William_MacAskill

Karma: 8,109

William_MacAskill 29 Dec 2021 21:37 UTC
300 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Democratising Risk—or how EA deals with critics
Hi—Thanks so much for writing this. I’m on holiday at the moment so have only have been able to quickly skim your post and paper. But, having got the gist, I just wanted to say:
(i) It really pains me to hear that you lost time and energy as a result of people discouraging you from publishing the paper, or that you had to worry over funding on the basis of this. I’m sorry you had to go through that.
(ii) Personally, I’m excited to fund or otherwise encourage engaged and in-depth “red team” critical work on either (a) the ideas of EA, longtermism or strong longtermism, or (b) what practical implications have been taken to follow from EA, longtermism, or strong longtermism. If anyone reading this comment would like funding (or other ways of making their life easier) to do (a) or (b)-type work, or if you know of people in that position, please let me know at will@effectivealtruism.org. I’ll try to consider any suggestions, or put the suggestions in front of others to consider, by the end of January.
What links here?

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?

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
151 points
19 ∶ 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.

William_MacAskill 18 Apr 2024 9:47 UTC
128 points
29 ∶ 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 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?
- Will MacAskill has stepped down as trustee of EV UK by lincolnq (21 Sep 2023 15:41 UTC; 141 points)
- JWS's comment on EA is good, actually by Amy Labenz (30 Nov 2023 12:07 UTC; 18 points)

William_MacAskill 18 Apr 2024 9:45 UTC
124 points
11 ∶ 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.
What links here?
- William_MacAskill's comment on Personal reflections on FTX by William_MacAskill (18 Apr 2024 9:39 UTC; 92 points)
- AnonymousEAForumAccount's comment on Personal reflections on FTX by William_MacAskill (23 Apr 2024 14:15 UTC; 33 points)

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 1 Apr 2022 15:58 UTC
99 points
0 ∶ 0
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 18 Apr 2024 9:46 UTC
94 points
11 ∶ 1
on: Personal reflections on FTX
How I publicly talked about Sam
Some people have asked questions about how I publicly talked about Sam, on podcasts and elsewhere. Here is a list of all the occasions I could find where I publicly talked about him. Though I had my issues with him, especially his overconfidence, overall I was excited by him. I thought he was set to do a tremendous amount of good for the world, and at the time I felt happy to convey that thought. Of course, knowing what I know now, I hate how badly I misjudged him, and hate that I at all helped improve his reputation.
Some people have claimed that I deliberately misrepresented Sam’s lifestyle. In a number of places, I said that Sam planned to give away 99% of his wealth, and in this post, in the context of discussing why I think honest signalling is good, I said, “I think the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried is a vegan and drives a Corolla is awesome, and totally the right call”. These statements represented what I believed at the time. Sam said, on multiple occasions, that he was planning to give away around 99% of his wealth, and the overall picture I had of him was highly consistent with that, so the Corolla seemed like an honest signal of his giving plans.
It’s true that the apartment complex where FTX employees, including Sam, lived, and which I visited, was extremely high-end. But, generally, Sam seemed uninterested in luxury or indulgence, especially for someone worth $20 billion at the time. As I saw it, he would usually cook dinner for himself. He was still a vegan, and I never saw him consume a non-vegan product. He dressed shabbily. He never expressed interest in luxuries. As far as I could gather, he never took a vacation, and rarely even took a full weekend off. On time off he would play chess or video games, or occasionally padel. I never saw him drink alcohol or do illegal drugs.
The only purchase that I knew of that seemed equivocal was the penthouse. But that was shared with 9 other flatmates, with the living room doubling as an office space, and was used to host company dinners. I did ask Nishad about why they were living in such luxury accommodation: he said that it was nicer than they’d ideally like, but that they were supply constrained in the Bahamas. They wanted to have somewhere that would be attractive enough to make employees move from the US, that would have good security, and that would have a campus feel, and that Albany was pretty much their only option. This seemed credible to me at the time, especially given how strange and cramped their offices were. And even if it was a pure indulgence, the cost to Sam of 1/10th of a $30M penthouse was ~0.01% of his wealth — so, compatible with giving away 99% of what he made.

After the collapse happened, though, I re-listened to Sam’s appearance on the 80,000 Hours podcast, where he commented that he likes nice apartments, which suggests that there was more self-interest at play than Nishad had made out. And, of course, I don’t know what I didn’t see; I was deceived about many things, so perhaps Sam and others lied about their personal spending, too.

