William MacAskill: Effective Altruism
生物与进化历史与文明音乐与艺术AI 与机器学习技术与编程
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"that encourages people to commit to donate at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities."
— William MacAskill （00:37.100）
"Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1."
— William MacAskill （01:42.100）
"an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world."
— William MacAskill （02:28.800）
🎙️ 完整对话（1568 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with William McCaskill.
Lex Fridman (00:03.600)
He's a philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement.
Lex Fridman (00:09.300)
His research focuses on the fundamentals of effective altruism,
Lex Fridman (00:13.000)
or the use of evidence and reason to help others by as much as possible with our time and money,
Lex Fridman (00:19.500)
with a particular concentration on how to act given moral uncertainty.
William MacAskill (00:24.400)
He's the author of Doing Good, Better, Effective Altruism,
Lex Fridman (00:28.600)
and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference.
William MacAskill (00:31.200)
He is a cofounder and the president of the Center of Effective Altruism, CEA,
William MacAskill (00:37.100)
that encourages people to commit to donate at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities.
William MacAskill (00:43.900)
He cofounded 80,000 Hours, which is a nonprofit that provides research and advice
Lex Fridman (00:49.200)
on how you can best make a difference through your career.
William MacAskill (00:52.600)
This conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
William MacAskill (00:57.800)
For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this crisis,
William MacAskill (01:02.300)
I'm sending love your way.
Lex Fridman (01:04.200)
Stay strong. We're in this together. We'll beat this thing.
William MacAskill (01:09.100)
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
William MacAskill (01:11.900)
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
William MacAskill (01:16.200)
support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
Lex Fridman (01:23.100)
As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now,
Lex Fridman (01:25.800)
and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation.
Lex Fridman (01:29.700)
I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
William MacAskill (01:34.700)
This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store.
Lex Fridman (01:39.000)
When you get it, use code LEXPODCAST.
William MacAskill (01:42.100)
Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1.
Lex Fridman (01:48.900)
Since Cash App allows you to send and receive money digitally, peer to peer,
Lex Fridman (01:52.800)
and security in all digital transactions is very important,
Lex Fridman (01:56.100)
let me mention the PCI data security standard that Cash App is compliant with.
William MacAskill (02:01.300)
I'm a big fan of standards for safety and security.
Lex Fridman (02:04.300)
PCI DSS is a good example of that,
William MacAskill (02:07.100)
where a bunch of competitors got together and agreed
Lex Fridman (02:10.000)
that there needs to be a global standard around the security of transactions.
William MacAskill (02:14.400)
Now, we just need to do the same for autonomous vehicles and AI systems in general.
Lex Fridman (02:19.300)
So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play,
Lex Fridman (02:22.600)
and use the code LEXPODCAST, you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST,
William MacAskill (02:28.800)
an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world.
Lex Fridman (02:34.500)
And now, here's my conversation with William McCaskill.
Lex Fridman (02:39.100)
What does utopia for humans and all life on Earth look like for you?
William MacAskill (02:43.500)
That's a great question.
Lex Fridman (02:45.400)
What I want to say is that we don't know,
Lex Fridman (02:49.200)
and the utopia we want to get to is an indirect one that I call the long reflection.
William MacAskill (02:55.500)
So, period of post scarcity, no longer have the kind of urgent problems we have today,
Lex Fridman (03:01.200)
but instead can spend, perhaps it's tens of thousands of years debating,
William MacAskill (03:06.200)
engaging in ethical reflection in order, before we take any kind of drastic lock in,
William MacAskill (03:12.100)
actions like spreading to the stars,
Lex Fridman (03:14.500)
and then we can figure out what is of kind of moral value.
William MacAskill (03:20.500)
The long reflection, that's a really beautiful term.
Lex Fridman (03:25.100)
So, if we look at Twitter for just a second,
Lex Fridman (03:29.600)
do you think human beings are able to reflect in a productive way?
Lex Fridman (03:37.300)
I don't mean to make it sound bad,
William MacAskill (03:39.500)
because there is a lot of fights and politics and division in our discourse.
Lex Fridman (03:45.000)
Maybe if you zoom out, it actually is civilized discourse.
William MacAskill (03:48.900)
It might not feel like it, but when you zoom out.
Lex Fridman (03:51.000)
So, I don't want to say that Twitter is not civilized discourse.
William MacAskill (03:55.100)
I actually believe it.
Lex Fridman (03:56.100)
It's more civilized than people give it credit for.
Lex Fridman (03:58.400)
But do you think the long reflection can actually be stable,
Lex Fridman (04:03.600)
where we as human beings with our descendant of eight brains
Lex Fridman (04:08.400)
would be able to sort of rationally discuss things together and arrive at ideas?
Lex Fridman (04:13.100)
I think, overall, we're pretty good at discussing things rationally,
Lex Fridman (04:19.800)
and at least in the earlier stages of our lives being open to many different ideas,
Lex Fridman (04:28.500)
and being able to be convinced and change our views.
William MacAskill (04:33.300)
I think that Twitter is designed almost to bring out all the worst tendencies.
Lex Fridman (04:38.800)
So, if the long reflection were conducted on Twitter,
William MacAskill (04:43.200)
maybe it would be better just not even to bother.
Lex Fridman (04:46.200)
But I think the challenge really is getting to a stage
William MacAskill (04:50.300)
where we have a society that is as conducive as possible
Lex Fridman (04:55.700)
to rational reflection, to deliberation.
William MacAskill (04:59.000)
I think we're actually very lucky to be in a liberal society
Lex Fridman (05:04.000)
where people are able to discuss a lot of ideas and so on.
William MacAskill (05:06.900)
I think when we look to the future,
Lex Fridman (05:08.100)
that's not at all guaranteed that society would be like that,
William MacAskill (05:12.400)
rather than a society where there's a fixed canon of values
Lex Fridman (05:16.900)
that are being imposed on all of society,
Lex Fridman (05:20.600)
and where you aren't able to question that.
Lex Fridman (05:22.300)
That would be very bad from my perspective,
William MacAskill (05:23.900)
because it means we wouldn't be able to figure out what the truth is.
Lex Fridman (05:27.900)
I can already sense we're going to go down a million tangents,
Lex Fridman (05:31.300)
but what do you think is the...
Lex Fridman (05:36.800)
If Twitter is not optimal,
Lex Fridman (05:38.700)
what kind of mechanism in this modern age of technology
William MacAskill (05:43.300)
can we design where the exchange of ideas could be both civilized and productive,
Lex Fridman (05:49.300)
and yet not be too constrained
Lex Fridman (05:52.600)
where there's rules of what you can say and can't say,
William MacAskill (05:55.300)
which is, as you say, is not desirable,
Lex Fridman (05:57.900)
but yet not have some limits as to what can be said or not and so on?
Lex Fridman (06:02.800)
Do you have any ideas, thoughts on the possible future?
Lex Fridman (06:05.700)
Of course, nobody knows how to do it,
Lex Fridman (06:07.200)
but do you have thoughts of what a better Twitter might look like?
Lex Fridman (06:10.900)
I think that text based media are intrinsically going to be very hard
William MacAskill (06:16.200)
to be conducive to rational discussion,
Lex Fridman (06:20.000)
because if you think about it from an informational perspective,
William MacAskill (06:24.100)
if I just send you a text of less than,
Lex Fridman (06:27.200)
what is it now, 240 characters, 280 characters, I think,
William MacAskill (06:31.700)
that's a tiny amount of information compared to, say, you and I talking now,
Lex Fridman (06:36.100)
where you have access to the words I say, which is the same as in text,
Lex Fridman (06:40.100)
but also my tone, also my body language,
Lex Fridman (06:43.800)
and we're very poorly designed to be able to assess...
William MacAskill (06:47.800)
I have to read all of this context into anything you say,
Lex Fridman (06:50.300)
so maybe your partner sends you a text and has a full stop at the end.
Lex Fridman (06:56.500)
Are they mad at you?
Lex Fridman (06:58.000)
You don't know.
William MacAskill (06:58.600)
You have to infer everything about this person's mental state
Lex Fridman (07:02.400)
from whether they put a full stop at the end of a text or not.
William MacAskill (07:04.700)
Well, the flip side of that is it truly text that's the problem here,
Lex Fridman (07:08.800)
because there's a viral aspect to the text,
William MacAskill (07:14.700)
where you could just post text nonstop.
Lex Fridman (07:17.200)
It's very immediate.
William MacAskill (07:19.800)
The times before Twitter, before the internet,
Lex Fridman (07:23.200)
the way you would exchange texts is you would write books.
Lex Fridman (07:28.500)
And that, while it doesn't get body language, it doesn't get tone, it doesn't...
Lex Fridman (07:33.200)
so on, but it does actually boil down after some time of thinking,
William MacAskill (07:36.700)
some editing, and so on, boil down ideas.
Lex Fridman (07:40.000)
So is the immediacy and the viral nature,
Lex Fridman (07:45.600)
which produces the outrage mobs and so on, the potential problem?
Lex Fridman (07:49.400)
I think that is a big issue.
William MacAskill (07:51.100)
I think there's going to be this strong selection effect where
Lex Fridman (07:56.200)
something that provokes outrage, well, that's high arousal,
William MacAskill (07:59.000)
you're more likely to retweet that,
Lex Fridman (08:04.400)
whereas kind of sober analysis is not as sexy, not as viral.
William MacAskill (08:08.800)
I do agree that long form content is much better to productive discussion.
Lex Fridman (08:16.400)
In terms of the media that are very popular at the moment,
William MacAskill (08:19.400)
I think that podcasting is great where your podcasts are two hours long,
Lex Fridman (08:25.400)
so they're much more in depth than Twitter are,
Lex Fridman (08:28.900)
and you are able to convey so much more nuance,
Lex Fridman (08:33.500)
so much more caveat, because it's an actual conversation.
William MacAskill (08:36.800)
It's more like the sort of communication that we've evolved to do,
Lex Fridman (08:40.200)
rather than these very small little snippets of ideas that,
William MacAskill (08:44.900)
when also combined with bad incentives,
Lex Fridman (08:46.900)
just clearly aren't designed for helping us get to the truth.
William MacAskill (08:49.800)
It's kind of interesting that it's not just the length of the podcast medium,
Lex Fridman (08:53.700)
but it's the fact that it was started by people that don't give a damn about
William MacAskill (08:59.300)
quote unquote demand, that there's a relaxed,
Lex Fridman (09:05.100)
sort of the style that Joe Rogan does,
William MacAskill (09:08.100)
there's a freedom to express ideas
Lex Fridman (09:12.800)
in an unconstrained way that's very real.
William MacAskill (09:15.300)
It's kind of funny that it feels so refreshingly real to us today,
Lex Fridman (09:22.100)
and I wonder what the future looks like.
William MacAskill (09:24.900)
It's a little bit sad now that quite a lot of sort of more popular people
Lex Fridman (09:29.700)
are getting into podcasting,
Lex Fridman (09:31.600)
and they try to sort of create, they try to control it,
Lex Fridman (09:37.300)
they try to constrain it in different kinds of ways.
William MacAskill (09:40.200)
People I love, like Conan O Brien and so on, different comedians,
Lex Fridman (09:43.400)
and I'd love to see where the real aspects of this podcasting medium persist,
William MacAskill (09:50.600)
maybe in TV, maybe in YouTube,
Lex Fridman (09:52.500)
maybe Netflix is pushing those kind of ideas,
Lex Fridman (09:55.600)
and it's kind of, it's a really exciting word,
Lex Fridman (09:58.400)
that kind of sharing of knowledge.
William MacAskill (10:00.200)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a double edged sword
Lex Fridman (10:02.100)
as it becomes more popular and more profitable,
William MacAskill (10:04.300)
where on the one hand you'll get a lot more creativity,
Lex Fridman (10:08.400)
people doing more interesting things with the medium,
Lex Fridman (10:10.700)
but also perhaps you get this place to the bottom
Lex Fridman (10:12.700)
where suddenly maybe it'll be hard to find good content on podcasts
William MacAskill (10:18.100)
because it'll be so overwhelmed by the latest bit of viral outrage.
Lex Fridman (10:24.300)
So speaking of that, jumping on Effective Altruism for a second,
Lex Fridman (10:31.100)
so much of that internet content is funded by advertisements.
Lex Fridman (10:36.200)
Just in the context of Effective Altruism,
William MacAskill (10:39.800)
we're talking about the richest companies in the world,
Lex Fridman (10:44.100)
they're funded by advertisements essentially,
William MacAskill (10:45.800)
Google, that's their primary source of income.
Lex Fridman (10:48.800)
Do you see that as,
Lex Fridman (10:51.000)
do you have any criticism of that source of income?
Lex Fridman (10:55.200)
Do you see that source of money
William MacAskill (10:57.500)
as a potentially powerful source of money that could be used,
Lex Fridman (11:01.000)
well, certainly could be used for good,
Lex Fridman (11:03.200)
but is there something bad about that source of money?
Lex Fridman (11:05.900)
I think there's significant worries with it,
William MacAskill (11:08.100)
where it means that the incentives of the company
Lex Fridman (11:13.200)
might be quite misaligned with making people's lives better,
William MacAskill (11:20.600)
where again, perhaps the incentives are towards increasing drama
Lex Fridman (11:28.400)
and debate on your social media feed
William MacAskill (11:32.300)
in order that more people are going to be engaged,
Lex Fridman (11:36.300)
perhaps compulsively involved with the platform.
William MacAskill (11:42.200)
Whereas there are other business models
Lex Fridman (11:45.600)
like having an opt in subscription service
William MacAskill (11:49.100)
where perhaps they have other issues,
Lex Fridman (11:51.500)
but there's much more of an incentive to provide a product
William MacAskill (11:57.600)
that its users are just really wanting,
Lex Fridman (12:00.500)
because now I'm paying for this product.
William MacAskill (12:02.900)
I'm paying for this thing that I want to buy
Lex Fridman (12:05.400)
rather than I'm trying to use this thing
Lex Fridman (12:09.200)
and it's going to get a profit mechanism
Lex Fridman (12:11.600)
that is somewhat orthogonal to me
William MacAskill (12:13.600)
actually just wanting to use the product.
Lex Fridman (12:19.000)
And so, I mean, in some cases it'll work better than others.
William MacAskill (12:23.000)
I can imagine, I can in theory imagine Facebook
Lex Fridman (12:27.100)
having a subscription service,
Lex Fridman (12:28.800)
but I think it's unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Lex Fridman (12:32.200)
Well, it's interesting and it's weird
William MacAskill (12:34.200)
now that you bring it up that it's unlikely.
