William MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Moral Progress, and Cultural Innovation

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here with Will MacAskill, who is one of the most important and influential philosophers, period. And August 16th is the publication date of his new and excellent book, What We Owe the Future. Will, most of all, is known for being a leader, perhaps the intellectual leader, of the effective altruism movement. Will, welcome.

Thanks so much for having me on.

Of all the inefficient things, which is the one you love most?

Of all the inefficient things? I mean, there are some amazing examples of inefficient charities that I love in the sense that they give me pleasure to think about. One of my favorites is a charity called Scots Care, which was set up in the early 17th century. It's called the Charity for Scots in London, and it's dedicated to help Scottish people in poverty in London. And you might think that's a pretty strange aim, but it made more sense when the charity was set up in the early 17th century. There was just recently the personal union of England and Scotland, there was migration from Scotland to London. So Scottish people were kind of poor immigrants. And so it made sense for there to be a charity. 400 years on, perhaps doesn't make quite as much sense. And, you know, I like it partly, especially given that, you know, London is pretty affluent, especially compared to many areas of Scotland. And so I like it as an example of what gets called the dead hand problem in philanthropy, where the founding of nonprofits can have a very specific mission, and that mission can become increasingly absurd over time. And I think it's a good and heartening lesson for people who are trying to do good looking into the future too, that you want to have, like, aims that can be sufficiently flexible that as in the environment where things change, they still keep making sense.

Does liking the inefficient mean that you are a pluralist and not a utilitarian?

I think I'm neither a pluralist nor a utilitarian. A pluralist is someone who thinks that there are many sources of moral reasons. Utilitarian thinks there's only one. I say I'm not a utilitarian because though it's the view I'm most inclined to argue for in seminar rooms because I think it's most underappreciated by the academy, I think we should have some degree of belief in a variety of moral views and take a compromise between them.

But that is pluralism, right?

No, pluralism would be saying there is one true moral view, and that view says there are multiple competing sources of reasons.

But the true moral view can be a probabilistic assemblage of the different things you think might matter, right? So if you go just a little bit more meta with pluralism, it encompasses what you think.

Yes, so that is my view, and it ends up looking very similar to what is known as pluralism. Because I end up paying attention to different sorts of model reasons. But I think that the actual model truth might be quite simple, whereas the pluralist, in terms of first-order model theorizing rather than the kind of meta-theorizing that I'm proposing, says that, you know, model reality might be really very complex or messy.

If we're assessing the well-being of non-human animals, should we use preference utilitarianism or hedonistic utilitarianism? 'Cause it will make a big difference. We're not sure all these animals are happy, right? They may live lives of terror, but we're pretty sure they want to stay alive.

It makes a huge difference. I mean, I think the arguments for hedonism as a theory of wellbeing, where that's saying that wellbeing consists only in conscious experiences, positive ones contribute positively, negative conscious experiences contribute negatively. I think the arguments for that as a theory of wellbeing and the theory of what's good are very strong. And it does mean that when you looked at lives of animals in the wild, I mean, my view is, is just very non-obvious whether those lives are good or not. That's me being a little bit more optimistic than other people that have looked into this. But the optimism is mainly flowing from just lack of— I think we know very little about the conscious lives of fish, let alone invertebrates. But yes, if you have a preference satisfaction view, then I think the world looks a lot better, because beings in general want to keep living. And that's true when we look to the future as well, I think. If you say, how good is the future going to be? On a hedonist view, well, maybe it's quite fragile. You could imagine lots of future ways that civilization could go where they just don't care about consciousness at all, or perhaps the beings that rule are not conscious. But probably beings in the future will have preferences and those preferences will be being satisfied. And so in general, the kind of moral reality looks a lot more rosy, I think, if you're a preference satisfactionist.

But it's possible, say, in your view, that human beings should spend a lot of their time and resources going around destroying nature since it might have negative net expected utility value.

I think it's a possible implication. I think it'd be very unlikely to be the best thing we could be doing because—

But there's a lot of nature. We have, you know, very effective bombs, weapons. We could develop animal-killing weapons if we set our minds to it, right?

That's right. There's a lot of nature, but there's far more future. And so If we're willing to take philosophical reasoning far enough that we'd be seriously considering, you know, removing nature, then you should be taking much more seriously the fact that we can have this enormous impact over our long-run future. And I will caveat and say, like, I really don't know whether animals in the wild have lives that are good or bad. It gets really determined when you look at the world as a whole. It gets incredibly determined by where's the cutoff for conscious experiences, Because are ants conscious? They have an awful lot of the total neuron count of animals in the wild. And if they are, do they have lives that are good or not? I'm like, I have no idea.

I worry a bit this is verging into the absurd, and I'm aware that word is a bit question begging. But if we think about the individual level, like what do you, Will, value? You value in part the inefficient. It's very hard to give people just pure utilitarian advice because they're necessarily partial. At the big macro level, like the whole world of nature versus humans, ethics of the infinite and so on, it also seems to me utilitarianism doesn't perform that well. So the utilitarian part of our calculations, isn't that like only a mid-scale theory? So you can ask, does rent control work? Are tariffs good? Utilitarianism is fine there, but otherwise it just doesn't make sense.