William_MacAskill 18 Apr 2024 9:39 UTC
92 points
8 ∶ 1
on: Personal reflections on FTX
Lessons and updates
The scale of the harm from the fraud committed by Sam Bankman-Fried and the others at FTX and Alameda is difficult to comprehend. Over a million people lost money; dozens of projects’ plans were thrown into disarray because they could not use funding they had received or were promised; the reputational damage to EA has made the good that thousands of honest, morally motivated people are trying to do that much harder. On any reasonable understanding of what happened, what they did was deplorable. I’m horrified by the fact that I was Sam’s entry point into EA.
In these comments, I offer my thoughts, but I don’t claim to be the expert on the lessons we should take from this disaster. Sam and the others harmed me and people and projects I love, more than anyone else has done in my life. I was lied to, extensively, by people I thought were my friends and allies, in a way I’ve found hard to come to terms with. Even though a year and a half has passed, it’s still emotionally raw for me: I’m trying to be objective and dispassionate, but I’m aware that this might hinder me.
There are four categories of lessons and updates:
- Undoing updates made because of FTX
- Appreciating the new world we’re in
- Assessing what changes we could make in EA to make catastrophes like this less likely to happen again
- Assessing what changes we could make such that EA could handle crises better in the future
On the first two points, the post from Ben Todd is good, though I don’t agree with all of what he says. In my view, the most important lessons when it comes to the first two points, which also have bearing on the third and fourth, are:
- Against “EA exceptionalism”: without evidence to the contrary, we should assume that people in EA are about average (given their demographics) on traits that don’t relate to EA. Sadly, that includes things like likelihood to commit crimes. We should be especially cautious to avoid a halo effect — assuming that because someone is good in some ways, like being dedicated to helping others, then they are good in other ways, too, like having integrity.
  - Looking back, there was a crazy halo effect around Sam, and I’m sure that will have influenced how I saw him. Before advising Future Fund, I remember asking a successful crypto investor — not connected to EA — what they thought of him. Their reply was: “He is a god.”
  - In my own case, I think I’ve been too trusting of people, and in general too unwilling to countenance the idea that someone might be a bad actor, or be deceiving me. Given what we know now, it was obviously a mistake to trust Sam and the others, but I think I’ve been too trusting in other instances in my life, too. I think in particular that I’ve been too quick to assume that, because someone indicates they’re part of the EA team, they are thereby trustworthy and honest. I think that fully improving on this trait will take a long time for me, and I’m going to bear this in mind in which roles I take on in the future.
- Presenting EA in the context of the whole of morality.
  - EA is compatible with very many different moral worldviews, and this ecumenicism was a core reason for why EA was defined as it was. But people have often conflated EA with naive utilitarianism: that promoting wellbeing is the *only* thing that matters.
  - Even on pure utilitarian grounds, you should take seriously the wisdom enshrined in common-sense moral norms, and be extremely sceptical if your reasoning leads you to depart wildly from them. There are very strong consequentialist reasons for acting with integrity and for being cooperative with people with other moral views.
  - But, what’s more, utilitarianism is just one plausible moral view among many, and we shouldn’t be at all confident in it. Taking moral uncertainty into account means taking seriously the consequences of your actions, but it also means respecting common-sense moral prohibitions.^[1]
  - I could have done better in how I’ve communicated on this score. In the past, I’ve emphasised the distinctive aspects of EA, treated the conflation with naive utilitarianism as a confusion that people have, and the response to it as an afterthought, rather than something built into the core of talking about the ideas. I plan to change that, going forward — emphasising more the whole of morality, rather than just the most distinctive contributions that EA makes (namely, that we should be a lot more benevolent and a lot more intensely truth-seeking than common-sense morality suggests).
- Going even further on legibly acting in accordance with common-sense virtues than one would otherwise, because onlookers will be more sceptical of people associated with EA than they were before.
  - Here’s an analogy I’ve found helpful. Suppose it’s a 30mph zone, where almost everyone in fact drives at 35mph. If you’re an EA, how fast should you drive? Maybe before it was ok to go at 35, in line with prevailing norms. Now I think we should go at 30.
- Being willing to fight for EA qua EA.
  - FTX has given people an enormous stick to hit EA with, and means that a lot of people have wanted to disassociate from EA. This will result in less work going towards the most important problems in the world today—yet another of the harms that Sam and the others caused.
  - But it means we’ll need, more than ever, for people who believe that the ideas are true and important to be willing to stick up for them, even in the face of criticism that’s often unfair and uncharitable, and sometimes downright mean.
On the third point — how to reduce the chance of future catastrophes — the key thing, in my view, is to pay attention to people’s local incentives when trying to predict their behaviour, in particular looking at the governance regime they are in. Some of my concrete lessons, here, are:
- You can’t trust VCs or the financial media to detect fraud.^[2] (Indeed, you shouldn’t even expect VCs to be particularly good at detecting fraud, as it’s often not in their self-interest to do so; I found Jeff Kaufman’s post on this very helpful).
- The base rates of fraud are surprisingly high (here and here).
- We should expect the base rate to be higher in poorly-regulated industries.
- The idea that a company is run by “good people” isn’t sufficient to counterbalance that.
  - In general, people who commit white collar crimes often have good reputations before the crime; this is one of the main lessons from Eugene Soltes’s book Why They Do It.
  - In the case of FTX: the fraud was committed by Caroline, Gary and Nishad, as well as Sam. Though some people had misgivings about Sam, I haven’t heard the same about the others. In Nishad’s case in particular, comments I’ve heard about his character are universally that he seemed kind, thoughtful and honest. Yet, that wasn’t enough.
  - (This is all particularly on my mind when thinking about the future behaviour of AI companies, though recent events also show how hard it is to get governance right so that it’s genuinely a check on power.)
- In the case of FTX, if there had been better aggregation of people’s opinions on Sam that might have helped a bit, though as I note in another comment there was a widespread error in thinking that the 2018 misgivings were wrong or that he’d matured. But what would have helped a lot more, in my view, was knowing how poorly-governed the company was — there wasn’t a functional board, or a risk department, or a CFO.
On how to respond better to crises in the future…. I think there’s a lot. I currently have no formal responsibilities over any community organisations, and do limited informal advising, too,^[3] so I’ll primarily let Zach (once he’s back from vacation) or others comment in more depth on lessons learned from this, as well as changes that are being made, and planned to be made, across the EA community as a whole.
But one of the biggest lessons, for me, is decentralisation, and ensuring that people and organisations to a greater extent have clear separation in their roles and activities than they have had in the past. I wrote about this more here. (Since writing that post, though, I now lean more towards thinking that someone should “own” managing the movement, and that that should be the Centre for Effective Altruism. This is because there are gains from “public goods” in the movement that won’t be provided by default, and because I think Zach is going to be a strong CEO who can plausibly pull it off.)
In my own case, at the point of time of the FTX collapse, I was:
- On the board of EV
- An advisor to Future Fund
- The most well-known advocate of EA
But once FTX collapsed, these roles interfered with each other. In particular, being on the board of EV and an advisor to Future Fund majorly impacted my ability to defend EA in the aftermath of the collapse and to help the movement try to make sense of what had happened. In retrospect, I wish I’d started building up a larger board for EV (then CEA), and transitioned out of that role, as early as 2017 or 2018; this would have made the movement as a whole more robust.
Looking forward, I’m going to stay off boards for a while, and focus on research, writing and advocacy.
1. ^
  I give my high-level take on what generally follows from taking moral uncertainty seriously, here: “In general, and very roughly speaking, I believe that maximizing expected choice- worthiness under moral uncertainty entails something similar to a value-pluralist consequentialism-plus-side-constraints view, with heavy emphasis on consequences that impact the long-run future of the human race.”
2. ^
  There’s a knock against prediction markets, here, too. A Metaculus forecast, in March of 2022 (the end of the period when one could make forecasts on this question), gave a 1.3% chance of FTX making any default on customer funds over the year. The probability that the Metaculus forecasters would have put on the claim that FTX would default on very large numbers of customer funds, as a result of misconduct, would presumably have been lower.
3. ^
  More generally, I’m trying to emphasise that I am not the “leader” of the EA movement, and, indeed, that I don’t think that the EA movement is the sort of thing that should have a leader. I’m still in favour of EA having advocates (and, hopefully, very many advocates, including people who hopefully get a lot more well-known than I am), and I plan to continue to advocate for EA, but I see that as a very different role.
What links here?
- Personal reflections on FTX by William_MacAskill (18 Apr 2024 9:37 UTC; 231 points)