Lex Fridman (12:36.200)
For example, I pay I think 10 bucks a month for YouTube Red
Lex Fridman (12:41.000)
and I don't think I get it much for that
Lex Fridman (12:45.300)
except just for no ads,
Lex Fridman (12:50.200)
but in general it's just a slightly better experience.
Lex Fridman (12:52.900)
And I would gladly, now I'm not wealthy,
William MacAskill (12:56.100)
in fact I'm operating very close to zero dollars,
Lex Fridman (12:59.200)
but I would pay 10 bucks a month to Facebook
Lex Fridman (13:01.800)
and 10 bucks a month to Twitter
Lex Fridman (13:04.000)
for some kind of more control
William MacAskill (13:07.500)
in terms of advertisements and so on.
Lex Fridman (13:09.100)
But the other aspect of that is data, personal data.
William MacAskill (13:13.700)
People are really sensitive about this
Lex Fridman (13:16.200)
and I as one who hopes to one day
William MacAskill (13:20.700)
create a company that may use people's data
Lex Fridman (13:25.600)
to do good for the world,
William MacAskill (13:27.500)
wonder about this.
Lex Fridman (13:28.900)
One, the psychology of why people are so paranoid.
William MacAskill (13:32.300)
Well, I understand why,
Lex Fridman (13:33.300)
but they seem to be more paranoid
William MacAskill (13:35.200)
than is justified at times.
Lex Fridman (13:37.700)
And the other is how do you do it right?
Lex Fridman (13:39.400)
So it seems that Facebook is,
Lex Fridman (13:43.500)
it seems that Facebook is doing it wrong.
William MacAskill (13:47.300)
That's certainly the popular narrative.
Lex Fridman (13:49.500)
It's unclear to me actually how wrong.
William MacAskill (13:53.000)
Like I tend to give them more benefit of the doubt
Lex Fridman (13:55.400)
because it's a really hard thing to do right
Lex Fridman (13:59.900)
and people don't necessarily realize it,
Lex Fridman (14:01.300)
but how do we respect in your view people's privacy?
William MacAskill (14:05.900)
Yeah, I mean in the case of how worried are people
Lex Fridman (14:10.700)
about using their data,
William MacAskill (14:12.300)
I mean there's a lot of public debate
Lex Fridman (14:15.200)
and criticism about it.
William MacAskill (14:18.600)
When we look at people's revealed preferences,
Lex Fridman (14:22.100)
people's continuing massive use
William MacAskill (14:24.200)
of these sorts of services.
Lex Fridman (14:27.600)
It's not clear to me how much people really do care.
William MacAskill (14:30.500)
Perhaps they care a bit,
Lex Fridman (14:31.500)
but they're happy to in effect kind of sell their data
William MacAskill (14:35.500)
in order to be able to kind of use a certain service.
Lex Fridman (14:37.500)
That's a great term, revealed preferences.
Lex Fridman (14:39.300)
So these aren't preferences you self report in the survey.
Lex Fridman (14:42.500)
This is like your actions speak.
William MacAskill (14:44.500)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (14:45.340)
So you might say,
William MacAskill (14:46.500)
oh yeah, I hate the idea of Facebook having my data.
Lex Fridman (14:51.000)
But then when it comes to it,
William MacAskill (14:52.700)
you actually are willing to give that data in exchange
Lex Fridman (14:55.600)
for being able to use the service.
Lex Fridman (15:00.400)
And if that's the case,
Lex Fridman (15:01.600)
then I think unless we have some explanation
William MacAskill (15:05.300)
about why there's some negative externality from that
Lex Fridman (15:11.000)
or why there's some coordination failure,
William MacAskill (15:15.800)
or if there's something that consumers
Lex Fridman (15:18.000)
are just really misled about
William MacAskill (15:19.700)
where they don't realize why giving away data like this
Lex Fridman (15:23.100)
is a really bad thing to do,
William MacAskill (15:27.400)
then ultimately I kind of want to,
Lex Fridman (15:30.800)
you know, respect people's preferences.
William MacAskill (15:32.300)
They can give away their data if they want.
Lex Fridman (15:35.500)
I think there's a big difference
William MacAskill (15:36.500)
between companies use of data
Lex Fridman (15:39.700)
and governments having data where,
William MacAskill (15:43.600)
you know, looking at the track record of history,
Lex Fridman (15:45.800)
governments knowing a lot about their people can be very bad
William MacAskill (15:51.600)
if the government chooses to do bad things with it.
Lex Fridman (15:55.000)
And that's more worrying, I think.
Lex Fridman (15:57.100)
So let's jump into it a little bit.
Lex Fridman (15:59.700)
Most people know, but actually I, two years ago,
William MacAskill (16:03.900)
had no idea what effective altruism was
Lex Fridman (16:07.000)
until I saw there was a cool looking event
William MacAskill (16:09.100)
in an MIT group here.
Lex Fridman (16:10.800)
I think it's called the Effective Altruism Club or a group.
Lex Fridman (16:17.900)
I was like, what the heck is that?
Lex Fridman (16:19.800)
And one of my friends said,
William MacAskill (16:23.200)
I mean, he said that they're just
Lex Fridman (16:27.200)
a bunch of eccentric characters.
Lex Fridman (16:30.000)
So I was like, hell yes, I'm in.
Lex Fridman (16:31.600)
So I went to one of their events
Lex Fridman (16:32.800)
and looked up what's it about.
Lex Fridman (16:34.400)
It's quite a fascinating philosophical
Lex Fridman (16:37.000)
and just a movement of ideas.
Lex Fridman (16:38.900)
So can you tell me what is effective altruism?
William MacAskill (16:42.600)
Great, so the core of effective altruism
Lex Fridman (16:44.800)
is about trying to answer this question,
William MacAskill (16:46.500)
which is how can I do as much good as possible
Lex Fridman (16:49.400)
with my scarce resources, my time and with my money?
Lex Fridman (16:53.200)
And then once we have our best guess answers to that,
Lex Fridman (16:57.200)
trying to take those ideas and put that into practice,
Lex Fridman (17:00.200)
and do those things that we believe will do the most good.
Lex Fridman (17:03.000)
And we're now a community of people,
William MacAskill (17:06.100)
many thousands of us around the world,
Lex Fridman (17:08.100)
who really are trying to answer that question
William MacAskill (17:10.800)
as best we can and then use our time and money
Lex Fridman (17:13.100)
to make the world better.
Lex Fridman (17:15.200)
So what's the difference between sort of
Lex Fridman (17:18.600)
classical general idea of altruism
Lex Fridman (17:22.300)
and effective altruism?
Lex Fridman (17:24.700)
So normally when people try to do good,
William MacAskill (17:28.300)
they often just aren't so reflective about those attempts.
Lex Fridman (17:34.100)
So someone might approach you on the street
William MacAskill (17:36.300)
asking you to give to charity.
Lex Fridman (17:38.600)
And if you're feeling altruistic,
William MacAskill (17:42.200)
you'll give to the person on the street.
Lex Fridman (17:44.400)
Or if you think, oh, I wanna do some good in my life,
William MacAskill (17:48.100)
you might volunteer at a local place.
Lex Fridman (17:50.000)
Or perhaps you'll decide, pursue a career
William MacAskill (17:52.900)
where you're working in a field
Lex Fridman (17:56.500)
that's kind of more obviously beneficial
William MacAskill (17:58.200)
like being a doctor or a nurse or a healthcare professional.
Lex Fridman (18:02.300)
But it's very rare that people apply the same level
William MacAskill (18:07.900)
of rigor and analytical thinking
Lex Fridman (18:11.800)
to lots of other areas we think about.
Lex Fridman (18:14.400)
So take the case of someone approaching you on the street.
Lex Fridman (18:16.400)
Imagine if that person instead was saying,
William MacAskill (18:18.700)
hey, I've got this amazing company.
Lex Fridman (18:20.200)
Do you want to invest in it?
William MacAskill (18:22.400)
It would be insane.
Lex Fridman (18:23.800)
No one would ever think, oh, of course,
William MacAskill (18:25.500)
I'm just a company like you'd think it was a scam.
Lex Fridman (18:29.200)
But somehow we don't have that same level of rigor
William MacAskill (18:31.300)
when it comes to doing good,
Lex Fridman (18:32.400)
even though the stakes are more important
William MacAskill (18:34.600)
when it comes to trying to help others
Lex Fridman (18:36.100)
than trying to make money for ourselves.
William MacAskill (18:38.500)
Well, first of all, so there is a psychology
Lex Fridman (18:40.700)
at the individual level of doing good just feels good.
Lex Fridman (18:46.200)
And so in some sense, on that pure psychological part,
Lex Fridman (18:51.700)
it doesn't matter.
William MacAskill (18:52.900)
In fact, you don't wanna know if it does good or not
Lex Fridman (18:56.400)
because most of the time it won't.
Lex Fridman (19:01.500)
So like in a certain sense,
Lex Fridman (19:04.800)
it's understandable why altruism
William MacAskill (19:06.900)
without the effective part is so appealing
Lex Fridman (19:09.800)
to a certain population.
William MacAskill (19:11.300)
By the way, let's zoom off for a second.
Lex Fridman (19:15.300)
Do you think most people, two questions.
Lex Fridman (19:18.700)
Do you think most people are good?
Lex Fridman (19:20.900)
And question number two is,
Lex Fridman (19:22.200)
do you think most people wanna do good?
Lex Fridman (19:24.900)
So are most people good?
William MacAskill (19:26.600)
I think it's just super dependent
Lex Fridman (19:28.000)
on the circumstances that someone is in.
William MacAskill (19:31.700)
I think that the actions people take
Lex Fridman (19:34.800)
and their moral worth is just much more dependent
William MacAskill (19:37.700)
on circumstance than it is on someone's intrinsic character.
Lex Fridman (19:41.900)
So is there evil within all of us?
William MacAskill (19:43.800)
It seems like with the better angels of our nature,
Lex Fridman (19:47.900)
there's a tendency of us as a society
William MacAskill (19:50.400)
to tend towards good, less war.
Lex Fridman (19:53.300)
I mean, with all these metrics.
William MacAskill (19:56.200)
Is that us becoming who we want to be
Lex Fridman (1:00:04.400)
our nature how the technologies improve fundamentally
William MacAskill (1:00:07.200)
improving most of the world's lives.
Lex Fridman (1:00:09.300)
Yeah, and actually there's some psychological research
William MacAskill (1:00:13.000)
on the well being benefits of volunteering where people
Lex Fridman (1:00:16.800)
who volunteer tend to just feel happier about their lives
Lex Fridman (1:00:20.900)
and one of the suggested explanations is it because it
Lex Fridman (1:00:23.700)
extends your reference class.
Lex Fridman (1:00:25.600)
So no longer you comparing yourself to the Joneses who
Lex Fridman (1:00:28.700)
have their slightly better car because you realize that
William MacAskill (1:00:31.500)
you know people in much worse conditions than you and
Lex Fridman (1:00:34.300)
so now, you know your life doesn't seem so bad.
William MacAskill (1:00:37.900)
That's actually on the psychological level.
Lex Fridman (1:00:39.800)
One of the fundamental benefits of effective altruism.
William MacAskill (1:00:42.700)
Yeah is is I mean, I guess it's the altruism part of
Lex Fridman (1:00:47.700)
effective altruism is exposing yourself to the suffering
William MacAskill (1:00:51.700)
in the world allows you to be more.
Lex Fridman (1:00:55.700)
Yeah happier and actually allows you in the sort of
William MacAskill (1:00:59.900)
meditative introspective way realize that you don't need
Lex Fridman (1:01:03.000)
most of the wealth you have to to be happy.
William MacAskill (1:01:07.800)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (1:01:08.300)
I mean, I think effective options have been this huge
William MacAskill (1:01:10.400)
benefit for me and I really don't think that if I had
Lex Fridman (1:01:13.400)
more money that I was living on that that would change
William MacAskill (1:01:16.400)
my level of well being at all.
Lex Fridman (1:01:18.100)
Whereas engaging in something that I think is meaningful
William MacAskill (1:01:21.500)
that I think is stealing humanity in a positive direction.
Lex Fridman (1:01:25.200)
That's extremely rewarding.
Lex Fridman (1:01:27.400)
And so yeah, I mean despite my best attempts at sacrifice.
Lex Fridman (1:01:32.500)
Um, I don't you know, I think I've actually ended up
William MacAskill (1:01:35.000)
happier as a result of engaging in effective altruism
Lex Fridman (1:01:37.500)
than I would have done.
William MacAskill (1:01:38.800)
That's such an interesting idea.
Lex Fridman (1:01:40.300)
Yeah, so let's let's talk about animal welfare.
Lex Fridman (1:01:43.200)
Sure, easy question. What is consciousness?
Lex Fridman (1:01:46.700)
Yeah, especially as it has to do with the capacity to
William MacAskill (1:01:50.400)
suffer. I think there seems to be a connection between
Lex Fridman (1:01:53.600)
how conscious something is the amount of consciousness
Lex Fridman (1:01:57.400)
and stability to suffer and that all comes into play
Lex Fridman (1:02:01.100)
about us thinking how much suffering there's in the
William MacAskill (1:02:03.300)
world with regard to animals.
Lex Fridman (1:02:05.600)
So how do you think about animal welfare and consciousness?
William MacAskill (1:02:08.700)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (1:02:09.200)
Well consciousness easy question.
William MacAskill (1:02:10.700)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (1:02:11.100)
Um, yeah, I mean, I think we don't have a good understanding
William MacAskill (1:02:13.800)
of consciousness.
Lex Fridman (1:02:14.500)
My best guess is it's got and by consciousness.
William MacAskill (1:02:17.000)
I'm meaning what it is feels like to be you the subjective
Lex Fridman (1:02:21.200)
experience that's seems to be different from everything
William MacAskill (1:02:24.000)
else we know about in the world.
Lex Fridman (1:02:26.000)
Yeah, I think it's clear.
William MacAskill (1:02:27.400)
It's very poorly understood at the moment.
Lex Fridman (1:02:29.400)
I think it has something to do with information processing.
Lex Fridman (1:02:32.000)
So the fact that the brain is a computer or something
Lex Fridman (1:02:35.000)
like a computer.
Lex Fridman (1:02:36.300)
So that would mean that very advanced AI could be conscious
Lex Fridman (1:02:40.300)
of information processors in general could be conscious
William MacAskill (1:02:44.000)
with some suitable complexity, but that also some suitable
Lex Fridman (1:02:48.300)
complexity.
William MacAskill (1:02:49.200)
It's a question whether greater complexity creates some
Lex Fridman (1:02:51.500)
kind of greater consciousness which relates to animals.
William MacAskill (1:02:54.900)
Yeah, right.
