Evidence, cluelessness, and the long term

Abstract

My talk has three parts. In part one, I’ll talk about three of the basic canons of effective altruism, as I think most people understand them. Effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and the value of evidence. In part two, I’ll talk about the limits of evidence. It’s really important to pay attention to evidence, if you want to know what works. But a problem we face is that evidence can only go so far. In particular, I argue in the second part of my talk that most of the stuff that we ought to care about is necessarily stuff that we basically have no evidence for. This generates the problem that I call ‘cluelessness’. And in the third part of my talk, I’ll discuss how we might respond to this fact. I don’t know the answer and this is something that I struggle with a lot myself, but what I will do in the third part of the talk is I’ll lay out five possible responses and I’ll at least tell you what I think about each of those possible responses.