William_MacAskill 19 Aug 2019 17:59 UTC
87 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: SiebeRozendal’s comment on: Ask Me Anything!
Honestly, the biggest benefit to my wellbeing was taking action about depression, including seeing a doctor, going on antidepressants, and generally treating it like a problem that needed to be solved. I really think I might not have done that, or might have done it much later, were it not for EA—EA made me think about things in an outcome-oriented way, and gave me an extra reason to ensure I was healthy and able to work well.
For others: I think that Scott Alexander’s posts on anxiety and depression are really excellent and hard to beat in terms of advice. Other things I’d add: I’d generally recommend that your top goal should be ensuring that you’re in a healthy state before worrying too much about how to go about helping others; if you’re seriously unhappy or burnt our, fixing that first is almost certainly the best altruistic thing you can do. I also recommend maintaining and cultivating a non-EA life: having a multi-faceted identity means that if one aspect of your life isn’t going so well, then you can take solace in other aspects.
What links here?
- Peter Wildeford's comment on AMA: Peter Wildeford (Co-CEO at Rethink Priorities) by Peter Wildeford (25 Jul 2023 4:24 UTC; 61 points)

William_MacAskill 7 Sep 2023 13:03 UTC
81 points
14 ∶ 4
on: Nick Beckstead is leaving the Effective Ventures boards
(My personal views only, and like Nick I’ve been recused from a lot of board work since November.)