Lex Fridman (1:02:55.600)
Is there if it's an information processing system and it's
William MacAskill (1:02:59.400)
smaller and smaller is an ant less conscious than a cow
Lex Fridman (1:03:04.100)
less conscious than a monkey.
William MacAskill (1:03:06.200)
Yeah, and again this super hard question, but I think my
Lex Fridman (1:03:10.900)
best guess is yes, like if you if I think well consciousness,
William MacAskill (1:03:14.500)
it's not some magical thing that appears out of nowhere.
Lex Fridman (1:03:17.700)
It's not you know, Descartes thought it was just comes in
William MacAskill (1:03:20.800)
from this other realm and then enters through the pineal
Lex Fridman (1:03:23.600)
gland in your brain and that's kind of soul and it's conscious.
Lex Fridman (1:03:28.400)
So it's got something to do with what's going on in your
Lex Fridman (1:03:30.200)
brain.
William MacAskill (1:03:30.700)
A chicken has one three hundredth of the size of the brain
Lex Fridman (1:03:34.200)
that you have ants.
William MacAskill (1:03:36.100)
I don't know how small it is.
Lex Fridman (1:03:37.500)
Maybe it's a millionth the size my best guess which I may
William MacAskill (1:03:41.900)
well be wrong about because this is so hard is that in some
Lex Fridman (1:03:45.300)
relevant sense the chicken is experiencing consciousness
William MacAskill (1:03:49.400)
to a less degree than the human and the ants significantly
Lex Fridman (1:03:51.900)
less again.
William MacAskill (1:03:52.900)
I don't think it's as little as three hundredth as much.
Lex Fridman (1:03:55.400)
I think there's everyone who's ever seen a chicken that's
William MacAskill (1:03:59.100)
there's evolutionary reasons for thinking that like the
Lex Fridman (1:04:02.500)
ability to feel pain comes on the scene relatively early
William MacAskill (1:04:06.000)
on and we have lots of our brain that's dedicated stuff
Lex Fridman (1:04:08.800)
that doesn't seem to have to do in anything to do with
William MacAskill (1:04:10.800)
consciousness language processing and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:04:13.900)
So it seems like the easy so there's a lot of complicated
William MacAskill (1:04:16.900)
questions there that we can't ask the animals about but
Lex Fridman (1:04:21.300)
it seems that there is easy questions in terms of suffering
William MacAskill (1:04:24.800)
which is things like factory farming that could be addressed.
Lex Fridman (1:04:29.400)
Yeah, is that is that the lowest hanging fruit?
William MacAskill (1:04:32.300)
If I may use crude terms here of animal welfare.
Lex Fridman (1:04:37.000)
Absolutely.
William MacAskill (1:04:37.700)
I think that's the lowest hanging fruit.
Lex Fridman (1:04:39.100)
So at the moment we kill we raise and kill about 50 billion
William MacAskill (1:04:43.200)
animals every year.
Lex Fridman (1:04:44.600)
So how many 50 billion in?
William MacAskill (1:04:48.000)
Yeah, so for every human on the planet several times that
Lex Fridman (1:04:52.300)
number of being killed and the vast majority of them are
William MacAskill (1:04:55.200)
raised in factory farms where basically whatever your view
Lex Fridman (1:04:59.200)
on animals, I think you should agree even if you think well,
William MacAskill (1:05:02.400)
maybe it's not bad to kill an animal.
Lex Fridman (1:05:03.900)
Maybe if the animal was raised in good conditions, that's
William MacAskill (1:05:06.500)
just not the empirical reality.
Lex Fridman (1:05:07.900)
The empirical reality is that they are kept in incredible
William MacAskill (1:05:11.700)
cage confinement.
Lex Fridman (1:05:12.900)
They are de beaked or detailed without an aesthetic, you
William MacAskill (1:05:18.000)
know chickens often peck each other to death other like
Lex Fridman (1:05:20.900)
otherwise because of them such stress.
William MacAskill (1:05:23.800)
It's really, you know, I think when a chicken gets killed
Lex Fridman (1:05:26.900)
that's the best thing that happened to the chicken in the
William MacAskill (1:05:29.200)
course of its life and it's also completely unnecessary.
Lex Fridman (1:05:32.700)
This is in order to save, you know a few pence for the price
William MacAskill (1:05:35.900)
of meat or price of eggs and we have indeed found it's also
Lex Fridman (1:05:41.400)
just inconsistent with consumer preference as well people
William MacAskill (1:05:44.500)
who buy the products if they could they all they when you
Lex Fridman (1:05:49.000)
do surveys are extremely against suffering in factory farms.
William MacAskill (1:05:52.800)
It's just they don't appreciate how bad it is and you know,
Lex Fridman (1:05:55.300)
just tend to go with easy options.
Lex Fridman (1:05:57.500)
And so then the best the most effective programs I know of
Lex Fridman (1:06:00.800)
at the moment are nonprofits that go to companies and work
William MacAskill (1:06:04.700)
with companies to get them to take a pledge to cut certain
Lex Fridman (1:06:09.900)
sorts of animal products like eggs from cage confinement
William MacAskill (1:06:13.200)
out of their supply chain.
Lex Fridman (1:06:14.700)
And it's now the case that the top 50 food retailers and
William MacAskill (1:06:19.400)
fast food companies have all made these kind of cage free
Lex Fridman (1:06:23.700)
pledges and when you do the numbers you get the conclusion
William MacAskill (1:06:27.000)
that every dollar you're giving to these nonprofits result
Lex Fridman (1:06:29.800)
in hundreds of chickens being spared from cage confinement.
Lex Fridman (1:06:33.300)
And then they're working to other other types of animals
Lex Fridman (1:06:37.600)
other products too.
Lex Fridman (1:06:39.300)
So is that the most effective way to do in have a ripple
Lex Fridman (1:06:43.300)
effect essentially it's supposed to directly having regulation
William MacAskill (1:06:48.100)
from on top that says you can't do this.
Lex Fridman (1:06:51.500)
So I would be more open to the regulation approach, but
William MacAskill (1:06:55.500)
at least in the US there's quite intense regulatory capture
Lex Fridman (1:06:59.100)
from the agricultural industry.
Lex Fridman (1:07:01.000)
And so attempts that we've seen to try and change regulation
Lex Fridman (1:07:05.800)
have it's been a real uphill struggle.
William MacAskill (1:07:08.700)
There are some examples of ballot initiatives where the
Lex Fridman (1:07:13.300)
people have been able to vote in a ballot to say we want
William MacAskill (1:07:16.500)
to ban eggs from cage conditions and that's been huge.
Lex Fridman (1:07:19.600)
That's been really good, but beyond that it's much more
William MacAskill (1:07:22.600)
limited. So I've been really interested in the idea of
Lex Fridman (1:07:27.500)
hunting in general and wild animals and seeing nature as
William MacAskill (1:07:32.800)
a form of cruelty that I am ethically more okay with.
Lex Fridman (1:07:41.400)
Okay, just from my perspective and then I read about wild
William MacAskill (1:07:46.100)
animal suffering that I'm just I'm just giving you the
Lex Fridman (1:07:48.900)
kind of yeah notion of how I felt because animal because
William MacAskill (1:07:53.900)
animal factory farming is so bad.
Lex Fridman (1:07:57.000)
Yeah that living in the woods seem good.
William MacAskill (1:08:00.100)
Yeah, and yet when you actually start to think about it
Lex Fridman (1:08:04.300)
all I mean all of the animals in the animal world the
Lex Fridman (1:08:08.600)
living in like terrible poverty, right?
Lex Fridman (1:08:11.300)
Yeah.
William MacAskill (1:08:11.600)
Yeah, so you have all the medical conditions all of that.
Lex Fridman (1:08:15.100)
I mean they're living horrible lives.
William MacAskill (1:08:17.000)
It could be improved.
Lex Fridman (1:08:18.700)
That's a really interesting notion that I think may not
William MacAskill (1:08:21.400)
even be useful to talk about because factory farming is
Lex Fridman (1:08:24.600)
such a big thing to focus on.
William MacAskill (1:08:26.500)
Yeah, but it's nevertheless an interesting notion to think
Lex Fridman (1:08:29.800)
of all the animals in the wild as suffering in the same
William MacAskill (1:08:32.900)
way that humans in poverty are suffering.
Lex Fridman (1:08:34.900)
Yeah, I mean and often even worse so many animals we
William MacAskill (1:08:38.400)
produce by our selection.
Lex Fridman (1:08:39.800)
So you have a very large number of children in the expectation
William MacAskill (1:08:44.700)
that only a small number survive.
Lex Fridman (1:08:46.700)
And so for those animals almost all of them just live short
William MacAskill (1:08:49.900)
lives where they starve to death.
Lex Fridman (1:08:53.100)
So yeah, there's huge amounts of suffering in nature that
William MacAskill (1:08:55.100)
I don't think we should you know pretend that it's this kind
Lex Fridman (1:09:00.000)
of wonderful paradise for most animals.
William MacAskill (1:09:04.900)
Yeah, their life is filled with hunger and fear and disease.
Lex Fridman (1:09:10.400)
Yeah, I did agree with you entirely that when it comes
William MacAskill (1:09:13.600)
to focusing on animal welfare, we should focus in factory
Lex Fridman (1:09:15.700)
farming, but we also yeah should be aware to the reality
William MacAskill (1:09:20.400)
of what life for most animals is like.
Lex Fridman (1:09:22.300)
So let's talk about a topic I've talked a lot about and
William MacAskill (1:09:26.400)
you've actually quite eloquently talked about which is the
Lex Fridman (1:09:29.700)
third priority that effective altruism considers is really
William MacAskill (1:09:34.900)
important is existential risks.
Lex Fridman (1:09:37.600)
Yeah, when you think about the existential risks that
Lex Fridman (1:09:41.500)
are facing our civilization, what's before us?
Lex Fridman (1:09:45.600)
What concerns you?
Lex Fridman (1:09:46.600)
What should we be thinking about from in the especially
Lex Fridman (1:09:49.200)
from an effective altruism perspective?
William MacAskill (1:09:51.100)
Great. So the reason I started getting concerned about
Lex Fridman (1:09:53.900)
this was thinking about future generations where the key
William MacAskill (1:09:59.500)
idea is just well future people matter morally.
Lex Fridman (1:10:03.200)
There are vast numbers of future people.
William MacAskill (1:10:05.300)
If we don't cause our own extinction, there's no reason
Lex Fridman (1:10:07.400)
why civilization might not last a million years.
William MacAskill (1:10:11.900)
I mean we last as long as a typical mammalian species
Lex Fridman (1:10:14.500)
or a billion years is when the Earth is no longer habitable
William MacAskill (1:10:18.700)
or if we can take to the stars then perhaps it's trillions
Lex Fridman (1:10:21.500)
of years beyond that.
Lex Fridman (1:10:23.100)
So the future could be very big indeed and it seems like
Lex Fridman (1:10:25.500)
we're potentially very early on in civilization.
William MacAskill (1:10:29.000)
Then the second idea is just well, maybe there are things
Lex Fridman (1:10:31.100)
that are going to really derail that things that actually
William MacAskill (1:10:33.600)
could prevent us from having this long wonderful civilization
Lex Fridman (1:10:37.400)
and instead could cause our own cause our own extinction
William MacAskill (1:10:43.900)
or otherwise perhaps like lock ourselves into a very bad
Lex Fridman (1:10:48.100)
state. And what ways could that happen?
William MacAskill (1:10:53.100)
Well causing our own extinction development of nuclear
Lex Fridman (1:10:56.700)
weapons in the 20th century at least put on the table
William MacAskill (1:11:00.600)
that we now had weapons that were powerful enough that
Lex Fridman (1:11:04.100)
you could very significantly destroy society perhaps
Lex Fridman (1:11:07.600)
and all that nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter.
Lex Fridman (1:11:09.900)
Perhaps that would be enough for the human race to go
William MacAskill (1:11:14.100)
extinct.
Lex Fridman (1:11:14.700)
Why do you think we haven't done it? Sorry to interrupt.
Lex Fridman (1:11:18.000)
Why do you think we haven't done it yet?
Lex Fridman (1:11:19.300)
Is it surprising to you that having, you know, always
William MacAskill (1:11:26.800)
for the past few decades several thousand of active ready
Lex Fridman (1:11:30.500)
to launch nuclear weapons warheads and yet we have not
William MacAskill (1:11:35.400)
launched them ever since the initial launch on Hiroshima
Lex Fridman (1:11:42.100)
and Nagasaki.
William MacAskill (1:11:42.900)
I think it's a mix of luck.
Lex Fridman (1:11:46.400)
So I think it's definitely not inevitable that we haven't
William MacAskill (1:11:48.300)
used them.
Lex Fridman (1:11:49.300)
So John F. Kennedy, general Cuban Missile Crisis put the
William MacAskill (1:11:52.300)
estimate of nuclear exchange between the US and USSR
Lex Fridman (1:11:55.700)
that somewhere between one and three and even so, you know,
William MacAskill (1:11:59.100)
we really did come close.
Lex Fridman (1:12:03.000)
At the same time, I do think mutually assured destruction
William MacAskill (1:12:06.900)
is a reason why people don't go to war.
Lex Fridman (1:12:08.600)
It would be, you know, why nuclear powers don't go to war.
Lex Fridman (1:12:11.900)
Do you think that holds if you can linger on that for a
Lex Fridman (1:12:15.200)
second, like my dad is a physicist amongst other things
Lex Fridman (1:12:20.600)
and he believes that nuclear weapons are actually just
Lex Fridman (1:12:24.900)
really hard to build which is one of the really big benefits
William MacAskill (1:12:29.600)
of them currently so that you don't have it's very hard
Lex Fridman (1:12:34.600)
if you're crazy to build to acquire a nuclear weapon.
Lex Fridman (1:12:38.700)
So the mutually shared destruction really works when you
Lex Fridman (1:12:41.200)
talk seems to work better when it's nation states, when
William MacAskill (1:12:46.200)
it's serious people, even if they're a little bit, you
Lex Fridman (1:12:49.900)
know, dictatorial and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:12:52.900)
Do you think this mutually sure destruction idea will
Lex Fridman (1:12:56.200)
carry how far will it carry us in terms of different kinds
Lex Fridman (1:13:01.000)
of weapons?
Lex Fridman (1:13:02.200)
Oh, yeah, I think it's your point that nuclear weapons
William MacAskill (1:13:06.700)
are very hard to build and relatively easy to control
Lex Fridman (1:13:09.600)
because you can control fissile material is a really
William MacAskill (1:13:12.700)
important one and future technology that's equally destructive
Lex Fridman (1:13:16.000)
might not have those properties.
