I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I’ve interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
Ok yeah I was using terms too loosely. But still:
1. I think we disagree about whether the harms of lawbreaking are mostly internalized. The degradation of social trust in the deliberative process seems bigger to me than the consequences to the individual? As an analogy, shoplifting is an ordinary crime where individuals do face real consequences, but the diffuse harms to consumers and businesses (goods locked up, stores closing) are large and dominate the social calculus.
I don’t think we should speak of “lawbreaking” as a general case in this context; some argue that shoplifting is too lightly punished/prosecuted (especially in eg liberal US cities), but even assuming that’s true, the question remains as to whether the more specific category of say “property damage via protest” is punished too lightly, too harshely, or about right.
My best guess is that it’s not “too lightly” from a purely normie “law and order and human welfare right now” perspective. Many people believe moral-ish things strongly and don’t find property destruction immoral, but far far fewer actually destroy the property of those they think are doing something immoral. This seems like good evidence that the expected punishment (including via informal mechanisms) is not too light.
2. The Pigouvian tax comparison doesn’t quite work here because paying a tax contributes to public resources that can directly address the harms of the act or improve welfare elsewhere, making the net outcome neutral. Going to jail doesn’t repair damaged property or restore trust in the democratic process.
I think we are/were both sort failing to decouple Pigouvian taxes and restitution. My understanding about both how the term “Pigouvian tax” is used in econ and about the real world is that even without restitution, you can get to the socially optimal level of some bad with a tax alone and no transfer to victims.
I think the motivating intuition is that the tax is affecting the amount of eg “social disorder” supplied, but the tax revenue is just a transfer of economic power from one party to another—it’s not creating real wealth that can then be given to the victims. So the same amount of real wealth exists before and after the transfer and a separate question is what to do with that wealth given the state of the world (eg you might think that the very well-off who are harmed slightly by some negative externality, say ambient noise, should not be given restitution and a tax on decibels should really flow to some other party like the very poor)
consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars
I think this is a good/fine question and the answer is “they’ll go to jail and then stop”. I think maybe you’re conflating this question and the following:
consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars and also we live in a tenuous society with only vigilante or no law enforcement
Plausibly the morally correct answers are different. If your policy might cause total collapse of social order (irl, not in a nested thought experiment), maybe you shouldn’t do the nonviolent disruptive protest, but if you live in the real US where you largely internalize the negative consequences and others are similarly dissuaded and you still find the ~1st order effect worthwhile, then go right ahead
It’s like a sin tax (not a perfect term here tbc) - you want some amount of Pigouvian tax on the thing that you’re worried is not generalizable (or good if it generalizes). If you find that the action is worth it to you tax included, then godspeed. It would be fallacious to say “in addition to the correctly priced carbon tax you’d be paying on the gas, consider your impact on the environment by driving”
I’m not sure this matters at all, but I tentatively think that percent of value of the best possible future, (we can call it ‘PVBPF’) which I’ve heard brought up by Will MacAskill a couple times now[1] (and maybe by others?) isn’t an ideal metric by which to measure or even mental/conceptual model by which to understand how good the world is.
My main concern is illustrated by the following:
Suppose we do a survey in 100 years[2] and conclude that the current world is, to our best guess, 50% as good as the best possible counterfactual[3]. So PVBPF = 50%
Then somehow we realize that actually there was actually ex ante a chance of a counterfactual outcome 5 times better than what we previously thought was the maximum of the distribution
What was originally PVBPF = 50% now becomes . So PVBPF = 10%
So the addition of an astronomically unlikely outcome- one that for all intents and purposes doesn’t change the ex ante the EV at all—radically effects our assessment of PVBPF.
Maybe this is fine—I’m not really claiming there’s a technical issue here (although maybe there is; more to think about).
But maybe there’s a vibes issue: 10% and 50% sound like really different numbers, and they are! But a 5x difference in PVBPF can correspond to either a 5x difference in actual moral value or the addition of an arbitrarily unlikely 5x-as-good-as-previously-believed-maximum counterfactual.[4]
Eg on the latest 80k podcast, Will says:
So the concept of viatopia is that it’s a state of society that is on track to produce a near-best future — something that’s at least 90% as good as a future that we could have.
