TL;DR

• We’re hosting an essay competition to elicit responses to Anthony DiGiovanni’s sequence, ‘The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance’—submit your entries by August 14th.
• There will be cash prizes for the best essays and the best comments: $7k in total.
  • Additionally, we're offering an outlier prize of up to $50k for a truly exceptional entry: an original solution to cluelessness, or a critique decisive enough to move the debate.
• We’re also offering a referral prize of $250 if a winner says you’re responsible for telling them about the competition.

Motivation

When I announced April’s Better Futures Highlight Week,^[1] I confidently wrote: “To make the future go better, we can either work to avoid near-term catastrophes like human extinction or improve the futures where we survive.”

But what if I was wrong? What if both options are bankrupt, and we have no justified answer as to whether any particular work would make the future better? In his Challenge of Unawareness sequence, Anthony DiGiovanni argues that we are in just this position.

Specifically, he argues that our evidence about the future is so poor that our assessments of impact (explicit expected-value estimates and informal best guesses alike) should be severely indeterminate, yielding no verdict on which actions better serve the impartial good.

If Anthony is correct, the implications for EAs are severe.^[2] Yet there has been little public response, and no definitive critique. With this contest, we hope to surface new solutions for the altruist who buys Anthony’s conclusion, and/or new reasons to think that we aren’t as clueless as Anthony claims. More details below.

How the competition works

By August 14th, 11:59pm anywhere on earth: Submit your entry via this form. You can message Toby with questions while you are drafting—including clarification questions about the sequence itself/ what you are arguing.

You may submit multiple entries as long as they are substantively different from each other. More eligibility information is below. 

During the week August 17–23: Posts eligible for judging will be posted on the EA Forum, and the comment competition will take place.

Week of August 24th: Winners of the post competition and the comment competition will be announced.

What your entry should look like

Every eligible entry does one of the following three things: challenge a premise, challenge the inference, or offer a constructive response to Anthony's sequence. On the submission form you’ll have to select which. 

Above all, we want focused entries: the most useful submissions zero in on a single, clearly-identified step of the argument rather than taking on the whole thing at once. Anthony’s summary post breaks the argument into the named premises outlined below and tabulates the main existing counterarguments to each—read it first, and use it to orient your entry.

Whichever route you take, your entry will only be published on the EA Forum and judged if it shows a clear grasp of Anthony’s argument. Posts can be whatever length they need to be: the winner could be a concise 200 words or a paper-length 5000.

Option 1: Challenge a premise

Argue that one specific premise is false or unmotivated. You must say which one you’re targeting:

• P1 — Normative: that a justified impartial-altruistic preference for A over B requires that A has higher ‘expected value’ (broadly construed, not necessarily literal EV), not merely (e.g.) that A seems heuristically good.
• P2a — Conceptual (against precise EVs): that we shouldn’t represent how good actions are with literal precise expected values.
• P2b — Conceptual (against best guesses): that, even setting precise EVs aside, we shouldn’t always force ourselves to reach a ‘best-guess’ comparison between two actions (in particular, not when our understanding of the actions’ consequences is too coarse-grained).
• P3a — Empirical (formal models): that, when we explicitly model an action’s cosmos-wide consequences, our understanding is too coarse to compare actions.
• P3b — Empirical (informal arguments): that the same holds when we rely on informal or heuristic reasoning.

Alternatively, go finer-grained: take one of the specific counterarguments Anthony lists in his table under a given premise, and explain why his response to it fails.

Option 2: Challenge the inference

Grant all the premises but argue that the conclusion—that we have no impartial-altruistic reason to prefer any action over another—doesn’t follow.

Option 3: Offer a constructive response

Accept the argument—and tell us what the impartial altruist should do anyway. Grant the conclusion, but offer a constructive response: defend a solution Anthony considers and rejects (e.g. wagering), or propose something entirely original.^[3]

Prizes

Essay competition

Macroscopic Ventures is offering prizes of $2500, $1500 and $1000 for the three best eligible^[4] posts.

Outlier Prize

Beyond the prizes above, we’re offering a much larger reward for a truly exceptional entry—one that meaningfully changes how we think about cluelessness. If the judges consider your contribution that significant, Macroscopic will award up to $50,000. Two kinds of entry could clear the bar:

• A constructive solution (option 3): an original response, broadly consequentialist and welfarist in spirit, that the judges consider as promising as existing approaches like bracketing.
• A decisive critique (option 1 or 2): an objection to one of the premises, or to the inference from them, that the judges consider strong enough to give the impartial altruist real grounds to reject Anthony’s conclusion.

This is a very high bar, and we’ll be very pleasantly surprised if we get to award this prize^[5]—but we want to signal how much we’d value a genuine breakthrough. And even short of the bar: if your entry sketches a promising idea, Macroscopic may fund you to develop it further, with the outlier prize still on the table should that work mature into something exceptional.

