William_MacAskill 4 Aug 2023 10:40 UTC
173 points
58 ∶ 10
on: University EA Groups Need Fixing
Hey,
I’m really sorry to hear about this experience. I’ve also experienced what feels like social pressure to have particular beliefs (e.g. around non-causal decision theory, high AI x-risk estimates, other general pictures of the world), and it’s something I also don’t like about the movement. My biggest worries with my own beliefs stem around the worry that I’d have very different views if I’d found myself in a different social environment. It’s just simply very hard to successfully have a group of people who are trying to both figure out what’s correct and trying to change the world: from the perspective of someone who thinks the end of the world is imminent, someone who doesn’t agree is at best useless and at worst harmful (because they are promoting misinformation).
In local groups in particular, I can see how this issue can get aggravated: people want their local group to be successful, and it’s much easier to track success with a metric like “number of new AI safety researchers” than “number of people who have thought really deeply about the most pressing issues and have come to their own well-considered conclusions”.
One thing I’ll say is that core researchers are often (but not always) much more uncertain and pluralist than it seems from “the vibe”. The second half of Holden Karnofsky’s recent 80k blog post is indicative. Open Phil splits their funding across quite a number of cause areas, and I expect that to continue. Most of the researchers at GPI are pretty sceptical of AI x-risk. Even among people who are really worried about TAI in the next decade, there’s normally significant support (whether driven by worldview diversification or just normal human psychology) for neartermist or other non-AI causes. That’s certainly true of me. I think longtermism is highly non-obvious, and focusing on near-term AI risk even more so; beyond that, I think a healthy EA movement should be highly intellectually diverse and exploratory.
What should be done? I have a few thoughts, but my most major best guess is that, now that AI safety is big enough and getting so much attention, it should have its own movement, separate from EA. Currently, AI has an odd relationship to EA. Global health and development and farm animal welfare, and to some extent pandemic preparedness, had movements working on them independently of EA. In contrast, AI safety work currently overlaps much more heavily with the EA/rationalist community, because it’s more homegrown.
If AI had its own movement infrastructure, that would give EA more space to be its own thing. It could more easily be about the question “how can we do the most good?” and a portfolio of possible answers to that question, rather than one increasingly common answer — “AI”.
At the moment, I’m pretty worried that, on the current trajectory, AI safety will end up eating EA. Though I’m very worried about what the next 5-10 years will look like in AI, and though I think we should put significantly more resources into AI safety even than we have done, I still think that AI safety eating EA would be a major loss. EA qua EA, which can live and breathe on its own terms, still has huge amounts of value: if AI progress slows; if it gets so much attention that it’s no longer neglected; if it turns out the case for AI safety was wrong in important ways; and because there are other ways of adding value to the world, too. I think most people in EA, even people like Holden who are currently obsessed with near-term AI risk, would agree.
What links here?