To get around the fact that I think the current world is net-negative. That’s a modeling inconvenience but one that I do think one that neither is nor reveals a fundamental weakness with the idea being gestured at.
You might be able to make this more well-defined via the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
I.e. as we make smaller and smaller, PVBPF doesn’t change but the delta between ex ante EVs represented by the original guess of the distribution of probabilities and moral values and the updated guess goes to zero
I made a podcast feed for the posts highlighted in Best of: AGI & Animals Debate Week
RSS Feed to paste into your favorite podcast app: https://f004.backblazeb2.com/file/aaronbergman-public/podcast/agi_animals/feed.xml
I also like the cover art Gemini made so here it is:
I mostly strongly agree with this but think it’s worth considering “being an official, recognized, and funded part of an organization” rather than constituting one’s own from scratch. I know Rethink Priorities and Hive have sponsored projects before—that seems like a possibly-good intermediate step, with the possibility of spinning out independently later
Does anyone know why @William_MacAskill says he is “not convinced by the shrimp argument” on his recent appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast?
SAM HARRIS
So yeah, so this is one area where perhaps my own cynicism creeps in. I worry that any focus on suffering beyond human suffering, it risks confusing enough people so as to damage people’s commitment to these principles. So I mean, I’m not, there’s zero defense of factory farming coming from me here, but When I see a philosopher who’s clearly EA or EA-adjacent arguing on behalf of the welfare of shrimp and claiming that maybe the worst atrocity perpetrated by humans is all of the mistreatment of shrimp because they exist in such numbers and live such terrible lives, one imagines.
…
WILL MACASKILL
Okay, great. So lots to unpack there. And so I actually personally am not convinced by the shrimp argument. But the thing I want to defend is people really taking ethical, including quite weird-seeming ethical ideas seriously and trying to reason that through for themselves.
Full unofficial transcript here and video below
Vibes, I have no idea, I hope someone convinces me with good takes
Thank you! I can’t verify this is perfect but added all the numbeo.com cities: https://pledge.up.railway.app/
This sounds right to me (although maybe easier to game if someone isn’t earnest) and EA really needs to get better at social incentive alignment like this
It’s kinda funny (and I think sub-optimal) that a group of mostly-libs landed on a flat tax tithing system (ie the GWWC pledge)
but this isn’t totally a joke—I thik there really are big gains (mostly for the rest of the world but also partially for EAs themselves) to be had from changing social norms and incentives around this stuff
In your case, the answer might be to have a new, different symbol/indicator tbc for this type of sacrifice—I’m not sure what the best system is but it’s probably not the status quo
(and vibecoded a tool for exploring how this might be different)
So cool! Comprehensive EA grants data is like the most central possible example of what I’m interested in, I don’t want to promise anything but potentially interested in contributing if there’s a need. I might just play around with the code and see if there’s anything potentially valuable to add
Also: genuinely unsure this is worth the time/effort to fix but I’d flag that the smallest grants all look like artifacts of some sort of parsing error rather than actual grants
I made a tool to play around with how alternatives to the 10% GWWC Pledge default norm might change:
How much individuals are “expected” to pay
The idea being that there are functions of income that people would prefer to the 10% pledge behind some relevant veil of ignorance, along the lines of “I don’t want to commit 10% of my $30k salary, but I gladly commit 20% of my $200k salary”
How much total donation revenue gets collected
There’s some discussion at this Tweet of mine
Some folks pushed back a bit, citing the following:
The pledge isn’t supposed to be revenue maximizing
A main function of the pledge is to “build the habit of giving” and complexity/higher expectations undermines this
Many pledgers give >10% - the pledge doesn’t set an upper bond
I don’t find these points very convincing...