Lex Fridman (1:13:18.500)
So for example, if in the future people are able to design
Lex Fridman (1:13:23.700)
viruses, perhaps using a DNA printing kit that's on that,
William MacAskill (1:13:29.600)
you know, one can just buy.
Lex Fridman (1:13:31.300)
In fact, there are companies in the process of creating
William MacAskill (1:13:37.500)
home DNA printing kits. Well, then perhaps that's just
Lex Fridman (1:13:42.800)
totally democratized.
William MacAskill (1:13:44.000)
Perhaps the power to reap huge destructive potential is
Lex Fridman (1:13:48.600)
in the hands of most people in the world or certainly
William MacAskill (1:13:52.000)
most people with effort and then yeah, I no longer trust
Lex Fridman (1:13:55.300)
mutually assured destruction because some for some people
William MacAskill (1:13:59.500)
the idea that they would die is just not a disincentive.
Lex Fridman (1:14:03.600)
There was a Japanese cult, for example.
William MacAskill (1:14:05.200)
Ohm Shinrikyo in the 90s that had they what they believed
Lex Fridman (1:14:10.400)
was that Armageddon was coming if you died before Armageddon,
William MacAskill (1:14:14.800)
you would get good karma.
Lex Fridman (1:14:17.200)
You wouldn't go to hell if you died during Armageddon.
William MacAskill (1:14:20.300)
Maybe you would go to hell and they had a biological weapons
Lex Fridman (1:14:25.500)
program chemical weapons program when they were finally
William MacAskill (1:14:28.600)
apprehended.
Lex Fridman (1:14:29.300)
They hadn't stocks of southern gas that were sufficient to
William MacAskill (1:14:33.500)
kill 4 million people engaged in multiple terrorist acts.
Lex Fridman (1:14:36.900)
If they had had the ability to print a virus at home,
William MacAskill (1:14:40.300)
that would have been very scary.
Lex Fridman (1:14:42.500)
So it's not impossible to imagine groups of people that
William MacAskill (1:14:45.900)
hold that kind of belief of death as suicide as a good
Lex Fridman (1:14:54.200)
thing for passage into the next world and so on and then
William MacAskill (1:14:58.100)
connect them with some weapons then ideology and weaponry
Lex Fridman (1:15:04.400)
may create serious problems for us.
William MacAskill (1:15:07.000)
Let me ask you a quick question on what do you think is
Lex Fridman (1:15:09.800)
the line between killing most humans and killing all humans?
Lex Fridman (1:15:14.300)
How hard is it to kill everybody?
Lex Fridman (1:15:17.600)
Yeah, have you thought about this?
William MacAskill (1:15:19.800)
I've thought about it a bit.
Lex Fridman (1:15:20.700)
I think it is very hard to kill everybody.
Lex Fridman (1:15:22.600)
So in the case of let's say an all out nuclear exchange
Lex Fridman (1:15:26.600)
and let's say that leads to nuclear winter.
William MacAskill (1:15:28.300)
We don't really know but we you know might well happen
Lex Fridman (1:15:34.400)
that would I think result in billions of deaths would
Lex Fridman (1:15:38.300)
it kill everybody?
Lex Fridman (1:15:39.500)
It's quite it's quite hard to see how that how it would
William MacAskill (1:15:42.600)
kill everybody for a few reasons.
Lex Fridman (1:15:45.500)
One is just those are so many people.
William MacAskill (1:15:47.900)
Yes, you know seven and a half billion people.
Lex Fridman (1:15:49.600)
So this bad event has to kill all you know, all almost
William MacAskill (1:15:54.200)
all of them.
Lex Fridman (1:15:54.800)
Secondly live in such a diversity of locations.
Lex Fridman (1:15:57.600)
So a nuclear exchange or the virus that has to kill people
Lex Fridman (1:16:00.800)
who live in the coast of New Zealand which is going to
William MacAskill (1:16:04.600)
be climatically much more stable than other areas in the
Lex Fridman (1:16:08.700)
world or people who are on submarines or who have access
William MacAskill (1:16:14.400)
to bunkers.
Lex Fridman (1:16:15.000)
So there's a very like there's just like I'm sure there's
William MacAskill (1:16:18.000)
like two guys in Siberia just badass.
Lex Fridman (1:16:20.800)
There's the just human nature somehow just perseveres.
William MacAskill (1:16:25.400)
Yeah, and then the second thing is just if there's some
Lex Fridman (1:16:28.400)
catastrophic event people really don't want to die.
Lex Fridman (1:16:31.600)
So there's going to be like, you know, huge amounts of
Lex Fridman (1:16:34.200)
effort to ensure that it doesn't affect everyone.
William MacAskill (1:16:37.100)
Have you thought about what it takes to rebuild a society
Lex Fridman (1:16:42.200)
with smaller smaller numbers like how big of a setback
Lex Fridman (1:16:45.400)
these kinds of things are?
Lex Fridman (1:16:47.200)
Yeah, so then that's something where there's real uncertainty
William MacAskill (1:16:50.100)
I think where at some point you just lose genetic sufficient
Lex Fridman (1:16:55.100)
genetic diversity such that you can't come back.
William MacAskill (1:16:58.300)
There's it's unclear how small that population is.
Lex Fridman (1:17:03.700)
But if you've only got say a thousand people or fewer
William MacAskill (1:17:07.300)
than a thousand, then maybe that's small enough.
Lex Fridman (1:17:09.100)
What about human knowledge and then there's human knowledge.
William MacAskill (1:17:14.900)
I mean, it's striking how short on geological timescales
Lex Fridman (1:17:19.400)
or evolutionary timescales the progress in or how quickly
William MacAskill (1:17:23.200)
the progress in human knowledge has been like agriculture.
Lex Fridman (1:17:26.000)
We only invented in 10,000 BC cities were only, you know,
William MacAskill (1:17:31.600)
3000 BC whereas typical mammal species is half a million
Lex Fridman (1:17:35.500)
years to a million years.
Lex Fridman (1:17:37.400)
Do you think it's inevitable in some sense agriculture
Lex Fridman (1:17:40.200)
everything that came the Industrial Revolution cars planes
William MacAskill (1:17:45.800)
the internet that level of innovation you think is inevitable.
Lex Fridman (1:17:50.700)
I think given how quickly it arose.
Lex Fridman (1:17:55.200)
So in the case of agriculture, I think that was dependent
Lex Fridman (1:17:58.000)
on climate.
Lex Fridman (1:17:58.500)
So it was the kind of glacial period was over the earth
Lex Fridman (1:18:05.600)
warmed up a bit that made it much more likely that humans
William MacAskill (1:18:10.300)
would develop agriculture when it comes to the Industrial
Lex Fridman (1:18:14.000)
Revolution. It's just you know, again only took a few thousand
William MacAskill (1:18:19.100)
years from cities to Industrial Revolution if we think okay,
Lex Fridman (1:18:22.700)
we've gone back to this even let's say agricultural era,
Lex Fridman (1:18:27.300)
but there's no reason why we wouldn't go extinct in the
Lex Fridman (1:18:29.600)
coming tens of thousands of years or hundreds of thousands
William MacAskill (1:18:32.200)
of years.
Lex Fridman (1:18:33.100)
It seems just vet.
William MacAskill (1:18:34.200)
It would be very surprising if we didn't rebound unless
Lex Fridman (1:18:37.500)
there's some special reason that makes things different.
William MacAskill (1:18:40.000)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:18:40.400)
So perhaps we just have a much greater like disease burden
William MacAskill (1:18:44.600)
now so HIV exists.
Lex Fridman (1:18:46.600)
It didn't exist before and perhaps that's kind of latent
Lex Fridman (1:18:50.500)
and you know and being suppressed by modern medicine
Lex Fridman (1:18:53.500)
and sanitation and so on but would be a much bigger problem
William MacAskill (1:18:57.800)
for some, you know, utterly destroyed the society that
Lex Fridman (1:19:02.600)
was trying to rebound or there's just maybe there's something
William MacAskill (1:19:06.600)
we don't know about.
Lex Fridman (1:19:07.500)
So another existential risk comes from the mysterious the
William MacAskill (1:19:14.400)
beautiful artificial intelligence.
Lex Fridman (1:19:16.600)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:19:17.500)
So what what's the shape of your concerns about AI?
Lex Fridman (1:19:22.700)
I think there are quite a lot of concerns about AI and
William MacAskill (1:19:25.300)
sometimes the different risks don't get distinguished enough.
Lex Fridman (1:19:30.400)
So the kind of classic worry most is closely associated
William MacAskill (1:19:35.400)
with Nick Bostrom and Elias Joukowski is that we at some
Lex Fridman (1:19:39.900)
point move from having narrow AI systems to artificial
William MacAskill (1:19:43.000)
general intelligence.
Lex Fridman (1:19:44.400)
You get this very fast feedback effect where AGI is able
William MacAskill (1:19:48.300)
to build, you know, artificial intelligence helps you to
Lex Fridman (1:19:51.300)
build greater artificial intelligence.
William MacAskill (1:19:53.900)
We have this one system that suddenly very powerful far
Lex Fridman (1:19:57.100)
more powerful than others than perhaps far more powerful
William MacAskill (1:20:01.000)
than, you know, the rest of the world combined and then
Lex Fridman (1:20:07.000)
secondly, it has goals that are misaligned with human goals.
Lex Fridman (1:20:10.400)
And so it pursues its own goals.
Lex Fridman (1:20:13.000)
It realize, hey, there's this competition namely from humans.
William MacAskill (1:20:16.500)
It would be better if we eliminated them in just the same
Lex Fridman (1:20:19.300)
way as homo sapiens eradicated the Neanderthals.
William MacAskill (1:20:22.700)
In fact, it in fact killed off most large animals on the
Lex Fridman (1:20:28.400)
planet that walk the planet. So that's kind of one set of
William MacAskill (1:20:32.200)
worries. I think that's not my I think these shouldn't
Lex Fridman (1:20:37.700)
be dismissed as science fiction.
William MacAskill (1:20:41.000)
I think it's something we should be taking very seriously,
Lex Fridman (1:20:44.800)
but it's not the thing you visualize when you're concerned
William MacAskill (1:20:47.200)
about the biggest near term.
Lex Fridman (1:20:49.700)
Yeah, I think it's I think it's like one possible scenario
William MacAskill (1:20:54.100)
that would be astronomically bad.
Lex Fridman (1:20:55.500)
I think that other scenarios that would also be extremely
William MacAskill (1:20:57.900)
bad comparably bad that are more likely to occur.
Lex Fridman (1:21:01.000)
So one is just we are able to control AI.
Lex Fridman (1:21:05.600)
So we're able to get it to do what we want it to do.
Lex Fridman (1:21:10.000)
And perhaps there's not like this fast takeoff of AI capabilities
William MacAskill (1:21:13.600)
within a single system.
Lex Fridman (1:21:14.700)
It's distributed across many systems that do somewhat different
William MacAskill (1:21:17.900)
things, but you do get very rapid economic and technological
Lex Fridman (1:21:23.400)
progress as a result that concentrates power into the hands
William MacAskill (1:21:27.000)
of a very small number of individuals, perhaps a single
Lex Fridman (1:21:29.600)
dictator. And secondly, that single individual is or small
William MacAskill (1:21:35.500)
group of individuals or single country is then able to like
Lex Fridman (1:21:38.400)
lock in their values indefinitely via transmitting those
William MacAskill (1:21:43.100)
values to artificial systems that have no reason to die
Lex Fridman (1:21:46.400)
like, you know, their code is copyable.
William MacAskill (1:21:49.500)
Perhaps, you know, Donald Trump or Xi Jinping creates their
Lex Fridman (1:21:53.900)
kind of AI progeny in their own image. And once you have
William MacAskill (1:21:58.200)
a system that's once you have a society that's controlled
Lex Fridman (1:22:02.200)
by AI, you no longer have one of the main drivers of change
William MacAskill (1:22:06.400)
historically, which is the fact that human lifespans are
Lex Fridman (1:22:10.600)
you know, only a hundred years give or take.
Lex Fridman (1:22:12.300)
So that's really interesting.
Lex Fridman (1:22:13.200)
So as opposed to sort of killing off all humans is locking
William MacAskill (1:22:18.100)
in creating a hell on earth, basically a set of principles
Lex Fridman (1:22:25.000)
under which the society operates that's extremely undesirable.
Lex Fridman (1:22:28.900)
So everybody is suffering indefinitely.
Lex Fridman (1:22:31.200)
Or it doesn't, I mean, it also doesn't need to be hell on
William MacAskill (1:22:33.900)
earth. It could just be the long values.
Lex Fridman (1:22:35.700)
So we talked at the very beginning about how I want to
William MacAskill (1:22:40.400)
see this kind of diversity of different values and exploration
Lex Fridman (1:22:43.300)
so that we can just work out what is kind of morally like
Lex Fridman (1:22:46.900)
what is good, what is bad and then pursue the thing that's
Lex Fridman (1:22:49.600)
bad. So actually, so the idea of wrong values is actually
William MacAskill (1:22:55.000)
probably the beautiful thing is there's no such thing as
Lex Fridman (1:22:59.200)
right and wrong values because we don't know the right
William MacAskill (1:23:01.200)
answer. We just kind of have a sense of which value is more
Lex Fridman (1:23:04.700)
right, which is more wrong.
Lex Fridman (1:23:06.500)
So any kind of lock in makes a value wrong because it
Lex Fridman (1:23:10.500)
prevents exploration of this kind.
William MacAskill (1:23:13.000)
Yeah, and just, you know, imagine if fascist value, you
Lex Fridman (1:23:17.500)
know, imagine if there was Hitler's utopia or Stalin's utopia
William MacAskill (1:23:21.000)
or Donald Trump's or Xi Jinping's forever.
Lex Fridman (1:23:24.100)
Yeah, you know, how good or bad would that be compared
William MacAskill (1:23:28.900)
to the best possible future we could create? And my suggestion
Lex Fridman (1:23:33.400)
is it would really suck compared to the best possible
William MacAskill (1:23:36.200)
future we could create.
Lex Fridman (1:23:37.000)
And you're just one individual.
William MacAskill (1:23:38.400)
There's some individuals for whom Donald Trump is perhaps
Lex Fridman (1:23:44.400)
the best possible future.
Lex Fridman (1:23:46.100)
And so that's the whole point of us individuals exploring
Lex Fridman (1:23:49.900)
the space together.
William MacAskill (1:23:51.000)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:23:51.500)
Yeah, and what's trying to figure out which is the path
William MacAskill (1:23:54.800)
that will make America great again.
Lex Fridman (1:23:56.500)
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:23:58.200)
So how can effective altruism help?
