The ‘Dog vs Cat’ cluelessness dilemma (and whether it makes sense)

By Jim Buhler @ 2024-11-28T11:34 (+23)

I want to find a good thought experiment that makes us appreciate how radically uncertain we should be about the very long-term effects of some actions altruistically motivated actors might take. Some have already been proposed in the 'cluelessness' literature -- a nice overview of which is given by Tarsney et al. (2024, §3)-- but I don't find them ideal, as I'll briefly suggest. So let me propose a new one. Call it the 'Dog vs Cat' dilemma:

Say you are a philanthropy advisor reputed for being unusually good at forecasting various direct and indirect effects donations to different causes can have. You are approached by a billionaire with a deep love for companion animals who wants to donate almost all his wealth to animal shelters. He asks you whether he should donate to dog shelters around the World or to cat shelters instead.[1] Despite the relatively narrow set of options he is considering, he importantly specifies that he does not only care about the short-term effects his donation would have on cats and dogs around the World. He carefully explains and hugely emphasizes that he wants his choice to be the one that is best, all things considered (i.e., not bracketing out effects on beings other than companion animals or effects on the long-term future).[2] You think about his request and, despite your great forecasting abilities, quickly come to appreciate how impossible the task is. The number and the complexity of causal ramifications and potentially decisive flow-through effects to consider are overwhelming. It is highly implausible a donation of that size does not somehow change important aspects of the course of History in some non-negligible ways. Even if it is very indirect, it will inevitably affect many people’s attitudes towards dogs and cats, the way these people live, their values, their consumption, economic growth, technological development, human and animal population sizes, the likelihood of a third World War and the exact actors which would involved, etc. Some aspects of these effects are predictable. Many others are way too chaotic. And you cannot reasonably believe these chaotic changes will be even roughly the same no matter whether the beneficiaries of the donation are dog or cat shelters. If the billionaire picks cats over dogs, this will definitely end up making the World counterfactually better or worse, all things considered, to a significant extent. The problem is you have no idea which it is. In fact, you even have no idea whether donating his money to either will turn out overall better than not donating it to begin with.

Here's how OpenAI's image generator portrays the scene:

I have two questions for you.

1. Can you think of any reasonable objection to the strongly implied takeaway that the philanthropy advisor should be agnostic about the sign of the overall consequences of the donation, there?

2. Is that a good illustration of the motivations for cluelessness?  I like it more than, e.g., Greaves' (2016) grandma-crossing-the-street example and Mogensen's (2021) 'AMF vs Make-A-Wish Foundation' one because there is no pre-established intuition that one is "obviously" better than the other (so we avoid biases). Also, it is clear in the above thought experiment that our choice matters a bunch despite our cluelessness. It's obvious that the "the future remains unchanged" (/ "ripple in the pond") objection doesn't work (see, e.g., Lenman 2000; Greaves 2016). I also find this story easy to remember. What do you think?

I also hope this thought experiment will be found interesting by some others and that me posting this may be useful beyond just me potentially getting helpful feedback on it.

  1. ^

    For simplicity, let’s assume it can only be 100% one or the other. He cannot split between the two.

  2. ^

    You might wonder why the billionaire only considers donating to dog or cat shelters and not to other causes given that he so crucially cares about the overall effects on the World from now till its end. Well, maybe he has special tax-deductibility benefits from donating to such shelters. Maybe his 12-year-old daughter will get mad at him if he gives to anything else. Maybe the money he wants to give is some sort a coupon that only dog and cat shelters can receive for some reason. Maybe you end up asking him why and he answers ‘none of your business!’. Anyway, this of course does not matter for the sake of the thought experiment.

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-11-28T22:16 (+4)

I wonder if the example is weakened by the last sentence:

In fact, you even have no idea whether donating his money to either will turn out overall better than not donating it to begin with.

Right now I feel like this is a hard question. But it doesn't feel like an impossibly intractable one. I think if the forum spent a week debating this question you'd get some coherent positions staked out -- where after the debate it would still be unreasonable to be very confident in either answer, but it wouldn't seem crazy to think that the balance of probabilities suggested favouring one course of action over the other.

This makes me notice that the cats and dogs question feels different only in degree, not kind. I think if you had a bunch of good thinkers consider it in earnest for some months, they wouldn't come out indifferent. I'd hazard that it would probably be worth >$0.01 (in expectation, on longtermist welfarist grounds) to pay to switch which kind of shelter the billions went to. But I doubt it would be worth >$100. And at that point it wouldn't be worth the analysis to get to the answer.