To quote myself: “I think it would be news to most GWWC pledgers that actually the main point is some indirect thing like building habits rather than getting money to effective orgs”
If the distribution of GWWC pledgers resembles the US distribution of household incomes and then cut implied donations in half to account for individual vs household discrepancy (obviously false but maybe still illustrative assumptions), the roughly 10,000 GWWC pledgers are giving $60M/year
That’s a lot of money. It matters a lot in absolute terms
This isn’t a giving game situation where a few college fellowships give $100/semester—there the main effect is indirect, not via the $100 moved. But at $60M/year, even relatively modest % increases matter a lot
The 10% GWWC pledge functions as a norm that probably has some influence over total amounts given even though folks are free to give as much (or as little, really) as they want.
The simplicity/memetic fitness of flat 10% is nice, but this has to be weighed against the actual object level consideration of how much money gets moved per year
Plausibly more folks would take a revised version of the pledge because it’s less costly at lower incomes. There’s a reason that the US income tax system is progressive!
Possibly we can have a best of both worlds situation, where the GWWC pledge remains a strong norm but there’s a different, mostly compatible system for those so inclined.
Tentatively it seems like a progressive system makes sense purely from a money moved POV. This screenshot is from the default settings, which is approximately the curve I endorse
The site is supposed to be about after-tax income, which is what matters insofar as you’re open to a non-flat curve
The site accounts for exactly two variables for simplicity and convenience: (1) metro area to determine cost of living and (2) after-tax income; plenty of other things that would plausibly change the function for the better, such as family size
The default curve when you load the page is roughly what I personally endorse but I haven’t put a ton of thought into it
That is:
You can modify the parameters in a couple different ways
The actual reason I chose to do this is that I think there are altruistic benefits to living in major US cities, most notably SF/Bay Area and DC, but also others like NYC and Boston, and so don’t want to disincentivize living in those places
I realize this is not incredibly principled, maybe this is the wrong call
Almost a year after the 2024 holiday season Twitter fundraiser, we managed to score a very exciting “Mystery EA Guest” to interview: Will MacAskill himself.
@MHR🔸 was the very talented interviewer and shrimptastic fashion icon
Thanks to @AbsurdlyMax🔹 for help behind the scenes
And of course huge thanks to Will for agreeing to do this
Summary, highlights, and transcript below video!
(summary AI-generated)
Effective Altruism has changed significantly since its inception. With the arrival of “mega donors” and major institutional changes, does individual effective giving still matter in 2025?
Will MacAskill—co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism and Giving What We Can, and currently a senior research fellow at the Forethought Institute—says the answer is a resounding yes. In fact, he argues that despite the resources currently available, individuals are “systematically not ambitious enough” relative to the scale of the problems the world faces.
In this special interview for the 2025 EA Twitter Fundraiser, Will joins host Matt to discuss the evolution of the movement’s focus. They discuss why animal welfare—specifically the fight against factory farming—has risen in prominence relative to global health, and why Will believes those working on it are “on the right side of history.”
Will also shares updates from his current work at the Forethought Institute, where he is moving beyond standard AI safety concerns to focus on “model character”—the idea that as AI agents become more autonomous, their embedded ethics and personality will determine how our economy and society function.
Matt and Will discuss:
Why “mega donors” haven’t made individual giving obsolete
The “founder effect” that initially prioritized global health over animal welfare
The funniest moment from the What We Owe the Future media tour (involving Tyler Cowen)
Why Forethought is focused on the moral status of digital beings
Will’s call for the community to embrace an “impartial, altruistic scout mindset” on social media
On earning to give:
Then, should people be more ambitious [about earning to give]? I genuinely think yes. I think people systematically aren’t ambitious enough, so the answer is almost always yes. Again, the ambition you have should match the scale of the problems that we’re facing—and the scale of those problems is very large indeed.
On current, most exciting work at Forethought:
Maybe the thing I’ll emphasize most at the moment… is the idea of “model character” or AI personality.
There is now OpenAI, which has this “Model Spec,” and then Claude’s “soul” was leaked. Basically, these companies are having to make decisions about how these AIs behave. That affects hundreds of millions of people every day already. And then in the future, it will determine how our most active economic agents in the world act.
There’s a real spectrum that you can imagine between AI that is as maximally like a tool as possible—just an obedient servant—versus an AI that actually has its own sense of ethics and own conscience. Once you’ve got that, then take every single hairy ethical issue or important circumstance the AIs will face; we really should be thinking in advance about how we want them to behave. I’d be keen for a lot more thought to be going into that.