Okay, so there is what we might call the train to crazy town. So we have these, all of these starting moral intuitions. What I see as the project of moral philosophy is reconciling them using theory and careful reasoning to make kind of moral progress, which often involves creating simpler and explanatorily powerful theories that move away from your common sense intuitions. And then the question is, how far are we willing to move? Very difficult kind of methodological question. You brought up infinite ethics, and that is something where I certainly in practice do not bite that bullet or follow that implication. Where, for the listeners, the argument is that, okay, the utilitarian wants to maximize the good, understanding that as total well-being. Now, in my book, I argue there's enormous amounts of value at stake when we consider the long term. So we should reduce the risk of extinction and promote good values so that we make the most of that, make the most of all the value in the long term. However, someone could reply and say, well, that's just piddling finite amounts of value. What about the possibility of creating infinite amounts of value? Because, you know, The religious traditions say that one can create infinite amounts of value, that heaven is infinitely good. And you're a good Bayesian, you don't have credence zero in the idea of there being a God that could produce infinite amounts of value. I would say, no, I don't. And if so, well, tiny, even if I put it 1 in a trillion that there's such a God, multiply 1 in a trillion by infinite positive value, then that overall expectation is infinitely great. And that's what we should be focusing on. And I will acknowledge I get off the train to Crazy Town before I'm at that point.

But why not get off the train a bit earlier and just say, well, the utilitarian part of our calculations, it's embedded within a particular social context, like how do we arrange certain affairs of society? But if you try to shrink it down to too small, how should you live your life, or to too large, how do we deal with infinite ethics and all of nature, that it just doesn't work and it has to stay embedded in this context. Universal domain as an assumption doesn't really work anywhere. So why should it work for the utilitarian part of our ethics? Get off the train at stop 2, not stop 17.

Yeah, stop 17. So I agree, there's a hard choice there. And certainly as someone who, you know, takes action in the real world as well, it's very notable to me how much you end up just infusing your action with common sense moral reasoning. And it's always unclear, like, is that on sophisticated consequentialist grounds or is it just that one is acting pluralistically? I think you should take it on a case-by-case basis. I think that actually the issue of wild animal suffering, it sounds completely wild when you first, no pun intended, first hear it. But I think it's not that many steps away from common sense moral reasoning. So I don't have a pet. My friends have pets. They care greatly about the lives of their pets. That's like, and their wellbeing. And that's just a very standard common sense kind of moral view. Then next, does that wellbeing of your pet change Does the moral worth of a creature change whether it happens to be your pet or is born in the wild? And I think a good argument for thinking no. And then the question of, okay, well, if you think it's good to invest in resources to improve the wellbeing of your pets, then yeah, maybe it's good to invest resources in improving the wellbeing of animals in the wild. And then I think the reaction that people have, which is like, this is just so crazy, partly it's not really thinking about it But partly also is just worries about interfering with nature having negative, like, backfiring consequences. And I think those arguments are just good. Like, maybe you think, oh, predation is bad, so we're going to stop predators, but then that leads to other worse consequences. I mean, I think it is true that you're dealing with an environment that, you know, we don't fully understand. So from the wild animal suffering perspective, I'd maybe be very pro kind of more research or more thinking about this. I'd be kind of pretty wary of just paving over the jungle on the basis of our very non-robust evaluation. We think that animal lives are on average negative.

Let me ask you the question I asked Sam Bankman-Fried. Let's say we take the known world of living beings, however large that may be, and a demon offers us a bet. We can double that world with probability 51%, but with 49%, it all goes away and disappears and everything's gone. Now, in expected value terms, that's a good bet, right? Should we do that? Sam said yes. He's like, I'm going to bite that bullet. Yeah, I want to bite this bullet, he said. What's your view?

Yeah. So one first thing is we've got to carefully state the question in that it's if you're just giving me like a doubling of the world as it is. Well, I think again, almost all value is in the future. It's to come.

Well, that doubles too, right? The future is going to double everything.

Okay, good.

So spell it out all carefully. But it's a double or nothing bet. 51% odds. I say no way should you do it.

Yeah. So I also admit, like, intuitively, I have, like, very rapid diminishing returns to value. So intuitively, I think that you take a galaxy and it's got, you know, full of bliss, best possible galaxy, 50/50 for that versus all accessible galaxies are, like, flourishing and so on. There's 20 billion of them. And I'm like, nope, don't wanna take that bet. And I also think that there are issues for expected value theory in general, where it comes in, in particular, with like low probabilities of large amounts of value.

Sure. Pascal's wager, Saint Petersburg paradox.

Exactly, yeah. We're getting into like all sorts of messes there. And then in this case, it's not an example of very low probabilities of very large amounts of value. And then your view would have to argue that, well, the future as it is, is like close to the upper bound of value in order to make sense of the idea that you shouldn't flip 50/50. I think that actually that position would be like pretty hard to defend, is my guess. And so my thought is that probably we're in a situation where any view you say ends up having implausible consequences.

Your response sounds very ad hoc to me. Why not just say, in matters of the very large, utilitarian kinds of moral reasoning just don't apply. They're always embedded in some degree of partiality. The 51-49% bet is not great for our partiality toward ourselves, and we just can't go there. So it's not that there's some other theory that's going to tie up all the conundrums in a nice bundle, but simply that there are limits to moral reasoning, and we cannot fully transcend the notion of being partial, because moral reasoning is embedded in that context of being partial about some things.

