It's great that you're thinking about this! 

I'm confused why you are denominating options in robotics-startup-days saved. This feels like a narrow definition of "impact". I'd encourage you to consider other ways to benefit the world; parts 4-6 of the 80k career guide might be helpful. Specifically, under the assumption that the thing you terminally value is more like "reducing suffering" than "robotics progress", I would encourage you to first consider which causes advance those values, and only then drill into job options. (The 80k career guide will walk you through this.)

Also, even to the extent you do just terminally value robotics progress, you might want to consider whether robotics will advance too quickly for your estimation to be accurate. 

You respond to Richard Ngo here:

> do you think that, if we had a theory of sociopolitics that was about as good as 20th-century economics, then we wouldn't be clueless about how to do sociopolitical interventions (like founding AI safety movements) effectively?

No, because I think “founding AI safety movements that succeed at making the far future go better” is a pretty out-of-distribution kind of sociopolitical intervention.

Suppose instead we had a comparably good theory of the right reference class, e.g. "movements trying to shape transformative technologies." Would we still be clueless about AI safety movement-building? 

More generally: you list various considerations across your posts and I have a hard time understanding which is load-bearing for your answer here. Some possibilities: 

1. We're clueless because we haven't yet developed the relevant theory (Richard's reading IIUC, on which cluelessness is contingent and reducible)
2. No such theory could be validated even in principle, because we never observe the target variable (far-future value) and calibration on near-term proxies doesn't transfer
3. Even a validated theory wouldn't help, because impact is dominated by considerations inaccessible to any theory (e.g. unconceived hypothesis classes)

What's the clearest example of a complex cluelessness sign flip you're aware of?

(By "clear" I mean "had a very narrow confidence interval before encountering some consideration and a narrow interval after encountering that consideration but the CIs now center points with opposite signs".^[1])

The clearest examples I know of (e.g. rescuing Hitler as a child) seem to me like examples of simple cluelessness. You list some examples here, but they don't seem that clear to me, e.g. I disagree that "Early awareness-raising about AGI x-risk presumably seemed robustly good" and would guess most people involved in that had CIs which comfortably straddled zero. 

1. ^{^}

   Or alternatively: there are two representors with narrow but non-overlapping CIs.

Thanks! "Don't arbitrarily favor some moral patients over others" was the most intuitive definition of "impartial" in my mind, so I was confused about how it was being used here. 

I feel somewhat confused about what exactly the challenge here is. You say:

Grant all the premises but argue that the conclusion—that we have no impartial-altruistic reason to prefer any action over another—doesn’t follow.

My understanding is that Anthony agrees we can justifiably prefer actions, and even do so on altruistic consequence-based grounds if something like bracketing works — but he'd deny that either deontological reasons or bracketed reasons are "impartial altruistic reasons" in the sense his conclusion targets: the first aren't consequence-comparisons at all, and the second are consequence-comparisons that give up full impartiality to stay determinate.

Is my understanding correct? If so, I would find a more precise statement of the inference people are supposed to challenge helpful. 

My understanding is that Anthony agrees that there are still reasons to do things:

First, the unawareness argument doesn’t imply that “nothing we do matters” all things considered. It only implies that impartial altruism, or any very far-reaching value system, isn’t action-guiding. Other values and moral norms still matter to us, for example, rules like avoiding dishonesty or virtues like compassion. These can be action-guiding even if we’re clueless about total consequences.

I think your justification "because all of my attempts to do good actually end up being a net positive for me in terms of my own self-interest" doesn't disagree with his conclusion?

Surprising that your MP was willing to meet with you for so long. Thanks for doing this (and writing it up)!

Sure, not the metaphor I would use but I broadly agree that applicants who are willing to plug the metaphorical USB stick into their computer (e.g. by following people they want to work with and applying to the jobs that they post) have a much lower rejection rate.

Sure, "hiring managers being bad at marketing is the bottleneck, not funding" is at least partially true. It still implies that if you happen to stumble across a poorly advertised position, you shouldn't expect the acceptance rate to be low!

My version of Matt's critique that you quoted is something like:

Imagine you're running a mining company, and you want to start mining Venus. You could either embark on a massive terraforming project to make Venus habitable by biological humans who can work in your mining colony, or you could just build a bunch of robots who can naturally withstand Venus' climate, think faster than a human, make better decisions than a human, etc. etc. What do you do?

Obviously you are going to choose to send the robots, and the robots aren't going to want to eat meat, so you don't need to worry about factory farming on Venus.

I don't think this argument is bulletproof. For example, ports in the U.S. are required to pay human dock workers to sit around and do nothing after their jobs had been automated. I could imagine some sort of analogous regulatory capture in the future which would require mining companies to send humans to other planets even when robots would be more efficient. Preventing this kind of lock-in is one of the few interventions targeting a post-singularity world that I feel positive about.