Thank you, Nick, for all your work on the Boards over the last eleven years. You helped steward the organisations into existence, and were central to helping them flourish and grow. I’ve always been impressed by your work ethic, your willingness to listen and learn, and your ability to provide feedback that was incisive, helpful, and kind.
Because you’ve been less in the limelight than me or Toby, I think many people don’t know just how crucial a role you played in EA’s early days. Though you joined shortly after launch, given all your work on it I think you were essentially a third cofounder of Giving What We Can; you led its research for many years, and helped build vital bridges with GiveWell and later Open Philanthropy. I remember that when you launched Giving What We Can: Rutgers, you organised a talk with I think over 500 people. It must still be one of the most well-attended talks that we’ve ever had within EA, and helped the idea of local groups get off the ground.
The EA movement wouldn’t have been the same without your service. It’s been an honour to have worked with you.

William_MacAskill 20 Aug 2019 15:27 UTC
81 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: HenryStanley’s comment on: Ask Me Anything!
Relative to the base rate of how wannabe social movements go, I’m very happy with how EA is going. In particular: it doesn’t spend much of its time on internal fighting; the different groups in EA feel pretty well-coordinated; it hasn’t had any massive PR crises; it’s done a huge amount in a comparatively small amount of time, especially with respect to moving money to great organisations; it’s in a state of what seems like steady, sustainable growth. There’s a lot still to work on, but things are going pretty well.
What I could change historically: I wish we’d been a lot more thoughtful and proactive about EA’s culture in the early days. In a sense the ‘product’ of EA (as a community) is a particular culture and way of life. Then the culture and way of life we want is whatever will have the best long-run consequences. Ideally I’d want a culture where (i) 10% or so of people interact with the EA community are like ‘oh wow these are my people, sign me up’; (ii) 90% of people are like ‘these are nice, pretty nerdy, people; it’s just not for me’; and (iii) almost no-one is like, ‘wow, these people are jerks’. (On (ii) and (iii): I feel like the Quakers is the sort of thing I’m thinking does well on this; the New Atheists is the sort of thing I want to avoid.) I feel we’re still pretty far from that ideal at the moment.
I think the ways in which the culture is currently less than ideal fall into two main categories (which are interrelated). I’m thinking about ‘culture’ as ‘ways in which a casual outsider might perceive EA’ - crucially, it doesn’t matter whether this is a ‘fair’ representation or not, and I’m bearing in mind that even occasional instances of bad culture can have outsized impact on peoples’ perceptions. (So, to really hammer this home: I’m not saying that what follows is an accurate characterisation of the EA community in general. But I am saying that this is how some people experience the EA community, and I wish the number of people who experience it like this was 0.)
- - Coming across as unwelcoming or in-groupy. E.g. people having a consequentialist approach to interactions with other people (“What can I get from this other person? If nothing, move on.”); using a lot of jargon; simply not being friendly to new people; not taking an interest in people as people.
  - Coming across as intellectually arrogant. E.g. giving a lot more weight to views and arguments from people inside the community than people outside the community; being dismissive of others’ value systems or worldviews, even when one’s own worldview is quite far from the mainstream.
And I think that can get in the way of the culture and perception we want of EA, which is something like: “These are the people who are just really serious about making a difference in the world, and are trying their damndest to figure out how best to do it.”

William_MacAskill 6 Sep 2022 13:24 UTC
78 points
0 ∶ 0
on: My take on What We Owe the Future
Hi Eli, thank you so much for writing this! I’m very overloaded at the moment, so I’m very sorry I’m not going to be able to engage fully with this. I just wanted to make the most important comment, though, which is a meta one: that I think this is an excellent example of constructive critical engagement — I’m glad that you’ve stated your disagreements so clearly, and I also appreciate that you reached out in advance to share a draft.