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-11-28T22:18 (+6)

But having written that, I notice that the example helped me to articulate my thoughts on cluelessness! Which makes it seem like actually a pretty helpful example. :)

(And maybe this is kind of the point -- that cluelessness isn't an absolute of "we cannot hope even in principle to say anything here", but rather a pragmatic barrier of "it's never gonna be worth taking the time to know".)

Jim Buhler @ 2024-11-29T07:21 (+3)

Interesting, thanks a lot! 

Fwiw, I wrote this, which sort of goes against your impression, in another comment thread here:

I really don't see how one could make a convincing argument why donating to animal shelters predictably makes the World better or worse, considering all the effects from now until the end of time.

The problem is we can't just update away from agnosticism based on arguments that don't address the very reasons for our agnosticism. In the DogvCat story, one key driver of my cluelessness is that I think there will always be crucial considerations we are unaware of, because we're missing them or couldn't even comprehend them (see Roussos 2021; Tarsney et al 2024, §3), and I can't conveniently assume good and bad unknown unknowns 'cancel out' (Lenman 2000; Greaves 2016; Tarsney et al 2024, §3). For me to quit agnosticism, we'd have to find an argument robust to these unknown unknowns (and I'd be surprised if we find one). Arguments that don't address unknown unknowns don't address my cluelessness at all and it seems like they shouldn't make me update. This is an instance of what Miriam Shoenfield (2012) calls 'insensitivity to mild sweetening'.

But it'd be hard for me to make a case more convincing than this without unpacking a lot more (which I'll do properly someday somewhere, hopefully). And your point that my thought experiment is weakened by the fact that the last sentence doesn't seem obviously right at all (at least if we assume that we are given more resources to think hard about the question) is still well taken! That's a very fair and helpful observation :)

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-11-29T10:33 (+8)

Just on this point:

I can't conveniently assume good and bad unknown unknowns 'cancel out'

FWIW, my take would be:

  • No, we shouldn't assume that they "cancel out"
  • However, as a structural fact[*] about the world, the prevalence of good and bad unknown unknowns are correlated with the good and bad knowns (and known unknowns)
  • So, on average and in expectation, things will point in the same direction as the analysis ignoring cluelessness (although it's worth being conscious that this will turn out wrong in a significant fraction of cases ― probably approaching 50% for something like cats vs dogs)

Of course this relies heavily on the "fact" I denoted as [*], but really I'm saying "I hypothesise this to be a fact". My reasons for believing it are something like:

  • Some handwavey argument along these lines:
    • Among the many complex things we could consider, they will vary in the proportion of considerations that point in a good direction
    • If our knowledge sampled randomly from the available considerations, we would expect this correlation
    • It's too much to expect our knowledge to sample randomly ― there will surely sometimes be structural biases ― but there's no reason to expect the deviations to be so perverse as to (on average) actively mislead
      • (this needn't preclude the existence of some domains with such a perverse pattern, but I'd want a positive argument that something might be such a domain)
    • Given that we shouldn't expect the good and bad unknown unknowns to cancel out, by default we should expect them to correlate with the knowns
  • A sense that empirically this kind of correlation is true in less clueless-like situations
    • e.g. if I uncover a new considerations about whether it's good or bad for EAs to steal-to-give, it's more likely to point to "bad" than "good"
    • Combined with something like a simplicity prior ― if this effect exists for things where we have a fairly strong sense of the considerations we can track, by default I'd expect it to exist in weaker form for things where we have a weaker sense of the considerations we can track (rather than being non-existent or occurring in a perverse form)

In principle, this could be tested experimentally. In practice, you're going to be chasing after tiny effect sizes with messy setups, so I don't think it's viable any time soon for human judgement. I do think you might hope to one day run experiments along these lines for AI systems. Of course they would have to be cases where we have some access to the ground truth, but the AI is pretty clueless -- perhaps something like getting non-superintelligent AI systems to predict outcomes in a complex simulated world.

Jim Buhler @ 2024-11-29T11:31 (+3)

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?

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-11-29T11:56 (+4)

I think this is at least in the vicinity of a crux?

