I think it's difficult to give a complete answer to your question without essentially drafting a fresh entry to the cluelessness critiques competition. I accept that it is not a solution to the general problem to simply say "just ignore the effects/causal pathways you're clueless about", because as you point out, in general, we can change the way we group these effects, and that may change what gets ignored. Iirc there is a section arguing this point clearly in digiovannis sequence.
My example was not meant to be taken as saying "look, there is this obviously correct method for approaching these problems that bracketing disagrees with". It was meant to be taken only as "in this very contrived example, bracketing's recommendations seem to clash with the intuition that motivates bracketing in the first place" (maybe I am going wrong by thinking it motivated by intuition)
In my contrived example, there are no other good things and other bad things. The effects are, by assumption, just (splitting positive and negative):
I get a tasty snack right away.
Broken glass left somewhere and injures someone.
Dystopian lock in triggered that otherwise would not have happened.
Dystopian lock in averted that otherwise would have happened.
Effect 1 occurs with probability 1. Effect 2 occurs with probability near 1 (if imprecise, the interval is small and near 1).
Effects 3 and 4 both occur with only very small probability (and are clearly mutually exclusive as well). And the probabilities are imprecise. But the upper limit of each imprecise interval is large enough to produce value in expectation that outweighs 1 and 2. And the intervals overlap, which makes the sign of the total expected value indeterminate.
This is I think a complete specification of the problem (we don't need to worry about the causal pathways?). And my intuition still strongly points to one of these conclusions being acceptable:
It is indeterminate whether we should want this act to happen.
We should prefer that this act does not happen.
But bracketing advocates neither of these, so feels wrong.
If you push me on what it is that lets me group 3 and 4 together so that I can ignore them, rather than grouping 2, 3, and 4 together (as bracketing does) I guess I would point to the degree of imprecision in the probability estimates, which feels like the more relevant factor than which person is feeling the effect.
It feels hard to come up with simple neat examples of clueless effects, which is why I left it ambiguous in my original question. But I think we can make it more precise without shifting the intuition (or at least my intuition).
Let's say effect 3 is that your act will shift the probability of dystopian lock in (a many thousand year dictatorship) in a direction that you are clueless about.
I don't think I agree that her welfare based answer is obviously 'no'. If I put myself in her shoes, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass.
I am considering whether something should happen that will:
Cause me a nasty injury with broken glass.
Have some other larger impact on my welfare that I am clueless about the sign of.
Why is it incoherent for me to say:
"The part of the effect that I am not clueless about is very bad, so I prefer that it does not happen."
..?
It is not clear to me why this is wrong. I admit it is also not clear that this reasoning is coherent.This is a confusing thing to reason about. But I think claiming I can have no welfare based reason for preferring one outcome here needs more justification, it should not just be asserted (is this not ultimately the kind of question that this whole essay competition is about?)
If I was in this situation, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass, for welfare based reasons. If this choice meant that someone else missed out on a tasty snack, I would not mind a theory that told me it was indeterminate whether my choice was still the best one. But if a theory tells me that giving the other person the snack is the strictly better choice, then this feels wrong.
I think we can just add that I am confident effect 3 will not become relevant until after I am dead. I didn't explicitly state that assumption, but that was what I had in mind. Then we get the problematic conclusion I was worried about I think?
This also raises another interesting question though, which is how bracketing interacts with personal identity being fuzzy. If bracketing cares about aggregating the effects on one 'person' then how do we deal with situations involving branching personal identity? I would have thought you would have to frame it in terms of 'person moments', rather than 'persons', in order to be coherent?
There's something that bothers me with bracketing, that I'd be interested to hear a reply to. It seems to affect bottom up bracketing as you have presented it here. I am unsure if it affects top down bracketing as well, but it sounds like it might.
Suppose I have an action available to me that will have the following 3 effects, impossible to disentangle:
I get a tasty snack right away.
Some broken glass is left somewhere. I am confident it will remain buried for 100 years, but after that I think it is highly likely to resurface and cause someone a nasty injury, due to where it is located.
