Action Versus Inaction When Clueless

Mal considers whether cluelessness permits any action and defends prioritizing robustly positive, non-transformative options.

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Author's note: This is an adapted version of my recent talk at EA Global NYC (I’ll add a link when it's available). The content has been adjusted to reflect things I learned from talking to people after my talk. If you saw the talk, you might still be interested in the “some objections” section at the end.

Summary

Wild animal welfare faces frequent tractability concerns, amounting to the idea that ecosystems are too complex to intervene in without causing harm. However, I suspect these concerns reflect inconsistent justification standards rather than unique intractability. To explore this idea:

I provide some context about why people sometimes have tractability concerns about wild animal welfare, providing a concrete example using bird-window collisions.
I then describe four approaches to handling uncertainty about indirect effects: spotlighting (focusing on target beneficiaries while ignoring broader impacts), ignoring cluelessness (acting on knowable effects only), assigning precise probabilities to all outcomes, and seeking ecologically inert interventions.
I argue that, when applied consistently across cause areas, none of these approaches suggest wild animal welfare is distinctively intractable compared to global health or AI safety. Rather, the apparent difference most commonly stems from arbitrarily wide "spotlights" applied to [...]

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Outline:

(00:31) Summary

(02:15) Consequentialism + impartial altruism → hard to do good

(03:43) The challenge: Deep uncertainty and backfire risk

(04:41) Example: Bird-window collisions

(05:22) We don't actually understand the welfare consequences of bird-window collisions on birds

(06:08) We don't know how birds would die otherwise

(07:06) The effects on other animals are even more uncertain

(09:16) Four approaches to handling uncertainty

(10:08) Spotlighting

(15:31) Set aside that which you are clueless about