I think we should be more ambitious than that with our moral reasoning, where I think if we did moral reasoning many times in the past, that were simply saying, look, there are many of these different considerations. It's all kind of pluralist. At some point, just even though I can't give it a good argument, the utilitarian-esque reasoning that seems so compelling when you're talking about saving one life versus 10, and we think, oh, clearly the 10 is more important, including a 50-50 chance of saving 10 lives versus one. It's like, okay, you should still— you should go with the math. 'Over time that would save more lives.' And then you say, 'Oh no, at some scale that sort of reasoning breaks.' That's what seems ad hoc to me. So if you're saying, 'Oh well, these arguments pushing you in a certain direction, but then at some scale—' I mean, what exactly is the scale? Is it 1,000 lives, 1 million lives, 1 billion lives? It seems like nothing qualitatively different has happened. Whereas the thing that I want to say is a qualitative difference is something to do with when we're juggling probability against value, that's where, okay, maybe the pure just like multiplication or like there's something going wrong with expected value theory and I can kind of constrain the issues to that. Whereas if I'm just saying in general, when the scales get big, drop kind of utilitarian-esque reasoning, that seems like unmotivated to me.

But I don't think it's just probabilistic question. So you're very familiar with the repugnant conclusion. Yeah. You know, we haven't solved it. There's nothing probabilistic there. It just seems to be another case where when you stretch the limits far enough, nothing works. And the U of Pascal's wager, the 51-49 gamble, the repugnant conclusion, many other paradoxes in moral philosophy, they all seem to kick in. And in my view, that's not an accident. There's no reason to ad hoc try to address every one. We just need to downgrade where we think a certain kind of consequentialist reasoning could apply.

Okay. I mean, I think these paradoxes show something much more thoroughgoing than an issue for consequentialism. Also, just briefly on the 51-49, because of the pluralism that I talked about, although again it's kind of meta-pluralism of putting weight on many different moral views, I would at least need the probabilities to be quite a bit wider in order to take the gamble. Because again, the kind of best combo— But I can give you 90-10.

You can give me 90-10. But we play it 200 times, right? You're still in a lot of trouble.

Yeah, I was kind of wanting to clarify that for the listeners. I didn't say it earlier because I was quite aware that you could pull me back with just, okay, give me some probability or something. But then I think it starts to get more defensible. Anyway, yeah, so there are these paradoxes. So take the paradoxes of population ethics. Again, for the listeners, any view that you have in population ethics has extremely unintuitive implications, and that's actually been formally proven. The repugnant conclusion is the idea that a world consisting of a very, very, very, very large number of beings, all with lives that are just barely above zero, just barely worth living, that, because it has more aggregate well-being, is better than 10 trillion lives of wonderful bliss. It turns out actually that's, in my view, the least bad of the bullets that you have to bite within population ethics. And sometimes this is taken as a problem for consequentialism, and that's what you're suggesting. But every moral view has to have a view on population ethics. Every moral view has to decide under what conditions should we think it's a good thing to bring a new, like, flourishing life into existence, not just consequentialist moral views. And so the view you'd have to be promoting is something much more thoroughgoing, which is just that there's limits to moral reasoning, perhaps that we should be okay with just inconsistent moral views. I'm not quite sure exactly what your view would be there, but it's not just that we have to throw consequentialism out the way. It's like we actually have to throw like moral consistency out the window or something.

Should the EA movement be anti-abortion?

I don't think so. But why not?

If you look at hedonistic utility, if you have more people, we're not at repugnant conclusion margins. You'd have somewhat more people, not that many more, right?

Yeah. So I think a few things. So the first is if you think that it's good to have more happy, flourishing people, and I think like if people have sufficiently good lives, then I think that's true. I argue for it in What We Owe the Future. Then by far and by overwhelming amounts, the focus should be on how many people might exist in the future rather than now. Where perhaps you have like a really good fertility program and you can increase the world population by 10%. That's like an extra billion people or so. But the loss of future life and future very good life if we go extinct, that's being measured in the trillions upon trillions of lives. And so the question of just how many people should be alive today is really driven by how would that impact on the long-term flourishing of humanity. That being said, like, all things considered, I think there's this idea at the moment that it's bad to have kids because of the carbon footprint. I think that only looks at one side of the ledger. Like, yep, people emit carbon dioxide and that has negative effects, but they also do a lot of good things. They innovate. And there's an intrinsic benefit too. They have happy lives. Well, if you can bring up people to live good lives,, then they will flourish and that's making the world better. They also might be like moral changemakers and so on. But then the question, so even suppose you think, okay, yeah, like larger family sizes are good, what's the best way of achieving that? Would seem very unlikely to me that banning abortions or like very heavily restricting women's reproductive rights is the best way of going about that.

It doesn't have to be the best way of achieving that. It might be the 37th best way, but if it were still positive expected utility value, at least in your framework, like you're fine with subsidizing births, right? Yeah. So taxing non-births just seems to be the opposite of that, right? It's like the dual.