William_MacAskill 26 Jun 2023 11:36 UTC
172 points
39 ∶ 1
on: William_MacAskill’s Shortform
Hey—I’m starting to post and comment more on the Forum than I have been, and you might be wondering about whether and when I’m going to respond to questions around FTX. So here’s a short comment to explain how I’m currently thinking about things:
The independent investigation commissioned by EV is still ongoing, and the firm running it strongly preferred me not to publish posts on backwards-looking topics around FTX while the investigation is still in-progress. I don’t know when it’ll be finished, or what the situation will be like for communicating on these topics even after it’s done.
I had originally planned to get out a backwards-looking post early in the year, and I had been holding off on talking about other things until that was published. That post has been repeatedly delayed, and I’m not sure when it’ll be able to come out. If I’d known that it would have been delayed this long, I wouldn’t have waited on it before talking on other topics, so I’m now going to start talking more than I have been, on the Forum and elsewhere; I’m hoping I can be helpful for some of the other issues that are currently active topics of discussion.
Briefly, though, and as I indicated before: I had no idea that Sam and others were misusing customer funds. Since November I’ve thought a lot about whether there were signs of this I really should have spotted, but even in hindsight I don’t think I had reason to suspect that that was happening.
Looking back, I wish I’d been far less trusting of Sam and those who’ve pleaded guilty. Looking forward, I’m going to be less likely to infer that, just because someone has sincere-seeming signals of being highly morally motivated, like being vegan or demonstrating credible plans to give away most of their wealth, they will have moral integrity in other ways, too.
I’m also more wary, now, of having such a high-trust culture within EA, especially as EA grows. This thought favours robust governance mechanisms even more than before (“trust but verify”), so that across EA we can have faith in organisations and institutions, rather than heavily relying on character judgement about the leaders of those organisations.
EA has grown enormously the last few years; in many ways it feels like an adolescent, in the process of learning how to deal with its newfound role in the world. I’m grateful that we’re in a moment of opportunity for us to think more about how to improve ourselves, including both how we work and how we think and talk about effective altruism.
As part of that broader set of reflections (especially around the issue of (de)centralisation in EA), I’m making some changes to how I operate, which I describe, along with some of the other changes happening across EA, in my post on decision-making and decentralisation here. First, I plan to distance myself from the idea that I’m “the face of” or “the spokesperson for” EA; this isn’t how I think of myself, and I don’t think that description reflects reality, but I’m sometimes portrayed that way. I think moving in the direction of clarity on this will better reflect reality and be healthier for both me and the movement.
Second, I plan to step down from the board of Effective Ventures UK once it has more capacity and has recruited more trustees. I found it tough to come to this decision: I’ve been on the board of EV UK (formerly CEA) for 11 years now, and I care deeply, in a very personal way, about the projects housed under EV UK, especially CEA, 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can. But I think it’s for the best, and when I do step down I’ll know that EV will be in good hands.
Over the next year, I’ll continue to do learning and research on global priorities and cause prioritisation, especially in light of the astonishing (and terrifying) developments in AI over the last year. And I’ll continue to advocate for EA and related ideas: for example, in September, WWOTF will come out in paperback in the US and UK, and will come out in Spanish, German, and Finnish that month, too. Given all that’s happened in the world in the last few years — including a major pandemic, war in Europe, rapid AI advances, and an increase in extreme poverty rates — it’s more important than ever to direct people, funding and clear thinking towards the world’s most important issues. I’m excited to continue to help make that happen.
What links here?

Ask Me Anything!

William_MacAskill14 Aug 2019 15:52 UTC

153 points

138 comments3 min readEA link

William_MacAskill 16 Aug 2022 15:10 UTC
153 points
0 ∶ 0
on: “Long-Termism” vs. “Existential Risk”
Hey Scott—thanks for writing this, and sorry for being so slow to the party on this one!
I think you’ve raised an important question, and it’s certainly something that keeps me up at night. That said, I want to push back on the thrust of the post. Here are some responses and comments! :)
The main view I’m putting forward in this comment is “we should promote a diversity of memes that we believe, see which ones catch on, and mould the ones that are catching on so that they are vibrant and compelling (in ways we endorse).” These memes include both “existential risk” and “longtermism”.

What is longtermism?
The quote of mine you give above comes from Spring 2020. Since then, I’ve distinguished between longtermism and strong longtermism.
My current preferred slogan definitions of each:
- Longtermism is the view that we should do much more to protect the interests of future generations. (Alt: that protecting the interests of future generations should be a key moral priority of our time.)
- Strong longtermism is the view that protecting the interests of future generations should be the key moral priority of our time. (That’s similar to the quote of mine you give.)
In WWOTF, I promote the weaker claim. In recent podcasts, I’ve described it something like the the following (depending on how flowery I’m feeling at the time):
Longtermism about taking seriously just how much is at stake when we look to humanity’s future. It’s about trying to figure out what are the challenges we face in our lifetime that could be pivotal for our long-run trajectory. And it’s about ensuring that we act responsibly and carefully to navigate those challenges, steering that trajectory in a better direction, making the world better not just in the present, but also for our grandchildren, and for their grandchildren in turn.
I prefer to promote longtermism rather than strong longtermism. It’s a weaker claim and so I have a higher credence in it, and I feel much more robustly confident in it; at the same time, it gets almost all the value because in the actual world strong longtermism recommends the same actions most of the time, on the current margin.