Referral Prize

Perhaps you yourself don’t want to enter, but you know a friend who might. If you refer said friend and they win one of the prizes with you listed as their referrer in their submission form, you yourself will win $250.

Apologies in advance if you have fifteen friends reaching out to you. Please only mention the first referrer on your form.

Comment competition

During the event week (August 17–23), there will be discussion of the competition entries, and of the unawareness sequence itself. We’d like to incentivise high-quality discussion, so we’re running a secondary competition, during the week, for the best comments. Up to $2000 in comment prizes will be awarded—more details nearer the time.

How will the essays and comments be judged?

On top of what we explain above in the ‘What your entry should look like’ section, the judges will be looking for the following:

• Quality of reasoning: Is the core argument valid and clearly structured? Are the philosophical moves sound? Does it anticipate obvious rebuttals?
• Originality: Does the critique add something to the debate, as opposed to re-deriving what has been said before?

What comes after the competition?

Arguments put forward in this contest could in principle influence Macroscopic’s funding priorities (though the bar for doing so is high). Furthermore, Macroscopic may consider strong contestants for longer-term funding to research cluelessness and/or adjacent topics.

Judges

This list may change a little before judging begins; I’ll make edits on this post if and when it does. Judges are not eligible for cash prizes.

Essay competition

• Anthony DiGiovanni — Researcher at the Center on Long-Term Risk, and author of the Challenge of Unawareness sequence
• Andreas Mogensen — Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University^[6]
• Jesse Clifton — Grants Director at Macroscopic Ventures^[7]

Comment competition

• Toby Tremlett — Senior Content Strategist for the EA Forum
• Will Aldred — Grants Associate at Macroscopic Ventures and EA Forum moderator
• Anthony DiGiovanni — aforementioned

Disclaimer

To enter, you must be 18 or over and not a judge or member of Macroscopic Ventures staff.^[8] Judges’ decisions are final and at their sole discretion.

You’re welcome to enter anonymously or under a pseudonym, but to receive a prize you’ll need to provide your legal name, address, payment details, and any documents Macroscopic reasonably ask for to complete the necessary checks. Prizes cannot be issued to people located in jurisdictions subject to comprehensive sanctions. Unfortunately, a prize cannot be paid if the necessary checks can’t be completed.

Prizes will be paid in USD within about 2 weeks of selection and completion of checks. Winners are responsible for any taxes in their own jurisdiction; Macroscopic Ventures and the contest organizers and judges don’t provide tax advice.

FAQs

Can I use AI?

Same rules as the Essays on Longtermism competition. You are permitted to use AI in whatever way you think best; however, relying on AI-written text in your final submission is extremely likely to render you ineligible (because the argument will be bad, the AI won’t grok the sequence, etc...).

We do nonetheless care about the quality, and therefore the usefulness, of the submissions above all else. If, somehow, the best submission is AI generated, it will win first place.

Can I co-author a piece?

Yes! The prize (if you win) will be split evenly between the co-authors.

Can I submit a piece I’ve already published elsewhere?

Not for this competition. No pieces which have been published (including blog posts) before the date of this announcement post will be considered. This is because we care about incentivising new content, rather than surfacing the best (as we did for the creative writing competition).

However, once the August 14th deadline has passed, you are very welcome to post your entry anywhere you please (yes, even before judging is completed).

Will I get feedback on my entry?

We can’t promise feedback on posts. However,

1. If you include a line at the top or bottom of your post asking for feedback, there’s a good chance you’ll get some thoughtful engagement from the EA Forum audience when it is published.
2. Message Toby if you’d like feedback on your entry or idea, and, as with any forum post, he’s usually able to make time.

Does style matter?

You won’t be marked on style, but readability is always a plus (also, I stand by this writing advice). Additionally, though you are very much encouraged to disagree with the arguments in the sequence, being too polemical is likely to get in the way of a good argument.

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Have we missed anything? Ask your questions about the competition in the comments below.

1. ^{^}

   this

2. ^{^}

   At first glance, one could be forgiven for thinking the implication is to veer into nihilism. However, Anthony outlines in his sequence what other responses might look like: see this section in particular.

3. ^{^}

   Bracketing is one attempt at an original, constructive response.

^{^}

If there are less than three posts deemed eligible (by the contest organizers or judges), fewer prizes will be given out. More on eligibility in What your entry should look like.

^{^}

 If multiple entries meet this bar, we will award multiple outlier prizes.

^{^}

 And the author of Maximal Cluelessness. See here for Andreas’ full list of publications.

^{^}

 And the author of several cluelessness-related pieces: see here and here.

^{^}

 Staff and judges can still write posts and comment – indeed they are encouraged to – they just can’t win the money.

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