Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Altruism, History, & Technology

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 Holden and me meeting Toby that helped catalyze it at the particular time it did.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:49

If it's true, as you say, in the book, that moral values are very contingent, then shouldn't that make us suspect that modern Western values aren't that good? They're mediocre, or worse, because ex ante, you would expect to end up with a median of all the values we could have had at this point. Obviously, we'd be biased in favor of whatever values we were brought up in.

Will MacAskill 2:09

Absolutely. Taking history seriously and appreciating the contingency of values, appreciating that if the Nazis had won the World War, we would all be thinking, “wow, I'm so glad that moral progress happened the way it did, and we don't have Jewish people around anymore. What huge moral progress we had then!” That's a terrifying thought. I think it should make us take seriously the fact that we're very far away from the moral truth.

One of the lessons I draw in the book is that we should not think we're at the end of moral progress. We should not think, “Oh, we should lock in the Western values we have.” Instead, we should spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually morally right, so that the future is guided by the right values, rather than whichever happened to win out.

Dwarkesh Patel 2:56

So that makes a lot of sense. But I'm asking a slightly separate question—not only are there possible values that could be better than ours, but should we expect our values - we have the sense that we've made moral progress (things are better than they were before or better than most possible other worlds in 2100 or 2200)- should we not expect that to be the case? Should our priors be that these are ‘meh’ values?

Will MacAskill 3:19

Our priors should be that our values are as good as expected on average. Then you can make an assessment like, “Are other values of today going particularly well?” There are some arguments you could make for saying no. Perhaps if the Industrial Revolution happened in India, rather than in Western Europe, then perhaps we wouldn't have wide-scale factory farming—which I think is a moral atrocity. Having said that, my view is to think that we're doing better than average.

If civilization were just a redraw, then things would look worse in terms of our moral beliefs and attitudes. The abolition of slavery, the feminist movement, liberalism itself, democracy—these are all things that we could have lost and are huge gains.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:14

If that's true, does that make the prospect of a long reflection dangerous? If moral progress is a random walk, and we've ended up with a lucky lottery, then you're possibly reversing. Maybe you're risking regression to the mean if you just have 1,000 years of progress.

Will MacAskill 4:30

Moral progress isn't a random walk in general. There are many forces that act on culture and on what people believe. One of them is, “What’s right, morally speaking? What's their best arguments support?” I think it's a weak force, unfortunately.

The idea of lumbar flexion is getting society into a state that before we take any drastic actions that might lock in a particular set of values, we allow this force of reason and empathy and debate and goodhearted model inquiry to guide which values we end up with.

Are we unwise?

Dwarkesh Patel 5:05

In the book, you make this interesting analogy where humans at this point in history are like teenagers. But another common impression that people have of teenagers is that they disregard wisdom and tradition and the opinions of adults too early and too often. And so, do you think it makes sense to extend the analogy this way, and suggest that we should be Burkean Longtermists and reject these inside-view esoteric threats?

Will MacAskill 5:32

My view goes the opposite of the Burkean view. We are cultural creatures in our nature, and are very inclined to agree with what other people think even if we don't understand the underlying mechanisms. It works well in a low-change environment. The environment we evolved towards didn't change very much. We were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of years.

Now, we're in this period of enormous change, where the economy is doubling every 20 years, new technologies arrive every single year. That's unprecedented. It means that we should be trying to figure things out from first principles.

Dwarkesh Patel 6:34

But at current margins, do you think that's still the case? If a lot of EA and longtermist thought is first principles, do you think that more history would be better than the marginal first-principles thinker?

Will MacAskill 6:47

Two things. If it's about an understanding of history, then I'd love EA to have a better historical understanding. The most important subject if you want to do good in the world is philosophy of economics. But we've got that in abundance compared to there being very little historical knowledge in the EA community.

Should there be even more first-principles thinking? First-principles thinking paid off pretty well in the course of the Coronavirus pandemic. From January 2020, my Facebook wall was completely saturated with people freaking out, or taking it very seriously in a way that the existing institutions weren't. The existing institutions weren't properly updating to a new environment and new evidence.

The contingency of technology

Dwarkesh Patel 7:47

In your book, you point out several examples of societies tha