Is existential risk a more compelling intro meme than longtermism?
My main take is: What meme is good for which people is highly dependent on the person and the context (e.g., the best framing to use in a back-and-forth conversation may be different from one in a viral tweet). This favours diversity; having a toolkit of memes that we can use depending on what’s best in context.
I think it’s very hard to reason about which memes to promote, and easy to get it wrong from the armchair, for a bunch of reasons:
- It’s inherently unpredictable which memes do well.
- It’s incredibly context-dependent. To figure this out, the main thing is just about gathering lots of (qualitative and quantitative) data from the demographic you’re interacting with. The memes that resonate most with Ezra Klein podcast listeners are very different from those that resonant most with Tyler Cowen podcast listeners, even though their listeners are very similar people compared to the wider world. And even with respect to one idea, subtly different framings can have radically different audience reactions. (cf. “We care about future generations” vs “We care about the unborn.”)
- People vary a lot. Even within very similar demographics, some people can love one message while other people hate it.
- “Curse of knowledge”—when you’re really deep down the rabbit hole in a set of ideas, it’s really hard to imagine what it’s like being first exposed to those ideas.
Then, at least when we’re comparing (weak) longtermism with existential risk, it’s not obvious which resonates better in general. (If anything, it seems to me that (weak) longtermism does better.) A few reasons:
First, message testing from Rethink suggests that longtermism and existential risk have similarly-good reactions from the educated general public, and AI risk doesn’t do great. The three best-performing messages they tested were:
- “The current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. It is imperative that we prepare both for pandemics and other risks which could threaten humanity’s long-term future.”
- “In any year, the risk from any given threat might be small—but the odds that your children or grandchildren will face one of them is uncomfortably high.”
- “It is important to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of their children.”
So people actually pretty like messages that are about unspecified, and not necessarily high-probability threats, to the (albeit nearer-term) future.
As terms to describe risk, “global catastrophic risk” and “long-term risk” did the best, coming out a fair amount better than “existential risk”.
They didn’t test a message about AI risk specifically. The related thing was how much the government should prepare for different risks (pandemics, nuclear, etc), and AI came out worst among about 10 (but I don’t think that tells us very much).
Second, most media reception of WWOTF has been pretty positive so far. This is based mainly on early reviews (esp trade reviews), podcast and journalistic interviews, and the recent profiles (although the New Yorker profile was mixed). Though there definitely has been some pushback (especially on Twitter), I think it’s overall been dwarfed by positive articles. And the pushback I have gotten is on the Elon endorsement, association between EA and billionaires, and on standard objections to utilitarianism — less so to the idea of longtemism itself.
Third, anecdotally at least, a lot of people just hate the idea of AI risk (cf Twitter), thinking of it as a tech bro issue, or doomsday cultism. This has been coming up in the twitter response to WWOTF, too, even though existential risk from AI takeover is only a small part of the book. And this is important, because I’d think that the median view among people working on x-risk (including me) is that the large majority of the risk comes from AI rather than bio or other sources. So “holy shit, x-risk” is mainly, “holy shit, AI risk”.