Lex Fridman (1:24:03.200)
I mean, this is a really interesting notion they actually
William MacAskill (1:24:05.100)
describing of artificial intelligence being used as extremely
Lex Fridman (1:24:09.800)
powerful technology in the hands of very few potentially
William MacAskill (1:24:13.300)
one person to create some very undesirable effect.
Lex Fridman (1:24:17.300)
So as opposed to AI and again, the source of the undesirableness
William MacAskill (1:24:21.300)
there is the human.
Lex Fridman (1:24:23.000)
Yeah, AI is just a really powerful tool.
Lex Fridman (1:24:26.200)
So whether it's that or whether AI's AGI just runs away
Lex Fridman (1:24:30.500)
from us completely.
Lex Fridman (1:24:31.600)
How as individuals, as people in the effective altruism
Lex Fridman (1:24:38.400)
movement, how can we think about something like this?
William MacAskill (1:24:41.100)
I understand poverty and animal welfare, but this is a far
Lex Fridman (1:24:44.200)
out incredibly mysterious and difficult problem.
William MacAskill (1:24:47.500)
Great.
Lex Fridman (1:24:47.800)
Well, I think there's three paths as an individual.
Lex Fridman (1:24:50.600)
So if you're thinking about, you know, career paths you
Lex Fridman (1:24:55.400)
can pursue.
Lex Fridman (1:24:56.000)
So one is going down the line of technical AI safety.
Lex Fridman (1:24:59.100)
So this is most relevant to the kind of AI winning AI taking
William MacAskill (1:25:05.800)
over scenarios where this is just technical work on current
Lex Fridman (1:25:10.700)
machine learning systems often sometimes going more theoretical
William MacAskill (1:25:13.600)
to on how we can ensure that an AI is able to learn human
Lex Fridman (1:25:17.800)
values and able to act in the way that you want it to act.
Lex Fridman (1:25:21.500)
And that's a pretty mainstream issue and approach in machine
Lex Fridman (1:25:26.800)
learning today.
William MacAskill (1:25:27.500)
So, you know, we definitely need more people doing that.
Lex Fridman (1:25:31.400)
Second is on the policy side of things, which I think is
William MacAskill (1:25:34.100)
even more important at the moment, which is how should developments
Lex Fridman (1:25:40.400)
in AI be managed on a political level?
Lex Fridman (1:25:43.200)
How can you ensure that the benefits of AI are very distributed?
Lex Fridman (1:25:47.600)
It's not being, power isn't being concentrated in the hands
William MacAskill (1:25:50.500)
of a small set of individuals.
Lex Fridman (1:25:54.200)
How do you ensure that there aren't arms races between different
William MacAskill (1:25:59.100)
AI companies that might result in them, you know, cutting corners
Lex Fridman (1:26:06.000)
with respect to safety.
Lex Fridman (1:26:07.200)
And so there the input as individuals who can have is this.
Lex Fridman (1:26:11.000)
We're not talking about money.
William MacAskill (1:26:12.300)
We're talking about effort.
Lex Fridman (1:26:14.000)
We're talking about career choices.
William MacAskill (1:26:15.600)
We're talking about career choice.
Lex Fridman (1:26:16.900)
Yeah, but then it is the case that supposing, you know, you're
William MacAskill (1:26:20.700)
like, I've already decided my career.
Lex Fridman (1:26:22.200)
I'm doing something quite different.
William MacAskill (1:26:24.500)
You can contribute with money too, where at the Center for Effective
Lex Fridman (1:26:28.000)
Altruism, we set up the Long Term Future Fund.
Lex Fridman (1:26:31.400)
So if you go on to effectivealtruism.org, you can donate where
Lex Fridman (1:26:36.800)
a group of individuals will then work out what's the highest value
William MacAskill (1:26:40.600)
place they can donate to work on existential risk issues with
Lex Fridman (1:26:44.200)
a particular focus on AI.
Lex Fridman (1:26:46.900)
What's path number three?
Lex Fridman (1:26:48.400)
This was path number three.
William MacAskill (1:26:49.500)
This is donations with the third option I was thinking of.
Lex Fridman (1:26:53.400)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (1:26:53.900)
And then, yeah, there are, you can also donate directly to organizations
Lex Fridman (1:26:58.500)
working on this, like Center for Human Compatible AI at Berkeley,
William MacAskill (1:27:01.900)
Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, or other organizations too.
Lex Fridman (1:27:08.500)
Does AI keep you up at night?
Lex Fridman (1:27:10.200)
This kind of concern?
Lex Fridman (1:27:13.000)
Yeah, it's kind of a mix where I think it's very likely things are
William MacAskill (1:27:17.300)
going to go well. I think we're going to be able to solve these
Lex Fridman (1:27:21.400)
problems. I think that's by far the most likely outcome, at least
William MacAskill (1:27:25.500)
over the next.
Lex Fridman (1:27:25.900)
By far the most likely.
Lex Fridman (1:27:26.800)
So if you look at all the trajectories running away from our
Lex Fridman (1:27:30.800)
current moment in the next hundred years, you see AI creating
William MacAskill (1:27:36.600)
destructive consequences as a small subset of those possible
Lex Fridman (1:27:41.300)
trajectories.
William MacAskill (1:27:41.700)
Or at least, yeah, kind of eternal, destructive consequences.
Lex Fridman (1:27:44.900)
I think that being a small subset.
William MacAskill (1:27:46.500)
At the same time, it still freaks me out.
Lex Fridman (1:27:48.500)
I mean, when we're talking about the entire future of civilization,
William MacAskill (1:27:51.600)
then small probabilities, you know, 1% probability, that's terrifying.
Lex Fridman (1:27:56.900)
What do you think about Elon Musk's strong worry that we should
Lex Fridman (1:28:02.500)
be really concerned about existential risks of AI?
Lex Fridman (1:28:05.200)
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, broadly speaking, I think he's
William MacAskill (1:28:09.100)
right.
Lex Fridman (1:28:09.300)
I think if we talked, we would probably have very different
William MacAskill (1:28:13.200)
probabilities on how likely it is that we're doomed.
Lex Fridman (1:28:16.200)
But again, when it comes to talking about the entire future of
William MacAskill (1:28:19.700)
civilization, it doesn't really matter if it's 1% or if it's
Lex Fridman (1:28:23.200)
50%, we ought to be taking every possible safeguard we can to
William MacAskill (1:28:26.700)
ensure that things go well rather than poorly.
Lex Fridman (1:28:30.300)
Last question, if you yourself could eradicate one problem from
Lex Fridman (1:28:34.000)
the world, what would that problem be?
Lex Fridman (1:28:35.700)
That's a great question.
William MacAskill (1:28:37.600)
I don't know if I'm cheating in saying this, but I think the
Lex Fridman (1:28:42.900)
thing I would most want to change is just the fact that people
William MacAskill (1:28:45.300)
don't actually care about ensuring the long run future goes well.
Lex Fridman (1:28:50.500)
People don't really care about future generations.
William MacAskill (1:28:52.500)
They don't think about it.
Lex Fridman (1:28:53.300)
It's not part of their aims.
William MacAskill (1:28:54.300)
In some sense, you're not cheating at all because in speaking
Lex Fridman (1:28:58.800)
the way you do, in writing the things you're writing, you're
William MacAskill (1:29:02.200)
doing, you're addressing exactly this aspect.
Lex Fridman (1:29:05.800)
Exactly.
William MacAskill (1:29:06.500)
That is your input into the effective altruism movement.
Lex Fridman (1:29:10.800)
So for that, Will, thank you so much.
William MacAskill (1:29:12.900)
It's an honor to talk to you.
Lex Fridman (1:29:14.300)
I really enjoyed it.
William MacAskill (1:29:15.000)
Thanks so much for having me on.
Lex Fridman (1:30:10.300)
If that were the case, we'd probably be pretty generous.
William MacAskill (1:30:13.300)
Next round's on me, but that's effectively the situation we're
Lex Fridman (1:30:17.500)
in all the time.
William MacAskill (1:30:18.800)
It's like a 99% off sale or buy one get 99 free.
Lex Fridman (1:30:23.400)
Might be the most amazing deal you'll see in your life.
William MacAskill (1:30:27.000)
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman (20:00.100)
or is that some kind of societal force?
Lex Fridman (20:03.300)
What's the nature versus nurture thing here?
Lex Fridman (20:05.300)
Yeah, so in that case, I just think,
William MacAskill (20:07.100)
yeah, so violence has massively declined over time.
Lex Fridman (20:10.600)
I think that's a slow process of cultural evolution,
William MacAskill (20:14.200)
institutional evolution such that now the incentives
Lex Fridman (20:17.600)
for you and I to be violent are very, very small indeed.
William MacAskill (20:21.700)
In contrast, when we were hunter gatherers,
Lex Fridman (20:23.700)
the incentives were quite large.
William MacAskill (20:25.800)
If there was someone who was potentially disturbing
Lex Fridman (20:31.900)
the social order and hunter gatherer setting,
William MacAskill (20:35.300)
there was a very strong incentive to kill that person
Lex Fridman (20:37.800)
and people did and it was just the guarded 10% of deaths
William MacAskill (20:41.400)
among hunter gatherers were murders.
Lex Fridman (20:44.800)
After hunter gatherers, when you have actual societies
William MacAskill (20:48.700)
is when violence can probably go up
Lex Fridman (20:51.300)
because there's more incentive to do mass violence, right?
William MacAskill (20:54.300)
To take over, conquer other people's lands
Lex Fridman (20:58.800)
and murder everybody in place and so on.
William MacAskill (21:01.200)
Yeah, I mean, I think total death rate
Lex Fridman (21:03.800)
from human causes does go down,
Lex Fridman (21:06.900)
but you're right that if you're in a hunter gatherer situation
Lex Fridman (21:10.400)
you're kind of a group that you're part of is very small
William MacAskill (21:15.000)
then you can't have massive wars
Lex Fridman (21:17.300)
that just massive communities don't exist.
Lex Fridman (21:19.600)
But anyway, the second question,
Lex Fridman (21:21.300)
do you think most people want to do good?
William MacAskill (21:23.400)
Yeah, and then I think that is true for most people.
Lex Fridman (21:26.100)
I think you see that with the fact that most people donate,
William MacAskill (21:31.800)
a large proportion of people volunteer.
Lex Fridman (21:33.800)
If you give people opportunities
William MacAskill (21:35.500)
to easily help other people, they will take it.
Lex Fridman (21:38.700)
But at the same time,
William MacAskill (21:39.700)
we're a product of our circumstances
Lex Fridman (21:43.700)
and if it were more socially awarded to be doing more good,
William MacAskill (21:47.400)
if it were more socially awarded to do good effectively
Lex Fridman (21:49.600)
rather than not effectively,
William MacAskill (21:51.300)
then we would see that behavior a lot more.
Lex Fridman (21:55.100)
So why should we do good?
William MacAskill (21:58.700)
Yeah, my answer to this is
Lex Fridman (22:01.400)
there's no kind of deeper level of explanation.
Lex Fridman (22:04.100)
So my answer to kind of why should you do good is
Lex Fridman (22:08.500)
well, there is someone whose life is on the line,
William MacAskill (22:11.300)
for example, whose life you can save
Lex Fridman (22:13.700)
via donating just actually a few thousand dollars
William MacAskill (22:17.800)
to an effective nonprofit
Lex Fridman (22:20.000)
like the Against Malaria Foundation.
William MacAskill (22:21.800)
That is a sufficient reason to do good.
Lex Fridman (22:23.900)
And then if you ask, well, why ought I to do that?
William MacAskill (22:27.000)
I'm like, I just show you the same facts again.
Lex Fridman (22:29.700)
It's that fact that is the reason to do good.
William MacAskill (22:32.000)
There's nothing more fundamental than that.
Lex Fridman (22:34.600)
I'd like to sort of make more concrete
William MacAskill (22:38.200)
the thing we're trying to make better.
Lex Fridman (22:41.000)
So you just mentioned malaria.
Lex Fridman (22:43.100)
So there's a huge amount of suffering in the world.
Lex Fridman (22:46.600)
Are we trying to remove?
Lex Fridman (22:50.000)
So is ultimately the goal, not ultimately,
Lex Fridman (22:53.500)
but the first step is to remove the worst of the suffering.
Lex Fridman (22:59.000)
So there's some kind of threshold of suffering
Lex Fridman (23:01.600)
that we want to make sure does not exist in the world.
William MacAskill (23:06.400)
Or do we really naturally want to take a much further step
Lex Fridman (23:11.100)
and look at things like income inequality?
Lex Fridman (23:14.600)
So not just getting everybody above a certain threshold,
Lex Fridman (23:17.000)
but making sure that there's some,
William MacAskill (23:21.500)
that broadly speaking,
Lex Fridman (23:23.600)
there's less injustice in the world, unfairness,
William MacAskill (23:27.400)
in some definition, of course,
Lex Fridman (23:29.200)
very difficult to define a fairness.
William MacAskill (23:31.200)
Yeah, so the metric I use is how many people do we affect
Lex Fridman (23:35.500)
and by how much do we affect them?
Lex Fridman (23:37.300)
And so that can, often that means eliminating suffering,
Lex Fridman (23:43.200)
but it doesn't have to,
William MacAskill (23:44.200)
could be helping promote a flourishing life instead.
Lex Fridman (23:47.800)
And so if I was comparing reducing income inequality
William MacAskill (23:53.000)
or getting people from the very pits of suffering
Lex Fridman (23:58.300)
to a higher level,
William MacAskill (24:00.600)
the question I would ask is just a quantitative one
Lex Fridman (24:03.100)
of just if I do this first thing or the second thing,
Lex Fridman (24:06.200)
how many people am I going to benefit
Lex Fridman (24:08.100)
and by how much am I going to benefit?
William MacAskill (24:10.000)
Am I going to move that one person from kind of 10%,
Lex Fridman (24:13.500)
0% well being to 10% well being?
William MacAskill (24:17.200)
Perhaps that's just not as good as moving a hundred people
Lex Fridman (24:20.200)
from 10% well being to 50% well being.
Lex Fridman (24:22.800)
And the idea is the diminishing returns is the idea of
Lex Fridman (24:27.200)
when you're in terrible poverty,
William MacAskill (24:32.800)
then the $1 that you give goes much further
Lex Fridman (24:38.200)
than if you were in the middle class in the United States,
William MacAskill (24:40.700)
for example.
Lex Fridman (24:41.700)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (24:42.300)
And this fact is really striking.
Lex Fridman (24:44.500)
So if you take even just quite a conservative estimate
William MacAskill (24:51.600)
of how we are able to turn money into well being,
Lex Fridman (24:56.900)
the economists put it as like a log curve.
William MacAskill (25:00.100)
That's the or steeper.
Lex Fridman (25:02.000)
But that means that any proportional increase
William MacAskill (25:04.600)
in your income has the same impact on your well being.