My immediate thoughts (I'd welcome hearing about issues with these views!):

  • I don't think our credences all ought to be determinate/precise
  • But I've also never been satisfied with any account I've seen of indeterminate/imprecise credences
    • (though noting that there's a large literature there and I've only seen a tiny fraction of it)
  • My view would be something more like:
    • As boundedly rational actors, it makes sense for a lot of our probabilities to be imprecise
    • But this isn't a fundamental indeterminacy — rather, it's a view that it's often not worth expending the cognition to make them more precise
    • By thinking longer about things, we can get the probabilities to be more precise (in the limit converging on some precise probability)
    • At any moment, we have credence (itself kind of imprecise absent further thought) about where our probabilities will end up with further thought
    • What's the point of tracking all these imprecise credences rather than just single precise best-guesses?
      • It helps to keep tabs on where more thinking might be helpful, as well as where you might easily be wrong about something
  • On this perspective, cluelessness = inability to get the current best guess point estimate of where we'd end up to deviate from 50% by expending more thought
Anthony DiGiovanni @ 2024-12-13T13:21 (+7)

I've also never been satisfied with any account I've seen of indeterminate/imprecise credences

I'd be keen to hear more why you're unsatisfied with these accounts. 

But this isn't a fundamental indeterminacy — rather, it's a view that it's often not worth expending the cognition to make them more precise

Just to be clear, are you saying: "It's a view that, for all/most indeterminate credences we might have, our prioritization decisions (e.g. whether intervention X is net-good or net-bad) aren't sensitive to variation within the ranges specified by these credences"?

At any moment, we have credence (itself kind of imprecise absent further thought) about where our probabilities will end up with further thought

If your estimate of your ideal-precise-credence-in-the-limit is itself indeterminate, that seems like a big deal — you have no particular reason to adopt a determinate credence then, seems to me. (Maybe by "kind of" you mean to allow for a degree of imprecision that isn't decision-relevant, per my question above?)

What's the point of tracking all these imprecise credences rather than just single precise best-guesses?

Because if the sign of intervention X for the long-term varies across your range of credences, that means you don't have a reason to do X on total-EV grounds. This seems hugely decision-relevant to me, if we have other decision procedures under cluelessness available to us other than committing to a precise best guess, as I think we do (see this comment).

ETA: I'm also curious whether, if you agreed that we aren't rationally obligated to assign determinate credences in many cases, you'd agree that your arguments about unknown unknowns here wouldn't work. (Because there's no particular reason to commit to one "simplicity prior," say. And the net direction of our biases on our knowledge-sampling processes could be indeterminate.)

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-12-16T15:58 (+3)

I'd be keen to hear more why you're unsatisfied with these accounts.

With the warning that this may be unsatisfying, since this is recounting a feeling I've had historically, and I'm responding to my impression about a range of accounts, rather than providing sharp complaints about a particular account:

  • Accounts of imprecise credences seem typically to produce something like ranges of probabilities and then treat these as primitives
  • I feel confusion about "where does the range come from? what's it supposed to represent?"
    • Honestly this echoes some of my unease about precise credences in the first place!
  • So I am into exploration of imprecise credences as a tool for modelling/describing the behaviour of boundedly rational actors (including in some contexts as a normative ideal for them to follow)
  • But I think I get off the train before reification of the imprecise credences as a thing unto themselves

(that's incomplete, but I think it's the first-order bit of what seems unsatisfying)

Just to be clear, are you saying: "It's a view that, for all/most indeterminate credences we might have, our prioritization decisions (e.g. whether intervention X is net-good or net-bad) aren't sensitive to variation within the ranges specified by these credences"?

Definitely not saying that!

Instead I'm saying that in many decision-situations people find themselves in, although they could (somewhat) narrow their credence range by investing more thought, in practice the returns from doing that thinking aren't enough to justify it, so they shouldn't do the thinking.

If your estimate of your ideal-precise-credence-in-the-limit is itself indeterminate, that seems like a big deal — you have no particular reason to adopt a determinate credence then, seems to me. 

I don't see probabilities as magic absolutes, rather than a tool. Sometimes it seems helpful to pluck a number out of the air and roll with that (and that to be better practice than investing cognition in keeping track of an uncertainty range).

That said, I'm not sure it's crucial to me to model there being a single precise credence that is being approximated. What feels more important is to be able to model the (common) phenomenon where you can reduce your uncertainty by investing more time thinking.