Do neartermists and longtermists agree on what’s best to do?
Here I want to say: maybe. (I personally don’t think so, but YMMV.) But even if you do believe that, I think that’s a very fragile state of affairs, which could easily change as more money and attention flows into x-risk work, or if our evidence changes, and I don’t want to place a lot of weight on it. (I do strongly believe that global catastrophic risk is enormously important even in the near term, and a sane world would be doing far, far better on it, even if everyone only cared about the next 20 years.)
More generally, I get nervous about any plan that isn’t about promoting what we fundamentally believe or care about (or a weaker version of what we fundamentally believe or care about, which is “on track” to the things we do fundamentally believe or care about).
What I mean by “promoting what we fundamentally believe or care about”:
- Promoting goals rather than means. This means that (i) if the environment changes (e.g. some new transformative tech comes along, or the political environment changes dramatically, like war breaks out) or (ii) if our knowledge changes (e.g. about the time until transformative AIs, or about what actions to take), then we’ll take different means to pursue our goals. I think this is particularly important for something like AI, but also true more generally.
- Promoting the ideas that you believe most robustly—i.e. that you think you are least likely to change in the coming 10 years. Ideally these things aren’t highly conjunctive or relying on speculative premises. This makes it less likely that you will realise that you’ve been wasting your time or done active harm by promoting wrong ideas in ten years’ time. (Of course, this will vary from person to person. I think that (weak) longtermism is really robustly true and neglected, and I feel bullish about promoting it. For others, the thing that might feel really robustly true is “TAI is a BFD and we’re not thinking about it enough”—I suspect that many people feel they more robustly believe this than longtermism.)
Examples of people promoting means rather than goals, and this going wrong:
- “Eat less meat because it’s good for your health” → people (potentially) eat less beef and more chicken.
- “Stop nuclear power” (in the 70s) → environmentalists hate nuclear power, even though it’s one of the best bits of clean tech we have.
Examples of how this could go wrong by promoting “holy shit x-risk”:
- We miss out on non-x-risk ways of promoting a good long-run future:
  - E.g. the risk that we solve the alignment problem but AI is used to lock in highly suboptimal values. (Personally, I think a large % of future expected value is lost in this way.)
- We highlight the importance of AI to people who are not longtermist. They realise how transformatively good it could be for them and for the present generation (a digital immortality of bliss!) if AI is aligned, and they think the risk of misalignment is small compared to the benefits. They become AI-accelerationists (a common view among Silicon Valley types).
- AI progress slows considerably in the next 10 years, and actually near-term x-risk doesn’t seem so high. Rather than doing whatever the next-best longtermist thing is, the people who came in via “holy shit x-risk” people just do whatever instead, and the people who promoted the “holy shit x-risk” meme get a bad reputation.
So, overall my take is:
- “Existential risk” and “longtermism” are both important ideas that deserve greater recognition in the world.
- My inclination is to prefer promoting “longtermism” because that’s closer to what I fundamentally believe (in the sense I explain above), and it’s nonobvious to me which plays better PR-wise, and it’s probably highly context-dependent.
- Let’s try promoting them both, and see how they each catch on.
What links here?

William_MacAskill 18 Apr 2024 11:47 UTC
147 points
18 ∶ 1
on: Personal reflections on FTX
On talking about this publicly
A number of people have asked why there hasn’t been more communication around FTX. I’ll explain my own case here; I’m not speaking for others. The upshot is that, honestly, I still feel pretty clueless about what would have been the right decisions, in terms of communications, from both me and from others, including EV, over the course of the last year and a half. I do, strongly, feel like I misjudged how long everything would take, and I really wish I’d gotten myself into the mode of “this will all take years.”
Shortly after the collapse, I drafted a blog post and responses to comments on the Forum. I was also getting a lot of media requests, and I was somewhat sympathetic to the idea of doing podcasts about the collapse — defending EA in the face of the criticism it was getting. My personal legal advice was very opposed to speaking publicly, for reasons I didn’t wholly understand; the reasons were based on a general principle rather than anything to do with me, as they’ve seen a lot of people talk publicly about ongoing cases and it’s gone badly for them, in a variety of ways. (As I’ve learned more, I’ve come to see that this view has a lot of merit to it). I can’t remember EV’s view, though in general it was extremely cautious about communication at that time. I also got mixed comments on whether my Forum posts were even helpful; I haven’t re-read them recently, but I was in a pretty bad headspace at the time. Advisors said that by January things would be clearer. That didn’t seem like that long to wait, and I felt very aware of how little I knew.
The “time at which it’s ok to speak”, according to my advisors, kept getting pushed back. But by March I felt comfortable, personally, about speaking publicly. I had a blog post ready to go, but by this point the Mintz investigation (that is, the investigation that EV had commissioned) had gotten going. Mintz were very opposed to me speaking publicly. I think they said something like that my draft was right on the line where they’d consider resigning from running the investigation if I posted it. They thought the integrity of the investigation would be compromised if I posted, because my public statements might have tainted other witnesses in the investigation, or had a bearing on what they said to the investigators. EV generally wanted to follow Mintz’s view on this, but couldn’t share legal advice with me, so it was hard for me to develop my own sense of the costs and benefits of communicating.
By December, the Mintz report was fully finished and the bankruptcy settlement was completed. I was travelling (vacation and work) over December and January, and aimed to record podcasts on FTX in February. That got delayed by a month because of Sam Harris’s schedule, so they got recorded in March.
It’s still the case that talking about this feels like walking through a minefield. There’s still a real risk of causing unjustified and unfair lawsuits against me or other people or organisations, which, even if frivolous, can impose major financial costs and lasting reputational damage. Other relevant people also don’t want to talk about the topic, even if just for their own sanity, and I don’t want to force their hand. In my own case, thinking and talking about this topic feels like fingering an open wound, so I’m sympathetic to their decision.

