William MacAskill
Article
William MacAskill is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2022 and May 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “MacAskill wants you to be a long-termist”; “7: William MacAskill, an effective altruist leader who got in trouble for being too friendly to FTX”. It most often appears alongside AI, New York Times, US.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: August 23, 2022
- Last seen: May 29, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- AI (2 shared issues)
-
- New York Times (2 shared issues)
-
- US (2 shared issues)
-
- Vox (2 shared issues)
-
- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
-
- @ElytraMithra (1 shared issues)
-
- Aaron (1 shared issues)
-
- abolitionist literature (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX (1 shared issues)
-
- Adderall (1 shared issues)
-
- AI Alignment (1 shared issues)
-
- AI risk (1 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.
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
7: William MacAskill, an effective altruist leader who got in trouble for being too friendly to FTX, has a post-mortem of his actions here. Nothing too surprising, but I was most interested in his discussion of why it took him a year and a half to say anything. Short version: all the lawyers involved told him not to talk, his organization commissioned an internal investigator who also demanded he not talk, and people told him there was a risk of defamation lawsuits if he said the wrong thing without checking with everybody. And even now, 1.5 years later, the first response to his comment is by a lawyer saying that talking about this is bad press and he shouldn’t have mentioned it. If you want to know why nobody important ever talks about anything outside of meaningless PR babble, this is a rare honest explanation by a relevant decision-maker.