Later in your comment you use the phrase "rationally obligated". I find I tend to shy away from that phrase in this context, because of vagueness about whether it means for fully rational or boundedly rational actors. In short:

  • I'm sympathetic to the idea that fully rational actors should have precise credences
    • (for the normal vNM kind of reasons)
    • I don't want to fully commit to that view, but it also doesn't seem to me to be cruxy
  • I don't think that boundedly rational actors are rationally obliged to have precise credences
  • But I don't think that entails giving up on the idea of them making progress towards something (that I might think of as "the precise credence a fully rational version of them would have") by thinking more, by saying "you have no reason to adopt a precise credence"

Because if the sign of intervention X for the long-term varies across your range of credences, that means you don't have a reason to do X on total-EV grounds.

I reject this claim. For a toy example, suppose that I could take action X, which will lose me $1 if the 20th digit of Pi is odd, and gain me $2 if the 20th digit of Pi is even. Without doing any calculations or looking it up, my range of credences is [0,1] -- if I think about it long enough (at least with computational aids), I'll resolve it to 0 or 1. But right now I can still make guesses about my expectation of where I'd end up (somewhere close to 50%), and think that this is a good bet to take -- rather than saying that EV somehow doesn't give me any reason to like the bet.

This seems hugely decision-relevant to me, if we have other decision procedures under cluelessness available to us other than committing to a precise best guess, as I think we do

For what it's worth I'm often pretty sympathetic to other decision procedures than committing to a precise best guess (cluelessness or not).

ETA: I'm also curious whether, if you agreed that we aren't rationally obligated to assign determinate credences in many cases, you'd agree that your arguments about unknown unknowns here wouldn't work. (Because there's no particular reason to commit to one "simplicity prior," say. And the net direction of our biases on our knowledge-sampling processes could be indeterminate.)

I don't think I'd agree with that. Although I could see saying "yes, this is a valid argument about unknown unknowns; however, it might be overwhelmed by as-yet-undiscovered arguments about unknown unknowns that point in the other direction, so we should be suspicious of resting too much on it".

Anthony DiGiovanni @ 2024-12-20T04:22 (+2)

Instead I'm saying that in many decision-situations people find themselves in, although they could (somewhat) narrow their credence range by investing more thought, in practice the returns from doing that thinking aren't enough to justify it, so they shouldn't do the thinking.

(I don't think this is particularly important, you can feel free to prioritize my other comment.) Right, sorry, I understood that part. I was asking about an implication of this view. Suppose you have an intervention whose sign varies over the range of your indeterminate credences. Per the standard decision theory for indeterminate credences, then, you currently don’t have a reason to do the intervention — it’s not determinately better than inaction. (I’ll say more about this below, re: your digits of pi example.) So if by “the returns from doing that thinking aren’t enough to justify it” you mean you should just do the intervention in such a case, that doesn’t make sense to me.

Anthony DiGiovanni @ 2024-12-20T04:22 (+2)

Thanks for explaining!

I feel confusion about "where does the range come from? what's it supposed to represent?"

  • Honestly this echoes some of my unease about precise credences in the first place!

Indeed. :) If “where do these numbers come from?” is your objection, this is a problem for determinate credences too. We could get into the positive motivations for having indeterminate credences, if you’d like, but I’m confused as to why your questions are an indictment of indeterminacy in particular.

Some less pithy answers to your question:

  • They might come from the same sort of process people go through when generating determinate credences — i.e. thinking through various considerations and trying to quantify them. But, at the step where you find yourself thinking, “Hm, it could be 0.2, but it could also be 0.3 I guess, idk…”, you don’t force yourself to pick just one number.
  • More formally, interval-valued credences fall out of Bradley’s (2017, sec 11.5.2) representation theorem. Even if your beliefs are just comparative judgments like “is A more/less/equally/[none-of-the-above] likely than B?” — which are realistic for bounded agents like us — if they satisfy all the usual axioms of probabilism except for completeness,[1] they have the structure of a set of probability distributions.

 

I don't see probabilities as magic absolutes, rather than a tool

I’m confused about this “tool” framing, because it seems that in order to evaluate some numerical representation of your epistemic state as “helpful,” you still need to make reference to your beliefs per se. There’s no belief-independent stance from which you can evaluate beliefs as useful (see this post).[2]

The epistemic question here is whether your beliefs per se should have the structure of (in)determinacy, e.g., do you think you should always be able to say “intervention XYZ is net-good, net-bad, or net-neutral for the long-term future”. That’s what I’m talking about when talking about “rational obligation” to have (in)determinate credences in some situation. It's independent of the kind of mere practical limitations on the precision of numbers in our heads you’re talking about.

