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2. Why intuitive comparisons of large-scale impact are unjustified — LessWrong

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We’ve seen so far that unawareness leaves us with gaps in the impartial altruistic justification for our decisions. It’s fundamentally unclear how the possible outcomes of our actions trade off against each other. But perhaps this ambiguity doesn’t matter much in practice, since the consequences that predominantly shape the impartial value of the future (“large-scale consequences”, for short) seem at least somewhat foreseeable. Here are two ways we might think we can fill these gaps: Implicit: “Even if we can’t assign EVs to interventions, we have reason to trust that our pre-theoretic intuitions at least track an intervention’s sign. These intuitions can distinguish whether the large-scale consequences are net-better than inaction.”[1] Do these approaches hold up, when we look concretely at how vast our unawareness could be? “The far future is complex” is a truism that many EAs are probably sick of hearing. But here I’ll argue that this complexity — which also plagues our impact on ne

x 2. Why intuitive comparisons of large-scale impact are unjustified — LessWrong The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance Decision theory Epistemology Rationality Frontpage 25 2. Why intuitive comparisons of large-scale impact are unjustified by Anthony DiGiovanni 4th Jun 2025 19 min read 0 25 We’ve seen so far that unawareness leaves us with gaps in the impartial altruistic justification for our decisions. It’s fundamentally unclear how the possible outcomes of our actions trade off against each other. But perhaps this ambiguity doesn’t matter much in practice, sinc

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