[Linkpost] “Bracketing Cluelessness” by JesseClifton
This is a link post. “Bracketing Cluelessness” is a philosophy paper by Sylvester Kollin, Anthony DiGiovanni, Nicolas Macé, and myself, which presents a new approach to decision-making in the face of consequentialist cluelessness. Abstract: Consequentialists must take into account all possible consequences of their actions, including those in the far future. But due to the difficulty of getting a grasp on these consequences and producing non-arbitrary probabilities for them, it seems that consequentialists should often consider themselves clueless about which option is best. Contrary to orthodox consequentialism, however, there is a common-sense intuition that one should bracket those consequences which one is clueless about. Building on a model involving imprecise probability, we develop two novel alternatives to orthodoxy which capture this intuition. On bottom-up bracketing, we set aside those beneficiaries for whom we are clueless what would be best, and then base the overall verdict on the remainder. On top-down [...] --- First published: September 24th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RHhFo8WbiXsmzSiqk/linkpost-bracketing-cluelessness Linkpost URL:https://longtermrisk.org/files/Bracketing_Cluelessness.pdf --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.