‘Longtermism’

William_MacAskill25 Jul 2019 21:27 UTC

128 points

56 comments9 min readEA link

William_MacAskill 21 Sep 2023 15:39 UTC
126 points
6 ∶ 0
on: William_MacAskill’s Shortform
I mentioned a few months ago that I was planning to resign from the board of EV UK: I’ve now officially done so.
Since last November, I’ve been recused from the board on all matters associated with FTX and related topics, which has ended up being a large proportion of board business. (This is because the recusal affected not just decisions that were directly related to the collapse of FTX, but also many other decisions for which the way EV UK has been affected by the collapse of FTX was important context.) I know I initially said that I’d wait for there to be more capacity, but trustee recruitment has moved more slowly than I’d anticipated, and with the ongoing recusal I didn’t expect to add much capacity for the foreseeable future, so it felt like a natural time to step down.
It’s been quite a ride over the last eleven years. Effective Ventures has grown to a size far beyond what I expected, and I’ve felt privileged to help it on that journey. I deeply respect the rest of the board, and the leadership teams at EV, and I’m glad they’re at the helm.
Some people have asked me what I’m currently working on, and what my plans are. This year has been quite spread over a number of different things, including fundraising, helping out other EA-adjacent public figures, support for GPI, CEA and 80,000 Hours, writing additions to What We Owe The Future and helping with the print textbook version of utilitarianism.net that’s coming out next year. It’s also personally been the toughest year of my life; my mental health has been at its worst in over a decade, and I’ve been trying to deal with that, too.
At the moment, I’m doing three main things:
- Some public engagement, in particular around the WWOTF paperback and foreign language book launches and at EAGxBerlin. This has been and will be lower-key than the media around WWOTF last year, and more focused on in-person events; I’m also more focused on fundraising than I was before.
- Research into “trajectory changes”: in particular, ways of increasing the wellbeing of future generations other than ‘standard’ existential risk mitigation strategies, in particular on issues that arise even if we solve AI alignment, like digital sentience and the long reflection. I’m also doing some learning to try to get to grips on how to update properly on the latest developments in AI, in particular with respect to the probability of an intelligence explosion in the next decade, and on how hard we should expect AI alignment to be.
- Gathering information for what I should focus on next. In the medium term, I still plan to be a public proponent of EA-as-an-idea, which I think plays to my comparative advantage, and because I’m worried about people neglecting “EA qua EA”. If anything, all the crises faced by EA and by the world in the last year has reminded me of just how deeply I believe in EA as a project, and how the message of taking a thoughtful, humble, and scientific approach to doing good is more important than ever. The precise options I’m considering are still quite wide-ranging, including: a podcast and/or YouTube show and/or substack; a book on effective giving; a book on evidence-based living; or deeper research into the ethics and governance questions that arise even if we solve AI alignment. I hope to decide on that by the end of the year.
What links here?
- JWS's comment on EA is good, actually by Amy Labenz (30 Nov 2023 12:07 UTC; 18 points)

William_MacAskill 18 Apr 2024 9:47 UTC
124 points
28 ∶ 1
on: Personal reflections on FTX
Elon Musk
Stuart Buck asks:
“[W]hy was MacAskill trying to ingratiate himself with Elon Musk so that SBF could put several billion dollars (not even his in the first place) towards buying Twitter? Contributing towards Musk’s purchase of Twitter was the best EA use of several billion dollars? That was going to save more lives than any other philanthropic opportunity? Based on what analysis?”
Sam was interested in investing in Twitter because he thought it would be a good investment; it would be a way of making more money for him to give away, rather than a way of “spending” money. Even prior to Musk being interested in acquiring Twitter, Sam mentioned he thought that Twitter was under-monetised; my impression was that that view was pretty widely-held in the tech world. Sam also thought that the blockchain could address the content moderation problem. He wrote about this here, and talked about it here, in spring and summer of 2022. If the idea worked, it could make Twitter somewhat better for the world, too.
I didn’t have strong views on whether either of these opinions were true. My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there.
On “ingratiating”: Musk has pledged to give away at least half his wealth; given his net worth in 2022, that would amount to over $100B. There was a period of time when it looked like he was going to get serious about that commitment, and ramp up his giving significantly. Whether that money was donated well or poorly would be of enormous importance to the world, and that’s why I was in touch with him.