Some effect on the long term future which I think will be significant in expectation, but which I am clueless about the sign of.
My understanding is that bracketing would say not only is this act permissable, but that I should do it. This is because it benefits me, and I am clueless about its effects on every other beneficiary (the person who is injured by the glass in 100 years may well be compensated by a benefit from 3).
But this feels wrong! If I just consider the effects that I am not clueless about, the bad seems to clearly outweigh the good. The same intuition that motivated bracketing in the first place would seem to say that this act is wrong.
I can buy the plausibility of a theory that says it is indeterminate whether I should take this act or not, due to the uncertainty bundled up in 3. And I can buy a theory which says the act is wrong (since that is what my intuition strongly points towards). But a theory that says it is wrong not to take this act feels like it has gone wrong somewhere.
Apologies if this is naive and has already been addressed at length somewhere. I would be interested to know how proponents of bracketing respond to this.
One thing I'm a bit confused by: in the table you classify several objections to incomparability as being responses to premise 1. But when I read premise 1 it doesn't obviously seem to make any claim about incomparability? That seems to enter in premise 2. Am I missing something?
As a data scientist who frequently wonders about this question, thank you for this post, it was a really interesting read!
But I'm a bit confused about your final section on "generative AI" roles, and the claim that data people have no special advantage here. What sort of roles do you have in mind exactly? If you're talking only about prompt engineering, or just about the skill of being able to use a product like Claude code/cowork well, then I can see where you're coming from, though I think I still weakly disagree. For example, if you have an understanding of how these models work under the hood then you are probably better placed to understand which tasks it will be good at and which it might struggle with (this includes really basic stuff, like knowledge cutoffs in training data, and the fact it won't necessarily remember what you asked it about the day before without a memory feature bolted on, and therefore won't improve day by day etc). You are also probably in a better position to understand things like which tasks will require higher reasoning, and which won't (which very often doesn't line up with their perceived human difficulty).
But that aside, I don't think applying generative AI to practical problems is just about prompt engineering or becoming a claude cowork super-user. If you are a business that wants to create an automated workflow where you run a certain prompt over a certain dataset at scale, on the basis of certain triggers, then you are doing something that looks a lot like data engineering (and you are going to need to write code). And if you're hitting context window limits, you'll have to manage context, by building some kind of agent orchestration/scaffolding. That's maybe closer to being a brand new skill, but it still requires strong coding ability, combined with the ability to evaluate the performance of a software tool empirically, which is a specific combination of skillsets that data scientists should already have.
It's true that with AI coding assistants, people are writing less and less code by hand. But you still need strong coding ability to use AI coding assistants effectively. Software engineering has not yet been fully automated. There's a possible future where that changes soon, and maybe that's the future informing your advice in that final section? But my personal feeling would be that in that world, most knowledge jobs probably follow shortly after anyway (if not before), so trying to plan your career development around this possible future seems challenging!
I may be misunderstanding something in the argument, but this potential solution is I think already discussed in detail in Reasons+Persons, where Parfit introduces the repugnant conclusion? He calls it the 'lexical value' solution, I think? And I don't think this write up addresses any of the strong arguments that Parfit makes against it there?
In Parfit's original argument, he doesn't just rely on an appeal to intuition that B is better than A. Instead we move to B from A in two steps: first we go to A+ (more people having lives just worth living, but original population unaffected). Parfit claims that A+ is not worse than A. And then we move to world B, where we are now significantly increasing the welfare of already existing people, with only a small drop in the welfare of the original population. Parfit claims that B is better than A+.
If we reject that A+ is not worse than A, then we have to say it is sometimes wrong to create new people, even if their lives are worth living. This seems very strange. If we reject that B is better than A, then we have to believe that a small drop in welfare for people whose welfare is already very high can outweigh a large increase in welfare for people whose welfare is very low. This is the bullet that I think the lexical value solution bites?
