Episode Details

I’d like to elicit direct, productive critiques of the argument for cluelessness from my sequence on “unawareness”, which I’ll call the unawareness argument.

To that end, this post will:

• break down the unawareness argument at a high level;
• explain why the EA community should care about this argument; and
• summarize the angles for critiquing the argument that I expect to be most productive, and how the sequence responds to existing critiques.

Argument breakdown

Here's a new framing of the unawareness argument (compared to how I present it in the sequence). I expect this framing to help readers disentangle different types of disagreements they might have, corresponding to three different premises of the argument.

Roughly: What would justify preferring action A over B on impartial altruistic grounds? We’d need to “expect” that according to our epistemically idealized self, A has better expected total consequences across the cosmos (normative premise). But if our understanding of these actions’ consequences is too coarse, then we can’t say how our idealized self would compare their expected values (conceptual premise). And our understanding of any given action's cosmos-wide consequences is in fact that coarse (empirical premise). [...]

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Outline:

(00:42) Argument breakdown

(03:51) Why cluelessness matters

(07:12) Critiques: What I expect to be productive, and what's been said so far

(09:29) Acknowledgments

(09:37) Appendix: Sequence summary annotated with the corresponding premises

The original text contained 43 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 19th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NesgdEY6yPrE9wDap/cluelessness-summary-of-the-argument-why-it-matters-and-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.