Thank you for the response, and in particular for the references for further reading!
I'm curious to hear more about your reasoning for those examples, or why they seem especially likely under some plausible distribution. (For what it's worth, I'll clarify the hypothetical donation goes to GiveDirectly, not GiveWell. Also, I eat meat, and my meat consumption is sensitive to my income.)
I agree that it is possible for them to occur, but there is no probability distribution I would include in my representor under which they are sufficiently likely to occur that the comparison between actions is indeterminate.
I'm not sure how helpful it is to dwell on specific examples, but this is the disagreement I have with many arguments for cluelessness about neartermist causes.
The story given in Mogensen 2021 of the priest saving Hitler from drowning as a child is illustrative. This was the right thing to do. There have been billions and billions of children; a handful have had both the opportunity and desire to commit horrific genocides. I don't believe there is a plausible probability distribution that make it so likely an anonymous child will commit genocide that it is better to let them drown.
Reading through all the essays and comments this week, I've become much more convinced that cluelessness is pervasive and standard ways of handling it fail. I agree with the normative and conceptual premises.
But the empirical premise is untrue. In particular, it is untrue that for any pair of actions, the actions' consequences are too coarse to be compared.
Consider the following counterexample: I could either donate 10% of my income to GiveDirectly or take a nice vacation. Is it true that our knowledge of the consequences of these actions is so coarse-grained that the comparison between them is indeterminate? I don't think so, even though in principle the same concerns about the catch-all and unawareness apply.
The "best guess" justification for donating is simple. My lifetime income is very likely to be in the top 5% globally; under all plausible theories of utility, marginal utility declines with income; thus, the marginal transfer from me to someone in extreme poverty improves aggregate well-being.
How might this be incorrect or imprecise?
The recipient of the donation could use it for something bad. (This is analogous to the meat-eater problem, but given my own consumption of animal products the meat-eater problem itself doesn't apply.)
Catch-up growth in recipient countries could lead to an unstable multi-polar world order, which eventually causes a catastrophic WWIII.
Because I don't go on vacation, I don't accidentally step on a butterfly I otherwise would have. The butterfly flaps its wings and causes a tornado that kills 50 people. Also, those 50 people were all wild animal suffering researchers.
Everyone else is a p-zombie; only my consumption matters, and I should take more vacations.
In case this seems too glib, I promise I tried to come up with better examples (and asked AI). I do not think there is any plausible probability distribution under which the above are likely enough that taking the vacation is better than donating. I would welcome suggestions.
"Plausible" is doing a lot of work here. I don't have a good justification for why no probability distribution where these events are likely enough to change the outcome of the comparison is plausible to me. All I can say is that if we consider these type of events to be equally plausible to the "best guess", then I agree with Richard Y Chappell that cluelessness considerations approach radical skepticism.
More formally, I would claim that the set S of all possible actions contains a non-empty proper subset C of actions over which an ideal impartially altruistic agent has complete preferences. The comparison between each action in C and each action in S\C is indeterminate. This still offers a lot of guidance on impartial altruistic action, because I would claim we all have more than one action within C available to us.
There is still a lot of debate to be had and research to be done to figure out which actions are in C and which aren't (see Jim Buhler's "The Train to Arbitrary Land" for a good elaboration of this problem.)
Still, this offers a meaningful change from previous cause prioritization discussions, which generally assumed that all actions are in C. Practically, these considerations push me towards near-term interventions, whose sign is clear and comparisons of which with alternative uses of resources I believe to be determinate.
Thank you for the response, and in particular for the references for further reading!
I'm curious to hear more about your reasoning for those examples, or why they seem especially likely under some plausible distribution. (For what it's worth, I'll clarify the hypothetical donation goes to GiveDirectly, not GiveWell. Also, I eat meat, and my meat consumption is sensitive to my income.)
I agree that it is possible for them to occur, but there is no probability distribution I would include in my representor under which they are sufficiently likely to occur that the comparison between actions is indeterminate.
I'm not sure how helpful it is to dwell on specific examples, but this is the disagreement I have with many arguments for cluelessness about neartermist causes.
The story given in Mogensen 2021 of the priest saving Hitler from drowning as a child is illustrative. This was the right thing to do. There have been billions and billions of children; a handful have had both the opportunity and desire to commit horrific genocides. I don't believe there is a plausible probability distribution that make it so likely an anonymous child will commit genocide that it is better to let them drown.
Reading through all the essays and comments this week, I've become much more convinced that cluelessness is pervasive and standard ways of handling it fail. I agree with the normative and conceptual premises.
But the empirical premise is untrue. In particular, it is untrue that for any pair of actions, the actions' consequences are too coarse to be compared.
Consider the following counterexample: I could either donate 10% of my income to GiveDirectly or take a nice vacation. Is it true that our knowledge of the consequences of these actions is so coarse-grained that the comparison between them is indeterminate? I don't think so, even though in principle the same concerns about the catch-all and unawareness apply.
The "best guess" justification for donating is simple. My lifetime income is very likely to be in the top 5% globally; under all plausible theories of utility, marginal utility declines with income; thus, the marginal transfer from me to someone in extreme poverty improves aggregate well-being.
How might this be incorrect or imprecise?
In case this seems too glib, I promise I tried to come up with better examples (and asked AI). I do not think there is any plausible probability distribution under which the above are likely enough that taking the vacation is better than donating. I would welcome suggestions.
"Plausible" is doing a lot of work here. I don't have a good justification for why no probability distribution where these events are likely enough to change the outcome of the comparison is plausible to me. All I can say is that if we consider these type of events to be equally plausible to the "best guess", then I agree with Richard Y Chappell that cluelessness considerations approach radical skepticism.
More formally, I would claim that the set S of all possible actions contains a non-empty proper subset C of actions over which an ideal impartially altruistic agent has complete preferences. The comparison between each action in C and each action in S\C is indeterminate. This still offers a lot of guidance on impartial altruistic action, because I would claim we all have more than one action within C available to us.
There is still a lot of debate to be had and research to be done to figure out which actions are in C and which aren't (see Jim Buhler's "The Train to Arbitrary Land" for a good elaboration of this problem.)
Still, this offers a meaningful change from previous cause prioritization discussions, which generally assumed that all actions are in C. Practically, these considerations push me towards near-term interventions, whose sign is clear and comparisons of which with alternative uses of resources I believe to be determinate.