But this is a tough bullet to bite! It is the opposite of egalitarian. It says we should prioritise changes in the welfare of already existing high welfare people (whose welfare is above the lexical level) over changes in the welfare of also already existing low welfare people (welfare below the lexical level).
I think it's difficult to give a complete answer to your question without essentially drafting a fresh entry to the cluelessness critiques competition. I accept that it is not a solution to the general problem to simply say "just ignore the effects/causal pathways you're clueless about", because as you point out, in general, we can change the way we group these effects, and that may change what gets ignored. Iirc there is a section arguing this point clearly in digiovannis sequence.
My example was not meant to be taken as saying "look, there is this obviously correct method for approaching these problems that bracketing disagrees with". It was meant to be taken only as "in this very contrived example, bracketing's recommendations seem to clash with the intuition that motivates bracketing in the first place" (maybe I am going wrong by thinking it motivated by intuition)
In my contrived example, there are no other good things and other bad things. The effects are, by assumption, just (splitting positive and negative):
Effect 1 occurs with probability 1. Effect 2 occurs with probability near 1 (if imprecise, the interval is small and near 1).
Effects 3 and 4 both occur with only very small probability (and are clearly mutually exclusive as well). And the probabilities are imprecise. But the upper limit of each imprecise interval is large enough to produce value in expectation that outweighs 1 and 2. And the intervals overlap, which makes the sign of the total expected value indeterminate.
This is I think a complete specification of the problem (we don't need to worry about the causal pathways?). And my intuition still strongly points to one of these conclusions being acceptable:
But bracketing advocates neither of these, so feels wrong.
If you push me on what it is that lets me group 3 and 4 together so that I can ignore them, rather than grouping 2, 3, and 4 together (as bracketing does) I guess I would point to the degree of imprecision in the probability estimates, which feels like the more relevant factor than which person is feeling the effect.
That's a fair challenge.
It feels hard to come up with simple neat examples of clueless effects, which is why I left it ambiguous in my original question. But I think we can make it more precise without shifting the intuition (or at least my intuition).
Let's say effect 3 is that your act will shift the probability of dystopian lock in (a many thousand year dictatorship) in a direction that you are clueless about.
My intuition still feels exactly the same.
Thanks for the reply!
I don't think I agree that her welfare based answer is obviously 'no'. If I put myself in her shoes, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass.
I am considering whether something should happen that will:
Why is it incoherent for me to say:
"The part of the effect that I am not clueless about is very bad, so I prefer that it does not happen."
..?
It is not clear to me why this is wrong. I admit it is also not clear that this reasoning is coherent. This is a confusing thing to reason about. But I think claiming I can have no welfare based reason for preferring one outcome here needs more justification, it should not just be asserted (is this not ultimately the kind of question that this whole essay competition is about?)
If I was in this situation, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass, for welfare based reasons. If this choice meant that someone else missed out on a tasty snack, I would not mind a theory that told me it was indeterminate whether my choice was still the best one. But if a theory tells me that giving the other person the snack is the strictly better choice, then this feels wrong.
Interesting!
I think we can just add that I am confident effect 3 will not become relevant until after I am dead. I didn't explicitly state that assumption, but that was what I had in mind. Then we get the problematic conclusion I was worried about I think?
This also raises another interesting question though, which is how bracketing interacts with personal identity being fuzzy. If bracketing cares about aggregating the effects on one 'person' then how do we deal with situations involving branching personal identity? I would have thought you would have to frame it in terms of 'person moments', rather than 'persons', in order to be coherent?
There's something that bothers me with bracketing, that I'd be interested to hear a reply to. It seems to affect bottom up bracketing as you have presented it here. I am unsure if it affects top down bracketing as well, but it sounds like it might.
Suppose I have an action available to me that will have the following 3 effects, impossible to disentangle:
My understanding is that bracketing would say not only is this act permissable, but that I should do it. This is because it benefits me, and I am clueless about its effects on every other beneficiary (the person who is injured by the glass in 100 years may well be compensated by a benefit from 3).