Yeah. I mean, again, you've got to fully take into account like different moral perspectives where in the same way, like I think it's good for people to donate to charity. I think that makes the world a better place. But having that view is like a far cry from saying therefore we should go and like lock people up who don't donate to charity. That could easily be like very bad, counterproductive. And I think that's probably very similar could be said about early-stage abortion, for example.

If there are smart, sentient space aliens out there, say in pretty large numbers, should we then worry much less about existential risk on Earth? Like someone will continue the tradition. Maybe they don't love Beethoven, but eh, you know, 400 years from now, maybe people won't anyway.

It's a great question. And among people I know, views are divided on Should you think that a human-originating future is going to be better than an alien-originating civilization? My honest view is more like it's a toss-up. I don't see a particular reason for thinking that a civilization that comes from human beings is going to be much greater in value than from aliens. Whether this undermines existential risk though is dependent very crucially on whether we actually expect aliens to come and build a flourishing civilization. And I think the best guess from the Fermi Paradox, that is the paradox that we don't in fact see advanced intelligent life, is that probably we're just alone, at least in a very, very large section of space. So as an empirical fact, I think it's really quite likely that if humanity dies off, no one else will take our place to build some flourishing civilization.

Just contingent on space aliens being out there, if just someone asked me to bet, well, which side in the war would Will MacAskill fight on? Like, I would bet 1,000 to 1 you'd fight for the humans. But in your moral theory, the humans being better than the aliens, it's kind of a toss-up. And this notion that you can't actually escape some preexisting degree of partiality in the normative framework seems to resurface. And I think you want to have it both ways, unless you feel my bet on you to fight for the humans is wrong. Like, is there really a 50% chance you'll fight for the aliens? Well, here's the argument.

I mean, So I have two kind of moral perspectives that I'm putting some weight on. One says it's just aliens have as good a chance of producing a great civilization as humans do. The second is like the more partial view, which would weight humans above aliens. If I'm putting weight on both of them, which again I think we should— I don't think you should be super confident in any one model worldview— then that will favor, to some extent favoring the humans. I think it would be a mistake to favor the humans by like 10,000 to 1, supposing you could do some very risky thing that could wipe out both, you know, it's a 50/50 chance of wiping out both aliens and humans, but 50% chance of saving the humans, and that increases your odds of humanity surviving. Then I'm like, no, don't do that thing. Would I give some extra weight to human-originating civilization, all things considered? Then yes. Now you're super influential.

I'd say you're one of the 5 most influential philosophers in the world, which is great. Does that mean you should personally give up having children?

Wow, what a great question.

And I want you to, to be clear, but I'm asking what you think.

It's obviously something I've thought deeply about, and I do want to say that, like, people in general should, you know, make their own reproductive choices. I think in my own case, like, it is pretty striking that I am now engaged in, like, all of these projects that bring me very large amounts of meaning. And then when I think about, like, The reason that many people, I think, are drawn to having kids is to have additional meaning in their lives. It's not something that appeals to me and so it really motivates me. I think I do have this extra responsibility when thinking about major decisions in my life as to, if I have kids, what is the impact of that on the world? On the one hand, it would take time away from other things I could be doing. On the other hand, Perhaps it's good. I do think it's good to have a family. Perhaps that's a good signaling thing. I do think those are relevant considerations. In my own case, it's like at least having a family is never something I've been particularly drawn to or excited about. And so it's currently not my plan. And I think the fact that that will help me do more good in the world is a benefit too.

Here's a very simple practical question. Let's say I'm a skilled lawyer and I'm more or less a generalist. I could do a lot of different things. And I want to do some pro bono work for effective altruism, what should I actually do?

If you're a skilled lawyer.

Skilled lawyer in the United States. Okay, yeah.

Then there's two obvious options. I mean, there are volunteering opportunities at like high-impact nonprofits, both within the effective altruism organizations or organizations we recommend like Malaria Consortium, Deworm the World. But the alternative is to work overtime and donate the profits as well.

But I could sue someone, right? I don't have to do malaria work or GiveWell or bed nets. I'm a lawyer. I could try to change laws by suing people, right? I have the special leverage.

Oh yeah. So what should I target? So I think people potentially doing dangerous, like biotechnology research, things that could have like large negative externalities. I don't know about the law there. People who are patent trolls seem like that's like particularly harmful, it seems to me. Like slowing down innovation, perhaps kind of legal work there could be very helpful as well. I'm kind of curious on— this is a little bit more theoretical and depends on the nature of the lawyer. But, you know, it's plausible to me that at some point in our lifetimes, there will be a world government set up, that world government will have a constitution. Very little— the forming of the Constitution of the United States was enormously impactful from a very long-term perspective. And yet was done over the course of about 4 months. We can think in terms of these plastic moments that have a real impact over the future. I think that whoever's writing the constitution of the world government, that is going to be a very influential moment. And so you could be one of the weird lawyers who are working on this that no one is currently working on but would turn out to be very impactful if it did occur or not over the next century.

Now, you have a PhD from Oxford, right? That's right. Given how much innovation comes out of top schools, why is it crazy to make big donations to them? But I see EA people criticize this fairly often, like, oh, don't give your money to Harvard, give it to bed nets. But given the power of innovation, including your own, right? Peter Singer has been connected to all these schools. Yeah. Why not make big donations to top universities? Yeah, I think two things.