On what he’d tell EA Twitter:
The main thing is just that I have been loving what I’ve been seeing as a resurgence in EA activity online—on Substack and Twitter in particular. If you think I haven’t been following along with popcorn on the Andy Masley data center water usage story, you would be wrong.
Honestly, I just love seeing more people really coming out to bat for EA ideas, demonstrating EA ideas on all sorts of topics...
MATT
Hello everyone and welcome. I’m Matt from the 2025 EA Twitter Fundraiser. I’m here with Will MacAskill himself, who likely needs no introduction for folks watching this. But in case anyone does, Will is a senior research fellow at the Forethought Institute and former associate professor at Oxford University. He co-founded Giving What We Can and the Centre for Effective Altruism. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Doing Good Better, What We Owe the Future, and my personal favorite, An Introduction to Utilitarianism. Thank you for joining us, Will.
WILL
Thanks for the interview.
MATT
We’re doing this in service of promoting effective giving. To start us off, we were curious to ask: What do you think the role of effective giving should be in the EA community in 2025? And maybe in particular, should people be more ambitious with trying to earn to give?
WILL
Yes. I think of effective giving as a core part of Effective Altruism. It was the start of it all, and it continues to be important. It continues to be important even if you see “mega donors” coming on the scene, because there are often a lot of things that individuals can fund that the mega donors can’t. And even taking the mega donors into account, there are still enormous problems in the world that they are not going to be able to solve.
Then, should people be more ambitious? I genuinely think yes. I think people systematically aren’t ambitious enough, so the answer is almost always yes. Again, the ambition you have should match the scale of the problems that we’re facing—and the scale of those problems is very large indeed.
MATT
Absolutely. One of those big problems—and the one that we’re raising money for in this year’s online fundraiser—is specifically farmed animal welfare. That’s something that has been really popular with highly engaged EAs recently. If you look at, for example, the donation election on the Forum, you’ll see there’s really a lot of enthusiasm around that. However, it is something that has historically played a smaller role in public EA messaging. Do you think that’s a good balance, or is that something that you would like to see change?
WILL
I definitely think that there was never some grand plan of reducing the focus on animal welfare. I and some others really got in via global health and development, so I think that really set the stage—there is a bit of a founder effect there. And then I think it’s also just the case that maybe there is naturally wider reach because more people are concerned [about human-centric causes].
But yes, I’d be down for that to change. The problem of factory farming is just so stark and so unnecessary. The arguments for [addressing] it are so good.
I remember when I became vegetarian twenty years ago—I’m getting old now—I got a lot of pushback. It was quite a weird thing to do. People thought it was “holier than thou.” It was like you were morally grandstanding or judging others at the time. That has changed. Now, regarding the people who are vegetarian or vegan who really care about animal welfare, it’s just clear that these are the good people. They are on the right side of history.
The amount of good that you can do is just absolutely enormous; the sheer amount you can affect is huge. So, yes, I’d love to see that rise in prominence.
MATT
Very cool. When I was doing some research for this, I was looking back at old versions of the 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can websites on the Wayback Machine. I was surprised that the first-ever archive of the 80,000 Hours page has farmed animal welfare as one of the issues on there. So, you mentioned the founder effect, but I was pleasantly surprised to see just how early this was getting into EA messaging.
WILL
We all cared. I was vegetarian. Little known fact: I and others at 80,000 Hours helped to set up Animal Charity Evaluators.
MATT
Yeah, I remember reading that at some point.
WILL
That was because we felt it was a gap at that point—that was in 2012 or something.
MATT
Well, one of the ways that we are trying to promote the fundraiser is leaning into EA memes. That’s certainly something that’s always been fun about the online EA community. Do you have a favorite EA meme that you’ve run across?
WILL
I feel I have many favorites. One is the April Fools’ posts naming Giving What We Can “Naming What We Can.”
I also feel it’s a shame that Dustin Moskovitz is no longer memeing quite as hard as he used to. But something he did… there was a big debate on Reddit where people were complaining about Wytham Abbey. There was a debate in the comments between who bought it—who owned it. One person was saying it was Will MacAskill, and the other was saying it was Owen Cotton-Barratt—both of which are incorrect. And then someone came in and said, “What if it’s neither of those people, but some mystery third person?”
