Cluelessness is Zeno’s paradox for EAs

Cluelessness can be an artifact of expected-value epistemics disconnecting from meaning. We know that sometimes, when taking the consequentialist stance, we lose meaningfulness. Cluelessness is a sophisticated example where the meaning has been lost and the tool is taking us for a ride.

In Socrates’ time, way back during the Axial Age, there was this guy named Zeno, and Zeno analyzed the flight of an arrow. His analysis led to the conclusion that movement from one place to another is impossible, because to get to that place you first have to get halfway there, but to get halfway there you’d first have to get a quarter of the way, and on and on.Of course today when we hear this we become skeptical about the analytic process itself, not about the possibility of movement. There’s actually an extremely complex mathematical proof that resolves the problem formally, but if we had to understand that proof before we could get from one place to another we’d all be stuck in one place forever.What we do know is that our Axial Age minds, the kinds of minds we have today, can create riddles in this way about all kinds of things. That something simultaneously is and is not. We can call all kinds of folk knowledge into question and come face to face with the specter of extreme doubt or become stunned into a state of aporia.Now only educated people are worried about these things, though, because they have been made neurotic enough to contemplate the problem, smart enough to conjure the riddle, but not smart enough to do the math.— Bonnitta Roy

Cluelessness poses a puzzle. That puzzle is

• legible because it uses the right moving parts — expected-value reasoning — in the right ways
• high-stakes because its resolution sits between us and an intelligible world
• compelling because it says that if we don’t solve it our actions might be hugely harmful
• a snipe because it baits our cerebral problem-solving to level-up into suitable cleverness to solve the puzzle in its terms

I think the fact that the puzzle is compelling enough to have gathered the attention it has is evidence of an epistemic capture of the EA community. We have become alienated from collecting evidence by looking with our eyes.

A good servant and a terrible master

Cluelessness posits, roughly, that expected value calculations are dominated by terms that can’t be estimated, even in sign, because there are systemic long-arc downstreams to actions that aren’t resolvable. We have no way to estimate the value of our actions.

To many of those positioned to feel concern about cluelessness, the virtues of utilitarianism and expected-value reasoning are ingrained enough that they’ve transmuted the frame of the tool into an embodied epistemic stance. Hence the felt concern.

Inhabited that way, expected value calculus, beyond posing the puzzle, demands a confrontation with long-arc downstreams. So expected-value reasoning helps, but because of it we’re clueless.

Meaning and mattering

I claim that the confrontation is really about meaning. The kind of meaning that’s lived, in which a friend, love, adversary, or battle can be true, and which inheres in actions agnostic to their explanations.

A helpful proposition about this sense of meaning: a vantage point from which I am meaningless is also meaningless to me. In the cosmic scale of the universe, I and my life, the Earth, are meaninglessly tiny. Thankfully, cosmic scales are meaningless to my real, lived life. It isn’t an accident that I go about my day-to-day without cosmic scales on my mind, haunting me. This is the kind of meaning I intend. It’s instantiated automatically by our being in the world and by real events out there.

Cluelessness says that (more carefully: is conditional on the assumption that) long-arc downstreams matter, have meaning in this sense for our decision-making, and, since we can’t know how our actions influence them, our actions lack purpose and can’t be directed. In my terms, our actions are meaningless and we are clueless.

Back to cluelessness

Our actions propagate through structures we don’t understand in ways we can’t know or predict, and the grounding of our collective sensemaking erodes well before the possible implications of our involvement play out. In this way the statement of cluelessness contains a true observation about the world in which our actions are situated.

The Zeno in cluelessness is that, more than a call to navigate, we are beholden as participants in the world to the logic of our tools and its limitations. We’ve turned an analytical method into an epistemic stance and, as a result, if the method fails, we can’t hope to succeed.

But that’s not how the world appears. I call on us to look with our eyes at what matters and make a deduction.

Looking: descriptively, out in the world and throughout history, our actions have mattered, and it is not the case that the world has degenerated, that good efforts often went haywire and caused massive harm. Careful reasoning, effective engagement, and good work do make a meaningful difference. Positive impact has been real throughout history. That should be viewed as a piece of evidence on which we base our epistemics, an empirical result that needs to be accounted for.

Deducing: expected-value reasoning, as an epistemic stance, implies that cluelessness matters, meaning we can’t guide our actions to lead to good outcomes. But we can, so the stance is wrong. It doesn’t capture reality accurately, and its implication that long-arc downstreams matter in our decision-making is contradicted — the effects of cluelessness are not found in the world.

This looks trivial, like a trick, or like it’s missing the point only because it steps outside the tacitly held framework for making sense in order to notice something that framework doesn’t admit as legitimate data. “But those are only near-term effects” is speaking through the framework, believing that a long run that doesn’t appear in the world should inform how we act in it. There is no statement of cluelessness without the connection between expected-value reasoning and apprehending the world in expected-value terms.

When that happens in the form of a tacit assumption, we’re led into one of the edge cases where expected-value logic disconnects from reality, but we don’t notice the move. Cluelessness feels overwhelming because it’s absurd rather than because it’s significant.

I personally feel satisfied that this is a resolution of cluelessness. Cluelessness is absurd. The data that’s being missed is the central tenet of EA, that doing good is possible. If we believe this tenet only as a theoretical supposition and don’t see it in the arc of the world and the work our community has done, none of us have reason to be here.

If we do see it and still feel concern about cluelessness, I invite a genuine inquiry into what a resolution of cluelessness is expected to do for us beyond giving us confidence that our reasoned actions lead to good outcomes.

Many thanks to Nicolas Macé for engaging conversation that got me thinking about cluelessness and to int/haven for the motivation to write about it.