#William Macaskill

[probablyasocialecologist]

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

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

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

MacAskill excuses the proposed near-elimination of the wild by saying that most wild animals (by neuron count) are fish, and by offering reasons for thinking fish have peculiarly bad lives typically compared to land animals. But there is only a preponderance of fish because we have extirpated an even higher percentage of wild land animals. He doesn’t even consider the possibility that we ought to reverse that situation and rewild much of the Earth. 

[maaarine]

Sam Harris:

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

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

This is celebrated as this delightful affectation.

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

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

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

So he's neuro-atypical at a minimum.

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

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

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

William MacAskill:

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

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

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

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

I guess I interact with people who are relatively emotionally flat quite a lot, [chuckles]."

[existentialcomicsfeed]

A Long Term Birthday Problem

[wolfpurplemoon]

Day 27 of First Page a Day, Doing Good Better by William MacAskill

[linusjf]

William MacAskill: We are the ancients

[justalittlesolarpunk]

I’ve teased it. You’ve waited. I’ve procrastinated. You’ve probably forgotten all about it.

But now, finally, I’m here with my solarpunk resources masterpost!

YouTube Channels:

Andrewism

The Solarpunk Scene

Solarpunk Life

Solarpunk Station

Our Changing Climate

Podcasts:

The Joy Report

How To Save A Planet

Demand Utopia

Solarpunk Presents

Outrage and Optimisim

From What If To What Next

Solarpunk Now

Idealistically

The Extinction Rebellion Podcast

The Landworkers' Radio

Wilder

What Could Possibly Go Right?

Frontiers of Commoning

The War on Cars

The Rewild Podcast

Solacene

Imagining Tomorrow

Books (Fiction):

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness The Dispossessed The Word for World is Forest

Becky Chambers: A Psalm for the Wild-Built A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Phoebe Wagner: When We Hold Each Other Up

Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation

Brenda J. Pierson: Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology

Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro: Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World

Justine Norton-Kertson: Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology

Sim Kern: The Free People’s Village

Ruthanna Emrys: A Half-Built Garden

Sarina Ulibarri: Glass & Gardens

Books (Non-fiction):

Murray Bookchin: The Ecology of Freedom

George Monbiot: Feral

Miles Olson: Unlearn, Rewild

Mark Shepard: Restoration Agriculture

Kristin Ohlson: The Soil Will Save Us

Rowan Hooper: How To Spend A Trillion Dollars

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The Mushroom At The End of The World

Kimberly Nicholas: Under The Sky We Make

Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass

David Miller: Solved

Ayana Johnson, Katharine Wilkinson: All We Can Save

Jonathan Safran Foer: We Are The Weather

Colin Tudge: Six Steps Back To The Land

Edward Wilson: Half-Earth

Natalie Fee: How To Save The World For Free

Kaden Hogan: Humans of Climate Change

Rebecca Huntley: How To Talk About Climate Change In A Way That Makes A Difference

Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac: The Future We Choose

Jonathon Porritt: Hope In Hell

Paul Hawken: Regeneration

Mark Maslin: How To Save Our Planet

Katherine Hayhoe: Saving Us

Jimmy Dunson: Building Power While The Lights Are Out

Paul Raekstad, Sofa Saio Gradin: Prefigurative Politics

Andreas Malm: How To Blow Up A Pipeline

Phoebe Wagner, Bronte Christopher Wieland: Almanac For The Anthropocene

Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist

William MacAskill: What We Owe To The Future

Mikaela Loach: It's Not That Radical

Miles Richardson: Reconnection

David Harvey: Spaces of Hope Rebel Cities

Eric Holthaus: The Future Earth

Zahra Biabani: Climate Optimism

David Ehrenfeld: Becoming Good Ancestors

Stephen Gliessman: Agroecology

Chris Carlsson: Nowtopia

Jon Alexander: Citizens

Leah Thomas: The Intersectional Environmentalist

Greta Thunberg: The Climate Book

Jen Bendell, Rupert Read: Deep Adaptation

Seth Godin: The Carbon Almanac

Jane Goodall: The Book of Hope

Vandana Shiva: Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture

Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement

Minouche Shafik: What We Owe To Each Other

Dieter Helm: Net Zero

Chris Goodall: What We Need To Do Now

Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stephanie Foote: The Cambridge Companion To The Environmental Humanities

Bella Lack: The Children of The Anthropocene

Hannah Ritchie: Not The End of The World

Chris Turner: How To Be A Climate Optimist

Kim Stanley Robinson: Ministry For The Future

Fiona Mathews, Tim Kendall: Black Ops & Beaver Bombing

Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come

Lynne Jones: Sorry For The Inconvenience But This Is An Emergency

Helen Crist: Abundant Earth

Sam Bentley: Good News, Planet Earth!