Analogy: Your view here is like that of a hedonist saying, "Oh yeah, if I tried always directly maximizing my own pleasure, I'd feel worse. So pursuing non-pleasure things is sometimes helpful for bounded agents, by a hedonist axiology. But sometimes it actually is better to just maximize pleasure." Whereas I'm the non-hedonist saying, "Okay but I'm endorsing the non-pleasure stuff as intrinsically valuable, and I'm not sure you've explained why intrinsically valuing non-pleasure stuff is confused." (The hedonism thing is just illustrative, to be clear. I don't think epistemology is totally analogous to axiology.)

 

for the normal vNM kind of reasons

The VNM theorem only tells you you’re representable as a precise EV maximizer if your preferences satisfy completeness. But completeness is exactly what defenders of indeterminate beliefs call into question. Rationality doesn’t seem to demand completeness — you can avoid money pumps / Dutch books with incomplete preferences.

 

For a toy example, suppose that I could take action X, which will lose me $1 if the 20th digit of Pi is odd, and gain me $2 if the 20th digit of Pi is even. Without doing any calculations or looking it up, my range of credences is [0,1] -- if I think about it long enough (at least with computational aids), I'll resolve it to 0 or 1. But right now I can still make guesses about my expectation of where I'd end up

I think this fights the hypothetical. If you “make guesses about your expectation of where you’d end up,” you’re computing a determinate credence and plugging that into your EV calculation. If you truly have indeterminate credences, EV maximization is undefined.

 

I don't think I'd agree with that.

I’d like to understand why, then. As I said, if indeterminate beliefs are on the table, it seems like the straightforward response to unknown unknowns is to say, “By nature, my access to these considerations is murky, so why should I think this particular determinate ‘simplicity prior’ is privileged as a good model?”

  1. ^

    (plus another condition that doesn’t seem controversial)

  2. ^

    Technically, there are Dutch book and money pump arguments, but those put very little constraints on beliefs, as argued in the linked post.

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-12-20T11:10 (+4)

I appreciated a bunch of things about this comment. Sorry, I'll just reply (for now) to a couple of parts.

The metaphor with hedonism felt clarifying. But I would say (in the metaphor) that I'm not actually arguing that it's confused to intrinsically care about the non-hedonist stuff, but that it would be really great to have an account of how the non-hedonist stuff is or isn't helpful on hedonist grounds, both because this may just be helpful to input into our thinking to whatever extent we endorse hedonist goods (even if we may also care about other things), and because without having such an account it's sort of hard to assess how much of our caring for non-hedonist goods is grounded in themselves, vs in some sense being debunked by the explanation that they are instrumentally good to care about on hedonist grounds.

I think the piece I feel most inclined to double-click on is the digits of pi piece. Reading your reply, I realise I'm not sure what indeterminate credences are actually supposed to represent (and this is maybe more fundamental than "where do the numbers come from?"). Is it some analogue of betting odds? Or what?

And then, you said:

I think this fights the hypothetical. If you “make guesses about your expectation of where you’d end up,” you’re computing a determinate credence and plugging that into your EV calculation. If you truly have indeterminate credences, EV maximization is undefined.

To some extent, maybe fighting the hypothetical is a general move I'm inclined to make? This gets at "what does your range of indeterminate credences represent?". I think if you could step me through how you'd be inclined to think about indeterminate credences in an example like the digits of pi case, I might find that illuminating.

(Not sure this is super important, but note that I don't need to compute a determinate credence here -- it may be enough have an indeterminate range of credences, all of which would make the EV calculation fall out the same way.)

Anthony DiGiovanni @ 2024-12-20T17:31 (+4)

I'll just reply (for now) to a couple of parts

No worries! Relatedly, I’m hoping to get out a post explaining (part of) the case for indeterminacy in the not-too-distant future, so to some extent I’ll punt to that for more details.

without having such an account it's sort of hard to assess how much of our caring for non-hedonist goods is grounded in themselves, vs in some sense being debunked by the explanation that they are instrumentally good to care about on hedonist grounds

Cool, that makes sense. I’m all for debunking explanations in principle. Extremely briefly, here's why I think there’s something qualitative that determinate credences fail to capture: If evidence, trustworthy intuitions, and appealing norms like the principle of indifference or Occam's razor don’t uniquely pin down an answer to “how likely should I consider outcome X?”, then I think I shouldn’t pin down an answer. Instead I should suspend judgment, and say that there aren’t enough constraints to give an answer that isn’t arbitrary. (This runs deeper than “wait to learn / think more”! Because I find suspending judgment appropriate even in cases where my uncertainty is resilient. Contra Greg Lewis here.)