William_MacAskill 17 Nov 2018 16:10 UTC
78 points
0 ∶ 0
on: William MacAskill misrepresents much of the evidence underlying his key arguments in “Doing Good Better”
Hi Alexey,
I appreciate that you’ve taken the time to consider what I’ve said in the book at such length. However, I do think that there’s quite a lot that’s wrong in your post, and I’ll describe some of that below. Though I think you have noticed a couple of mistakes in the book, I think that most of the alleged errors are not errors.
I’ll just focus on what I take to be the main issues you highlight, and I won’t address the ‘dishonesty’ allegations, as I anticipate it wouldn’t be productive to do so; I’ll leave that charge for others to assess.
tl;dr:
- Of the main issues you refer to, I think you’ve identified two mistakes in the book: I left out a caveat in my summary of the Baird et al (2016) paper, and I conflated overheads costs and CEO pay in a way that, on the latter aspect, was unfair to Charity Navigator.
- In neither case are these errors egregious in the way you suggest. I think that: (i) claiming that the Baird et al (2016) should cause us to believe that there is ‘no effect’ on wages is a misrepresentation of that paper; (ii) my core argument against Charity Navigator, regarding their focus on ‘financial efficiency’ metrics like overhead costs, is both successful and accurately depicts Charity Navigator.
- I don’t think that the rest of the alleged major errors are errors. In particular: (i) GiveWell were able to review the manuscript before publication and were happy with how I presented their research; the quotes you give generally conflate how to think about GiveWell’s estimates with how to think about DCP2’s estimates; (ii) There are many lines of evidence supporting the 100x multiplier, and I don’t rely at all on the DCP2 estimates, as you imply.
(Also, caveating up front: for reasons of time limitations, I’m going to have to precommit to this being my last comment on this thread.)
(Also, Alexey’s post keeps changing, so if it looks like I’m responding to something that’s no longer there, that’s why.)
1. Deworming
Since the book came out, there has been much more debate about the efficacy of deworming. As I’ve continued to learn about the state and quality of the empirical evidence around deworming, I’ve become less happy with my presentation of the evidence around deworming in Doing Good Better; this fact has been reflected on the errata page on my website for the last two years. On your particular points, however:
Deworming vs textbooks
If textbooks have a positive effect, it’s via how much children learn in school, rather than an incentive for them to spend more time in school. So the fact that there doesn’t seem to be good evidence for textbooks increasing test scores is pretty bad.
If deworming has a positive effect, it could be via a number of mechanisms, including increased school attendance or via learning more in school, or direct health impacts, etc. If there are big gains on any of these dimensions, then deworming looks promising. I agree that more days in school certainly aren’t good in themselves, however, so the better evidence is about the long-run effects.
Deworming’s long-run effects
Here’s how GiveWell describes the study on which I base my discussion of the long-run effects of deworming:
“10-year follow-up: Baird et al. 2016 compared the first two groups of schools to receive deworming (as treatment group) to the final group (as control); the treatment group was assigned 2.41 extra years of deworming on average. The study’s headline effect is that as adults, those in the treatment group worked and earned substantially more, with increased earnings driven largely by a shift into the manufacturing sector.” Then, later: “We have done a variety of analyses to assess the robustness of the core findings from Baird et al. 2016, including reanalyzing the data and code underlying the study, and the results have held up to our scrutiny.”
You are correct that my description of the findings of the Baird et al paper was not fully accurate. When I wrote, “Moreover, when Kremer’s colleagues followed up with the children ten years later, those who had been dewormed were working an extra 3.4 hours per week and earning an extra 20 percent of income compared to those who had not been dewormed,” I should have included the caveat “among non-students with wage employment.” I’m sorry about that, and I’m updating my errata page to reflect this.
As for how much we should update on the basis of the Baird et al paper — that’s a really big discussion, and I’m not going to be able to add anything above what GiveWell have already written (here, here and here). I’ll just note that:
(i) Your gloss on the paper seems misleading to me. If you include people with zero earnings, of course it’s going to be harder to get a statistically significant effect. And the data from those who do have an income but who aren’t in wage employment are noisier, so it’s harder to get a statistically significant effect there too. In particular, see here from the 2015 version of the paper: “The data on [non-agricultural] self-employment profits are likely measured with somewhat more noise. Monthly profits are 22% larger in the treatment group, but the difference is not significant (Table 4, Panel C), in part due to large standard errors created by a few male outliers reporting extremely high profits. In a version of the profit data that trims the top 5% of observations, the difference is 28% (P < 0.10).”
(ii) GiveWell finds the Baird et al paper to be an important part of the evidence behind their support of deworming. If you disagree with that, then you’re engaged in a substantive disagreement with GiveWell’s views; it seems wrong to me to class that as a simple misrepresentation.
2. Cost-effectiveness estimates