William_MacAskill 24 Jan 2024 18:43 UTC
124 points
16 ∶ 3
on: William_MacAskill’s Shortform
This is a quick post to talk a little bit about what I’m planning to focus on in the near and medium-term future, and to highlight that I’m currently hiring for a joint executive and research assistant position. You can read more about the role and apply here! If you’re potentially interested, hopefully the comments below can help you figure out whether you’d enjoy the role.
Recent advances in AI, combined with economic modelling (e.g. here), suggest that we might well face explosive AI-driven growth in technological capability in the next decade, where what would have been centuries of technological and intellectual progress on a business-as-usual trajectory occur over the course of just months or years.
Most effort to date, from those worried by an intelligence explosion, has been on ensuring that AI systems are aligned: that they do what their designers intend them to do, at least closely enough that they don’t cause catastrophically bad outcomes.
But even if we make sufficient progress on alignment, humanity will have to make, or fail to make, many hard-to-reverse decisions with important and long-lasting consequences. I call these decisions Grand Challenges. Over the course of an explosion in technological capability, we will have to address many Grand Challenges in a short space of time including, potentially: what rights to give digital beings; how to govern the development of many new weapons of mass destruction; who gets control over an automated military; how to deal with fast-reproducing human or AI citizens; how to maintain good reasoning and decision-making even despite powerful persuasion technology and greatly-improved ability to ideologically indoctrinate others; and how to govern the race for space resources.
As a comparison, we could imagine if explosive growth had occurred in Europe in the 11th century, and that all the intellectual and technological advances that took a thousand years in our actual history occurred over the course of just a few years. It’s hard to see how decision-making would go well under those conditions.
The governance of explosive growth seems to me to be of comparable importance as AI alignment, not dramatically less tractable, and is currently much more neglected. The marginal cost-effectiveness of work in this area therefore seems to be even higher than marginal work on AI alignment. It is, however, still very pre-paradigmatic: it’s hard to know what’s most important in this area, what things would be desirable to push on, or even what good research looks like.
I’ll talk more about all this in my EAG: Bay Area talk, “New Frontiers in Effective Altruism.” I’m far from the only person to highlight these issues, though. For example, Holden Karnofsky has an excellent blog post on issues beyond misalignment; Lukas Finnveden has a great post on similar themes here and an extensive and in-depth series on potential projects here. More generally, I think there’s a lot of excitement about work in this broad area that isn’t yet being represented in places like the Forum. I’d be keen for more people to start learning about and thinking about these issues.
Over the last year, I’ve done a little bit of exploratory research into some of these areas; over the next six months, I plan to continue this in a focused way, with an eye toward making this a multi-year focus. In particular, I’m interested in the rights of digital beings, governance of space resources, and, above all, on the “meta” challenge of ensuring that we have good deliberative processes through the period of explosive growth. (One can think of work on the meta challenge as fleshing out somewhat realistic proposals that could take us in the direction of the “long reflection”.) By working on good deliberative processes, we could thereby improve decision-making on all the Grand Challenges we will face. This work could also help with AI safety, too: if we can guarantee power-sharing after the development of superintelligence, that decreases the incentive for competitors to race and cut corners on safety.
I’m not sure yet what output this would ultimately lead to, if I decide to continue work on this beyond the next six months. Plausibly there could be many possible books, policy papers, or research institutes on these issues, and I’d be excited to help make happen whichever of these seem highest-impact after further investigation.
Beyond this work, I’ll continue to provide support for individuals and organisations in EA (such as via fundraising, advice, advocacy and passing on opportunities) in an ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ way; most likely, I’ll just literally allocate 20% of my time to this, and spend the remaining 80% on the ethics and governance issues I list above. I expect not to be very involved with organisational decision-making (for example by being on boards of EA organisations) in the medium term, in order to stay focused and play to my comparative advantage.
I’m looking for a joint research and executive assistant to help with the work outlined above. The role involves research tasks such as providing feedback on drafts, conducting literature reviews and small research projects, as well as administrative tasks like processing emails, scheduling, and travel booking. The role could also turn into a more senior role, depending on experience and performance.
Example projects that a research assistant could help with include:
- A literature review on the drivers of moral progress.
- A “literature review” focused on reading through LessWrong, the EA Forum, and other blogs, and finding the best work there related to the fragility of value thesis.
- Case studies on: What exactly happened to result in the creation of the UN, and the precise nature of the UN Charter? What can we learn from it? Similarly for The Kyoto Protocol, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, the Montreal Protocol.
- Short original research projects, such as:
  - Figuring out what a good operationalisation of transformative AI would be, for the purpose of creating an early tripwire to alert the world of an imminent intelligence explosion.
  - Taking some particular neglected Grand Challenge, and fleshing out the reasons why this Grand Challenge might or might not be a big deal.
  - Supposing that the US wanted to make an agreement to share power and respect other countries’ sovereignty in the event that it develops superintelligence, figuring out how we could legibly guarantee future compliance with that agreement, such that the commitment is credible to other countries?
The deadline for applications is February the 11th. If this seems interesting, please apply!
What links here?