Is it some analogue of betting odds? Or what?

No, I see credences as representing the degree to which I anticipate some (hypothetical) experiences, or the weight I put on a hypothesis / how reasonable I find it. IMO the betting odds framing gets things backwards. Bets are decisions, which are made rational by whether the beliefs they’re justified by are rational. I’m not sure what would justify the betting odds otherwise.

how you'd be inclined to think about indeterminate credences in an example like the digits of pi case

Ah, I should have made clear, I wouldn’t say indeterminate credences are necessary in the pi case, as written. Because I think it’s plausible I should apply the principle of indifference here: I know nothing about digits of pi beyond the first 10, except that pi is irrational and I know irrational numbers’ digits are wacky. I have no particular reason to think one digit is more or less likely than another, so, since there’s a unique way of splitting my credence impartially across the possibilities, I end up with 50:50.[1]

Instead, here’s a really contrived variant of the pi case I had too much fun writing, analogous to a situation of complex cluelessness, where I’d think indeterminate credences are appropriate:

  • Suppose that Sally historically has an uncanny ability to guess the parity of digits of (conjectured-to-be) normal numbers with an accuracy of 70%. Somehow, it’s verifiable that she’s not cheating. No one quite knows how her guesses are so good.
  • Her accuracy varies with how happy she is at the time, though. She has an accuracy of ~95% when really ecstatic, ~50% when neutral, and only ~10% when really sad. Also, she’s never guessed parities of Nth digits for any N < 1 million.
  • Now, Sally also hasn’t seen the digits of pi beyond the first 10, and she guesses the 20th is odd. I don’t know how happy she is at the time, though I know she’s both gotten a well-earned promotion at her job and had an important flight canceled.
  • What should my credence in “the 20th digit is odd” be? Seems like there are various considerations floating around:
    • The principle of indifference seems like a fair baseline.
    • But there’s also Sally’s really impressive average track record on N ≥ 1 million.
    • But also I know nothing about what mechanism drives her intuition, so it’s pretty unclear if her intuition generalizes to such a small N.
    • And even setting that aside, since I don’t know how happy she is, should I just go with the base rate of 70%? Or should I apply the principle of indifference to the “happiness level” parameter, and assume she’s neutral (so 50%)?
    • But presumably the evidence about the promotion and canceled flight tell me something about her mood. I guess slightly less than neutral overall (but I have little clue how she personally would react to these two things)? How much less?
  • I really don’t know a privileged way to weigh all this up, especially since I’ve never thought about how much to defer to a digit-guessing magician before. It seems pretty defensible to have a range of credences between, say, 40% and 75%. These endpoints themselves are kinda arbitrary, but at least seem considerably less arbitrary than pinning down to one number.
    • I could try modeling all this and computing explicit priors and likelihood ratios, but it seems extremely doubtful there's gonna be one privileged model and distribution over its parameters.

(I think forming beliefs about the long-term future is analogous in many ways to the above.)

Not sure how much that answers your question? Basically I ask myself what constraints the considerations ought to put on my degree of belief, and try not to needlessly get more precise than those constraints warrant.

  1. ^

    I don’t think this is clearly the appropriate response. I think it’s kinda defensible to say, “This doesn’t seem like qualitatively the same kind of epistemic situation as guessing a coin flip. I have at least a rough mechanistic picture of how coin flips work physically, which seems symmetric in a way that warrants a determinate prediction of 50:50. But with digits of pi, there’s not so much a ‘symmetry’ as an absence of a determinate asymmetry.” But I don’t think you need to die on that hill to think indeterminacy is warranted in realistic cause prio situations.

Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-12-20T23:36 (+2)

IMO the betting odds framing gets things backwards. Bets are decisions, which are made rational by whether the beliefs they’re justified by are rational. I’m not sure what would justify the betting odds otherwise.