Given the previous debate that had occurred between us on how to think and talk about cost-effectiveness estimates, and the mistakes I had made in this regard, I wanted to be sure that I was presenting these estimates in a way that those at GiveWell would be happy with. So I asked an employee of GiveWell to look over the relevant parts of the manuscript of DGB before it was published; in the end five employees did so, and they were happy with how I presented GiveWell’s views and research.
How can that fact be reconciled with the quotes you give in your blog post? It’s because, in your discussion, you conflate two quite different issues: (i) how to represent that cost-effectiveness estimates provided by DCP2, or by single studies; (ii) how to represent the (in my view much more rigorous) cost-effectiveness estimates provided by GiveWell. Almost all the quotes from Holden that you give are about (i). But the quotes you criticise me for are about (ii). So, for example, when I say ‘these estimates’ are order of magnitude estimates that’s referring to (i), not to (ii).
There’s a really big difference between (i) and (ii). I acknowledge that back in 2010 I was badly wrong about the reliability of DCP2 and individual studies, and that GWWC was far too slow to update its web pages after the unreliability of these estimates came to light. But the level of time, care and rigour that have gone into the GiveWell estimates are much greater than those that have gone into the DCP2 estimates. It’s still the case that there’s a huge amount of uncertainty surrounding the GiveWell estimates, but describing them as “the most rigorous estimates” we have seems reasonable to me.
More broadly: Do I really think that you do as much good or more in expectation from donating $3500 to AMF as saving a child’s life? Yes. GiveWell’s estimate of the direct benefits might be optimistic or pessimistic (though it has stayed relatively stable over many years now — the median GiveWell estimate for ‘cost for outcome as good as averting the death of an individual under 5’ is currently $1932), but I really don’t have a view on which is more likely. And, what’s more important, the biggest consideration that’s missing from GiveWell’s analysis is the long-run effects of saving a life. While of course it’s a thorny issue, I personally find it plausible that the long-run expected benefits from a donation to AMF are considerably larger than the short-run benefits — you speed up economic progress just a little bit, in expectation making those in the future just a little bit better off than they would have otherwise been. Because the future is so vast in expectation, that effect is very large. (There’s *plenty* more to discuss on this issue of long-run effects — Might those effects be negative? How should you discount future consumption? etc — but that would take us too far afield.)
3. Charity Navigator
Let’s distinguish: (i) the use of overhead ratio as a metric in assessing charities; (ii) the use of CEO pay as a metric in assessing charities. The idea of evaluating charities on overheads and on the basis of CEO pay are often run together in public discussion, and are both wrong for similar reasons, so I bundled them together in my discussion.
Regarding (ii): CN-of-2014 did talk a lot about CEO pay: they featured CEO pay, in both absolute terms and as a proportion of expenditure, prominently on their charity evaluation pages (see, e.g. their page on Books for Africa), they had top-ten lists like, “10 highly-rated charities with low paid CEOs”, and “10 highly paid CEOs at low-rated charities” (and no lists of “10 highly-rated charities with high paid CEOs” or “10 low-rated charities with low paid CEOs”). However, it is true that CEO pay was not a part of CN’s rating system. And, rereading the relevant passages of DGB, I can see how the reader would have come away with the wrong impression on that score. So I’m sorry about that. (Perhaps I was subconsciously still ornery from their spectacularly hostile hit piece on EA that came out while I was writing DGB, and was therefore less careful than I should have been.) I’ve updated my errata page to make that clear.
Regarding (i): CN’s two key metrics for charities are (a) financial health and (b) accountability and transparency. (a) is in very significant part about the charities’ overheads ratios (in several different forms), where they give a charity a higher score the lower its overheads are, breaking the scores into five broad buckets: see here for more detail. The doughnuts for police officers example shows that a really bad charity could score extremely highly on CN’s metrics, which shows that CN’s metrics must be wrong. Similarly for Books for Africa, which gets a near-perfect score from CN, and features in its ‘ten top-notch charities’ list, in significant part because of its very low overheads, despite having no good evidence to support its program.
I represent CN fairly, and make a fair criticism of its approach to assessing charities. In the extended quote you give, they caveat that very low overheads are not make-or-break for a charity. But, on their charity rating methodology, all other things being equal they give a charity a higher score the lower the charity’s overheads. If that scoring method is a bad one, which it is, then my criticism is justified.
4. Life satisfaction and income and the hundredfold multiplier
The hundredfold multiplier
You make two objections to my 100x multiplier claim: that the DCP2 deworming estimate was off by 100x, and that the Stevenson and Wolfers paper does not support it.
But there are very many lines of evidence in favour of the 100x multiplier, which I reference in Doing Good Better. I mention that there are many independent justifications for thinking that there is a logarithmic (or even more concave) relationship between income and happiness on p.25, and in the endnotes on p.261-2 (all references are to the British paperback edition—yellow cover). In addition to the Stevenson and Wolfers lifetime satisfaction approach (which I discuss later), here are some reasons for thinking that the hundredfold multiplier obtains:
- The experiential sampling method of assessing happiness. I mention this in the endnote on p.262, pointing out that, on this method, my argument would be stronger, because on this method the relationship between income and wellbeing is more concave than logarithmic, and is in fact bounded above.
- Imputed utility functions from the market behaviour of private individuals and the actions of government. It’s absolutely mainstream economic thought that utility varies with log of income (that is, eta=1 in an isoelastic utility function) or something more concave (eta>1). I reference a paper that takes this approach on p.261, the Groom and Maddison (2013). They estimate eta to be 1.5.
- Estimates of cost to save a life. I discuss this in ch.2; I note that this is another strand of supporting evidence prior to my discussion of Stevenson and Wolfers on p.25: “It’s a basic rule of economics that money is less valuable to you the more you have of it. We should therefore expect $1 to provide a larger benefit for an extremely poor Indian farmer than it would for you or me. But how much larger? Economists have sought to answer this question through a variety of methods. We’ll look at some of these in the next chapter, but for now I’ll just discuss one [the Stevenson and Wolfers approach].” Again, you find 100x or more discrepancy in the cost to save a life in rich or poor countries.
- Estimate of cost to provide one QALY. As with the previous bullet point.
Note, crucially, that the developing world estimates for cost to provide one QALY or cost to save a life come from GiveWell, not — as you imply — from DCP2 or any individual study.
Is there a causal relationship from income to wellbeing?
It’s true that there Stevenson and Wolfers only shows the correlation is between income and wellbeing. But that there is a causal relationship, from income to wellbeing, is beyond doubt. It’s perfectly obvious that, over the scales we’re talking, higher income enables you to have more wellbeing (you can buy analgesics, healthcare, shelter, eat more and better food, etc).
It’s true that we don’t know exactly the strength of the causal relationship. Understanding this could make my argument stronger or weaker. To illustrate, here’s a quote from another Stevenson and Wolfers paper, with the numerals in square brackets added in by me:
“Although our analysis provides a useful measurement of the bivariate relationship between income and well-being both within and between countries, there are good reasons to doubt that this corresponds to the causal effect of income on well-being. It seems plausible (perhaps even likely) that [i] the within-country well-being-income gradient may be biased upward by reverse causation, as happiness may well be a productive trait in some occupations, raising income. A different perspective, from offered by Kahneman, et al. (2006), suggests that [ii] within-country comparisons overstate the true relationship between subjective well-being and income because of a “focusing illusion”: the very nature of asking about life satisfaction leads people to assess their life relative to others, and they thus focus on where they fall relative to others in regard to concrete measures such as income. Although these specific biases may have a more important impact on within-country comparisons, it seems likely that [iii] the bivariate well-being-GDP relationship may also reflect the influence of third factors, such as democracy, the quality of national laws or government, health, or even favorable weather conditions, and many of these factors raise both GDP per capita and well-being (Kenny, 1999).29 [iv] Other factors, such as increased savings, reduced leisure, or even increasingly materialist values may raise GDP per capita at the expense of subjective well-being. At this stage we cannot address these shortcomings in any detail, although, given our reassessment of the stylized facts, we would suggest an urgent need for research identifying these causal parameters.”
To the extent to which (i), (ii) or (iv) are true, the case for the 100x multiplier becomes stronger. To the extent to which (iii) is true, the case for the 100x multiplier becomes weaker. We don’t know, at the moment, which of these are the most important factors. But, given that the wide variety of different strands of evidence listed in the previous section all point in the same direction, I think that estimating a 100x multiplier as a causal matter is reasonable. (Final point: noting again that all these estimates do not factor in the long-run benefits of donations, which would increase the ratio of benefits others to benefits to yourself even further in the direction of benefits to others.)
On the Stevenson and Wolfers data, is the relationship between income and happiness weaker for poor countries than for rich countries?
If it were the case that money does less to buy happiness (for any given income level) in poor countries than in rich countries, then that would be one counterargument to mine.
However, it doesn’t seem to me that this is true of the Stevenson and Wolfers data. In particular, it’s highly cherry-picked to compare Nigeria and the USA as you do, because Nigeria is a clear outlier in terms of how flat the slope is. I’m only eyeballing the graph, but it seems to me that, of the poorest countries represented (PHL, BGD, EGY, CHN, IND, PAK, NGA, ZAF, IDN), only NGA and ZAF have flatter slopes than USA (and even for ZAF, that’s only true for incomes less than $6000 or so); all the rest have slopes that are similar to or steeper than that of USA (IND, PAK, BGD, CHN, EGY, IDN all seem steeper than USA to me). Given that Nigeria is such an outlier, I’m inclined not to give it too much weight. The average trend across countries, rich and poor, is pretty clear.