One is that, yeah, the standard line of criticism of like donations to big universities I don't actually think that's like— among charitable gifts, I don't really think that's one of the ones we should be criticising for being enormously ineffective compared to, I don't know, Scots Care or things that are promoting the opera or something, or the US Golf Society. On the other hand, if I'm going to promote the search, I think a generic gift to Harvard is going to look pretty unlevered. I don't think universities are in general in a great state. In terms of how they could promote the search compared to, say, independent research-focused organizations. And in particular, when you're donating to these universities with these enormous existing endowments, looking at what in principle happens there, where maybe even you're trying to target the donation to some focused thing. Now, sometimes that can work and then it's good. And we have funded a bunch of things that research institutes at major universities, including Oxford, But if you're just giving like a generic gift, then probably you're just giving to like Harvard as a whole. And like, that's fine. I do think universities have produced enormous amounts of value, but probably you're missing out on an opportunity to do something more focused that pays off sooner as well.

We'll take gifts to the opera, which you mentioned. Why should we not build monuments to what has been our greatest and most profound creations just to show people like, we did this, this is really important. We still think it's important. It's a kind of elitism. But nonetheless, isn't it important to keep those traditions alive and highly visible? Yeah, it could be important.

Is it going to pass the benefit-cost test? I mean, at least, you know, I'm open to anything. You've got to just show me the numbers ultimately.

But there are not going to be numbers, right? We're just kind of guessing. Well, you hear Beethoven in the symphony. Do you do something great 30 years later? Yeah. We're not going to have an RCT on that, right?

Well, we're not going to have an RCT, but you can still at least say like, okay, at best, this message will reach this many people. At best, this message reaching people will, let's say, increase the impact of their lives by a certain percentage. And then you could at least get a kind of upper bound where you think, okay, with the most optimistic assumptions, how much benefit would be being created by this extra run of the opera? And I think my guess, my strong guess would be that even with those optimistic assumptions, it would not look compatible to other good things that one could be doing.

But it's like Parfit's paradoxes and moral arithmetic, right? So the single action doesn't seem that important. If you're a single marksman in a firing squad, well, you didn't kill the person, but in a way you still did. No single performance of a great opera is really going to matter much in my view. But the fact that we have a network of operas performing The Magic Flute, Fidelio, keeping alive these 18th, 19th century ideals of liberty, freedom, you know, the Masonic temple, glorious music, the importance of the exalted and the divine. That seems to me intuitively a super high return, though I don't ever think I'll be able to measure it.

So I actually think that if you think that even in expectation, your additional project, let's say, run of the opera, is not making a difference, then that actually suggests that this class of projects is being overfunded. You should just take that at face value. The value doesn't get inherited from the fact that it's already done. Like, has done a lot of good. So taking another example of voting, let's say there's kind of evil candidate and good candidate, we'll suppose. Should I vote in the election? If I think, oh, maybe it actually could go either way, then I think often the answer is yes, because there's some chance that your vote will be decisive. That's worth enormous amounts of value. If, however, it's already kind of 95% towards the good candidate in terms of votes, and you're just absolutely sure that voting for the good candidate will not make a difference, then I think the main argument, and by far the main argument, is kind of undermined because it's already overdetermined that this good thing is going to happen. And so you adding your extra weight is not making the world any better.

How should it matter if for our moral calculations, if we think we might be living in a simulation?

I think it potentially matters in a lot of ways. Gets into very, what seem like esoteric topics in decision theory. So two different views of decision theory, causal decision theory and non-causal decision theory. Causal decision theory says I care about what I cause. If so, then if I'm living in a simulation, the argument for taking the very long-term future seriously gets a massive penalty at least, because those people in the future who are simulating us, who are interested in how did things go down at this crucial moment in history when human-level artificial intelligence gets built and so on, once they've got that information, it's much less likely that they're going to keep simulating things. Like, things would get like a lot more boring. And computational— computation is expensive. So if we're living in a simulation, the future is probably going to be a lot shorter. And therefore the causal impact of my actions is much lower. If, however, you've got a non-causal decision theory where I don't take into account just the causal effects of my actions, but also what evidence do I get about how other people will behave, then I should think, well, even if I'm in a simulation, if I do such and such thing, that is also giving me evidence that the Will who is in the real world, the non-simulated Will, with all of this important, you know, huge consequences in front of him, he will do such and such an action too. And so for non-causal decision theory, you know, makes much less of a difference. Now I'm someone who tends to prefer causal decision theory. So I guess I think two things. One, if we're in a simulation, kind of all bets are off, 'cause like who knows now, like what implications you're having. But secondly, maybe you also just are much more likely to favor near-term actions rather than long-term actions. Because, you know, helping the simulated suffering person now, okay, well, that's a good thing that you're doing. Trying to positively impact the long-term future is not something that will actually occur because the simulation is kind of likely to get shut off.