Not sure what I overall think of the better odds framing, but to speak in its defence: I think there's a sense in which decisions are more real than beliefs. (I originally wrote "decisions are real and beliefs are not", but they're both ultimately abstractions about what's going on with a bunch of matter organized into an agent-like system.) I can accept the idea of X as an agent making decisions, and ask what those decisions are and what drives them, without implicitly accepting the idea that X has beliefs. Then "X has beliefs" is kind of a useful model for predicting their behaviour in the decision situations. Or could be used (as you imply) to analyse the rationality of their decisions. 

I like your contrived variant of the pi case. But to play on it a bit:

  • Maybe when I first find out the information on Sally, I quickly eyeball and think that defensible credences probably lie within the range 30% to 90%
  • Then later when I sit down and think about it more carefully, I think that actually the defensible credences are more like in the range 40% to 75%
  • If I thought about it even longer, maybe I'd tighten my range a bit further again (45% to 55%? 50% to 70%? I don't know!)

In this picture, no realistic amount of thinking I'm going to do will bring it down to just a point estimate being defensible, and perhaps even the limit with infinite thinking time would have me maintain an interval of what seems defensible, so some fundamental indeterminacy may well remain.

But to my mind, this kind of behaviour where you can tighten your understanding by thinking more happens all of the time, and is a really important phenomenon to be able to track and think clearly about. So I really want language or formal frameworks which make it easy to track this kind of thing.

Moreover, after you grant this kind of behaviour [do you grant this kind of behaviour?], you may notice that from our epistemic position we can't even distinguish between:

  • Cases where we'd collapse our estimated range of defensible credences down to a very small range or even a single point with arbitrary thinking time, but where in practice progress is so slow that it's not viable
  • Cases where even in the limit with infinite thinking time, we would maintain a significant range of defensible credences

Because of this, from my perspective the question of whether credences are ultimately indeterminate is ... not so interesting? It's enough that in practice a lot of credences will be indeterminate, and that in many cases it may be useful to invest time thinking to shrink our uncertainty, but in many other cases it won't be.

Anthony DiGiovanni @ 2024-12-21T19:48 (+4)

I can accept the idea of X as an agent making decisions, and ask what those decisions are and what drives them, without implicitly accepting the idea that X has beliefs. Then "X has beliefs" is kind of a useful model for predicting their behaviour in the decision situations.

I think this is answering a different question, though. When talking about rationality and cause prioritization, what we want to know is what we ought to do, not how to describe our patterns of behavior after the fact. And when asking what we ought to do under uncertainty, I don’t see how we escape the question of what beliefs we’re justified in. E.g. betting on short AI timelines by opting out of your pension is only rational insofar as it’s rational to (read: you have good reasons to) believe in short timelines.

 

from my perspective the question of whether credences are ultimately indeterminate is ... not so interesting? It's enough that in practice a lot of credences will be indeterminate, and that in many cases it may be useful to invest time thinking to shrink our uncertainty, but in many other cases it won't be

I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. My substantive claim is that in some cases, our credences about features of the far future might be sufficiently indeterminate that overall we won’t be able to determinately say “X is net-good for the far future in expectation.” If you agree with that, that seems to have serious implications that the EA community isn’t pricing in yet. If you don’t agree with that, I’m not sure if it’s because of (1) thorny empirical disagreements over the details of what our credences should be, or (2) something more fundamental about epistemology (which is the level at which I thought we were having this discussion, so far). I think getting into (1) in this thread would be a bit of a rabbit hole (which is better left to some forthcoming posts I’m coauthoring), though I’d be happy to give some quick intuition pumps. Greaves here (the "Suppose that's my personal uber-analysis..." paragraph) is a pretty good starting point.

Jim Buhler @ 2024-11-29T15:07 (+3)

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!

OscarD🔸 @ 2024-11-29T09:41 (+2)

Surely we should have nonzero credence, and maybe even >10% that there aren't any crucial considerations we are missing that are on the scale of 'consider nonhumans' or 'consider future generations'. 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. Which could still move us slightly away from pure agnosticism?

Your view seems to imply the futility of altruistic endeavour? Which of course doesn't mean it is incorrect, just seems like an important implication.

Jim Buhler @ 2024-11-29T10:37 (+1)

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').

OscarD🔸 @ 2024-11-29T12:04 (+2)

I think I am quite sympathetic to A, and to the things Owen wrote in the other branch, especially about operationalizing imprecise credences. But this is sufficiently interesting and important-seeming that I am noting to read later some of the references you give to justify A being false.