Lex Fridman (25:09.300)
And so someone moving from $1,000 a year
William MacAskill (25:11.500)
to $2,000 a year has the same impact
Lex Fridman (25:15.800)
as someone moving from $100,000 a year to $200,000 a year.
Lex Fridman (25:20.600)
And then when you combine that with the fact that we
Lex Fridman (25:23.200)
in middle class members of rich countries are 100 times richer
William MacAskill (25:28.700)
than financial terms in the global poor,
Lex Fridman (25:31.100)
that means we can do a hundred times to benefit the poorest people
William MacAskill (25:33.700)
in the world as we can to benefit people of our income level.
Lex Fridman (25:37.600)
And that's this astonishing fact.
William MacAskill (25:39.400)
Yeah, it's quite incredible.
Lex Fridman (25:40.900)
A lot of these facts and ideas are just difficult to think about
William MacAskill (25:47.600)
because there's an overwhelming amount of suffering in the world.
Lex Fridman (25:56.000)
And even acknowledging it is difficult.
William MacAskill (26:00.700)
Not exactly sure why that is.
Lex Fridman (26:02.300)
I mean, I mean, it's difficult because you have to bring to mind,
William MacAskill (26:07.700)
you know, it's an unpleasant experience thinking
Lex Fridman (26:10.000)
about other people's suffering.
William MacAskill (26:11.700)
It's unpleasant to be empathizing with it, firstly.
Lex Fridman (26:14.700)
And then secondly, thinking about it means
William MacAskill (26:16.700)
that maybe we'd have to change our lifestyles.
Lex Fridman (26:19.000)
And if you're very attached to the income that you've got,
William MacAskill (26:22.900)
perhaps you don't want to be confronting ideas or arguments
Lex Fridman (26:26.500)
that might cause you to use some of that money to help others.
Lex Fridman (26:31.400)
So it's quite understandable in the psychological terms,
Lex Fridman (26:34.600)
even if it's not the right thing that we ought to be doing.
Lex Fridman (26:38.100)
So how can we do better?
Lex Fridman (26:40.100)
How can we be more effective?
Lex Fridman (26:42.400)
How does data help?
Lex Fridman (26:44.400)
Yeah, in general, how can we do better?
William MacAskill (26:47.500)
It's definitely hard.
Lex Fridman (26:48.800)
And we have spent the last 10 years engaged in kind of some deep research projects,
William MacAskill (26:54.700)
to try and answer kind of two questions.
Lex Fridman (26:59.500)
One is, of all the many problems the world is facing,
Lex Fridman (27:02.500)
what are the problems we ought to be focused on?
Lex Fridman (27:04.700)
And then within those problems that we judge to be kind of the most pressing,
William MacAskill (27:08.600)
where we use this idea of focusing on problems that are the biggest in scale,
Lex Fridman (27:13.200)
that are the most tractable,
William MacAskill (27:15.600)
where we can make the most progress on that problem,
Lex Fridman (27:20.900)
and that are the most neglected.
William MacAskill (27:23.800)
Within them, what are the things that have the kind of best evidence,
Lex Fridman (27:27.500)
or we have the best guess, will do the most good.
Lex Fridman (27:32.000)
And so we have a bunch of organizations.
Lex Fridman (27:34.500)
So GiveWell, for example, is focused on global health and development,
Lex Fridman (27:39.200)
and has a list of seven top recommended charities.
Lex Fridman (27:42.300)
So the idea in general, and sorry to interrupt,
William MacAskill (27:44.600)
is, so we'll talk about sort of poverty and animal welfare and existential risk.
Lex Fridman (27:48.600)
Those are all fascinating topics, but in general,
William MacAskill (27:52.200)
the idea is there should be a group,
Lex Fridman (27:56.200)
sorry, there's a lot of groups that seek to convert money into good.
Lex Fridman (28:04.100)
And then you also on top of that want to have a accounting
Lex Fridman (28:11.500)
of how good they actually perform that conversion,
Lex Fridman (28:15.900)
how well they did in converting money to good.
Lex Fridman (28:18.400)
So ranking of these different groups,
William MacAskill (28:20.400)
ranking these charities.
Lex Fridman (28:24.000)
So does that apply across basically all aspects of effective altruism?
Lex Fridman (28:29.600)
So there should be a group of people,
Lex Fridman (28:31.700)
and they should report on certain metrics of how well they've done,
Lex Fridman (28:35.700)
and you should only give your money to groups that do a good job.
Lex Fridman (28:39.900)
That's the core idea. I'd make two comments.
William MacAskill (28:43.500)
One is just, it's not just about money.
Lex Fridman (28:45.300)
So we're also trying to encourage people to work in areas
William MacAskill (28:49.700)
where they'll have the biggest impact.
Lex Fridman (28:51.300)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (28:51.900)
And in some areas, you know, they're really people heavy, but money poor.
Lex Fridman (28:56.400)
Other areas are kind of money rich and people poor.
Lex Fridman (28:59.700)
And so whether it's better to focus time or money depends on the cause area.
Lex Fridman (29:05.200)
And then the second is that you mentioned metrics,
Lex Fridman (29:08.300)
and while that's the ideal, and in some areas we do,
Lex Fridman (29:12.300)
we are able to get somewhat quantitative information
William MacAskill (29:15.100)
about how much impact an area is having.
Lex Fridman (29:18.900)
That's not always true.
William MacAskill (29:20.200)
For some of the issues, like you mentioned existential risks,
Lex Fridman (29:23.800)
well, we're not able to measure in any sort of precise way
William MacAskill (29:30.400)
like how much progress we're making.
Lex Fridman (29:32.400)
And so you have to instead fall back on just rigorous argument and evaluation,
William MacAskill (29:38.500)
even in the absence of data.
Lex Fridman (29:41.000)
So let's first sort of linger on your own story for a second.
Lex Fridman (29:47.400)
How do you yourself practice effective altruism in your own life?
Lex Fridman (29:51.100)
Because I think that's a really interesting place to start.
Lex Fridman (29:54.700)
So I've tried to build effective altruism into at least many components of my life.
Lex Fridman (30:00.100)
So on the donation side, my plan is to give away most of my income
William MacAskill (30:06.200)
over the course of my life.
Lex Fridman (30:07.500)
I've set a bar I feel happy with and I just donate above that bar.
Lex Fridman (30:12.400)
So at the moment, I donate about 20% of my income.
Lex Fridman (30:17.300)
Then on the career side, I've also shifted kind of what I do,
William MacAskill (30:22.000)
where I was initially planning to work on very esoteric topics
Lex Fridman (30:28.400)
in the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language,
William MacAskill (30:30.800)
things that are intellectually extremely interesting,
Lex Fridman (30:33.000)
but the path by which they really make a difference to the world is,
William MacAskill (30:37.400)
let's just say it's very unclear at best.
Lex Fridman (30:40.600)
And so I switched instead to researching ethics to actually just working
William MacAskill (30:44.600)
on this question of how we can do as much good as possible.
Lex Fridman (30:48.400)
And then I've also spent a very large chunk of my life over the last 10 years
William MacAskill (30:53.300)
creating a number of nonprofits who again in different ways
Lex Fridman (30:56.400)
are tackling this question of how we can do the most good
Lex Fridman (31:00.000)
and helping them to grow over time too.
Lex Fridman (31:02.000)
Yeah, we mentioned a few of them with the career selection, 80,000.
William MacAskill (31:06.600)
80,000 hours.
Lex Fridman (31:07.500)
80,000 hours is a really interesting group.
Lex Fridman (31:11.100)
So maybe also just a quick pause on the origins of effective altruism
Lex Fridman (31:18.400)
because you paint a picture who the key figures are,
William MacAskill (31:21.700)
including yourself in the effective altruism movement today.
Lex Fridman (31:26.800)
Yeah, there are two main strands that kind of came together
William MacAskill (31:31.300)
to form the effective altruism movement.
Lex Fridman (31:34.800)
So one was two philosophers, myself and Toby Ord at Oxford,
Lex Fridman (31:40.400)
and we had been very influenced by the work of Peter Singer,
Lex Fridman (31:43.900)
an Australian model philosopher who had argued for many decades
William MacAskill (31:47.200)
that because one can do so much good at such little cost to oneself,
Lex Fridman (31:52.900)
we have an obligation to give away most of our income
William MacAskill (31:55.600)
to benefit those in extreme poverty,
Lex Fridman (31:58.200)
just in the same way that we have an obligation to run in
Lex Fridman (32:01.300)
and save a child from drowning in a shallow pond
Lex Fridman (32:04.700)
if it would just ruin your suit that cost a few thousand dollars.
Lex Fridman (32:10.300)
And we set up Giving What We Can in 2009,
Lex Fridman (32:13.100)
which is encouraging people to give at least 10% of their income
William MacAskill (32:16.000)
to the most effective charities.
Lex Fridman (32:18.100)
And the second main strand was the formation of GiveWell,
William MacAskill (32:21.300)
which was originally based in New York and started in about 2007.
Lex Fridman (32:26.300)
And that was set up by Holden Carnovsky and Elie Hassenfeld,
William MacAskill (32:30.200)
who were two hedge fund dudes who were making good money
Lex Fridman (32:36.200)
and thinking, well, where should I donate?
Lex Fridman (32:38.400)
And in the same way as if they wanted to buy a product for themselves,
Lex Fridman (32:42.100)
they would look at Amazon reviews.
Lex Fridman (32:44.100)
They were like, well, what are the best charities?
Lex Fridman (32:46.600)
Found they just weren't really good answers to that question,
William MacAskill (32:49.300)
certainly not that they were satisfied with.
Lex Fridman (32:51.200)
And so they formed GiveWell in order to try and work out
Lex Fridman (32:56.200)
what are those charities where they can have the biggest impact.
Lex Fridman (32:59.000)
And then from there and some other influences,
William MacAskill (33:02.200)
kind of community grew and spread.
Lex Fridman (33:05.200)
Can we explore the philosophical and political space
Lex Fridman (33:08.600)
that effective altruism occupies a little bit?
Lex Fridman (33:11.400)
So from the little and distant in my own lifetime
William MacAskill (33:16.600)
that I've read of Ayn Rand's work, Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism,
Lex Fridman (33:21.100)
espouses, and it's interesting to put her philosophy in contrast
William MacAskill (33:26.700)
with effective altruism.
Lex Fridman (33:28.000)
So it espouses selfishness as the best thing you can do.
Lex Fridman (33:34.000)
But it's not actually against altruism.
Lex Fridman (33:37.600)
It's just you have that choice, but you should be selfish in it, right?
William MacAskill (33:43.100)
Or not, maybe you can disagree here.
Lex Fridman (33:44.800)
But so it can be viewed as the complete opposite of effective altruism
William MacAskill (33:49.500)
or it can be viewed as similar because the word effective is really interesting.
Lex Fridman (33:55.500)
Because if you want to do good, then you should be damn good at doing good, right?
William MacAskill (34:02.200)
I think that would fit within the morality that's defined by objectivism.
Lex Fridman (34:08.600)
So do you see a connection between these two philosophies
Lex Fridman (34:11.100)
and other perhaps in this complicated space of beliefs
Lex Fridman (34:17.300)
that effective altruism is positioned as opposing or aligned with?
William MacAskill (34:24.700)
I would definitely say that objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy,
Lex Fridman (34:27.800)
is a philosophy that's quite fundamentally opposed to effective altruism.
Lex Fridman (34:33.100)
In which way?
Lex Fridman (34:34.300)
Insofar as Ayn Rand's philosophy is about championing egoism
Lex Fridman (34:38.600)
and saying that I'm never quite sure whether the philosophy is meant to say
Lex Fridman (34:42.800)
that just you ought to do whatever will best benefit yourself,
William MacAskill (34:47.300)
that's ethical egoism, no matter what the consequences are.
Lex Fridman (34:50.700)
Or second, if there's this alternative view, which is, well,
William MacAskill (34:55.200)
you ought to try and benefit yourself because that's actually the best way
Lex Fridman (34:59.800)
of benefiting society.
William MacAskill (35:02.900)
Certainly, in Atlas Shalaguchi is presenting her philosophy
Lex Fridman (35:07.500)
as a way that's actually going to bring about a flourishing society.
Lex Fridman (35:12.000)
And if it's the former, then well, effective altruism is all about promoting
Lex Fridman (35:16.100)
the idea of altruism and saying, in fact,
William MacAskill (35:18.800)
we ought to really be trying to help others as much as possible.
Lex Fridman (35:22.400)
So it's opposed there.
Lex Fridman (35:23.900)
And then on the second side, I would just dispute the empirical premise.
Lex Fridman (35:28.700)
It would seem, given the major problems in the world today,
William MacAskill (35:31.500)
it would seem like this remarkable coincidence,
Lex Fridman (35:34.200)
quite suspicious, one might say, if benefiting myself was actually
William MacAskill (35:38.500)
the best way to bring about a better world.
Lex Fridman (35:41.100)
So on that point, and I think that connects also with career selection
William MacAskill (35:46.800)
that we'll talk about, but let's consider not objectives, but capitalism.
Lex Fridman (35:53.100)
And the idea that you focusing on the thing that you are damn good at,
William MacAskill (36:00.900)
whatever that is, may be the best thing for the world.
Lex Fridman (36:05.800)
Part of it is also mindset, right?
William MacAskill (36:09.800)
The thing I love is robots.
Lex Fridman (36:13.200)
So maybe I should focus on building robots
Lex Fridman (36:17.500)
and never even think about the idea of effective altruism,
Lex Fridman (36:22.500)
which is kind of the capitalist notion.
William MacAskill (36:25.000)
Is there any value in that idea in just finding the thing you're good at
Lex Fridman (36:28.500)
and maximizing your productivity in this world
Lex Fridman (36:31.500)
and thereby sort of lifting all boats and benefiting society as a result?
Lex Fridman (36:38.600)
Yeah, I think there's two things I'd want to say on that.
Lex Fridman (36:41.000)
So one is what your comparative advantages,
Lex Fridman (36:43.500)
what your strengths are when it comes to career.
William MacAskill (36:45.400)
That's obviously super important because there's lots of career paths
William MacAskill (36:49.300)
I would be terrible at if I thought being an artist was the best thing one could do.
William MacAskill (36:53.800)
Well, I'd be doomed, just really quite astonishingly bad.
Lex Fridman (36:59.300)
And so I do think, at least within the realm of things that could plausibly be very high impact,
William MacAskill (37:05.800)
choose the thing that you think you're going to be able to really be passionate at
Lex Fridman (37:11.500)
and excel at over the long term.
