#william macaskill

MacAskill is determined that endless economic growth—fueled by having more kids, or perhaps even just creating ‘digital’ worker-people who could take over the economy—is desirable. It’s extraordinary to us that, in a world where the pronatalist norm of bringing new people into the world remains widely unquestioned as a central aim in life, the ‘longtermists’ present themselves as being edgy by favoring ever-more births.

In the ‘longtermist’ view, the more humans there are with lives that aren’t completely miserable, the better. MacAskill says he believes that only ‘technologically capable species’ are valuable. This is why he writes that ‘if Homo sapiens went extinct,’ the badness of this outcome may depend on whether ‘some other technologically capable species would evolve and take our place.’ Without such a species evolving to ‘take our place,’ the biosphere—with all its wonders and beauty—would be worthless. We find this to be a very shallow perspective. 

Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that MacAskill doesn’t see much of a place for non-human animals in the future. True, some ‘longtermists’ have spent a lot of time recently worrying about the suffering of wild animals. You might find it touching that they fret about such innocent creatures, including shrimp. But look out: their concern has a sinister side. Some ‘longtermists’ have suggested that wild animals’ lives are not worth living, so full (allegedly) of suffering are they. MacAskill tends toward envisaging those animals’ more or less complete replacement: by (you guessed it) many more humans. Here’s what MacAskill says: ‘if we assess the lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing, which I think is plausible … then we arrive at the dizzying conclusion that from the perspective of the wild animals themselves, the enormous growth and expansion of Homo sapiens has been a good thing’—a growth that MacAskill wants to endlessly inflate.

In truth, the EA community has always lacked integrity, honesty and common sense. This was, in fact, a core component of its brand. It’s what made EA unique and attractive to “moral weirdos,” a term that MacAskill uses endearingly. The about-face in the fallout of FTX’s implosion, with EAs now claiming to care about things like integrity, is just more evidence that the community is a relentless grift. It has billions in the bank, a palatial estate in Oxfordshire, and links to some of the richest people on the planet. Hundreds of millions of dollars are poured back into the community for “movement building,” and leading EAs — while presenting themselves as modest and self-sacrificing — flew in private jets, bought hundreds of millions in Bahamian real estate, and were offered literally millions, from tech billionaires, to boost book sales.

Sam Harris:

"There are details of how he [Sam Bankman-Fried] behaved with people, that struck me as arrogant to the point of insanity.

In these investors' calls, he's describing his business and soliciting hundreds of millions of dollars from firms, and he is simultaneously playing video games.

This is celebrated as this delightful affectation.

But clearly he's someone who thinks he need not give 100% of his attention because he's got so much bandwidth he can just play video games while having these important conversations.

And there are things in Michael Lewis' book that revealed that he was quite a strange person.

He claimed that he didn't know what people meant when they said they experienced the feeling of love.

So he's neuro-atypical at a minimum.

Shouldn't there have been more red flags earlier on in terms of his integrity or capacity for ethical integrity?

If someone tells me that they have no idea what one means when they say they love other people, that is an enormous red flag.

Collaborating with this person, putting trust in them, it's an enormous red flag."

William MacAskill:

"On his inability to feel love, that's not something that was striking or notable to me.

After the Michael Lewis book and lots of things came out, it seemed like he had emotional flatness across the board.

Whether this was a result of depression or ADHD or autism, it's not clear to me.

But that wasn't something that seemed obvious at the time.