Jim Buhler @ 2024-11-29T15:20 (+1)

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.

OscarD🔸 @ 2024-11-29T15:55 (+2)

yeah sure, lmk what you find out!

Isaac Dunn @ 2024-11-28T14:04 (+4)

For what it's worth, although I do think we are clueless about the long-run (and so overall) consequences of our actions, the example you've given isn't intuitively compelling to me. My intuition wants to say that it's quite possible that the cat vs dog decision ends up being irrelevant for the far future / ends up being washed out.

Sorry, I know that's probably not what you want to hear! Maybe different people have different intuitions.

Jim Buhler @ 2024-11-28T15:07 (+3)

That's very useful, thanks! I was hoping that it felt like there is no way it gets washed out given that what is such a large portion of the World's resources gets put into this, so really good to know you don't have this intuition reading this (especially if you generally think we are clueless!). 

Maybe I can give a better intuition pump for how the effects will last and ramificate. But, also, maybe talking about cats and dogs makes the decision look too trivial to begin with and other cause area examples would be better.

Thanks again! Glad you shared an intuition that goes against what I was hoping. That was the whole point of me posting this :)

OscarD🔸 @ 2024-11-28T16:56 (+12)

I also didn't find it too compelling, I think partly it is the issue of the choice seeming not important or high-stakes enough. Maybe the philanthropist should be deciding whether to fund clean energy R&D or vaccines R&D, or similar.

I don't think I quite agreed with this, or at least it felt misleading:

And you cannot reasonably believe these chaotic changes will be even roughly the same no matter whether the beneficiaries of the donation are dog or cat shelters.

I think it may be very reasonable to think that in expectation the longterm effects will be 'roughly the same'. This feels more like a simple cluelessness case than complex cluelessness (unless you explain why the cats vs dogs will predictably change economic growth, world values, population size etc).

Whereas the vaccines vs clean energy I think there would be more plausible reasons why one or the other will systematically have different consequences. (Maybe a TB vaccine will save more lives, increasing population and economic growth (including making climate change slightly worse), whereas the clean energy will increase growth slightly, make climate change slightly less bad, and therefore increase population a bit as well, but with a longer lag time.)

Also on your question 1, I think being agnostic about which one is better is quite different to being agnostic about whether something is good at all (in expectation) and I think the first is a significantly easier thing to argue for than the second.

Jim Buhler @ 2024-11-29T09:30 (+3)

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..

Jim Buhler @ 2024-11-28T18:07 (+3)

Nice, thanks Oscar! I totally get how it might seem like a case of simple cluelessness. I don't think it actually is but it definitely isn't obvious, yeah. This is a problem. 

Also on your question 1, I think being agnostic about which one is better is quite different to being agnostic about whether something is good at all (in expectation) and I think the first is a significantly easier thing to argue for than the second.

I think I kinda agree but the same way I agree that doing 1 trillion push-ups in a row is significantly harder than doing 1 million. It's technically true in some sense but both are way out of reach anyway. I really don't see how one could make a convincing argument why donating to animal shelters predictably makes the World better or worse, considering all the effects from now until the end of time.

Isaac Dunn @ 2024-11-28T17:14 (+3)

You're welcome! N=1 though, so might be worth seeing what other people think too.

SummaryBot @ 2024-11-28T17:19 (+1)

Executive summary: The "Dog vs Cat" thought experiment illustrates how radically uncertain we should be about the very long-term effects of altruistic actions, even for narrow decisions like donating to dog vs cat shelters.

Key points:

  1. A billionaire wants to donate his wealth to either dog or cat shelters worldwide, caring about all long-term consequences, not just direct effects on companion animals.
  2. Even for this narrow decision, the number and complexity of causal ramifications and flow-through effects are overwhelming and impossible to predict.
  3. The donation will inevitably affect attitudes, values, consumption, economic growth, technological development, populations, geopolitical events, etc. in chaotic and unpredictable ways.
  4. The philanthropy advisor should arguably be agnostic about whether the overall consequences will be positive or negative.
  5. This thought experiment may be a compelling illustration of the motivations for "cluelessness" about long-term effects, avoiding some shortcomings of previous examples.
  6. The story makes it clear that the choice matters significantly despite our cluelessness, and the "future remains unchanged" objection does not apply.

 

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.