Episode Details

Malcolm & Simone Collins dive deep into the worldview of Amanda Askell (philosopher & Anthropic's personality alignment lead, formerly Amanda MacAskill), former wife of effective altruism leader William MacAskill.

They unpack her 2015 Quartz piece arguing that killing predators like Cecil the Lion might ethically reduce wild animal suffering — and the logical extensions: euthanizing prey, sterilizing wildlife, negative utilitarianism vibes, and dystopian "Hunger Games for animals" with AI-managed nature.

From prey/predator identification psychology (victim vs. hunter lens), to name changes in marriage, fertility views, polyamory skepticism, anti-"born this way" LGBT arguments, AI safety blind spots, and why elite leftist intellectuals often ask rhetorical questions but stop short of pragmatic follow-ups.

Why do these hyper-rational EA circles seem insulated? How does this mindset connect to declining fertility, techno-utopianism, and the future of AI ethics? Plus: why pragmatic "hard" effective altruism beats signaling-based benevolence — and why cultures that don't reproduce simply die out.

If you're interested in EA critiques, wild animal welfare debates, pronatalism, AI alignment quirks, or why identifying with prey vs. predator reveals deep worldview differences — this episode is for you.

BTW, if you want to learn more about Hard Effective Altruism, check out HardEA.org.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Which is we accept that prey animals may indeed have miserable lives, and that if they do, his death condemns his potential prey to potentially many more years of suffering than had he killed them. Okay. But the claim that prey animals have miserable lives leads animal activists to a surprising conclusion of a different sort.

What is it? Ooh.

Think

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: then we have to kill the prey animals as well.

Simone Collins: Oh God, of course. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Why should the man not take the woman’s name , and he just asks a question, why, why, why is it bad?

Why is it bad? But he doesn’t even think to investigate that. This is what’s so interesting about this elitist leftist perspective. They, for phrase it tonally as if it’s a rhetorical question and then they don’t engage with it.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing.

The mindset and trying to dig into the world perspective of the leftist intellectual elite.

Simone Collins: Oh, no.

Malcolm Collins: And specifically leftist intellectual elite [00:01:00] women. And we are going to do this through I mean originally this was called to me as an idea because you sent me a WhatsApp about a tweet that you wrote, HP Lovecraft had me about a Amanda McCaskill who, well, she was called Amanda McCaskill when the piece was written.

She’s no longer called Amanda McCaskill, which is kind of hilarious because her husband changed his last name to her maternal grandmother’s last name, which was McCaskill. That’s Will McCaskill. By the way, if you don’t know him, incredibly like one of the leading two or three leading figures of the effect of altruist movement.

Simone Collins: He wrote What We Owe The Future, which had one of the most successful press debuts of a book. In forever

Malcolm Collins: in human history. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So it’s insane.

Malcolm Collins: But when she broke up with him, he kept the last name that she made him take and she changed it again. That’s why she has a different name now

Simone Collins: and, and they chose the, yeah.

That’