But couldn't it be, this convex returns to time, that the simulation might be likely to run for much longer, at least in terms of subjective time, than like if all we have is the so-called real physical universe? And you should care about the long run much more. But there's this insuperable epistemic problem. You don't know what the simulators want, or even people in other simulations. And there's quite possibly lots and lots and lots of them. So you're paralyzed for this other reason. Just, you don't know anything. And what you want seems to now be smaller than if, like, it's just us, Mars, and Venus.

Yeah. So I think that's pretty plausible, this— if you're in a simulation, it's just, like I said, all bets are off and we don't really know. And maybe that means that no matter how confident you are that you're in a simulation, you should act as if you're not. Because 99% you're in a simulation, it's like nihilism. It's like, well, who knows what the impact of any of our actions are. 1% that you're not in a simulation, and then you just do the kind of things that seem best. On this issue of like, oh, maybe it's convex, so maybe the simulation goes even longer, that's in this kind of category of things that again feel to me like the kind of low but also like extremely speculative probabilities that feel like Thasytown. Because it's not just the kind of simulation ones that are— other thoughts you might have, and we've mentioned Infinite Ethics as well, other thoughts you might have that would lead to even more value in the future but seem like extremely implausible. So here's another one, which is you are in favor of speeding up economic growth because that has many benefits for not just now but like many centuries to come. My kind of response to that would be, well, at some point economic growth would plateau, not in a few centuries, but certainly by 10,000 years' time, we can't just keep growing. And so the more important thing is to either change the values that guide the future or ensure that we have a future at all, because that's a difference that really persists for all time. But here's a response you could make, Tyler, which is, well, we shouldn't be confident. We shouldn't be certain, not 100% certain that economic growth will plateau. Maybe it just keeps going forever and ever and ever until 100 trillion years when the last stars burn out. And what's more, that's where all the value is. Because if economic growth can keep going for so long, then that's huge amounts of value, way more than if we merely get a few thousand years of growth. And my response to that is, man, this just seems like super brittle, low probability, because it seems so implausible to me that we could get hundreds of billions of years of technological progress and improving wellbeing. And so—

What about the simple response that higher economic growth today gives you better institutions,, and that also serves to minimize existential risk. Look at the countries with poor growth records. None of them seem to have the institutions to fight off a real threat to humanity, right? So isn't there just a simple argument for growth being a priority? Okay, so there's a different argument.

Then I would focus less on growth per se, but there is something that I do buy, and at some margin I think it is what we should be doing, and I've done a bit of it so far, which is just like, okay, it's hard to predict the future. We're going to get lots of unexpected events. There are some things that just correlate pretty well, we're onto a good thing, like improved technologically driven growth, good institutions, democracy, liberalism, more cooperation, higher trust in societies. These are just genetically good. I mean, innovation. And let's just, from the sheer track record of how helpful these have been over the last 200 years, let's just kind of keep pushing on that. That's the kind of view that I think I'm most sympathetic to in terms of the kind of more progress studies worldview. And I do think that's like good for the long-term future. And it's kind of like, can you beat the market? And I think probably we can actually. But at some margin, that's what I think long-termism turns into. It looks kind of more common sensey, like building a flourishing society.

Now I'm gonna use the word "hingy" to describe the quality of living in a time that is highly influential where that influence may very well persist for a long period of time. Do people in their own eras know when they are living in especially Hingyi eras, or are they clueless?

I think we know a lot more now than we did in the past. So I think people in the past would've been pretty clueless. I mean, the fact that the universe is so truly enormous, so big and yet uninhabited, is actually a very recent idea, like a little over 100 years that we've really appreciated that. So people in previous times may have thought that they were living in extraordinarily hingy times. The early Christians, extraordinarily hingy time. Kingdom was going to come in one or two generations. It was, I would say. You think they were right and we've just been lucky?

Well, no, but Christianity has proven extremely important and it's still with us, right? Yes. Oh, right. Foundation for Western prosperity.

Actually, I do agree they were a very hingy time, just not for the reasons they thought..

But that gets at the epistemic problem. Do people ever know, like people in 1720, how many of them were sitting around saying, well, we're on the cusp of an industrial revolution, right? Yeah, that was a hinge event.

I'm not saying no one knew, but the Founding Fathers were aware. So John Adams has this great quote of the last importance that we build the institutions of America correctly because they may well not wear out for thousands of years. And if they are built incorrectly, then They will not return except by accident to the right path. So I think they actually did seem pretty aware of the importance of what they were doing. So I think two things. One, I think this should give us a lot of humbleness or humility in terms of taking actions today. I think perfectly plausible to me, maybe even more likely than not, that in 100 years' time, people would look back and say, oh, wow, these are the people, they cared about AI and worried about bioweapons, in the same way as I look back at John Stuart Mill at the end of the 19th century, who was fighting for future generations by trying to keep coal in the ground, because he thought that we were going to run out of coal very quickly and that would impoverish future generations. I think that's actually quite likely. I think that gives a good argument for trying to build up, do much more robustly good actions, or trying to build up the sources that will be very useful in 100 years' time, increasing the number of impartially concerned and altruistically motivated and carefully reasoning thinkers, for example. But I also think we have much better evidence than those people in the past. We have like a much better understanding of physics, a better understanding of social science, of probability, even of ethics.

But say foreign policy, like we can't predict anything. I don't know anyone good at predicting foreign policy outcomes. Those are the maybe the most important issues in the world. So if we can't predict foreign policy 2 years out, like how well can we understand our own inginess?

