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

TL;DR We’re hosting an essay competition to elicit responses to Anthony DiGiovanni's sequence, ‘The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance’—submit your entries by August 14th. There will be cash prizes for the best essays and the best comments: 7 thousand dollars in total. Additionally, we're offering an outlier prize of up to 50 thousand dollars for a truly exceptional entry: an original solution to cluelessness, or a critique decisive enough to move the debate. We’re also offering a referral prize of $250 if a winner says you’re responsible for telling them about the competition. Motivation When I announced April's Better Futures Highlight Week,[1] I confidently wrote: “To make the future go better, we can either work to avoid near-term catastrophes like human extinction or improve the futures where we survive.” But what if I was wrong? What if both options are bankrupt, and we have no justified answer as to whether any particular work would make the future better? In his Challenge of Unawareness sequence, Anthony DiGiovanni argues that we are in just this position. Specifically, he argues that our evidence about the future is so poor that our assessments of impact (explicit expected-value estimates [...] --- Outline: (00:12) TL;DR (00:54) Motivation (02:12) How the competition works (02:55) What your entry should look like (03:49) Option 1: Challenge a premise (05:19) Option 2: Challenge the inference (05:33) Option 3: Offer a constructive response (05:54) Prizes (05:58) Essay competition (07:43) Comment competition (08:09) How will the essays and comments be judged? (08:40) What comes after the competition? (09:00) Judges (09:13) Essay competition (09:33) Comment competition (09:50) Disclaimer (10:44) FAQs (10:48) Can I use AI? (11:21) Can I co-author a piece? (11:31) Can I submit a piece I've already published elsewhere? (12:03) Will I get feedback on my entry? (12:31) Does style matter? --- First published: June 19th, 2026 Source: --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts , or another podcast app.