Timothy Beal: When Time Is Short

Andrew Boyd: I Want A Better Catastrophe

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Everyday Utopia

Elizabeth Cripps: What Climate Justice Means & Why We Should Care

Kylie Flanagan: Climate Resilience

Chris Johnstone, Joanna Macy: Active Hope

Mark Engler: This is an Uprising

Anne Therese Gennari: The Climate Optimist Handbook

Magazines:

Solarpunk Magazine

Positive News

Resurgence & Ecologist

Ethical Consumer

Films (Fiction):

How To Blow Up A Pipeline

The End We Start From

Woman At War

Black Panther

Star Trek

Tomorrowland

Films (Documentary):

2040: How We Can Save The Planet

The People vs Big Oil

Wild Isles

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

Generation Green New Deal

Planet Earth III

Video Games:

Terra Nil

Animal Crossing

Gilded Shadows

Anno 2070

Stardew Valley

RPGs:

Solarpunk Futures

Perfect Storm

Advocacy Groups:

A22 Network

Extinction Rebellion

Greenpeace

Friends of The Earth

Green New Deal Rising

Apps:

Ethy

Sojo

BackMarket

Depop

Vinted

Olio

Buy Nothing

Too Good To Go

Websites:

European Co-housing

UK Co-housing

US Co-housing

Brought By Bike (connects you with zero-carbon delivery goods)

ClimateBase (find a sustainable career)

Environmentjob (ditto)

Businesses (🤢):

Ethical Superstore

Hodmedods

Fairtransport/Sail Cargo Alliance

Let me know if you think there’s anything I’ve missed!

[quillandink333]

📕 What kind of books does your F/O read?

Kazuma reads mostly nonfiction, lots of progressive thought pieces like “Doing Good Better” by William MacAskill, but also a few novels! The one he just finished is called “Snakes and Earrings” by Hitomi Kanehara

Ok but also, you didn’t hear this from me hsgfjsgdh but he’s also super into classical romance lit ❤️ more so than he’d willingly admit to the general public lol

Ty for the ask!!!

[wankerwatch]

Commons Vote

On: Immigration and asylum: Ten Minute Rule Motion

Ayes: 74 (97.3% Con, 1.4% Ind, 1.4% RUK) Noes: 49 (59.2% SNP, 16.3% LD, 6.1% Ind, 6.1% PC, 2.0% Lab, 2.0% WPB, 2.0% Green, 2.0% Alba, 2.0% SDLP, 2.0% APNI) Absent: ~527

Individual Votes:

Ayes

Conservative (72 votes)

Andrew Lewer Andrew Percy Andrew Rosindell Antony Higginbotham Bill Wiggin Bob Blackman Bob Seely Brendan Clarke-Smith Caroline Ansell Charles Walker Chris Grayling Chris Green Christopher Chope Danny Kruger David Evennett David Jones Dean Russell Desmond Swayne Eddie Hughes Elizabeth Truss Gordon Henderson Graham Stuart Greg Smith Heather Wheeler Henry Smith Iain Stewart Jack Brereton Jacob Rees-Mogg James Davies James Grundy Jane Hunt Jane Stevenson John Hayes John Redwood John Stevenson John Whittingdale Jonathan Gullis Jonathan Lord Julian Lewis Julian Sturdy Karl McCartney Kevin Foster Lia Nici Marco Longhi Mark Pawsey Martin Vickers Miriam Cates Neil O'Brien Nick Fletcher Nigel Mills Paul Scully Pauline Latham Philip Davies Philip Dunne Philip Hollobone Rachel Maclean Richard Graham Robert Goodwill Robin Millar Sally-Ann Hart Sarah Atherton Sarah Dines Selaine Saxby Shailesh Vara Simon Clarke Steve Double Thérèse Coffey Tom Hunt Tom Randall Trudy Harrison Vicky Ford Will Quince

Independent (1 vote)

Andrew Bridgen

Reform UK (1 vote)

Lee Anderson

Noes

Scottish National Party (29 votes)

Alison Thewliss Allan Dorans Amy Callaghan Angela Crawley Anne McLaughlin Anum Qaisar Brendan O'Hara Dave Doogan David Linden Hannah Bardell Ian Blackford Joanna Cherry John McNally John Nicolson Kirsten Oswald Kirsty Blackman Marion Fellows Martin Docherty-Hughes Mhairi Black Owen Thompson Patricia Gibson Patrick Grady Philippa Whitford Richard Thomson Ronnie Cowan Stephen Flynn Steven Bonnar Stewart Hosie Stuart C McDonald

Liberal Democrat (8 votes)

Daisy Cooper Helen Morgan Munira Wilson Richard Foord Sarah Dyke Sarah Green Tim Farron Wera Hobhouse

