“Results: Cluelessness Critiques Competition” by Will Aldred, Toby Tremlett🔹

Last week, the Forum grappled with cluelessness. The volume of entries (76 essays!)—from newcomers and Forum power users alike—was a happy surprise, and there were many thoughtful contributions beyond those mentioned below.

Essay winners

First place ($2,500):

• Elliott Thornley, for Challenging the unawareness argument with third actions and mixed actions

Joint second place ($1,500 each):

• Magnus Vinding (aka ‘unsharp’), for Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification

• Impartial Partially, for Bottom-up bracketing: A person-centered response to cluelessness

The judges—Andreas Mogensen, Jesse Clifton and Anthony DiGiovanni—decided against awarding the up-to-50 thousand dollars outlier prize. Though they saw some promise in the winning essays’ approaches, their minds have not been significantly changed. The outlier prize remains open; there is still much progress to be made on cluelessness.

Here's more from our judges on the winning essays. (Their comments are technical! If you haven’t yet read ‘Cluelessness: Summary of the argument’, I suggest starting there.)

Challenging the unawareness argument with third actions and mixed actions

Jesse's comments

This piece offers two challenges to Anthony's argument. First, it challenges the normative premise on the grounds that only c-preferring A to B when we expect our ideal self to prefer A to [...]

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Outline:

(00:27) Essay winners

(01:31) Challenging the unawareness argument with third actions and mixed actions

(01:37) Jesse's comments

(04:15) Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification

(04:20) Andreas's comments

(05:23) Jesse's comments

(07:32) Bottom-up bracketing: A person-centered response to cluelessness

(07:39) Andreas's comments

(08:43) Anthony's comments

(11:07) Judges' shortlist

(11:49) Comment winners

(13:24) Wrapping up

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 29th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oxoyBNq5uYXEbwEen/results-cluelessness-critiques-competition

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.