“How One Clueless Layman Makes Decisions in Animal Welfare” by Jo_🔸

This personal post is not part of the competition, as my intent is not to produce an original constructive response to cluelessness. However, Toby Tremlett encouraged me to share it insofar as it contributes to this week's conversation.

TL; DR: I work in animal welfare and am clueless. To avoid choosing actions at random, I decided to write a decision procedure for myself and to indicate the assumptions that accompany it. This does not constitute a new argument on the topic. Rather, this is a layman's attempt to apply it. For those who want to skim, you can skip to the Decision procedure section, where I bolded the aspects of my decision procedure that seem most likely to elicit pushback.

Epistemic status and intent

• Like many in animal welfare, I intuitively agree with cluelessness without understanding all of the philosophical steps behind it, and this will show in the post. I focused on honestly representing my understanding of cluelessness, rather than high-quality philosophical reasoning. I’m partly betting on Cunningham's Law here.

• This post does not aim to be a constructive general response like bracketing. It is also mostly derived from other writings on cluelessness. It assumes surface-level familiarity with [...]

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Outline:

(00:55) Epistemic status and intent

(01:55) What Cluelessness Means To Me, a Layman

(03:39) Why not just use what exists?

(04:04) Why not maximize expected value?

(04:12) Why not apply bracketing?

(05:40) Why not apply metanormative bracketing?

(06:28) Benefits of having my own decision procedure:

(07:37) Section 1: My decision procedure

(07:42) Disclaimers

(08:39) My decision procedure

(15:57) Brief tentative conclusion

(16:48) Early updates from applying the procedure

(17:27) Section 2: My judgment on underdetermined matters

(18:20) Eight underdetermined assumptions

(22:06) Next steps

The original text contained 24 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 21st, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yASpyx4zHGZxMsgNP/how-one-clueless-layman-makes-decisions-in-animal-welfare

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.