William MacAskill (37:15.100)
Then on this question of should one just do that in an unrestricted way
Lex Fridman (37:19.000)
and not even think about what the most important problems are.
William MacAskill (37:22.300)
I do think that in a kind of perfectly designed society, that might well be the case.
Lex Fridman (37:27.800)
That would be a society where we've corrected all market failures,
William MacAskill (37:31.500)
we've internalized all externalities,
Lex Fridman (37:34.700)
and then we've managed to set up incentives such that people just pursuing their own strengths
William MacAskill (37:41.700)
is the best way of doing good.
Lex Fridman (37:44.100)
But we're very far from that society.
Lex Fridman (37:46.200)
So if one did that, then it would be very unlikely that you would focus
Lex Fridman (37:53.000)
on improving the lives of nonhuman animals that aren't participating in markets
William MacAskill (37:57.900)
or ensuring the long run future goes well,
Lex Fridman (38:00.000)
where future people certainly aren't participating in markets
William MacAskill (38:03.200)
or benefiting the global poor who do participate,
Lex Fridman (38:06.400)
but have so much less kind of power from a starting perspective
William MacAskill (38:11.000)
that their views aren't accurately kind of represented by market forces too.
Lex Fridman (38:18.900)
Got it.
Lex Fridman (38:19.500)
So yeah, instead of pure definition capitalism,
Lex Fridman (38:22.700)
it just may very well ignore the people that are suffering the most,
William MacAskill (38:27.000)
the white swath of them.
Lex Fridman (38:28.900)
So if you could allow me this line of thinking here.
Lex Fridman (38:35.400)
So I've listened to a lot of your conversations online.
Lex Fridman (38:38.800)
I find, if I can compliment you, they're very interesting conversations.
William MacAskill (38:46.000)
Your conversation on Rogan, on Joe Rogan was really interesting,
Lex Fridman (38:50.100)
with Sam Harris and so on, whatever.
William MacAskill (38:55.600)
There's a lot of stuff that's really good out there.
Lex Fridman (38:58.000)
And yet, when I look at the internet and I look at YouTube,
William MacAskill (39:01.600)
which has certain mobs, certain swaths of right leaning folks,
Lex Fridman (39:08.200)
whom I dearly love.
William MacAskill (39:12.500)
I love all people, especially people with ideas.
Lex Fridman (39:19.000)
They seem to not like you very much.
Lex Fridman (39:22.700)
So I don't understand why exactly.
Lex Fridman (39:26.200)
So my own sort of hypothesis is there is a right left divide
William MacAskill (39:31.100)
that absurdly so caricatured in politics,
Lex Fridman (39:36.100)
at least in the United States.
Lex Fridman (39:38.300)
And maybe you're somehow pigeonholed into one of those sides.
Lex Fridman (39:42.700)
And maybe that's what it is.
William MacAskill (39:46.600)
Maybe your message is somehow politicized.
Lex Fridman (39:49.600)
Yeah, I mean.
Lex Fridman (39:50.800)
How do you make sense of that?
Lex Fridman (39:52.200)
Because you're extremely interesting.
William MacAskill (39:54.400)
Like you got the comments I see on Joe Rogan.
Lex Fridman (39:58.600)
There's a bunch of negative stuff.
Lex Fridman (40:00.400)
And yet, if you listen to it, the conversation is fascinating.
Lex Fridman (40:03.200)
I'm not speaking, I'm not some kind of lefty extremist,
Lex Fridman (40:08.300)
but just it's a fascinating conversation.
Lex Fridman (40:10.100)
So why are you getting some small amount of hate?
Lex Fridman (40:13.800)
So I'm actually pretty glad that Effective Altruism has managed
Lex Fridman (40:18.100)
to stay relatively unpoliticized because I think the core message
William MacAskill (40:24.000)
to just use some of your time and money to do as much good as possible
Lex Fridman (40:27.100)
to fight some of the problems in the world can be appealing
William MacAskill (40:30.100)
across the political spectrum.
Lex Fridman (40:31.700)
And we do have a diversity of political viewpoints among people
William MacAskill (40:35.500)
who have engaged in Effective Altruism.
Lex Fridman (40:38.800)
We do, however, do get some criticism from the left and the right.
William MacAskill (40:42.700)
Oh, interesting.
Lex Fridman (40:43.400)
What's the criticism?
William MacAskill (40:44.400)
Both would be interesting to hear.
Lex Fridman (40:45.800)
Yeah, so criticism from the left is that we're not focused enough
William MacAskill (40:49.300)
on dismantling the capitalist system that they see as the root
Lex Fridman (40:54.100)
of most of the problems that we're talking about.
Lex Fridman (40:58.500)
And there I kind of disagree on partly the premise where I don't
Lex Fridman (41:06.800)
think relevant alternative systems would say to the animals or to the
William MacAskill (41:11.900)
global poor or to the future generations kind of much better.
Lex Fridman (41:15.400)
And then also the tactics where I think there are particular ways
William MacAskill (41:19.000)
we can change society that would massively benefit, you know,
Lex Fridman (41:22.400)
be massively beneficial on those things that don't go via dismantling
William MacAskill (41:27.600)
like the entire system, which is perhaps a million times harder to do.
Lex Fridman (41:30.900)
Then criticism on the right, there's definitely like in response
William MacAskill (41:34.900)
to the Joe Rogan podcast.
Lex Fridman (41:36.900)
There definitely were a number of Ayn Rand fans who weren't keen
William MacAskill (41:40.000)
on the idea of promoting altruism.
Lex Fridman (41:43.000)
There was a remarkable set of ideas.
William MacAskill (41:46.900)
Just the idea that Effective Altruism was unmanly, I think, was
Lex Fridman (41:50.700)
driving a lot of criticism.
William MacAskill (41:52.100)
Okay, so I love fighting.
Lex Fridman (41:56.700)
I've been in street fights my whole life.
William MacAskill (41:58.900)
I'm as alpha in everything I do as it gets.
Lex Fridman (42:04.100)
And the fact that Joe Rogan said that I thought Scent of a Woman
William MacAskill (42:08.700)
is a better movie than John Wick put me into this beta category
Lex Fridman (42:14.600)
amongst people who are like basically saying this, yeah, unmanly
William MacAskill (42:20.700)
or it's not tough.
Lex Fridman (42:21.500)
It's not some principled view of strength that is represented
William MacAskill (42:26.900)
by a spasmodic.
Lex Fridman (42:27.700)
So actually, so how do you think about this?
William MacAskill (42:31.200)
Because to me, altruism, especially Effective Altruism, I don't
Lex Fridman (42:41.400)
know what the female version of that is, but on the male side, manly
William MacAskill (42:44.800)
as fuck, if I may say so.
Lex Fridman (42:46.300)
So how do you think about that kind of criticism?
William MacAskill (42:51.500)
I think people who would make that criticism are just occupying
Lex Fridman (42:55.400)
a like state of mind that I think is just so different from my
William MacAskill (42:59.200)
state of mind that I kind of struggle to maybe even understand it
Lex Fridman (43:03.300)
where if something's manly or unmanly or feminine or unfeminine,
William MacAskill (43:07.700)
I'm like, I don't care.
Lex Fridman (43:08.700)
Like, is it the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do?
Lex Fridman (43:11.000)
So let me put it not in terms of man or woman.
Lex Fridman (43:14.700)
I don't think that's useful, but I think there's a notion of acting
William MacAskill (43:20.100)
out of fear as opposed to out of principle and strength.
Lex Fridman (43:26.700)
Yeah.
William MacAskill (43:27.400)
So, okay.
Lex Fridman (43:28.400)
Yeah.
William MacAskill (43:28.600)
Here's something that I do feel as an intuition and that I think
Lex Fridman (43:33.500)
drives some people who do find Canvaean Land attractive and so on
William MacAskill (43:38.200)
as a philosophy, which is a kind of taking control of your own
Lex Fridman (43:43.000)
life and having power over how you're steering your life and not
William MacAskill (43:51.300)
kind of kowtowing to others, you know, really thinking things through.
Lex Fridman (43:55.500)
I find like that set of ideas just very compelling and inspirational.
William MacAskill (43:59.800)
I actually think of effect of altruism has really, you know, that
Lex Fridman (44:04.300)
side of my personality.
William MacAskill (44:05.300)
It's like scratch that itch where you are just not taking the kind
Lex Fridman (44:11.400)
of priorities that society is giving you as granted.
William MacAskill (44:14.100)
Instead, you're choosing to act in accordance with the priorities
Lex Fridman (44:19.300)
that you think are most important in the world.
Lex Fridman (44:21.200)
And often that involves then doing quite unusual things from a
Lex Fridman (44:29.400)
societal perspective, like donating a large chunk of your earnings
William MacAskill (44:33.400)
or working on these weird issues about AI and so on that other
Lex Fridman (44:38.100)
people might not understand.
William MacAskill (44:39.200)
Yeah, I think that's a really gutsy thing to do.
Lex Fridman (44:42.000)
That is taking control.
William MacAskill (44:43.400)
That's at least at this stage.
Lex Fridman (44:45.600)
I mean, that's you taking ownership, not of just yourself, but
William MacAskill (44:53.300)
your presence in this world that's full of suffering and saying
Lex Fridman (44:58.500)
as opposed to being paralyzed by that notion is taking control
Lex Fridman (45:02.300)
and saying I could do something.
Lex Fridman (45:03.600)
Yeah, I mean, that's really powerful.
Lex Fridman (45:05.900)
But I mean, sort of the one thing I personally hate too about the
Lex Fridman (45:09.500)
left currently that I think those folks to detect is the social
William MacAskill (45:15.500)
signaling. When you look at yourself, sort of late at night, would
Lex Fridman (45:21.600)
you do everything you're doing in terms of effective altruism if
William MacAskill (45:25.900)
your name, because you're quite popular, but if your name was
Lex Fridman (45:29.300)
totally unattached to it, so if it was in secret.
William MacAskill (45:32.400)
Yeah, I mean, I think I would.
Lex Fridman (45:34.800)
To be honest, I think the kind of popularity is like, you know,
William MacAskill (45:39.800)
it's mixed bag, but there are serious costs.
Lex Fridman (45:43.300)
And I don't particularly, I don't like love it.
William MacAskill (45:45.600)
Like, it means you get all these people calling you a cuck on
Lex Fridman (45:49.700)
Joe Rogan.
William MacAskill (45:50.300)
It's like not the most fun thing.
Lex Fridman (45:51.900)
But you also get a lot of sort of brownie points for doing good
William MacAskill (45:56.100)
for the world.
Lex Fridman (45:56.700)
Yeah, you do.
Lex Fridman (45:57.800)
But I think my ideal life, I would be like in some library solving
Lex Fridman (46:02.200)
logic puzzles all day and I'd like really be like learning maths
Lex Fridman (46:06.500)
and so on.
Lex Fridman (46:07.100)
So you have a like good body of friends and so on.
Lex Fridman (46:10.600)
So your instinct for effective altruism is something deep.
Lex Fridman (46:14.500)
It's not one that is communicating
William MacAskill (46:19.100)
socially. It's more in your heart.
Lex Fridman (46:21.300)
You want to do good for the world.
William MacAskill (46:23.200)
Yeah, I mean, so we can look back to early giving what we can.
Lex Fridman (46:26.700)
So, you know, we're setting this up, me and Toby.
Lex Fridman (46:31.800)
And I really thought that doing this would be a big hit to my
Lex Fridman (46:36.500)
academic career because I was now spending, you know, at that time
William MacAskill (46:40.100)
more than half my time setting up this nonprofit at the crucial
Lex Fridman (46:43.700)
time when you should be like producing your best academic work
Lex Fridman (46:46.500)
and so on.
Lex Fridman (46:47.000)
And it was also the case at the time.
William MacAskill (46:49.700)
It was kind of like the Toby order club.
Lex Fridman (46:52.900)
You know, he was he was the most popular.
William MacAskill (46:55.300)
There's this personal interest story about him and his plans
Lex Fridman (46:57.700)
donate and sorry to interrupt but Toby was donating a large
Lex Fridman (47:02.600)
amount. Can you tell just briefly what he was doing?
Lex Fridman (47:05.100)
Yeah, so he made this public commitment to give everything
William MacAskill (47:09.000)
he earned above 20,000 pounds per year to the most effective
Lex Fridman (47:13.900)
causes. And even as a graduate student, he was still donating
William MacAskill (47:17.400)
about 15, 20% of his income, which is so quite significant
Lex Fridman (47:21.600)
given that graduate students are not known for being super
William MacAskill (47:24.100)
wealthy.
Lex Fridman (47:24.500)
That's right. And when we launched Giving What We Can, the
William MacAskill (47:28.500)
media just loved this as like a personal interest story.
Lex Fridman (47:31.500)
So the story about him and his pledge was the most, yeah, it
William MacAskill (47:38.500)
was actually the most popular news story of the day.
Lex Fridman (47:40.500)
And we kind of ran the same story a year later and it was
William MacAskill (47:43.400)
the most popular news story of the day a year later too.
Lex Fridman (47:45.800)
And so it really was kind of several years before then I
William MacAskill (47:53.100)
was also kind of giving more talks and starting to do more
Lex Fridman (47:55.400)
writing and then especially with, you know, I wrote this book
William MacAskill (47:58.000)
Doing Good Better that then there started to be kind of attention
Lex Fridman (48:02.100)
and so on. But deep inside your own relationship with effective
William MacAskill (48:06.300)
altruism was, I mean, it had nothing to do with the publicity.
Lex Fridman (48:12.300)
Did you see yourself?
Lex Fridman (48:14.400)
How did the publicity connect with it?
Lex Fridman (48:16.900)
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I'm saying is I think the
William MacAskill (48:19.700)
publicity came like several years afterwards.
Lex Fridman (48:22.900)
I mean, at the early stage when we set up Giving What We Can,
William MacAskill (48:25.400)
it was really just every person we get to pledge 10% is, you
Lex Fridman (48:30.200)
know, something like $100,000 over their lifetime.
William MacAskill (48:34.800)
That's huge.
Lex Fridman (48:35.800)
And so it was just we had started with 23 members, every single
William MacAskill (48:39.600)
person was just this like kind of huge accomplishment.
Lex Fridman (48:43.200)
And at the time, I just really thought, you know, maybe over
William MacAskill (48:46.500)
time we'll have a hundred members and that'll be like amazing.
Lex Fridman (48:49.700)
Whereas now we have, you know, over four thousand and one and
William MacAskill (48:52.900)
a half billion dollars pledged.
Lex Fridman (48:54.100)
That's just unimaginable to me at the time when I was first kind
William MacAskill (48:59.100)
of getting this, you know, getting the stuff off the ground.
