I would even take this further and argue that your chain of reasoning could be applied to most causes (perhaps even all?), which seems valid.

Would you disagree with this?

I mean, I didn't actually give any argument for why I don't believe AI safety is good overall (assuming pure longtermism, i.e., taking into account everything from now until the end of time). I just said that I would believe it if there was evidence robust to unknown unknowns. (I haven't argued that there wasn't such evidence already; although the burden of the proof is very much on the opposite claim tbf). But I think this criterion applies to all causes where unknown unknowns are substantial, and I believe this is all of them as long as we're evaluating them from a pure longtermist perspective, yes. And whether there is any cause that meets this criterion depends on one's values I think. From a classical utilitarian perspective (and assuming the trade-offs between suffering and pleasure that most longtermists endorse), for example, I think there's very plausibly none that does meet this criterion.

If you do have a determinate credence above 50% for AI safety work, how do you arrive at this conclusion?

It happens that I do not. But I would if I believed there was evidence robust to unknown unknowns in favor of assuming "AI Safety work" is good, factoring in all the possible consequences from now until the end of time. This would require robust reasons to believe that current AI safety work actually increases rather than decreases safety overall AND that increased safety is actually good all things considered (e.g., that human disempowerment is actually bad overall). (See Guillaume's comment on the distinction). I won't elaborate on what would count as "evidence robust to unknown unknowns" in such a context but this is a topic for a future post/paper, hopefully.

Next, I want to push back on your claim that if ii) is correct, everything collapses. I agree that this would lead to the conclusion that we are probably entirely clueless about longtermist causes, probably the vast majority of causes in the world. However, it would make me lean toward near-term areas with much shorter causal chains, where there is a smaller margin of error—for example, caring for your family or local animals, which carry a low risk of backfiring.

Sorry, I didn't mean to argue against that. I just meant that work you are clueless about (e.g. maybe AI safety work in your case?) shouldn't be given any weight in your diversified portfolio. I didn't mean to make any claim about what I personnally think we should or shouldn't be clueless about. The "everything falls apart" was unclear and probably unwarranted.

Do you think that AI safety is i) at least a bit good in expectation (but like with a determinate credence barely higher than 50% because high risk/uncertainty) or ii) you don't have determinate credences and feel clueless/agnostic about this? I feel like your post implicitly keeps jumping back and forth between these two positions, and only (i) could support your conclusions. If we assume (ii), everything falls apart. There's no reason to support a cause X (or the exact opposite of X) to any degree if one is totally clueless about whether it is good.

Thanks for writing this :)

Influence on cosmic actors seems not only "plausible" but inevitable to me. Everything we do influences them in expectation, even if extremely indirectly (e.g., anything that directly or indirectly reduces X-risks reduces the likelihood of alien counterfactuals and increases that of interaction between our civilization and alien ones). The real questions seem to be i) how crucial is this influence for evaluating whether the work we do is good or bad; and ii) whether we can predictably influence them (right now, we know we are influencing them; we simply have no idea if this is in a way that makes the future better or worse). I think your first section gives good arguments in favor of answering "plausibly quite crucial" to (i). As for (ii), your fourth section roughly responds "maybe, but we'd yet have to figure out precisely how" which seems fair (although, fwiw, I think I'm more skeptical than you that we'll ever find evidence robust enough to warrant updating away from radical agnosticism on whether our influence on cosmic actors makes the future better or worse).

Also, this is unrelated to the point of your post but I think your second section should invite us to reflect on whether longtermists can/should ignore the unpredictable (see, e.g., this recent comment thread and the references therein) since this may be a key -- and controversial -- assumption behind the objections you respond to.

Thanks for this interesting post :)

I'd be very curious to know who's working or considering working on questions mentioned in 1.2.1 Cluelessness, Unawareness, and Deep Uncertainty and/or 4.2.1 Severe Uncertainty, in case anyone reading this happens to be able to enlighten me. :)

Thanks for the post. Nice to see an up-to-date version of GPI's research agenda!

Oh interesting, I would have guessed you'd endorse some version of B or come up with a C, instead. 

Iirc, these resources I referenced don't directly address Owen's points to justify A, though. Not sure. I'll look into this and where they might be more straightforwardly addressed, since this seems quite important w.r.t. the work I'm currently doing. Happy to keep you updated if you want.

Oh my bad. I don't think it's really a crux, then. Or not the most key one at least. I guess I can't narrow it down to more precise than whether your "fact[*]" is true, in that case. And it looks like I misunderstood the assumptions behind your justification of it. 

