AMA: Anthony DiGiovanni, author of the ‘Challenge of Unawareness’ sequence
By Toby Tremlett🔹, Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸 @ 2026-07-03T09:14 (+35)
We announced the Cluelessness Critiques Competition two weeks ago.
A lot of you, not only prospective entrants, will have been reading Anthony's sequence where he lays out his unawareness argument, or following the comments on his summary post. I thought that this might be a great time to have Anthony put some time aside to answer your questions.
Although we are calling this an AMA[1], the focus will be on helping people understand the sequence so that they can write the best entries to the competition that they can. Anthony will be choosing the questions he responds to with this in mind.
Anthony will be answering your questions on Thursday the 9th. He cannot guarantee that he will answer every question, so make sure to upvote the questions you’d like to see answered.
- ^
Which stands for 'Ask Me Anything'
Ben_West🔸 @ 2026-07-03T20:24 (+5)
What's the clearest example of a complex cluelessness sign flip you're aware of?
(By "clear" I mean "had a very narrow confidence interval before encountering some consideration and a narrow interval after encountering that consideration but the CIs now center points with opposite signs".[1])
The clearest examples I know of (e.g. rescuing Hitler as a child) seem to me like examples of simple cluelessness. You list some examples here, but they don't seem that clear to me, e.g. I disagree that "Early awareness-raising about AGI x-risk presumably seemed robustly good" and would guess most people involved in that had CIs which comfortably straddled zero.
- ^
Or alternatively: there are two representors with narrow but non-overlapping CIs.
Ben_West🔸 @ 2026-07-03T22:09 (+2)
You respond to Richard Ngo here:
> do you think that, if we had a theory of sociopolitics that was about as good as 20th-century economics, then we wouldn't be clueless about how to do sociopolitical interventions (like founding AI safety movements) effectively?
No, because I think “founding AI safety movements that succeed at making the far future go better” is a pretty out-of-distribution kind of sociopolitical intervention.
Suppose instead we had a comparably good theory of the right reference class, e.g. "movements trying to shape transformative technologies." Would we still be clueless about AI safety movement-building?
More generally: you list various considerations across your posts and I have a hard time understanding which is load-bearing for your answer here. Some possibilities:
- We're clueless because we haven't yet developed the relevant theory (Richard's reading IIUC, on which cluelessness is contingent and reducible)
- No such theory could be validated even in principle, because we never observe the target variable (far-future value) and calibration on near-term proxies doesn't transfer
- Even a validated theory wouldn't help, because impact is dominated by considerations inaccessible to any theory (e.g. unconceived hypothesis classes)