But this feels wrong! If I just consider the effects that I am not clueless about, the bad seems to clearly outweigh the good. The same intuition that motivated bracketing in the first place would seem to say that this act is wrong.
I can buy the plausibility of a theory that says it is indeterminate whether I should take this act or not, due to the uncertainty bundled up in 3. And I can buy a theory which says the act is wrong (since that is what my intuition strongly points towards). But a theory that says it is wrong not to take this act feels like it has gone wrong somewhere.
Apologies if this is naive and has already been addressed at length somewhere. I would be interested to know how proponents of bracketing respond to this.
I see, thanks!
I found this summary really helpful, thank you!
One thing I'm a bit confused by: in the table you classify several objections to incomparability as being responses to premise 1. But when I read premise 1 it doesn't obviously seem to make any claim about incomparability? That seems to enter in premise 2. Am I missing something?
Really interesting write up, thanks! What would the effects be on aviation?
As a data scientist who frequently wonders about this question, thank you for this post, it was a really interesting read!
But I'm a bit confused about your final section on "generative AI" roles, and the claim that data people have no special advantage here. What sort of roles do you have in mind exactly? If you're talking only about prompt engineering, or just about the skill of being able to use a product like Claude code/cowork well, then I can see where you're coming from, though I think I still weakly disagree. For example, if you have an understanding of how these models work under the hood then you are probably better placed to understand which tasks it will be good at and which it might struggle with (this includes really basic stuff, like knowledge cutoffs in training data, and the fact it won't necessarily remember what you asked it about the day before without a memory feature bolted on, and therefore won't improve day by day etc). You are also probably in a better position to understand things like which tasks will require higher reasoning, and which won't (which very often doesn't line up with their perceived human difficulty).
But that aside, I don't think applying generative AI to practical problems is just about prompt engineering or becoming a claude cowork super-user. If you are a business that wants to create an automated workflow where you run a certain prompt over a certain dataset at scale, on the basis of certain triggers, then you are doing something that looks a lot like data engineering (and you are going to need to write code). And if you're hitting context window limits, you'll have to manage context, by building some kind of agent orchestration/scaffolding. That's maybe closer to being a brand new skill, but it still requires strong coding ability, combined with the ability to evaluate the performance of a software tool empirically, which is a specific combination of skillsets that data scientists should already have.
It's true that with AI coding assistants, people are writing less and less code by hand. But you still need strong coding ability to use AI coding assistants effectively. Software engineering has not yet been fully automated. There's a possible future where that changes soon, and maybe that's the future informing your advice in that final section? But my personal feeling would be that in that world, most knowledge jobs probably follow shortly after anyway (if not before), so trying to plan your career development around this possible future seems challenging!
I may be misunderstanding something in the argument, but this potential solution is I think already discussed in detail in Reasons+Persons, where Parfit introduces the repugnant conclusion? He calls it the 'lexical value' solution, I think? And I don't think this write up addresses any of the strong arguments that Parfit makes against it there?
In Parfit's original argument, he doesn't just rely on an appeal to intuition that B is better than A. Instead we move to B from A in two steps: first we go to A+ (more people having lives just worth living, but original population unaffected). Parfit claims that A+ is not worse than A. And then we move to world B, where we are now significantly increasing the welfare of already existing people, with only a small drop in the welfare of the original population. Parfit claims that B is better than A+.
If we reject that A+ is not worse than A, then we have to say it is sometimes wrong to create new people, even if their lives are worth living. This seems very strange. If we reject that B is better than A, then we have to believe that a small drop in welfare for people whose welfare is already very high can outweigh a large increase in welfare for people whose welfare is very low. This is the bullet that I think the lexical value solution bites?
But this is a tough bullet to bite! It is the opposite of egalitarian. It says we should prioritise changes in the welfare of already existing high welfare people (whose welfare is above the lexical level) over changes in the welfare of also already existing low welfare people (welfare below the lexical level).