further development).
I would like to see more of an argument that this isn’t our situation, perhaps building on what you say in your appendix about low-footprint capacity-building.
Without trying to build an elaborate case here, there is a simple extension that I think further strengthens the case: instead of focusing only on the best-supported strategies, we can specifically compare the seemingly best-supported strategy (say, some form of low-footprint CB) with the strategy that seems worst (I suspect it’s better not to go into details about what that might be).
When comparing two such contrasting strategies, the expected difference plausibly gets beyond the (relatively) narrow band of indeterminacy under some plausible graded approach, considering both the arguments favoring the seemingly better strategy and the arguments opposing the seemingly worse strategy. The reason this helps is that the width of the indeterminacy band doesn’t obviously scale with how contrasting the pair is, whereas the expected difference does. (Again, the expected difference between the two strategies need not be remotely as stark as in the figure below.)
You can have insensitivity to mild sweetening under vague degrees of betterness; it doesn’t assume maximality.
I agree that there can be insensitivity to mild sweetening under rules other than maximality. (As noted in more general terms, the blanket objection that rejects “any evidence or proposal we might wager on … assumes the kind of categorical decision rule that collapses a broad set of evidential states into complete and undifferentiated indeterminacy.”)
But interestingly, under a graded approach, even if indeterminacy may in some sense be preserved after a mild sweetening (within the relatively narrow indeterminacy band), we still wouldn’t get complete insensitivity to mild sweetening. In that case, we would have a hazy cloud of vague expected values, and a vague degree of ex ante betterness, but that vague degree would still slightly increase from the mild sweetening, even if the change isn’t large enough to yield a determinately higher degree of betterness for one option. The hazy cloud and degree do move. And as a result, the degree of vagueness in the comparison can in some sense be reduced.
A justified wager is not guaranteed under such an approach, as our evidence could in principle be closely balanced, but the bar for finding one is relatively low (since the approach doesn’t collapse a broad set of distinct evidential states into indeterminacy, cf. the figure here). It seems to me we can make such justified wagers given both how mild sweetenings do incrementally move ex ante degrees of betterness and the, in my view, sufficiently weighty arguments and considerations that support the most plausible strategies over the worst ones.

unsharp 24 Aug 2026 19:46 UTC
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in reply to: JesseClifton’s comment on: Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification
Thank you for your comment.
Regarding unappealing properties, I think it’s worth thinking about this in comparative terms. Properties that seem unappealing in some absolute sense may still be comparatively appealing when compared to properties or implications of alternative views. For example, compared to the (in my view extremely unappealing) implications of maximality discussed in the torture cases and footnote 17, the ostensibly unappealing properties of graded betterness may be highly appealing by comparison.
It is an open question whether all graded views of betterness have unappealing properties (which is not an easy case to make given that it’s a very broad category), and even if they do, the bar for having properties that are less unappealing than maximality’s does not appear that high.
In terms of CD in particular (which is just a simple example of a graded index), it seems debatable whether the possibility of a sign-flip from adding the same background consequences is desirable or not. This is related to the approach mentioned in footnote 37 about dropping the dominance clause and relying on CD alone. That is, if we decide based on the range of plausible expected values, and we do not privilege the profile of pairwise differences across probability functions, a sign-flip from adding the same background can be a principled result rather than a defect (when the background shifts the range of plausible expected values differently for the two actions).
For a concrete example, suppose A and B have expected values (1, −1, −1, −1) and (0, 0, 0, −2) at the four extreme points of P, so their ranges are [−1, 1] and [−2, 0], and A is better at both ends. Now add a background prospect Z with expected values (−1, −1, 1, 1) at those points, which is bad where A does best and good where B does worst. The resulting ranges are [−2, 0] for A + Z and [−1, 1] for B + Z, so B’s range now lies above A’s at both ends.^[1]
The pairwise differences are unchanged, while the background shifts the ranges by changing which probability functions set the endpoints, a shift that independence says should be irrelevant. So the flip may be less a defect of graded views than a reflection of a potential substantive disagreement about what the comparison should be sensitive to. But again, there’s a broad range of graded views, and this simple form of midpoint ordering may not be among the most plausible such views.
[Edit: I agree that it would be highly implausible if adding the same background consequences could reverse which outcome is better ex post, and this might motivate the general intuition that such an addition should never flip a verdict. But it is less obvious that the background should be irrelevant to the ex ante comparison, since that comparison concerns our expectations about the total outcomes, which the same background can affect differently.]
1. ^
  Note that neither act dominates the other here, before or after Z is added, so maximality returns “both permissible” in each case. The sign-flip therefore occurs, and can only occur, entirely within the region where maximality delivers no ranking.