William_MacAskill 18 Apr 2024 9:45 UTC
114 points
9 ∶ 2
on: Personal reflections on FTX
What I heard from former Alameda people
A number of people have asked about what I heard and thought about the split at early Alameda. I talk about this on the Spencer podcast, but here’s a summary. I’ll emphasise that this is me speaking about my own experience; I’m not speaking for others.
In early 2018 there was a management dispute at Alameda Research. The company had started to lose money, and a number of people were unhappy with how Sam was running the company. They told Sam they wanted to buy him out and that they’d leave if he didn’t accept their offer; he refused and they left.
I wasn’t involved in the dispute; I heard about it only afterwards. There were claims being made on both sides and I didn’t have a view about who was more in the right, though I was more in touch with people who had left or reduced their investment. That included the investor who was most closely involved in the dispute, who I regarded as the most reliable source.
It’s true that a number of people, at the time, were very unhappy with Sam, and I spoke to them about that. They described him as reckless, uninterested in management, bad at managing conflict, and being unwilling to accept a lower return, instead wanting to double down. In hindsight, this was absolutely a foreshadowing of what was to come. At the time, I believed the view, held by those that left, that Aladema had been a folly project that was going to fail.^[1]
As of late 2021, the early Alameda split made me aware that Sam might be difficult to work with. But there are a number of reasons why it didn’t make me think I shouldn’t advise his foundation, or that he might be engaging in fraud.
The main investor who was involved in the 2018 dispute and negotiations — and who I regarded as largely “on the side” of those who left (though since the collapse they’ve emphasised to me they didn’t regard themselves as “taking sides”) — continued to invest in Alameda, though at a lower amount, after the dispute. This made me think that what was at issue, in the dispute, was whether the company was being well-run and would be profitable, not whether Sam was someone one shouldn’t work with.
The view of those that left was that Alameda was going to fail. When, instead, it and FTX were enormously successful, and had received funding from leading VCs like Blackrock and Sequoia, this suggested that those earlier views had been mistaken, or that Sam had learned lessons and matured over the intervening years. I thought this view was held by a number of people who’d left Alameda; since the collapse I checked with several of those who left, who have confirmed that was their view.^[2]
This picture was supported by actions taken by people who’d previously worked at Alameda. Over the course of 2022, former Alameda employees, investors or advisors with former grievances against Sam did things like: advise Future Fund, work as a Future Fund regranter, accept a grant from Future Fund, congratulate Nick on his new position, trade on FTX, or even hold a significant fraction of their net worth on FTX. People who left early Alameda, including very core people, were asked for advice prior to working for FTX Foundation by people who had offers to work there; as far as I know, none of them advised against working for Sam.
I was also in contact with a few former Alameda people over 2022: as far as I remember, none of them raised concerns to me. And shortly after the collapse, one of the very most core people who left early Alameda, with probably the most animosity towards Sam, messaged me to say that they were as surprised as anyone, that they thought it was reasonable to regard the early Alameda split as a typical cofounder fallout, and that even they had come to think that Alameda and FTX had overcome their early issues and so they had started to trade on FTX.^[3]^[4]
I wish I’d been able to clear this up as soon as the TIME article was released, and I’m sorry that this means there’s been such a long period of people having question marks about this. There was a failure where at the time I thought I was going to be able to talk publicly about this just a few weeks later, but then that moment in time kept getting delayed.
1. ^
  Sam was on the board of CEA US at the time (early 2018). Around that time, after the dispute, I asked the investor that I was in touch with whether Sam should be removed from the board, and the investor said there was no need. A CEA employee (who wasn’t connected to Alameda) brought up the idea that Sam should transition off the board, because he didn’t help improve diversity of the board, didn’t provide unique skills or experience, and that CEA now employed former Alameda employees who were unhappy with him. Over the course of the year that followed, Sam was also becoming busier and less available. In mid-2019, we decided to start to reform the board, and Sam agreed to step down.
2. ^
  In addition, one former Alameda employee, who I was not particularly in touch with, made the following comment in March 2023. It was a comment on a private googledoc (written by someone other than me), but they gave me permission to share:
  “If you’d asked me about Sam six months ago I probably would have said something like “He plays hardball and is kind of miserable to work under if you want to be treated as an equal, but not obviously more so than other successful business people.” (Think Elon Musk, etc.)
  “Personally, I’m not willing to be an asshole in order to be successful, but he’s the one with the billions and he comprehensively won on our biggest concrete disagreements so shrug. Maybe he reformed, or maybe this is how you have to be.”
  As far as I was concerned that impression was mostly relevant to people considering working with or for Sam directly, and I shared it pretty freely when that came up.
  Saying anything more negative still feels like it would have been a tremendous failure to update after reality turned out not at all like I thought it would when I left Alameda in 2018 (I thought Alameda would blow up and that FTX was a bad idea which played to none of our strengths).
  Basically I think this and other sections [of the googledoc] are acting like people had current knowledge of bad behaviour which they feared sharing, as opposed to historical knowledge of bad behaviour which tended to be accompanied by doomy predictions that seemed to have been comprehensively proven false. Certainly I had just conceded epistemic defeat on this issue.”
3. ^
  They also thought, though, that the FTX collapse should warrant serious reflection about the culture in EA.
4. ^
  On an older draft of this comment (which was substantively similar) I asked several people who left Alameda in 2018 (or reduced their investment) to check the above six paragraphs, and they told me they thought the paragraphs were accurate.

