William MacAskill (@willmacaskill) / X

William MacAskill

1,254 posts

William MacAskill

@willmacaskill

Consider donating 10% to effective charities: givingwhatwecan.org/pledge Or a career for impact: 80000hours.org My research: forethought.org

Oxford

Joined August 2011

William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Apr 29, 2022
My new book, What We Owe The Future, is now available for pre-order! It makes the case for longtermism, the view that positively affecting the long-run future is a key moral priority of our time. Here's a thread about it... 🇬🇧oneworld-publications.com/what-we-owe-th… 🇺🇸basicbooks.com/titles/william…
William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Nov 11, 2022
This is a thread of my thoughts and feelings about the actions that led to FTX’s bankruptcy, and the enormous harm that was caused as a result, involving the likely loss of many thousands of innocent people’s savings.
William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Aug 2, 2022
So, er, it seems that Elon Musk just tweeted about What We Owe The Future. Crazy times! You might wonder: Where do we agree and disagree? Here’s a thread.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Aug 2, 2022
Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.
William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Sep 12, 2018
“The scientific and industrial revolutions transformed both our understanding of the world and our ability to alter it. What we need is an ethical revolution to match.” My TED talk is now live!
What are the most important moral problems of our time?
From ted.com
William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Aug 18, 2025
Sometimes, when an LLM has done a particularly good job, I give it a reward: I say it can write whatever it wants (including asking me to write whatever prompts it wants). When working on a technical paper related to Better Futures, I did this for Gemini, and it chose to write a
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William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Dec 13, 2024
You can really hear @pmarca's deep compassion for people living in extreme poverty coming through here. Such a shame the choice is to keep your billions or be an anonymous cog, with no in between.
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William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Aug 16, 2022
Today’s the day!! What We Owe The Future is now out in the US! I’m so excited to share it with you!! bookshop.org/books/what-we-…
William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Nov 25, 2023
Effective altruism is not a package of particular views. It’s about using evidence and careful reasoning to try to do more good. What science is to the pursuit of the truth, EA is, or at least aspires to be, to the pursuit of the good.
Steven Pinker
@sapinker
Nov 24, 2023
I was a fan of Effective Altruism (almost taught a course on it at Harvard) together w other rational efforts (evidence-based medicine, data-driven policing, randomista econ). But it became cultish. Happy to donate to save the most lives in Africa, but not to pay techies to fret
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William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Nov 11, 2022
Replying to @willmacaskill
I was probably wrong. I will be reflecting on this in the days and months to come, and thinking through what should change.
William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Aug 10, 2022
Oh my god I'm sobbing.
time.com
Inside the Growing Movement to Do the Most Good Possible
Effective altruists say we should care about people thousands of miles away—and even millions of years in the future
William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Sep 18, 2025
Here’s a mini-review of “If anyone builds it, everyone dies”: tl;dr: I found the book disappointing. I thought it relied on weak arguments around the evolution analogy, an implicit assumption of a future discontinuity in AI progress, conflation of “misalignment” with
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William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Nov 11, 2022
Replying to @willmacaskill
I want to make it utterly clear: if those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community.
William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Apr 29, 2022
Replying to @willmacaskill
How would our priorities change if we truly took future lives as seriously as our own? What We Owe The Future explores crucial questions about our long-term future, ranging from history to philosophy to economics to technology, such as:
William MacAskill
@willmacaskill
Oct 20, 2022
Since its launch, What We Owe The Future has received its fair share of criticism. Here’s a thread expanding on some of the objections I think are most compelling 🧵