That commenter, like many threads down into this Reddit post, was Dustin Moskovitz himself, who actually bought it. So, I salute him. Maybe not a meme per se, but part of the same culture.
MATT
Maybe if we lean in, we can get him to participate a little bit more again.
WILL
Maybe.
MATT
You did quite the media blitz for What We Owe the Future. Was there a funniest or most unexpected story you have from that whirlwind tour?
WILL
The thing that leaps out the most is when I was being interviewed by Tyler Cowen. Podcasts normally have a bit of a chat and get a bit of a warm-up. Tyler just immediately goes in: “Okay, so what is something you like that’s ineffective?”
I just couldn’t think of an answer. I went completely blank. So this gets edited from the podcast, but there were minutes of me just being like… [silence]. It kind of threw me off for the whole episode, really. It’s not that I only like maximally efficient things, to be clear!
MATT
I sometimes listen to Conversations with Tyler, and yes, he sometimes has that energy where you really feel like he should let the guest take a breather.
WILL
That was right at the start.
MATT
Well, Will, I know you’ve been doing some really exciting work at Forethought these days. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the work that’s going on there and maybe what you’re most excited about?
WILL
Sure. Forethought in general is trying to do research that is as useful as possible in helping the world as a whole navigate the transition to extremely advanced AI—superintelligence. Distinctively, we tend to not focus on the risk of loss of control to AI systems themselves. Our work often hits on that or helps on that, and it’s a big risk—we’re glad that other people are working on it—but I personally don’t think that makes up the vast majority of the issues we face.
We are often looking at neglected issues other than that. That can include:
The risk of intense concentration of power among humans.
The idea that we should be taking seriously the moral status of digital beings themselves and what kind of rights they have.
A number of other issues, like how AI will interact with society’s ability to reason well and make good decisions.
Maybe the thing I’ll emphasize most at the moment, because I’m very excited about it from an impact perspective but I think people don’t appreciate it quite enough, is the idea of “model character” or AI personality.
There is now OpenAI, which has this “Model Spec,” and then Claude’s “soul” was leaked. Basically, these companies are having to make decisions about how these AIs behave. That affects hundreds of millions of people every day already. And then in the future, it will determine how our most active economic agents in the world act.
There’s a real spectrum that you can imagine between AI that is as maximally like a tool as possible—just an obedient servant—versus an AI that actually has its own sense of ethics and own conscience. Once you’ve got that, then take every single hairy ethical issue or important circumstance the AIs will face; we really should be thinking in advance about how we want them to behave. I’d be keen for a lot more thought to be going into that.
MATT
Absolutely. That seems incredibly important. All right, well to close, is there anything else you want to tell the people of EA Twitter?
WILL
The main thing is just that I have been loving what I’ve been seeing as a resurgence in EA activity online—on Substack and Twitter in particular. If you think I haven’t been following along with popcorn on the Andy Masley data center water usage story, you would be wrong.
Honestly, I just love seeing more people really coming out to bat for EA ideas, demonstrating EA ideas on all sorts of topics—whether that’s data center usage or the utter monstrosity of current shrimp factory farming. So I would just love for more people to feel empowered to be shouting about the giving they’re doing, the causes that they’re working on, and demonstrating the impartial, altruistic scout mindset that I think is EA at its best.
MATT
Awesome. Well, you heard it here first, folks: post more.
WILL
And thanks for the fundraiser; thanks to everybody who has contributed. It’s very, very cool to see this.
Matt
Yes, we definitely are really grateful for everyone who has donated so far and who will continue to donate, because the animal welfare fund is awesome and supporting effective animal interventions is a really, really fantastic cause.
All right. Well, thank you, Will, for joining us. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.
WILL
It’s been a joy. Cool. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays.
MATT
Merry Christmas.
I strongly endorse this and think that there are some common norms that stand in the way of actually-productive AI assistance.