Defining Effective Altruism

William_MacAskill19 Jul 2019 10:49 UTC

108 points

22 comments5 min readEA link

William_MacAskill 1 Apr 2022 15:58 UTC
99 points
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on: Announcing What The Future Owes Us
I love this, haha.

But, as with many things, J.S. Mill did this meme first!!!

In the Houses of Parliament on April 17th, 1866, he gave a speech arguing that we should keep coal in the ground (!!). As part of that speech, he said:

I beg permission to press upon the House the duty of taking these things into serious consideration, in the name of that dutiful concern for posterity [...] There are many persons in the world, and there may possibly be some in this House, though I should be sorry to think so, who are not unwilling to ask themselves, in the words of the old jest, “Why should we sacrifice anything for posterity; what has posterity done for us?”
They think that posterity has done nothing for them: but that is a great mistake. Whatever has been done for mankind by the idea of posterity; whatever has been done for mankind by philanthropic concern for posterity, by a conscientious sense of duty to posterity [...] all this we owe to posterity, and all this it is our duty to the best of our limited ability to repay.”
all great deeds [and] all [of] culture itself [...] all this is ours because those who preceded us have cared, and have taken thought, for posterity [...] Not owe anything to posterity, Sir! We owe to it Bacon, and Newton, and Locke, and Bentham; aye, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Wordsworth.”
Huge H/T to Tom Moynihan for sending this to me back in December. Interestingly, in the 1860s there seems to have been a bit of a wave of longtermist thought among the utilitarians, though their empirical views about the amount of available coal were way off.

William_MacAskill

On talking about this publicly

Elon Musk

What I heard from former Alameda people