Heuristics for clueless agents: how to get away with ignoring what matters most in ordinary decision-making
David Thorstad and Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
GPI Working Paper No. 2-2020
Even our most mundane decisions have the potential to significantly impact the long-term future, but we are often clueless about what this impact may be. In this paper, we aim to characterize and solve two problems raised by recent discussions of cluelessness, which we term the Problems of Decision Paralysis and the Problem of Decision-Making Demandingness. After reviewing and rejecting existing solutions to both problems, we argue that the way forward is to be found in the distinction between procedural and substantive rationality. Clueless agents have access to a variety of heuristic decision-making procedures which are often rational responses to the decision problems that they face. By simplifying or even ignoring information about potential long-term impacts, heuristics produce effective decisions without demanding too much of ordinary decision-makers. We outline two classes of problem features bearing on the rationality of decision-making procedures for clueless agents, and show how these features can be used to shed light on our motivating problems.
Other working papers
Maximal cluelessness – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance…
Dispelling the Anthropic Shadow – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
There are some possible events that we could not possibly discover in our past. We could not discover an omnicidal catastrophe, an event so destructive that it permanently wiped out life on Earth. Had such a catastrophe occurred, we wouldn’t be here to find out. This space of unobservable histories has been called the anthropic shadow. Several authors claim that the anthropic shadow leads to an ‘observation selection bias’, analogous to survivorship bias, when we use the historical record to estimate catastrophic risks. …
The end of economic growth? Unintended consequences of a declining population – Charles I. Jones (Stanford University)
In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women are having fewer than two children on average. It is a distinct possibility — highlighted in the recent book, Empty Planet — that global population will decline rather than stabilize in the long run. …