William_MacAskill 15 Mar 2023 15:50 UTC
77 points
21 ∶ 23
on: William_MacAskill’s Shortform
Given the TIME article, I thought I should give you all an update. Even though I have major issues with the piece, I don’t plan to respond to it right now.

Since my l ast shortform post, I’ve done a bunch of thinking, updating and planning in light of the FTX collapse. I had hoped to be able to publish a first post with some thoughts and clarifications by now; I really want to get it out as soon as I can, but I won’t comment publicly on FTX at least until the independent investigation commissioned by EV is over. Unfortunately, I think that’s a minimum of 2 months, and I’m still sufficiently unsure on timing that I don’t want to make any promises on that front. I’m sorry about that: I’m aware that this will be very frustrating for you; it’s frustrating for me, too.
What links here?

William_MacAskill 19 Aug 2019 18:09 UTC
77 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Ask Me Anything!
Lots! Treat all of the following as ‘things Will casually said in conversation’ rather than ‘Will is dying on this hill’ (I’m worried about how messages travel and transmogrify, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I changed lots of these views again in the near future!). But some things include:
- I think existential risk this century is much lower than I used to think — I used to put total risk this century at something like 20%; now I’d put it at less than 1%.
- I find ‘takeoff’ scenarios from AI over the next century much less likely than I used to. (Fast takeoff in particular, but even the idea of any sort of ‘takeoff’, understood in terms of moving to a higher growth mode, rather than progress in AI just continuing existing two-century-long trends in automation.) I’m not sure what numbers I’d have put on this previously, but I’d now put medium and fast takeoff (e.g. that in the next century we have a doubling of global GDP in a 6 month period because of progress in AI) at less than 10%.
- In general, I think it’s much less likely that we’re at a super-influential time in history; my next blog post will be about this idea
- I’m much more worried about a great power war in my lifetime than I was a couple of years ago. (Because of thinking about the base rate of war, not because of recent events.)
- I find (non-extinction) trajectory change more compelling as a way of influencing the long-run future than I used to.
- I’m much more sceptical about our current level of understanding about how to influence the long-run future than I was before, and think its more likely than I did before that EAs in 50 years will think that EAs of today were badly mistaken.
- I’m more interested than I was in getting other people’s incentives right with respect to long-run outcomes, as compared to just trying to aim for good long-run outcomes directly. So for example, I’m more interested in institutional changes than I was, including intergovernmental institutions and design of world government, and space law.
- I’m much more sympathetic to the idea of giving later (and potentially much later) than I was before.
On the more philosophical end:
- I’m no longer convinced of naturalism as a metaphysical view, where by ‘naturalism’ I mean the view that everything that exists exists in space-time. (So now, e.g., I think that numbers and properties exist, and I no longer see what supports the idea that everything that exists must be spatio-temporal).
- I haven’t really worked it through, but I probably have a pretty different take on the right theoretical approach to moral uncertainty than I used to have. (This would take a while to explain, and wouldn’t have major practical implications, but it’s different than the broad view I defend in the book and my PhD.)
What links here?

William_MacAskill 15 Apr 2022 15:38 UTC
72 points
0 ∶ 0
on: To PA or not to PA?
I reasonably often get asked about the value of executive assistants and other support staff. My estimate is that me + executive assistant is about 110%-200% of the value of me alone.
The range is so wide because I feel very unsure about increasing vs diminishing returns. If having an ExA is equivalent to doing (say) 20% more work in a week, does that increase the value of a week by more or less than 20%? My honest guess is that, for many sorts of work we’re doing, the “increasing returns” model is closer to the truth, because so many sorts of work have winner-takes-all or rich-get-richer effects. The most widely-read books or articles get read far more than slightly-worse books or articles; the public perception of an academic position at Oxford is much greater than a position at UCL, even though the difficulty of getting the former is not that much greater than the difficulty of getting the latter.
(Of course, there are also diminishing returns, which makes figuring this out so hard. E.g. there are only so many podcasts one can go on, and the listenership drops off rapidly.)
I think people normally think of the value of ExAs as just saving you time: doing things like emails, scheduling, and purchasing. In my experience, this is only a small part of the value-add. The bigger value-add comes from: (i) doing things that you just didn’t have capacity to do, or helping you do things to a higher level of quality; (ii) qualitative benefits that aren’t just about saving or gaining time. On (ii): For me that’s (a) meaning that I know that important emails, tasks, etc, won’t get overlooked, which dramatically reduces my stress levels, decreases burnout risk, and means I can do more deep work rather than feeling I need to check my emails and other messages every hour; (b) helping me prioritise (especially advising on when to say no to things, and making it easier to say no to things). Depending on the person, they can also bring skills that I simply lack, like graphic design, facility with spreadsheets, or mathematical knowledge.
Some caveats:
- It is notable to me, and an argument against my view, that some of the highest-performing people I know don’t use ExAs. I’m not quite sure what’s going on there. My guess is that if you’re a really super-productive person, the benefits I list above aren’t as great for you.
- It’s definitely an investment. It’s a short-term cost (to hire the person, think about a new structure for your life and workflow, think about what can be delegated, think about information security and data privacy, etc) for a longer-term gain.
- You should in general be cautious about hiring, and that applies to this, too: once you’ve hired someone, you now have an ongoing responsibility to them and their wellbeing, you have to think about things like compensation, performance evaluation, feedback, and so on.
What links here?
- PAs in EA: A Brief Guide & FAQ by Vaidehi Agarwalla (25 Oct 2022 16:16 UTC; 57 points)

William_MacAskill

On talking about this publicly

Elon Musk

What I heard from former Alameda people

How I publicly talked about Sam

Lessons and updates