What We Owe The Future
Article
What We Owe The Future is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between April 03, 2022 and October 17, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Will MacAskill’s book What We Owe The Future , on effective altruism and the long-term future”; “He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured”; “These kinds of population ethics problems are just one chapter of What We Owe The Future”. It most often appears alongside Will MacAskill, China, effective altruism.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 8
- Issue count: 8
- First seen: April 03, 2022
- Last seen: October 17, 2024
Appears In
- Open Thread 218
- Book Review: What We Owe The Future
- Links For September 2022
- “Is Wine Fake?” In Asterisk Magazine
- Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
- Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
- Contra Stone On EA
- Book Review: Deep Utopia
Related Pages
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- Will MacAskill (4 shared issues)
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- China (3 shared issues)
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- effective altruism (3 shared issues)
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- MacAskill (3 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours (2 shared issues)
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- AI risk (2 shared issues)
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- Ajeya Cotra (2 shared issues)
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- Amazon (2 shared issues)
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- Amish (2 shared issues)
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- Brazil (2 shared issues)
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- Bryan Caplan (2 shared issues)
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- Confucius (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
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
But what is “long-termism”? I’m unusually well-placed to answer that, because a few days ago a copy of What We Owe The Future showed up on my doorstep. I was briefly puzzled before remembering that some PR strategies hinge on a book having lots of pre-orders, so effective altruist leadership asked everyone to pre-order the book back in March, so I did. Like the book as a whole, my physical copy was a byproduct of the marketing campaign. Still, I had a perverse urge to check if it really was just lorem ipsum text, one thing led to another, and I ended up reading it. I am pleased to say that it is actual words and sentences and not just filler (aside from pages 15 through 19, which are just a glyph of a human figure copy-pasted nine hundred fifty four times)
Inline links: asked everyone to pre-order the book back in March
So fine. At the risk of joining on an already-overcrowded bandwagon, let’s see what we owe the future.
11: Related: Eli Lifland’s take on What We Owe The Future. Two major disagreements: MacAskill estimates AI risk as 3% chance vs. Lifland (a star forecaster) treats it as 35% chance; MacAskill thinks a 35% chance of dangerous technological stagnation, vs. Lifland’s 5%. He thinks this has important implications for long-termist priorities.
Inline links: Eli Lifland’s take on
Book Review - What We Owe The Future: You’ve read mine, this is Kelsey Piper’s. Kelsey is always great, and this is a good window into the battle over the word “long-termism”.
Inline links: Book Review - What We Owe The Future:, mine
Where do we see this? Only a few months ago, in his book review of What We Owe the Future, Scott responded to the Repugnant Conclusion (a seemingly-unwinnable philosophical paradox) by saying:
Inline links: his book review of
Like I said with What We Owe The Future, it’s probably unfair to review this book qua book.
Inline links: What We Owe The Future
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.