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Nice, thanks for the explanation of your reasoning.

The example I gave there was the same as for simple cluelessness, but it needn’t be. (I like this example because it shows that, even for simple cluelessness, there isn’t wash out.) For example, if we imagine some version of complex cluelessness we can see that ripples on a pond objection doesn’t seem to work. Eg. increased economic growth —> increased carbon emissions —> increased climate change —> migration problems and resources struggles —> great power conflict etc. As time goes on, the world where the extra economic growth happened will look more and more different from the world where it didn’t happen. Does that seem true?

I agree that we don’t know how to predict a bunch of these long-term effects, and this only gets worse as the timescales get longer. But why does that mean we can ignore them? Aren’t we interested in doing the things with the best effects (all the effects)? Does it matter whether we can predict the effects at the moment? Like does GiveWell doing an analysis of AMF mean that there are now better effects from donating to AMF? That doesn’t seem right to me. It does seem more reasonable to donate after the analysis (more subjectively choice-worthy or something like that). But the effects aren’t better, right? Similarly, if there are unpredictable long-term effects, why does it matter (morally*) whether that the effects are unpredictable?

With regards to that EV calculation, I think that might be assuming you have precise credences. If we’re uncertain in our EV estimates, don’t we need to use imprecise credences? Then we’d have a bunch of different term like

EV under model n*credence in model n

*or under whatever value system is motivating you/me eg subjective preferences

No worries, sorry if I didn't write it as clearly as I could have!

BTW, I've had this conversation enough times now that last summer I wrote down my thoughts on cluelessness in a document that I've been told is pretty accessible—this is the doc I link to from the words "don't have an expected value". I know it can be annoying just to be pointed off the page, but just letting you know in case you find it helpful or interesting.

Your long-term effects don’t persist response:

One way we can see that long-term effects seem to persist is through identity-altering actions, as described in the ‘simple cluelessness’ section above. Once my decisions affect a conception event, I am causally responsible for everything that the conceived person counterfactually does. I am causally responsible for the effects of those things and for the effects of those effects and so on. As time goes on, I will be causally responsible for more and more effects, not fewer and fewer.

I don't think you made a convincing point here, I don’t see how simple cluelessness is relevant here. Since we have no chance to predict how these identity-altering actions will pan out, we can’t take them into account when making decisions. We only account for what we can predict.

For some short-term interventions, as time goes on, there are fewer and fewer consequences that we can predict. For example, let’s take my decision to eat a vegan meal today rather than meat to help animals (without anyone else noticing it). I can’t predict any effect it will have in 1000 years so I don’t worry about it.

A more complicated example can be something like clean meat research. Let’s imagine that I believe that no matter what we do, in 1000 years there will be no animal farming. Either we will be making clean meat, not eating meat at all, or humanity will be extinct altogether. So me donating to clean meat research is like jumping on a sinking animal farming ship to make it sink faster. The end result will be the same no matter what I do. Sure, I can make some fancy theory about how donating to this research will influence the views of beings alive in 1000 years. But I will have so little confidence in this theory that it won’t dominate my expected value calculation.

Expected value of an action = predicted short-term effect ✕ probability that I predicted short-term effect correctly + predicted long-term effect ✕ probability that I predicted long-term effect correctly. No matter what research I do, the probability that I predicted long-term effect correctly can be so low that it won’t matter much and won't dominate the estimation.

Note that this is only an example of views I’d find reasonable, and not necessarily my actual views about clean meat.

Sorry, I misunderstood your comment on my first reading, so I retracted my first reply.

Does that seem wrong to you?

No, that seems plausible, although I'd have to look into how long the population effects go. The point isn't about direct vs indirect effects (all effects are indirect, in my view), but net effects we have estimates of magnitude for. I don't consider those effects to be "long-term" in the way longtermists use the word. The expected value on the long term isn't obvious at all, since there are too many different considerations to weigh against one another, many we're unaware of, and no good way to weigh them.

Note: I retracted my previous reply.

Hold on—now it seems like you might be talking past the OP on the issue of complex cluelessness. I 1000% agree that changing population size has many effects beyond those I listed, and that we can't weigh them; but that's the whole problem!

The claim is that CC arises when (a) there are both predictably positive and predictably negative indirect effects of (say) saving lives which are larger in magnitude than the direct effects, and (b) you can't weigh them all against each other so as to arise at an all-things-considered judgment of the sign of the value of the intervention.

A common response to the phenomenon of CC is to say, "I know that the direct effects are good, and I struggle to weigh all of the indirect effects, so the latter are zero for me in expectation, and the intervention is appealing". But (unless there's a strong counterargument to Hilary's observation about this in "Cluelessness" which I'm unaware of), this response is invalid. We know this because if this response were valid, we could by identical reasoning pick out any category of effect whose effects we can estimate—the effect on farmed chicken welfare next year from saving a chicken-eater's life, say—and say "I know that the next-year-chicken effects are bad, and I struggle to weigh all of the non-next-year-chicken effects, so the latter are zero for me in expectation, and the intervention is unappealing".

