Astral Codex Ten

MacAskill

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MacAskill

Article

MacAskill is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 23, 2022 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “MacAskill introduces long-termism with the Broken Bottle hypothetical”; “MacAskill frames this as: if humanity stays at the same population”; “cause MacAskill uses each glyph to represent 10 billion people”. It most often appears alongside India, Reddit, Repugnant Conclusion.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: August 23, 2022
  • Last seen: May 15, 2024

Appears In

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.

Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
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
MacAskill introduces long-termism with the Broken Bottle hypothetical: you are hiking in the forest and you drop a bottle. It breaks into sharp glass shards. You expect a barefoot child to run down the trail and injure herself. Should you pick up the shards? What if it the trail is rarely used, and it would be a whole year before the expected injury? What if it is very rarely used, and it would be a millennium? Most people say that you need to pick up the shards regardless of how long it will be - a kid getting injured is a kid getting injured.
But the future (hopefully) has more people than the present. MacAskill frames this as: if humanity stays at the same population, but exists for another 500 million years, the future will contain about 50,000,000,000,000,000 (50 quadrillion) people. For some reason he stops there, but we don’t have to: if humanity colonizes the whole Virgo Supercluster and lasts a billion years, there could be as many as 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (100 nonillion) people.
Inline links: colonizes the whole Virgo Supercluster
Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF
August 25, 2022 · Original source
Second, MacAskill actually cites some research about where we should put the zero point. Weirdly, it’s not in the section about the repugnant conclusion, it’s in a separate section about whether we should ascribe the future positive value.
MacAskill calls the necessary assumption “non-anti-egalitarianism”, ie you don’t think equality is so bad in and of itself that you would be willing to make the world worse off on average just to avoid equality. While you can always come up with justifications for this (maybe the lack of equality creates something to strive for and gives life meaning, or whatever) I don’t think most people would naturally support this form of anti-egalitarianism if they didn’t know they needed it to “win” the thought experiment.
3: Regarding MacAskill’s thought experiment intending to show that creating hapy people is net good, Blacktrance writes:
Inline links: writes
Links For September 2022
September 06, 2022 · Original source
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
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
“I’m not sure I want to play the philosophy game. Maybe MacAskill can come up with some clever proof that the commitments I list above imply I have to have my eyes pecked out by angry seagulls or something. If that’s true, I will just not do that, and switch to some other set of axioms….
Profile: The Far Out Initiative
May 15, 2024 · Original source
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).
This is Pearce’s thesis. It’s not as popular as the normal effective altruism that just tries to help solve poverty and cure diseases. While Ord and Bostrom and MacAskill got followers and press coverage and friendly billionaires, Pearce and his movement (“suffering abolitionism”) got a few very devoted email correspondents.