Well, so here's a general argument for thinking that we're at least plausibly a very influential time. And I think this argument works. I don't think it means we're at the most influential time. That's a substantially harder argument to make. But it's just that level of technological progress is very high compared to history, and also very high, like the rate of technological progress, and very high compared to what must happen in the future. And the argument is just that if we had economic growth of 2% per year for 10,000 years, then we would be producing 10 to the 87 worlds worth of economic output. And we'll be deducing that there are 10 to the 67 atoms within 10,000 light years. So we would be producing about a trillion— like, current civilization's worth of economic output for every atom within 10,000 years. And that just seems like, okay, that can't happen. So economic growth, technologically driven economic growth, is going to have to decrease when we look to the future. And so that actually suggests we're living at a time of unusually high technological change. And this is actually a very tiny window, 10,000 years. So it's only been like 200 years that we've gotten anything close to this level of tech progress. 10,000 years is also a very tiny window compared to hundreds of thousands of years that we've been around so far, the millions, billions, or trillions of years we could be around in the future. That just seems like a really pretty good reason for thinking there's at least decent probability for thinking at a unusually hingy time. Again, maybe not the most influential time, but something that's like pretty distinctive if you kind of tell the story of the whole of civilization, not just the past, but also the future.

Now on this question, I'm looking for a sociological answer. It's really striking to me how many very smart young people right now are attracted to the effective altruism movement. I think way more than a lot of outsiders realize. I'm sure you've seen this. Why is that the case? And the mere fact that you all might be correct, I do not consider a satisfactory answer, to be clear, because in general, it's not the case that the correct movements are always attracting the smartest people. So why is this happening now?

I was absolutely going to say, well, maybe we've just got the best arguments. Okay, fine. I've got to give an entirely sociological explanation. One is I think there's just like an untapped market of altruistically minded people. I think that especially like this kind of You know, effective altruism is much broader than consequentialism, but consequentialism-flavored ethical views, I think, correlate with being very high educationally performing. I think it's also the case that something that correlates with being high educationally performing is just being kind of secure about your material needs, whether that's because you come from a better family or also because your career prospects are looking pretty good. I think of altruism like a luxury good. So the The more secure you are, the more you can focus on that. And so one thing is just we've tapped into this market that I think wasn't otherwise being tapped into. A second thing I could say is just that the topics are just very intellectually interesting and like a very unusual intersection of like intellectually interesting and extremely impactful and important for one's own life and in fact how the world should be. So you're making arguments about paradoxes in population ethics in moral philosophy and what the resolution there is like really gonna make a difference to what you should do. So perhaps that's kind of more attractive to the nerds of the world too.

Let me make a sociological observation of my own. If I think about making the world a better place, I think so much about so many things being downstream from culture that we need to think about culture. This is quite a messy topic. It's not easily amenable to what you might call optimization kinds of reasoning. And then when I hear EA discussions, they seem very often to be about optimization. So many chats online, in person, like how many chickens are worth a cow, the bed net versus anti-malaria program. And I often think that this is maybe my biggest difference with EA, that EA has the wrong emphasis, pushing people into the optimization discussions when it should be more about improving the quality of institutions and management everywhere in a way that depends on culture, which is this harder thing to manage. And this may even get back to subsidizing Mozart's Magic Flute. But there's something about the sociology of EA that strongly encourages, especially online, what I would call the optimization mindset. What's your response to that?

I think I'm going to surprise you and agree with you, Tyler. I'm not sure it's about optimization, but here's a certain critique that one could make of EA in general, or traditionally, which is like, hey, you're a bunch of nerds, you're a bunch of kind of STEM people. You're like, the way your brains work will be inclined to focus on like technology or technological fixes. And not on mushy things like institutions and culture, but they're super important. And I at least think that that criticism has a lot going for it. And I don't want to wholesale endorse it, because often you just can have technological fixes to what are even sociological problems, where the risk of an engineered pandemic killing hundreds of millions of people, that is in part a sociological or political problem, because it's going to be an individual that builds it and does it. We could just solve it with technology though, early warning detection systems, far UVC lighting that can kind of sterilizes wombs. So there doesn't need to be a match between political or sociological problems and political or cultural responses. But I do think that culture is just enormously important. That's something I've kind of changed my view on and appreciated a lot over the last few years. I like— just as I started to learn more about history, about the cultural evolution literature, about Joseph Henrich's work and our understanding of humanity as a species. So Nathan Dunn, actually, it's one of my favorite and most underrated articles is by Nathan Dunn. It's called History is Evolution, which I think is extremely good. And actually my understanding of human beings, rather than Homo economists, which are mainly motivated by self-interest, you understand that in terms of income. At least when you're looking at a much broader scale, I think we're much more like Homo culturalis, where people have a view of how the world should be and they go out and try and make that vision happen. And I think that can have hard to measure and very long run but important effects. And I actually see effective altruism as a whole as kind of cultural innovation. It's creating this new subculture, a culture of people who are impartial and altruistically motivated, extremely concerned about the truth and having accurate beliefs. And that is a way in which I think effective altruism could have a big impact. In the same way as kind of the scientific revolution was like primarily a cultural revolution, I think. I shouldn't use that term. Primarily an evolution in culture where people suddenly started innovating and they started to think in a certain way. It was like, oh, we can do experiments and we can We can test things and we can tinker. So I actually see effective altruism as a cultural innovation that could drive great moral progress in the future. And then, should we be doing more in terms of cultural change? I guess one thing I'll say is people are doing quite a lot of it in terms of, I mean, myself promoting concern for future generations in this book, What We Owe the Future, is doing that. An awful lot of people are going to promote cultural change around attitudes to non-human animals. It is hard to measure, but I think there's a very big difference between having an optimization mindset and do the best and having a mindset that's like, therefore we always need to be able to measure what we're doing and have some metric that we're optimizing towards. Where that latter thing I think is a bit of a straw man against EA.