The above reasoning doesn't invalidate that kind of response to simple cluelessness, because there the indirect effects have a feature—symmetry—which breaks when you cut up the space of consequences differently. But this means that, unless one can demonstrate that the distribution of non-direct effects has a sort of evidential symmetry that the distribution of non-next-year-chicken effects does not, one is not yet in a position to put a sign to the value of saving a life.

So, the response to

What's the expected value (on net) of the indirect effects to you? Is its absolute value much greater than the direct effects' expected value?

is that, given an inability to weigh all the effects, and an absence of evidential symmetry, I simply don't have an expected value (or even a sign) of the indirect effects, or the total effects, of saving a life.

Does that clarify things at all, or am I the one doing the talking-past?

Thanks for the answer Saulius, and I agree the hotel analogy is pretty different to the reality! So do you think the long-term effects don’t dominate? Or we can’t say what they are because they depend on other people’s unpredictable behaviour in a way that near-term things don’t?

And I think you’re also saying that, at any given time, we have a special opportunity to influence that time. Is that because we have more evidence about present effects or because there’s something special about direct rather than indirect effects? I’m confused because it seems like while we do have a special opportunity to influence the present because we’re here now, we also have a special opportunity to influence the future too because we’re here now. Eg. by doing anything that has positive compounding effects, or avoids lock-in of a bad state.

—maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I believe the proposition being defended here is that the distribution of long-term welfare outcomes from a short-termist intervention differs substantially from the status quo distribution of long-term welfare outcomes (and that this distribution-difference is much larger than the intervention's direct benefits). Do you mean that you're not convinced that this is the case for any short-termist intervention?

To be specific (and revising my claim somewhat), I'm not convinced of any net expected longterm effect in any particular direction on my social welfare function/utility function. I think there are many considerations that can go in either direction, the weight we give them is basically arbitrary, and I usually don't have good reason to believe their effects persist very long or are that important, anyway.

Assuming that fertility in saved children isn't dramatically lower than population fertility, this strikes me as a strong reason to think that the indirect welfare effects of saving a young person's life in Africa today—indeed, even a majority of the effects on total human welfare before 2100—will be larger than the direct welfare effect.

I am arguing from ignorance here, but I don't yet have enough reason to believe the expected effect is good or bad. Unless I expect to be able to weigh opposing considerations against one another in a way that feels robust and satisfactory to me and be confident that I'm not missing crucial considerations, I'm inclined to not account for them until I can (but also try to learn more about them in hope of having more robust predictions). A sensitivity analysis might help, too, but only so much. The two studies you cite are worth looking into, but there are also effects of different population sizes that you need to weigh. How do you weigh them against each other?

this strikes me as a strong reason to think that the indirect welfare effects of saving a young person's life in Africa today—indeed, even a majority of the effects on total human welfare before 2100—will be larger than the direct welfare effect.

What's the expected value (on net) of the indirect effects to you? Is its absolute value much greater than the direct effects' expected value? How robust do you think the sign of the expected value of the indirect effects is to your subjective weighting of different considerations and missed considerations?

Also, what do you think the expected change in population size is from saving one life through AMF?

Also, from "The Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism" by Christian Tarsney for the Global Priorities Institute:

If we simply aim to maximize expected value, and don’t mind premising our choices on minuscule probabilities of astronomical payoffs, the case for longtermism looks robust. But on some prima facie plausible empirical worldviews, the expectational superiority of longtermist interventions depends heavily on these “Pascalian” probabilities. So the case for longtermism may depend either on plausible but non-obvious empirical claims or on a tolerance for Pascalian fanaticism.

For what it's worth, this doesn't really justify the case for any particular longtermist intervention, so the case for longtermism only looks robust here if you can predictably make a net positive difference with some small but large enough probability. This probability could actually be negligible, unless you have good reason to believe otherwise.

Also, whether you think the probabilities involved are Pascalian or not, or even care, this work is super cool, and I think the talk is pretty accessible if you're comfortable with 2nd-year undergrad probability. I definitely recommend watching/reading.

Only we can help those who are suffering now. Future people will be able to influence those who will live in the future. So I don’t think that the hotel analogy is quite right. We press a button knowing what it will do to the occupant in the room #327 right now. What happens to other occupants will depend on many other people pressing buttons afterwards, and these other people will be in better positions to optimize for other rooms. Which button we press influences which buttons/options they will have, but it doesn’t directly cause occupants bliss or torture in a way that we can predict. In this situation it’s unclear whether it’s better to optimize for room #327, or to make some fancy theory where we try to predict what buttons/options other people will have and which buttons they will decide to press.