Independent (3 votes)

Angus Brendan MacNeil Jeremy Corbyn Jonathan Edwards

Plaid Cymru (3 votes)

Ben Lake Hywel Williams Liz Saville Roberts

Labour (1 vote)

John McDonnell

Workers Party of Britain (1 vote)

George Galloway

Green Party (1 vote)

Caroline Lucas

Alba Party (1 vote)

Kenny MacAskill

Social Democratic & Labour Party (1 vote)

Claire Hanna

Alliance (1 vote)

Stephen Farry

[gerdfeed]

Bankman-Fried was a vocal and financial supporter of effective altruism and a close friend of William MacAskill, an academic who has strong links to the FHI and who set up the Centre for Effective Altruism, where Bankman-Fried worked briefly.

‘Eugenics on steroids’: the toxic and contested legacy of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute

[probablyasocialecologist]

[Longtermism] was developed over the past two decades by philosophers at the University of Oxford including Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord and William MacAskill. Bostrom is one of the leading advocates of the idea that advanced artificial intelligence is going to kill everyone on Earth, and he was the subject of harsh criticism earlier this year after an old email surfaced in which he claimed that “blacks are more stupid than whites”. MacAskill’s past is chequered too, as he was the moral “adviser” of Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency billionaire and diehard longtermist charged with perpetrating what American prosecutors have called “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history”. Longtermism is the brainchild of these people – a group of highly privileged white men, based at elite universities, who have come to believe that they know what’s best for humanity as a whole. Longtermists ask us to imagine the future spanning millions, billions, even trillions of years, during which our descendants have left Earth and colonised other star systems, galaxies and beyond. Though Earth may only remain habitable for another one billion years or so, at which point the sun will grow too luminous for us to survive, the universe itself won’t stomp out the flames of life for an estimated 10¹⁰ years – that’s a 1 followed by 100 zeros, an unimaginably long time.

[...]

Bostrom, the father of longtermism, has written that we shouldn’t shy away from preemptive violence if necessary to protect our “posthuman” future, and he argued in 2019 that policymakers should seriously consider implementing a global surveillance system to prevent “civilisational devastation”. More recently, Bostrom’s colleague Eliezer Yudkowsky contended that pretty much everyone on Earth should be “allowed to die” if it means that we might still reach “the stars someday”. He also claimed in Time magazine that militaries should engage in targeted strikes against data centres to stop the development of advanced artificial intelligence, even at the risk of triggering a nuclear war. When I was a longtermist, I didn’t think much about the potential dangers of this ideology. However, the more I studied utopian movements that became violent, the more I was struck by two ingredients at the heart of such movements. The first was – of course – a utopian vision of the future, which believers see as containing infinite, or at least astronomical, amounts of value. The second was a broadly “utilitarian” mode of moral reasoning, which is to say the kind of means-ends reasoning above. The ends can sometimes justify the means, especially when the ends are a magical world full of immortal beings awash in “surpassing bliss and delight”, to quote Bostrom’s 2020 “Letter from Utopia”.

[disabled-dragoon]

[ID: A document. It is a list of British MPs, split into four columns and listed alphabetically in bulleted descending order.

The title "The 125 MPs who voted for a Ceasefire in Gaza, on Wednesday, 15th Nov. 2023" is at the top of the document in red writing.

The MPs listed in column 1 are:

Diane Abbott

Tahir Ali

Rosena Allin-Khan

Hannah Bardell

Paula Barker

Apsana Begum

Clive Betts

Mhairi Black

Paul Blomfield

Steven Bonnar

Deidre Brock

Alan Brown

Karen Buck

Richard Burgon

Dawn Butler

Ian Byrne

Liam Byrne

Amy Callaghan

Dan Carden

Alistair Carmichael

Wendy Chamberlain

Sarah Champion

Douglas Chapman

Joanna Cherry

Hywel Williams

Munira Wilson

Beth Winter

Pete Wishart

Mohammad Yasin

Daisy Cooper

Jeremy Corbyn

The MPs listed in column 2 are:

Ronnie Cowan

Angela Crawley

Stella Creasy

Jon Cruddas

Judith Cummins

Ed Davey

Martyn Day

Marsha De Cordova

Martin Docherty-Hughes

Allan Dorans

Peter Dowd

Sarah Dyke

Colum Eastwood

Jonathan Edwards

Julie Elliot

Tim Farron

Stephen Farry

Marion Fellows

Stephen Flynn

Richard Foord

Mary Kelly Foy

Barry Gardiner

Patricia Gibson

Patrick Grady

Peter Grant

Sarah Green

Margaret Greenwood

Fabian Hamilton

Claire Hanna

Neale Hanvey

Drew Hendry

The MPs listed in column 3 are:

