CFP: Cluelessness Critiques Competition

The Effective Altruism Forum, with prizes funded by Macroscopic Ventures, is running an essay competition inviting critiques of the "unawareness argument" set out in Anthony DiGiovanni’s sequence The Challenge of Unawareness for Impartial Altruist Action Guidance. DiGiovanni argues that our evidence about the long-run consequences of our actions is too coarse to compare them: impact assessments, whether precise expected-value estimates or informal best guesses, should be severely indeterminate, leaving the impartial altruist with no justified verdict on which action does more good.

Eligible entries take one of three routes:

• Challenge a premise — argue that a specific premise (normative, conceptual, or empirical) is false or unmotivated.

• Challenge the inference — grant the premises but deny that the "no reason to prefer any action" conclusion follows.

• Offer a constructive response — grant the conclusion and say what the impartial altruist should do anyway, defending an existing proposal (e.g. bracketing or wagering) or an original one.

The strongest entries focus on a single, clearly identified step of the argument rather than the whole. Length is open, from roughly 200 to 5,000 words. Read DiGiovanni’s summary post first to orient your entry.

Prizes (USD): $2,500 / $1,500 / $1,000 for the top three essays, plus up to $2,000 in comment prizes during the discussion week (Week starting August 17th). An outlier prize of up to $50,000 is on offer for a decisive critique or a genuinely original solution. A $250 referral prize is also available for those cited by a winner as the reason they entered the competition.

Deadline: 14 August 2026, 23:59 anywhere on Earth. 

Entries are submitted via the form linked from the announcement post. Eligible entries are published on the EA Forum during 17–23 August, with winners announced the week of 24 August. Open to academics, students, and anyone else aged 18 and over; pieces published before the announcement are not eligible. Essay judges: Anthony DiGiovanni, Andreas Mogensen (Oxford), and Jesse Clifton (Macroscopic Ventures).