I'll brush upon my little knowledge of the literature on unawareness -- maybe dive deeper -- and see to what extent your "fact[*]" was already discussed. I'm sure it was. Then, I'll go back to your justification of it to see if I understand it better and whether I actually can say I disagree.

Thanks for all your thoughts!

Thanks a lot for developing on that! To confirm whether we've identified at least one of the cruxes, I'd be curious to know what you think of what follows.

Say I am clueless about the (dis)value of the alien counterfactual we should expect (i.e., whether another civ someday replacing our own after we go extinct or something would be better or worse than if it was ours maintaining control over our corner of the Universe). One consideration I have identified is that there is, all else equal, a selection effect against caring about suffering for grabby civs. But all else is ofc not equal and there might be plenty of considerations I haven't thought of and/or never will be aware of supporting the opposite or other relevant considerations that have nothing to do with care for suffering. I'm clueless. By, 'I'm clueless', I don't mean 'I have a 50% credence the alien counterfactual is better'. Instead, I mean 'my credence is severely indeterminate/imprecise, such that I can't compute the expected value of reducing X-risks (unless I decide to give up on impartial consequentialism and ignore things like the alien counterfactual which I'm clueless about)' (for a case for how cluelessness threatens expected value reasoning in such a way, see e.g. Mogensen 2021).

Your above argument is based on the assumption that our credences all ought to be determinate/precise and that cluelessness = 50% credence, right? It's probably not worth discussing further in here whether this assumption is justified but do you also think that's one of the cruxes, here?

In which case we can bracket worlds where there is a crucial consideration we are missing as too hard, and base our decision on the worlds where we have the most crucial considerations already, and base our analysis on that.

Ah nice, so this could mean two different things:

A. (The ‘canceling out’ objection to (complex) cluelessness:) We assume that good and bad unpredictable effects “cancel each other out” such that we are warranted to believe whatever option is best according to predictable effects is also best according to overall effects, OR

B. (Giving up on impartial consequentialism:) We reconsider what matters for our decision and simply decide to stop caring about whether our action makes the World better or worse, all things considered. Instead, we focus only on whether the parts of the World that are predictably affected a certain way are made better or worse and/or about things that have nothing to do with consequences (e.g., our intentions), and ignore the actual overall long-term impact of our decision which we cannot figure out.

I think A is a big epistemic mistake for the reasons given by, e.g., Lenman 2000; Greaves 2016; Tarsney et al 2024, §3.

Some version of B might be the right response in the scenario where we don't know what else to do anyway? I don't know. One version of B is explicitly given by Lenman who says we should reject consequentialism. Another is implicitly given by Tarsney (2022) when he says we should focus on the next thousands of years and sort of admit we have no idea what our impact is beyond that. But then we're basically saying that we "got beaten" by cluelessness and are giving up on actually trying to improve the long-term future, overall (which is what most longtermists are claiming our goal should be, for compelling ethical reasons). We can very well endorse B, but then we can't pretend we're trying to actually predictably improve the World. We're not. We're just trying to improve some aspects of the World, ignoring how this affects things overall (since we have no idea).

Your view seems to imply the futility of altruistic endeavour?

If you replace "altruistic endeavour" by "impartial consequentialism", in the DogvCat case, yes, absolutely. But I didn't mean to imply that cluelessness in that case generalizes to everything (although I'm also not arguing it doesn't). There might be cases where we have arguments plausibly robust to many unknown unknowns that warrant updating away from agnosticism, e.g., arguments based on logical inevitabilities or unavoidable selection effects. In this thread, I've only argued that I'd be surprised if we find such (convincing) argument for the DogVCat case, specifically. But it may very well be that this generalizes to many other cases and that we should be agnostic about many other things, to the extent that we actually care about our overall impact.

And I absolutely agree that this is an important implication of my points here. I think the reason why these problems are neglected by sympathizers of longtermism is that they (unwarrantedly) endorse A or (also unwarrantedly) assume that the fact that 'wild guesses' are often better than agnosticism in short-term geopolitical forecasting means they're also better when it comes to predicting our overall impact on the long-term future (see 'Winning isn't enough').

Maybe the philanthropist should be deciding whether to fund clean energy R&D or vaccines R&D, or similar.

I like these examples, especially the fact that it's obvious they impact the long term. My main worry, however, would be that most longtermists will start pretty convinced that we can figure out which one is best without too much trouble (actually, I think they'd even already have an opinion) and that this is not a good example of cluelessness, (even) more so than with something like dogs vs cats.

But very good pointer. I'll try to think of something in the same vein as clean energy vs vaccines but where longtermist would start more agnostic. Maybe two things where the sign on X-risk reduction seems unusually uncertain..