Lex Fridman (49:02.000)
So can we talk about poverty and the biggest problems that you
William MacAskill (49:10.100)
think in the near term effective altruism can attack in each
Lex Fridman (49:15.300)
one. So poverty obviously is a huge one.
Lex Fridman (49:18.900)
Yeah. How can we help?
Lex Fridman (49:21.400)
Great.
William MacAskill (49:22.200)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (49:22.400)
So poverty, absolutely this huge problem.
William MacAskill (49:24.800)
700 million people in extreme poverty living in less than two
Lex Fridman (49:28.800)
dollars per day where that's what that means is what two dollars
William MacAskill (49:33.800)
would buy in the US.
Lex Fridman (49:34.900)
So think about that.
William MacAskill (49:36.900)
It's like some rice, maybe some beans.
Lex Fridman (49:38.800)
It's very, you know, really not much.
Lex Fridman (49:40.600)
And at the same time, we can do an enormous amount to improve
Lex Fridman (49:45.600)
the lives of people in extreme poverty.
Lex Fridman (49:47.400)
So the things that we tend to focus on interventions in global
Lex Fridman (49:51.800)
health and that's for a couple of few reasons.
William MacAskill (49:54.600)
One is like global health just has this amazing track record
Lex Fridman (49:58.100)
life expectancy globally is up 50% relative to 60 or 70 years
William MacAskill (50:02.700)
ago. We've eradicated smallpox that's which killed 2 million
Lex Fridman (50:06.600)
lives every year almost eradicated polio.
William MacAskill (50:08.900)
Second is that we just have great data on what works when it
Lex Fridman (50:13.800)
comes to global health.
Lex Fridman (50:14.600)
So we just know that bed nets protect children from prevent
Lex Fridman (50:20.500)
them from dying from malaria.
Lex Fridman (50:21.600)
And then the third is just that's extremely cost effective.
Lex Fridman (50:26.300)
So it costs $5 to buy one bed net, protects two children for
William MacAskill (50:30.800)
two years against malaria.
Lex Fridman (50:31.900)
If you spend about $3,000 on bed nets, then statistically
William MacAskill (50:35.600)
speaking, you're going to save a child's life.
Lex Fridman (50:37.300)
And there are other interventions too.
Lex Fridman (50:40.900)
And so given the people in such suffering and we have this
Lex Fridman (50:45.300)
opportunity to, you know, do such huge good for such low cost.
Lex Fridman (50:50.800)
Well, yeah, why not?
Lex Fridman (50:52.000)
So the individual.
Lex Fridman (50:53.300)
So for me today, if I wanted to look at poverty, how would
Lex Fridman (50:59.400)
I help? And I wanted to say, I think donating 10% of your
William MacAskill (51:03.700)
income is a very interesting idea or some percentage or some
Lex Fridman (51:07.000)
setting a bar and sort of sticking to it.
Lex Fridman (51:09.400)
How do we then take the step towards the effective part?
Lex Fridman (51:14.700)
So you've conveyed some notions, but who do you give the
William MacAskill (51:19.200)
money to? Yeah.
Lex Fridman (51:21.300)
So GiveWell, this organization I mentioned, well, it makes
William MacAskill (51:25.900)
charity recommendations and some of its top recommendations.
Lex Fridman (51:29.300)
So Against Malaria Foundation is this organization that buys
Lex Fridman (51:34.200)
and distributes these insecticide seeded bed nets.
Lex Fridman (51:37.300)
And then it has a total of seven charities that it recommends
William MacAskill (51:41.400)
very highly. So that recommendation, is it almost like a star
Lex Fridman (51:46.100)
of approval or is there some metrics?
Lex Fridman (51:48.800)
So what are the ways that GiveWell conveys that this is a
Lex Fridman (51:54.600)
great charity organization?
William MacAskill (51:57.200)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (51:58.000)
So GiveWell is looking at metrics and it's trying to compare
William MacAskill (52:01.700)
charities ultimately in the number of lives that you can save
Lex Fridman (52:05.800)
or an equivalent benefit.
Lex Fridman (52:07.500)
So one of the charities it recommends is GiveDirectly, which
Lex Fridman (52:11.700)
simply just transfers cash to the poorest families where poor
William MacAskill (52:17.100)
family will get a cash transfer of $1,000 and they kind of
Lex Fridman (52:20.800)
regard that as the baseline intervention because it's so simple
Lex Fridman (52:24.600)
and people, you know, they know what to do with how to benefit
Lex Fridman (52:27.300)
themselves. That's quite powerful, by the way.
Lex Fridman (52:30.400)
So before GiveWell, before the Effective Altruism Movement, was
Lex Fridman (52:34.600)
there, I imagine there's a huge amount of corruption, funny
William MacAskill (52:39.000)
enough, in charity organizations or misuse of money.
Lex Fridman (52:42.100)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (52:43.500)
So there was nothing like GiveWell before that?
Lex Fridman (52:46.200)
No.
William MacAskill (52:46.500)
I mean, there were some.
Lex Fridman (52:47.700)
So, I mean, the charity corruption, I mean, obviously
William MacAskill (52:49.500)
there's some, I don't think it's a huge issue.
Lex Fridman (52:53.800)
They're also just focusing on the long things. Prior to GiveWell,
William MacAskill (52:57.700)
there were some organizations like Charity Navigator, which
Lex Fridman (53:00.900)
were more aimed at worrying about corruption and so on.
Lex Fridman (53:04.600)
So they weren't saying, these are the charities where you're
Lex Fridman (53:07.300)
going to do the most good. Instead, it was like, how good
Lex Fridman (53:10.300)
are the charities financials?
Lex Fridman (53:12.700)
How good is its health?
William MacAskill (53:14.100)
Are they transparent? And yeah, so that would be more useful
Lex Fridman (53:16.800)
for weeding out some of those worst charities.
Lex Fridman (53:19.200)
So GiveWell has just taken a step further, sort of in this
Lex Fridman (53:21.900)
21st century of data.
William MacAskill (53:25.200)
It's actually looking at the effective part.
Lex Fridman (53:28.700)
Yeah. So it's like, you know, if you know the wire cutter for
William MacAskill (53:32.100)
if you want to buy a pair of headphones, they will just look
Lex Fridman (53:34.200)
at all the headphones and be like, these are the best headphones
William MacAskill (53:36.400)
you can buy.
Lex Fridman (53:37.800)
That's the idea with GiveWell.
William MacAskill (53:39.300)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (53:39.700)
So do you think there's a bar of what suffering is?
Lex Fridman (53:44.400)
And do you think one day we can eradicate suffering in our
Lex Fridman (53:47.800)
world? Yeah.
Lex Fridman (53:49.400)
Amongst humans?
Lex Fridman (53:50.200)
Let's talk humans for now. Talk humans.
Lex Fridman (53:52.300)
But in general, yeah, actually.
Lex Fridman (53:55.000)
So there's a colleague of mine calling the term abolitionism
William MacAskill (54:00.800)
for the idea that we should just be trying to abolish
Lex Fridman (54:02.800)
suffering. And in the long run, I mean, I don't expect to
William MacAskill (54:06.100)
anytime soon, but I think we can.
Lex Fridman (54:09.100)
I think that would require, you know, quite change, quite
William MacAskill (54:11.900)
drastic changes to the way society is structured and perhaps
Lex Fridman (54:15.400)
even the, you know, the human, in fact, even changes to human
William MacAskill (54:21.600)
nature. But I do think that suffering whenever it occurs
Lex Fridman (54:25.400)
is bad and we should want it to not occur.
Lex Fridman (54:28.300)
So there's a line.
Lex Fridman (54:31.500)
There's a gray area between suffering.
William MacAskill (54:33.900)
Now I'm Russian.
Lex Fridman (54:34.700)
So I romanticize some aspects of suffering.
William MacAskill (54:38.600)
There's a gray line between struggle, gray area between
Lex Fridman (54:41.400)
struggle and suffering.
Lex Fridman (54:42.700)
So one, do we want to eradicate all struggle in the world?
Lex Fridman (54:51.800)
So there's an idea, you know, that the human condition
William MacAskill (54:59.900)
inherently has suffering in it and it's a creative force.
Lex Fridman (55:04.800)
It's a struggle of our lives and we somehow grow from that.
Lex Fridman (55:09.400)
How do you think about, how do you think about that?
Lex Fridman (55:13.600)
I agree that's true.
William MacAskill (55:15.600)
So, you know, often, you know, great artists can be also
Lex Fridman (55:20.300)
suffering from, you know, major health conditions or depression
Lex Fridman (55:24.300)
and so on. They come from abusive parents.
Lex Fridman (55:26.600)
Most great artists, I think, come from abusive parents.
William MacAskill (55:29.900)
Yeah, that seems to be at least commonly the case, but I
Lex Fridman (55:33.200)
want to distinguish between suffering as being instrumentally
William MacAskill (55:37.100)
good, you know, it causes people to produce good things and
Lex Fridman (55:40.900)
whether it's intrinsically good and I think intrinsically
William MacAskill (55:43.300)
it's always bad.
Lex Fridman (55:44.500)
And so if we can produce these, you know, great achievements
William MacAskill (55:48.000)
via some other means where, you know, if we look at the
Lex Fridman (55:52.200)
scientific enterprise, we've produced incredible things
William MacAskill (55:55.000)
often from people who aren't suffering, have, you know,
Lex Fridman (55:59.300)
pretty good lives.
William MacAskill (56:00.000)
They're just, they're driven instead of, you know, being
Lex Fridman (56:02.700)
pushed by a certain sort of anguish.
William MacAskill (56:04.200)
They're being driven by intellectual curiosity.
Lex Fridman (56:06.200)
If we can instead produce a society where it's all cavet
Lex Fridman (56:11.300)
and no stick, that's better from my perspective.
Lex Fridman (56:14.000)
Yeah, but I'm going to disagree with the notion that that's
William MacAskill (56:17.000)
possible, but I would say most of the suffering in the world
Lex Fridman (56:21.600)
is not productive.
Lex Fridman (56:23.100)
So I would dream of effective altruism curing that suffering.
Lex Fridman (56:28.200)
Yeah, but then I would say that there is some suffering that
William MacAskill (56:30.800)
is productive that we want to keep the because but that's
Lex Fridman (56:35.600)
not even the focus of because most of the suffering is just
William MacAskill (56:38.800)
absurd and needs to be eliminated.
Lex Fridman (56:44.100)
So let's not even romanticize this usual notion I have,
Lex Fridman (56:47.700)
but nevertheless struggle has some kind of inherent value
Lex Fridman (56:51.800)
that to me at least, you're right.
William MacAskill (56:56.900)
There's some elements of human nature that also have to
Lex Fridman (56:59.400)
be modified in order to cure all suffering.
William MacAskill (57:01.900)
Yeah, I mean, there's an interesting question of whether
Lex Fridman (57:03.900)
it's possible.
Lex Fridman (57:04.500)
So at the moment, you know, most of the time we're kind
Lex Fridman (57:07.000)
of neutral and then we burn ourselves and that's negative
Lex Fridman (57:10.300)
and that's really good that we get that negative signal
Lex Fridman (57:13.200)
because it means we won't burn ourselves again.
William MacAskill (57:15.800)
There's a question like could you design agents humans such
Lex Fridman (57:21.100)
that you're not hovering around the zero level you're hovering
William MacAskill (57:23.600)
it like bliss.
Lex Fridman (57:24.600)
Yeah, and then you touch the flame and you're like, oh no,
William MacAskill (57:26.700)
you're just slightly worse bliss.
Lex Fridman (57:28.300)
Yeah, but that's really bad compared to the bliss you
William MacAskill (57:31.800)
were normally in so that you can have like a gradient of
Lex Fridman (57:34.200)
bliss instead of like pain and pleasure on that point.
William MacAskill (57:37.300)
I think it's a really important point on the experience
Lex Fridman (57:41.200)
of suffering the relative nature of it.
William MacAskill (57:46.500)
Maybe having grown up in the Soviet Union were quite poor
Lex Fridman (57:52.100)
by any measure and when I when I was in my childhood,
Lex Fridman (57:58.100)
but it didn't feel like you're poor because everybody around
Lex Fridman (58:01.000)
you were poor there's a and then in America, I feel I for
William MacAskill (58:06.100)
the first time begin to feel poor.
Lex Fridman (58:09.200)
Yeah.
William MacAskill (58:09.500)
Yeah, because of the road there's different.
Lex Fridman (58:11.900)
There's some cultural aspects to it that really emphasize
William MacAskill (58:15.200)
that it's good to be rich.
Lex Fridman (58:17.200)
And then there's just the notion that there is a lot of
William MacAskill (58:19.500)
income inequality and therefore you experience that inequality.
Lex Fridman (58:23.000)
That's where suffering go.
Lex Fridman (58:24.200)
Do you so what do you think about the inequality of suffering
Lex Fridman (58:27.400)
that that we have to think about do you think we have to
Lex Fridman (58:32.900)
think about that as part of effective altruism?
Lex Fridman (58:37.300)
Yeah, I think we're just things vary in terms of whether
William MacAskill (58:41.800)
you get benefits or costs from them just in relative terms
Lex Fridman (58:45.000)
or in absolute terms.
Lex Fridman (58:46.700)
So a lot of the time yeah, there's this hedonic treadmill
Lex Fridman (58:49.300)
where if you get you know, there's money is useful because
William MacAskill (58:56.800)
it helps you buy things or good for you because it helps
Lex Fridman (58:59.700)
you buy things, but there's also a status component too
Lex Fridman (59:02.500)
and that status component is kind of zero sum if you were
Lex Fridman (59:06.600)
saying like in Russia, you know, no one else felt poor
William MacAskill (59:10.900)
because everyone around you is poor.
Lex Fridman (59:13.500)
Whereas now you've got this these other people who are
William MacAskill (59:17.600)
you know super rich and maybe that makes you feel.
Lex Fridman (59:22.600)
You know less good about yourself.
William MacAskill (59:24.100)
There are some other things however, which are just
Lex Fridman (59:27.300)
intrinsically good or bad.
Lex Fridman (59:28.800)
So commuting for example, it's just people hate it.
Lex Fridman (59:33.000)
It doesn't really change knowing the other people are
William MacAskill (59:35.500)
commuting to doesn't make it any any kind of less bad,
Lex Fridman (59:40.000)
but it's sort of to push back on that for a second.
William MacAskill (59:42.800)
I mean, yes, but also if some people were, you know on
Lex Fridman (59:48.300)
horseback your commute on the train might feel a lot better.
William MacAskill (59:52.200)
Yeah, you know the there is a relative Nick.
Lex Fridman (59:55.400)
I mean everybody's complaining about society today forgetting
William MacAskill (59:59.400)
it's forgetting how much better is the better angels of
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