People don’t like AI writing aesthetically
AI reduces the signal value of text purportedly written by a human (i.e. because it might have been trivial to create and the “author” needn’t even endorse each claim in the writing)
Both of these are reasonable but we could really use some sort of social technology for saying “yes, this was AI-assisted, you can tell, I’m not trying to trick anyone, but also I stand by all the claims made in the text as though I had done the token generation myself.”
I think I’m more bullish on digital storage than you.
Most alignment work today exists as digital bits: arXiv papers, lab notes, GitHub repos, model checkpoints. Digital storage is surprisingly fragile without continuous power and maintenance.
SSDs store bits as charges in floating-gate cells; when unpowered, charge leaks, and consumer SSDs may start losing data after a few years. Hard drives retain magnetic data longer, but their mechanical parts degrade; after decades of disuse they often need clean-room work to spin up safely. Data centres depend on air-conditioning, fire suppression, and regular maintenance.
In a global collapse where grids are down for years, almost all unmaintained digital archives eventually succumb to bit-rot, corrosion, fire, or physical decay.
This is true but the fundamental value proposition of digital storage is extremely cheap, and easy (~free on both fronts for a few GB of PDFs) replication. So it’s true that a single physical device by default won’t last very long, but the data itself simply (“simply”—I mean the crux is how hard/common this will be) needs to hop from device to device (possibly and ideally existing on many devices at any one time) indefinitely.
By analogy you might think that human aging/death poses a major problem for the continued existence of the information necessary to recreate a human (i.e. DNA + a few other sources of info) but in fact the ability for people to replicate makes destruction of that knowledge much, much harder.
Of course a key consideration is how bad the setback is. At the limit you’re right because our ability to create the tools for info replication won’t exist, but at least naively it might take quite a bit to destroy all of society’s ability to manufacture flash drives and computers for long enough for all info to die out via the mechanisms you describe.
Wanted to bring this comment thread out to ask if there’s a good list of AI safety papers/blog posts/urls anywhere for this?
(I think local digital storage in many locations probably makes more sense than paper but also why not both)
Lightcone and Alex Bores (so far)
Edit: to say a tiny bit more, LessWrong seems instrumentally good and important and rationality is a positive influence on EA. Lightcone doesn’t have the vibes of “best charity” to me, but when I imagine my ideal funding distribution it is the immediate example of “most underfunded org” that comes to mind. Obviously related to Coefficient not supporting rationality community building anymore. Remember, we are donating on the margin, and approximately the margin created by Coefficient Giving!
Edit: And Animal Welfare Fund
Super cool—a bit hectic and I substantively disagree with one of the “fallacies” the fallacy evaluator flagged on this post but I’ll definitely be using this going forward
Thanks for the highlight! Yeah I would love better infrastructure for trying to really figure out what the best uses of money are. I don’t think it has to be as formal/quantitative as GiveWell. To quote myself from a recent comment (bolding added)
At some level, implicitly ranking charities [eg by donating to one and not another] is kind of an insane thing for an individual to do—not in an anti-EA way (you can do way better than vibes/guessing randomly) but in a “there must be better mechanisms/institutions for outsourcing donation advice than GiveWell and ACE and ad hoc posts/tweets/etc and it’s really hard and high stakes” way.
Like what I would love is a lineup of 10-100 very highly engaged and informed people (could create the list simply by number of endorsements/requests) who talk about their strategy and values in a couple pages and then I just defer to them (does this exist?)
I did something related but haven’t updated it in a couple years! If there’s a good collection of AI safety papers/other resources/anything anywhere it would be very easy for me to add it to the archive for people to download locally, or else I could try to collect stuff myself
Not addressing every point but I think in some respects I agree that crime is C but then how much benefit the criminal gets/values is a case-by-case question, and we can’t just assume that in the irl case at hand that the benefit is (in the analogy) $101 instead of $1000
There’s real deadweight loss from the mineshaft drop/spending money on prisons, but also potentially real value to be gained from the crime itself (canonical case = speeding bc wife is going in to labor)
Remember, property damage as activism isn’t like simple theft—the property damage can cost society amount $X and benefits of activism feature can separately benefit society or be valued by the perpetrator at any other number $Y