Why didn’t Will MacAskill predict Sam Bankman-Fried’s malfeasance?

I thought this was a great, as well as hilarious, critique from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, loc 398:

And MacAskill’s ability to forecast the future—even in the short term—is seriously questionable. Given far more information than most, he still didn’t accurately predict what would happen with Sam, just a few months after What We Owe the Future was published.

Effective Altruism founder Will MacAskill has built a hugely influential philosophical movement on the moral application of our knowledge about the world. In its more recent Longtermist variant this rests on weighing knowledge, even if fuzzy, about the long term trajectory of human civilisation against present concerns.

Yet Will MacAskill was old friends with billionaire crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who he was repeatedly warned about and who supported his organisations with tens of billions of dollars. If he couldn’t act morally in relation to the substantial weight of evidence about SBF’s malfeasance then why should anyone have confidence in his capacity to act morally in relation to the deeply speculative knowledge of the future he assigns great importance to?

#AdamBecker #digitalElites #effectiveAltruism #longtermism #SamBankmanFried #WillMacAskill

Will MacAskill is an Oxford philosopher. He’s an influential of the Effective Altruism movement and has a view of the world he calls ‘longtermism’. I don’t know him, and I haven’t read his book, but I have done some ethics as part of my Philosophy degree. As a parent, I find this review of his most recent book pretty shocking. I’m willing to consider most ideas but utilitarianism is the kind of thing which is super-attractive as a first-year Philosophy student but which… you grow out of? The review goes more into depth than I can here, but human beings are not cold, calculating machines. We’re emotional people. We’re parents. And all I can say is that, well, my worldview changed a lot after I became a father. Oxford philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, both affiliated with the university’s Future of Humanity Institute, coined the word “longtermism” five years ago. Their outlook draws on utilitarian thinking about morality. According to utilitarianism—a moral theory developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century—we are morally required to maximize expected aggregate well-being, adding points for every moment of happiness, subtracting points for suffering, and discounting for probability. When you do this, you find that tiny chances of extinction swamp the moral mathematics. If you could save a million lives today or shave 0.0001 percent off the probability of premature human extinction—a one in a million chance of saving at least 8 trillion lives—you should do the latter, allowing a million people to die. Now, as many have noted since its origin, utilitarianism is a radically counterintuitive moral view. It tells us that we cannot give more weight to our own interests or the interests of those we love than the interests of perfect strangers. We must sacrifice everything for the greater good. Worse, it tells us that we should do so by any effective means: if we can shave 0.0001 percent off the probability of human extinction by killing a million people, we should—so long as there are no other adverse effects. […] MacAskill spends a lot of time and effort asking how to benefit future people. What I’ll come back to is the moral question whether they matter in the way he thinks they do, and why. As it turns out, MacAskill’s moral revolution rests on contentious, counterintuitive claims in “population ethics.” […] [W]hat is most alarming in his […]

https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2022/08/27/population-ethics/