Will MacAskill is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between August 30, 2020 and October 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "inspired by philosophers like Will MacAskill and Peter Singer"; "Will MacAskill's book What We Owe The Future"; "Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare". It most often appears alongside effective altruism, FTX, EA.
- Article page
- Will MacAskill
- Mention count
- 14
- Issue count
- 14
- First seen
- August 30, 2020
- Last seen
- October 27, 2025
Outbound links
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221104130431/https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/1m-bet-rules
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221129133112/https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221224061743/https://www.skirsch.com/covid/SaarWilf.pdf
- https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class#comment-1350744
- https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2276692
- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YhmkYB32RpGsXvQTsX4xZ0Yul1wiwh8Z/view
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html
Issue trail
- You're Probably Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today
- Open Thread 218
- Book Review: What We Owe The Future
- Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions
- Open Thread 250
- Mantic Monday: Twitter Chaos Edition
- Links For December 2022
- Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)
- Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
- Seems Like Targeting
- Profile: The Far Out Initiative
- Contra Stone On EA
- Book Review: Deep Utopia
- Open Thread 405
Related pages
Source context
I'm privileged to be at the intersection of a number of communities exploring these concepts. The rationalist community is a group of people, mostly centered around the website Less Wrong, investigating reasoning and probability. The effective altruist community is a group, inspired by philosophers like Will MacAskill and Peter Singer, who work on how best to use charitable resources for the greater good. And I work in psychiatry, which it turns out is pretty relevant to questions about how people end up believing strange things - both as an investigative science and as a terrible warning. These groups aren't always great at reporting their ideas and conclusions to the general public, so I'm here to help. Most of the interesting stuff you see here will be influenced by at least one of them; most of the errors will be mine alone.
Inline links: Less Wrong, effective altruist
5: Related: Will MacAskill's book What We Owe The Future, on effective altruism and the long-term future, is available for pre-order. He says it helps with marketing if people pre-order rather than wait until it comes out, so if you're interested, get it now. You can preorder on Amazon ($27).
Inline links: book, preorder on Amazon
If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.
Inline links: What We Owe The Future, New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, Boston Review, Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, Tyler Cowen, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Matt Yglesias
There’s a lot of commentary. Effective altruism is now a semi-organized movement, with leaders like Will MacAskill and Toby Ord and institutions like the Open Philanthropy Project. It’s produced a vast literature on effective charities, ranging from how to best prevent malaria to how to promote animal welfare to speculative scenarios about AI apocalypse. These aren’t above criticism, and lots of people have criticized them. But if you criticize them successfully, and feel like they’re discredited, then you’re back at the basic tenets of the movement again.
5: In light of recent events, some people have asked if effective altruism approves of doing unethical things to make money, as long as the money goes to good causes. I think the movement has been pretty unanimous in saying no. Obviously everyone is condemning it super-strongly now. But people have also been condemning it, consistently, since the beginning of the movement. For example, Will MacAskill is as close as EA has to a leader, and he wrote in 2017:
Inline links: everyone is condemning it super-strongly, he wrote in 2017
2: Manifold now has a bot that uses an image AI to generate a thumbnail for every market. My favorite pictures are the ones on the scandal markets. For example, here’s how it imagines it would look if Will MacAskill (effective altruist philosopher) committed a scandal:
47: EA Forum: A Letter To The Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists. Apparently the Bulletin published accusations of research misconduct about Will MacAskill which they knew to be false at the time of publication. Since then, two of the scientists the article said it approached have spoken out on Twitter (1, 2), confirming that the Bulletin never even interviewed them in the first place. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists are also the people who update the Doomsday Clock, so I guess if they’re liars that’s actually really good news for the world!
EA might have screwed this up worse than some other groups, but I don’t think a movement our size is capable of rebranding. We just have to eat the loss. If we were optimizing entirely for clarity and not for attractive-soundingness, I’d go for Systematic Altruism on the one side, and The Network Of People Who All Pursue Systematic Altruism Together In A Way Causally Downstream Of Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, And Nick Bostrom (TONOPWAPSATIAWCDOTOWMAANB) on the other.
I can’t complain about the media coverage we got before 2023. The movement had lots of friends in the media, it was inherently sympathetic (give lots of money to charity!), and it had good pro-establishment credentials. Everyone was very nice to us. Sometimes it was kind of sickening - the endless drumbeat of praise for Will MacAskill’s summer-2022 book seemed excessive even by my standards.
Turn-of-the-21st-century Oxford was an exciting place. Derek Parfit was leading a renaissance in utilitarian thought. New technologies like the personal computer, the Internet, and the Human Genome Project were inspiring a new generation of transhumanists. Out of this milieu, philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, and Toby Ord were laying the groundwork for what would become the rationalist and effective altruist movements. Utilitarians, they argued, were charged with relieving the suffering of the world as quickly and effectively as possible. Technology offered new opportunities to do this at scale. This could be ending poverty and curing diseases (if you were well-grounded in the present moment) or creating a superintelligence to lead us to a post-scarcity future (if you were feeling more ambitious).
How many effective altruists would have to be in the Bay for Stone to notice? If we assume ability to detect a signal of 0.5 pp, it would take 200x this amount, or 500,000 in the Bay alone. For comparison, the most popular book on effective altruism, Will MacAskill’s What We Owe The Future, sold only 100,000 copies in the whole world.
I couldn’t help comparing Deep Utopia to Will MacAskill’s book What We Owe The Future. Both MacAskill and Bostrom are in a weird, almost unprecedented position - Oxford philosophers suddenly thrust onto the world stage by the success of the effective altruism movement. MacAskill got famous and decided to write an Official Important Person Book and promote it on the world stage. Bostrom got famous and decided he didn’t need to pretend to be normal anymore. As a result, Deep Utopia feels less like an academic paper, and more like the sort of things one of the great philosophers of the past might have written, back in the days when philosophical tracts could include a character called Stupidus who secretly represented the Pope.
5: Forethought (AI preparedness research org including Will MacAskill, Tom Davidson, etc) wants to hire more researchers. Offices in Oxford/Berkeley, slight bias towards people in these areas but remote work possible. Salaries £80,000 - £150,000 depending on qualifications and seniority. Must be, uh, good at research, I think this looks more like academic philosophy or economic modeling than like training LLMs, but it’s pretty vague. Learn more and apply here.
Inline links: Learn more and apply here