Episode Details
Back to Episodes“Challenging the unawareness argument with third actions and mixed actions” by Elliott Thornley
Description
This competition entry has been selected for publication by the Forum team.
1. Introduction
Here's Anthony DiGiovanni's unawareness argument, quoted from his summary post (footnotes omitted):
Let's say that we c-prefer A over B if the reason we prefer A is an impartial altruistic comparison of the actions’ possible consequences.
P1. Normative premise: To justify c-preferring A over B, it's not enough to say (e.g.) that A seems heuristically good. Rather, we need to argue that A has higher “expected value” broadly speaking, meaning: In some sense we “expect” that, if we were idealized agents who could aggregate all of A's and B's possible consequences into literal EVs, then we’d say A has higher EV. (We ourselves don’t need literal EVs to justify c-preferences, hence the scare quotes.) Otherwise, it's unacceptably arbitrary to c-prefer A.
P2. Conceptual premise: If our understanding of A's and B's possible consequences is sufficiently coarse-grained, then we don’t have an argument for “expecting” our idealized self's EV for A to be higher, lower, or equal to B's. So A's and B's “EVs” are incomparable. In particular:
a. Against precise EVs: We shouldn’t represent actions’ degrees of c-preferability with literal precise expected values.
b. Against [...]
---
Outline:
(00:17) 1. Introduction
(03:16) 2. When can you "expect" your idealized self to assign higher EV to A than B?
(04:44) 3. A challenge to P1
(08:21) 4. A challenge to the inference
(13:43) 5. The relevant mixed actions might be hard to find
(16:22) 6. Does our rule guide clueless agents?
(19:24) 7. Conclusion
The original text contained 20 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
August 17th, 2026
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.