I recently spoke with Anthony DiGiovanni about cluelessness and incomparability. Cluelessness is the idea that we’re often radically clueless about the long-term impacts of various actions, so that actions that try to benefit the long-run future don’t actually have a well-defined positive expected value.
Incomparability is the idea that there are goods which can’t be precisely compared—so neither is better than the other, but they’re not equal. For example, it might be that you are deciding between being a doctor and a lawyer. Those jobs are incomparable. They’re not exactly equal—it isn’t as if someone offered you a dollar to become a doctor instead of a lawyer, you’d confidently take the doctor job—only that you don’t have a preference either way because you feel they can’t be precisely compared.
I don’t buy either incomparability or cluelessness. We argued about those here. I thought the conversation went great, and Anthony is very smart!
One brief note: there was a period during the middle of the debate when I was explaining a principle that rules out incomparability (of the kind Anthony preferred) but that I didn’t do a great job of explaining. So just to state the principle, I think it is irrational to maintain the following:
Giving all the information I currently have about how lotteries A and B turned out, I prefer A to B, but I know that I don’t prefer how lottery A turned out to how lottery B turned out.
(Watch the video if you’re not sure why incomparability requires denying that).
Anyways, hope you enjoy the chat as much as I did! And check out Anthony’s EA forum account for more!