Wera Hobhouse

Kate Hollern

Rachel Hopkins

Stewart Hosie

Rupa Huq

Imran Hussain

Christine Jardine

Afzal Khan

Ben Lake

Ian Lavery

Chris Law

Emma Lewell-Buck

Clive Lewis

David Linden

Rebecca Long Bailey

Caroline Lucas

Kenny MacAskill

Angus Brendan MacNeil

Khalid Mahmood

Rachael Maskell

Andy McDonald

Stewart Malcolm McDonald

Stuart C McDonald

John McDonnell

Conor McGinn

Anne McLaughlin

John McNally

Ian Mearns

Carol Monaghan

Layla Moran

Helen Morgan

Grahame Morris

The MPs in column 4 are:

John Nicolson

Brendan O'Hara

Sarah Olney

Kate Osamor

Kate Osborne

Sarah Owen

Jess Phillips

Anum Qaisar

Yasmin Qureshi

Bell Ribeiro-Addy

Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Liz Saville Roberts

Naz Shah

Andy Slaughter

Alyn Smith

Cat Smith

Alex Sobel

Chris Stephens

Jamie Stone

Zarah Sultana

Sam Tarry

Alison Thewliss

Owen Thompson

Richard Thomson

Stephen Timms

Jon Trickett

Valerie Vaz

Claudia Webbe

Philippa Whitford

Nadia Whittome

/end]

The mps the voted for a ceasefire

[pazodetrasalba]

Charity

Dear Caroline:

I had to look up Elie Hassenfeld to discover that he is one of the hot shots of Effective Altruism. I did know his (until recently) co-CEO and co-founder Holden Karnofsky (I recently listening to a long podcast interview in which he said lots of very interesting stuff). Truth be told, I follow more the Giving What We Can site than GiveWell, and the two donations I've made so far -to the Against Malaria Foundation and the Malaria Consortium- came out of recommendations from the former, although I don't think there would be much discrepancy between the two.

I not only read Carolingian 'EA' books: two days ago I in fact finished McAskill's Doing Good Better, in which among other things, he expostulates on what your career paths should be for the purpose of 'maximizing good'. He also has a cheeky comment in which he makes fun of Fields Medalists -this btw got me pretty angry and brought to mind the many aspects in which I disagree with even rather foundational EA ideas and points of view...

But anyway, I digress: he briefly expounds the different options, including earning to give, working in a non profit, joining the non-profits late in life..., and I couldn't help but think of an alternative universe in which you actually landed yourself a spot in GiveWell or OPP, maybe as an aftereffect of this talk you went to. I firmly believe that would have been a universe in which you would have been happier and more self-realized, your natural talents and virtue would have shined, and would have never bumped against the law and your current predicament, so in a way, I wish it had been this one. On the other hand, I am pretty sure that if that had been the case, I would have never heard of you or bumped into EA to begin with. That would have been a small price to pay from the global perspective, but one I would personally find unpalatable, as I am really glad of having discovered the existence of such a lovable, good and intellectually engaging person as you are. Still, it would have been worth paying, as I can only desire what would have been best for you, Caroline.

Quote:

Around the same time, two New York hedge fund analysts, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, quit their jobs to start GiveWell, an organization that does extraordinarily in-depth research to work out which charities do the most good with every dollar they receive.

William MacAskill

[linusjf]

William MacAskill: Key moral priority

[garudabluffs]

MIT philosophy professor Kieran Setiya’s book “Life Is Hard” offers guidance for living an ethical life in hard times.

READ MORE https://news.mit.edu/2022/life-hard-setiya-1104

The Economist

Prof. Kieran Setiya’s book “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way,” has been named one of The Economist’s best books of 2022. In the book, Setiya makes the case that “suffering need not dimmish or spoil a good life,” writes The Economist.

Full story via The Economist →

The New Moral Mathematics

“Space is big,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Time is big, too—even if we just think on the timescale of a species. We’ve been around for approximately 300,000 years. There are now about 8 billion of us, roughly 15 percent of all humans who have ever lived. You may think that’s a lot, but it’s just peanuts to the future. If we survive for another million years—the longevity of a typical mammalian species—at even a tenth of our current population, there will be 8 trillion more of us. We’ll be outnumbered by future people on the scale of a thousand to one.

READ MORE https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-new-moral-mathematics/

In his new book, philosopher William MacAskill implies that humanity’s long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death. His arguments are shaky. by Kieran Setiya

[mserratog]

Book Review: What We Owe The Future, by William MacAskill

This book is written by William MacAskill, who is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. I decided to read the book after Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University, suggested it during one of the university’s senior teams meeting. As presented by the author, this book is about longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key…