Will the EA movement avoid Conquest's second law, namely that institutions not explicitly Designed to be right-wing end up becoming left-wing. It's happened to all these major foundations, right? Rockefeller, Ford, Pew. You can go all the way down the list. Whether you like that or not, right? It seems to be an empirical regularity. So will it happen to EA?

Yeah, I think I'd be curious about what the underlying mechanism is there for those other foundations. It's not something I know about. It's interesting that if you look at the demographics and political views of people in effective altruism, even though we've really not been selecting for that at all. We've been selecting for people who care about things like, does it make sense to spend your money to pay for bed nets to save lives in poor countries? That's certainly not a politically hot-button issue. There does tend to be a pretty systematic tendency towards being very socially liberal and being economically moderate or something. And there's still obviously a range on both of those cases. But there certainly is a particular tendency. My guess is that that's the bigger factor and inertia would keep effective altruism broadly in that category. But perhaps you could convince me otherwise if I understood what's the mechanism by which these other foundations are shifting left wing.

For our final segment, do you have time for a quick round of underrated versus overrated? Of course. Okay. Bishop Barclay, the philosopher, overrated or underrated?

Underrated because idealism in general, I think, is underrated as a metaphysical view.

And that's related to thinking we might be living in a simulation or not.

Yeah. Or in general, the fact that it's our experiences that we have direct awareness of and the idea that like, well, maybe there is no external world. I think there's more on the table than maybe modern philosophers give it credit for.

You're from Scotland. Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments as a book, over or underrated?

I'll have to confess I haven't read it. My guess is that it's underrated. Well, from people I know I respect, they think of it very highly. So.

Quine, the philosopher, over or underrated?

Overrated, I'm afraid. Why? Two Dogmas of Empiricism, for example, is his most famous article. You know, there's the analytic-synthetic distinction, views that are true in virtue of meaning, views that are true empirically. And he's like, I don't believe in this distinction. His argument is just, well, can you define what it means for something to be true in virtue of meaning? And he's like, this definition is circular, this definition is circular. I don't think it's a very good argument. I think you can clearly have positions that involve primitive concepts without being able to define them in non-circular terms. You know, that's regarded as one of the great papers of analytic philosophy over the last century. And I think the arguments are pretty weak. And then more generally, he has this tendency of writing these articles where the arguments aren't very good, but he ends with some like, vivid picture or metaphor. And people don't really understand the arguments because they're often quite technical, but then really like the metaphor and people think, "Oh, he's great." Bildering, overrated or underrated?

And you need to tell us what it is.

Bildering is also known as urban climbing. So it's where you just basically climb buildings in urban environments. It's something I used to do as a younger man and it is very dangerous. And so I'm going to say it's overrated. In the book, I talk about how I nearly killed myself doing that and draw a lesson from that to the long-term future of humanity.

Thus we need to worry about existential risk. Exactly. Last question to close this out. What is it you will do next? But just to remind our readers, What We Owe the Future, Will's new book, excellent, one of the most important books of the year. Will is one of the most influential and important philosophers in the world, so please do buy it and read it. Tell us also, what will you do next?

Thanks so much, Tyler. So I have a few options on the table. I've been helping Sam Bankman-Fried launch his foundation, the Future Fund, which has been going well, and we've been able to move a lot of money, about $140 million this year. Possible I will keep working more on that. That's one option. Second is just doubling down on books and promotion of ideas. That's what I truly love. I enjoy having back and forth with people like yourself. And there's plenty more I'd be interested in writing. Another book that's kind of a follow-up to Doing Good Better that is really explaining kind of what is the effective altruism community and actually taking an introduction into that that's less from abstract principles and arguments and more just what are actually the people in that community, what are they doing. And then a final option that I consider is some sort of new college or university. So really trying to take some of the brightest people from all around the world, especially in countries where very bright, promising, morally motivated people are being missed. You could be extremely intellectually talented in rural India, and maybe you can make your way out, but it's a challenge at least. And then just trying to give the kind of very best kind of all-round education possible, hiring people who are dedicated as teachers rather than having their attention split between research and teaching, which is the standard university model, and also using certain techniques that we have kind of discovered that aren't very widely used within education to try and accelerate people's learning as fast as possible. And if that worked well in this one instance, then perhaps it could become a much wider idea.

Will MacAskill, congratulations again on the book and thank you very much.

Okay, thank you so much, Tyler.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvoes. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.