Podcast Episode Details

Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Altruism, History, & Technology

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Will MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruist movement and the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future.

We talk about improving the future, risk of extinction & collapse, technological & moral change, problems of academia, who changes history, and much more.

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Episode website + Transcript here.

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Timestamps

(00:23) - Effective Altruism and Western values

(07:47) - The contingency of technology

(12:02) - Who changes history?

(18:00) - Longtermist institutional reform

(25:56) - Are companies longtermist?

(28:57) - Living in an era of plasticity

(34:52) - How good can the future be?

(39:18) - Contra Tyler Cowen on what’s most important

(45:36) - AI and the centralization of power

(51:34) - The problems with academia

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Transcript

Dwarkesh Patel 0:06

Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing William MacAskill. Will is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism movement, and most recently, the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future. Will, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Will MacAskill 0:20

Thanks so much for having me on.

Effective Altruism and Western values

Dwarkesh Patel 0:23

My first question is: What is the high-level explanation for the success of the Effective Altruism movement? Is it itself an example of the contingencies you talk about in the book?

Will MacAskill 0:32

Yeah, I think it is contingent. Maybe not on the order of, “this would never have happened,” but at least on the order of decades. Evidence that Effective Altruism is somewhat contingent is that similar ideas have been promoted many times during history, and not taken on.

We can go back to ancient China, the Mohists defended an impartial view of morality, and took very strategic actions to help all people. In particular, providing defensive assistance to cities under siege. Then, there were early utilitarians. Effective Altruism is broader than utilitarianism, but has some similarities. Even Peter Singer in the 70s had been promoting the idea that we should be giving most of our income to help the very poor — and didn’t get a lot of traction until early 2010 after GiveWell and Giving What We Can launched.

What explains the rise of it? I think it was a good idea waiting to happen. At some point, the internet helped to gather together a lot of like-minded people which wasn’t possible otherwise. There were some particularly lucky events like Alex meeting Published on 3 years, 4 months ago